New characters and the group..

[Leon The Lion]

That's the thing, this actually makes the least sense to me in D&D and similiar games! I mean, the party is level 10. One of them dies. So what now, the player gets a new character at level 1? How are you supposed to balance encounters against that? The power gap between level 1 and 10 is immense! An encounter geared towards a level 10 party will almost guarantee that the level 1 character simply dies again, or else is completely useless. I'm sure the player will have so much fun!

And, regardless of game system, requiring a new player's character to start as a beginning character when everybody else is much more advanced is just being a poor host. What, exactly, are they being punished for? What, because they're new, they have to earn the right to be treated equally to everybody else? It's some kind of hazing ritual, or what? It just boggles my mind.
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[garhkal]

Maybe not start out at L1 (keeping with the dnd talk) but not all the way up at L9/10.. Say L5 would be ok.
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[griff]

I had always thought that if there were actual players behind the movie characters, than Lando would have been the replacement character for the player that lost Obi-Wan. I would have the player create a new character, and reward all the CPs that the lost character had earned. Only that the new character had to be significally different from the first. No bounty hunter to bounty hunter, maybe bounty hunter to young senatorial, or brash pilot to Ewok.

[DougRed4]

I have to say, garhkal, I've read some of your responses and thought much the same way as Leon.

The longer and longer I've GMd, the more I've come to the realization that we're all there to have fun. So whereas in years past I might have insisted that people start out with a brand new "Level 1" PC (falling into the trap/logic that the true 'joy' was in building that character up from "zero to hero"), nowadays I would give them whatever was appropriate for that gaming situation/campaign.

So - to use the Star Wars movies as an example of a campaign (keeping with griff's illustration) - if the player of Obi-Wan just lost his PC, why would I insist on him coming into the story with a brand new, inexperienced character (like farmboy Luke)? Why not give him Yoda, or Lando, or Wedge, or Mon Mothma, or Admiral Ackbar, or even Wicket?

More and more in recent years I/we have started games with 'experienced' characters, and it works just fine. In our Star Trek game, we bucked the 'Level 1' trend even more drastically than that. We made our PCs the "bridge crew". So to use Levels as a baseline(that game has Advancements rather than Levels), it would be the equivalent of having the PCs start out as Level 20 (Captain), a few 15-17 (some high ranking Commanders), and all the way down to about Level 3 (for an Ensign). It's worked fine (excellently, really), and that game has the added military aspect of 'rank' (with certain PCs able to "order" and give commands to others. There's not been a single issue with one character being tougher, or more powerful, than another. So much so that I now view the 'old way I used to view it' as antiquated and nonsensical (absolutely no insult intended towards anyone who views things that way, though, as I did the same for decades).

My current SW game has never even seen a character be wounded significantly (so nothing even remotely close to character death). The few times they've faced adversaries that could have wiped them out they've been smart, and have fled or negotiated or avoided combat, etc. So this question hasn't really even come up for us. Replacement characters have been more akin to 'starting' characters, though, being as they're really not that far off from the other PCs.
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Currently Running: Villains & Vigilantes (a 32-year-old campaign with multiple groups) and D6 Star Wars; mostly on hiatus are Adventures in Middle-earth and Delta Green

[garhkal]

Part of it (for me) might be that i was raised on RPGs before even looking into PC games where if you died you had to start from scratch, where as many of the new generation of gamers come into RPGs with their PC / console mentality of 'save points' and such, so when they do die, they expect to be able to reload their character from that last point..
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[Whill]

[griff]

I feel it is important that a replacement characters should be close in skill level of the lost character. If the replacement character would be unable to be very useful to the group. If there is a new player joins the group, I would have the new character be a little farther behind the group than a replacement character, but not much.
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[garhkal]

[Tinman]

We don't generally have a lot of problem with character "power level," as far as players comparing their characters is concerned. It's more often the case that players will question whether their character should even have some particular skill at higher than a certain level (or at all) based on background.

It even happens now and then that players will give their characters minor disadvantages simply because that's part of how they envision the character. The funniest example I can think of was a pilot who suffered from severe cometophobia, and ruled that the character takes twice as long to perform Astrogation tasks because he's obsessively checking to make sure the ship doesn't go anywhere near a comet. (The character was raised in a deeply superstitious culture which considers comets to be harbingers of terrible evil.)

[garhkal]

Sweet. Do you by chance have all those 'disadvantages' that your players over the years made up, listed out anywhere?
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[Tinman]

[garhkal]

That makes me wonder what phobias everyone has had characters play with in the past, and whether those people had them just for "story factor" or actually with some in game issues (such as someone who had agorophobia (fear of open spaces) suffering panic attacks when outside)..
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[DougRed4]

I've never had anyone have any in Star Wars, but they're pretty common in other games we play.

In our long-running supers game, you guys would probably appreciate a "Phobia/Psychosis" one of our heroes had. He believed himself to truly be a Jedi Knight, though the world of 'Star Wars' is clearly a fictional one in our modern, supers world.

So the character dressed and looked like Darth Revas. He carried a wooden stick sloppily painted fluorescent green, and when he wielded it (to fight adversaries) he would make buzzing sounds like a kid playing with a toy lightsaber.

He would commonly quote lines from Star Wars, ascribe mysterious things as being caused by the Force, and the like. Last we'd seen him, he'd built up his own "Jedi Order" that was operating out of a trailer park.
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Currently Running: Villains & Vigilantes (a 32-year-old campaign with multiple groups) and D6 Star Wars; mostly on hiatus are Adventures in Middle-earth and Delta Green

[Lane Arroway]

For those that read my tale in the zombies in star wars thread you know that I've recently lost a player character. Simon, the minor Jedi. The player had plans and hopes for the character as we all do. He had mentioned that he wanted a larger role in the story. He wanted to roll with the big kids in the A-team, so to speak. So, the rest of my players and I brainstormed about a new character for the A-team. We modified an idea from another game and came up with the noble-in-exile. Yes, I'm aware of the template but this was more of a description than stats. You see, in this game one player plays a Jedi Knight and leads a kind-of ragtag rebel fleet in a homemade sector of the midrim. The other major player is a force using specops guy and together with the Jedi handle the major situations. So, if Han and Luke were cruising around with a sidekick like chewy and a droid like Artoo, it seems only natural for Leia to tag along. A member of a ruling house of a major planet in the sector who is outcast in someway. This character would know many of the influential people in the sector and could help form alliances to support the rebellion. Like Leia, this person could be a warrior as well.

Because the characters are so experienced I decided that 15D skill dice and no more than 2D in any skill would be a fair start. I also suggested that the player should write a background for his character. With some starting points from me, the player gave me a decent background and I gave him 2 more dice. If it had more details I would have awarded a total of 3. As it should, the background gave me most of the source material for the introductory adventure for the new character and so far we are 3 sessions into a 5 session game and having a blast.
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[garhkal]

Did everyone else get that boost?
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