How often do you switch characters?

[Nagog]

Howdy folks

Out of curiosity, how frequently do ya'll change your character while in a long term (6+ months) campaign? I've noticed that I change characters at least once per long term campaign, typically because the character I start with doesn't fit the vibe of the campaign/party as well as I'd have hoped. Is that common? Do ya'll as DMs find that rude/difficult to deal with?

[Hawk7915]

We have a campaign that's been ongoing for three years. The party composition has changed a ton, but only one player has retired a PC and rolled a new one. He started as a Half-Elf Warlock, and found that as we hit level 7 or so he was feeling mechanically stymied and frustrated. By level 9, he was also feeling narratively like this character had run its course and needed to either fully embrace his demonic pact and become an evil NPC, or break his pact, lose his powers, and retire. We went with the latter and he's now happy as a Human Order Cleric. At the same time we introduced his cleric, a new player brought in a Dhampir Fighter and we're toying with retiring him now too, but I think he'll stick around a bit longer at least. I'm finding it harder at higher levels to support shifts in party composition, because we're reaching a point where a 12th soon 13th level character is a narratively huge deal for the world. Also my players are more casual, and frequently flub rules even for characters they've played for a year which drags combat to a crawl - and so it makes me hard to be excited to approve a new character with new mechanics to learn. I'm a much bigger fan especially if it's a problem of tone with just embracing a big character change if we can, which is what we're working on for the Dhampir.

I am playing a homebrew Plantfolk Druid in another campaign, and after ~2 years am toying on retiring them. But I'm also toying with retiring outright at the end of our current story arc so who knows lol. That's an easier sell to our DM as I both have a back-up character in that campaign world already and I'm our most enfranchised player and can play anyone switfly without ramp-up time.

[KorvinStarmast]

In my brothers campign: we are now level 11.
My cleric retired at level 6 to be replaced by level 6 celestial warlock.
Another cleric retired at level 5 to become a Swords Bard
Ranger 3/ Rogue 5 retired to become Warlock 8 (UA warlock, the predecessor to Celstial, Astral something).
^^ that one annoyed me a little bit, as a fellow player, since as my celestial was already fulfilling the role but it ended up working out because we work together and tend to provide support to different other team members in our own styles.
The Evoker wizard, champion fighter, Totem Barbarian, and Arcane Trickster have not changed and not multi-classed.
We added another Life Cleric.
We were at 8 people in the party. yes, combat was slow.
Then 3 people left: evoker wizard, new warlock, life cleric since Real Life made the game not possible for them.
We have just added a battle master (9), to bring the party back up to 6.

[Zevox]

I have never yet changed characters mid-campaign, personally. I don't even always change them between campaigns - our current campaign was a direct follow-up to our last, and we all just kept going with the same characters. While I'm sure the next time I play (I'll be DMing our next campaign) I'll want to play a new character just because I've been on this one so long now, I suspect I will come back to this one again in the future too, as our DM has a plot hook set up for him that I'm sure leads into another campaign idea he has.

[Sigreid]

Current campaign we decided on 3 characters each, level locked to each other and you grab the one you want to use for the current task. It's been working great and keeps players like me from getting an itch to play something else.

[JonBeowulf]

I've only switched once... I thought Mastermind looked cool but it didn't suit my style so I took over an NPC minotaur barbarian halfway through. Otherwise I stay with the char I brought.

[JNAProductions]

More often than other players, but not that often.

As a DM, I allow players to change as often as they want. A respec to a similar build (say, Champion Fighter to Battlemaster) doesn't need any justification in-game. A larger respec (Battlemaster to Eldritch Knight) would warrant some kind of in-game thing to spur, and obviously a wholly new PC needs the old PC to find a reason to leave and the new one reason to join.

The reason I'm so free with it is that this is a game for fun. If you'd have more fun with another build/PC, go nuts! We'll figure it out. :)

[da newt]

It's very campaign / people dependent for me. If there is no strong reason to change, I like to keep playing PCs that I like, but if the PC-DM or PC-rest of party dynamic is troublesome, I'll change.

In one longer campaign, my OG PC caused issues because he was a caster (AOEs) who flew and that was contentious (3D is hard). Then the party ended up being a bunch of individual selfish tools, so my replacement PC didn't fit - he was a very nice guy who was all about the team and trust. So I tried to swap to a PC who had a strong tie to an immortal who was very involved in the campaign, but that went sideways as well. In the end I quit the campaign - as much as I liked the Players and DM, I simply did not jive with that Party and Campaign.

In other campaigns, I've gone the whole way with one dude.

Sometimes it's nice to restart fresh and some PCs can become boring/redundant, but if I enjoy my guy and he jives with the party filling a niche well, I'll stick w/ one guy forever.

BLATB - it depends for me.

[Chaos Jackal]

I don't. I generally know what I want to play from the get go, both mechanically and narratively. Having good knowledge of the game and a tendency to play characters with at least some spellcasting ability means I'm both aware of how my characters will play out and have some backup plans and tricks in case circumstances or unexpected tendencies from the DM cause issues. Building largely setting-agnostic and campaign-independent backstories and bringing in characters I already have envisioned and planned depending on the campaign's tone means I typically play as someone I already "know" while making it easy to adapt to the campaign's and story's needs. Besides, how a character evolves in a story is what I'm most eager to see when playing and like I said, mechanically I just know what I'm getting into beforehand. I've never once changed my character, nor ever felt the need to do so.

That being said, I've seen it happen a few times. More often than not, I see people who change characters during a campaign dropping out eventually, especially if they end up switching again (though I've only seen that happen twice). I've seen it done successfully too, of course, but overall, I cannot say I'm too fond of the practice, especially later on in the campaign where the rest of the players/characters find it understandably harder to get involved with a new addition, often appearing practically out of the blue. As a DM, I allow it, but I will have an in-depth discussion with the player over the whys and hows and I will generally advocate that the player just drop out instead if I get a second switching request from someone.

[Mastikator]

I switch characters in a campaign usually between zero and once. It's usually because I didn't grok the campaign that I switched character.

In my game I find some players switch all the time and others don't, I find it annoying because it gives me more homework (how to fit them into the group), and it discourages me from caring about their backstory and motivation. Can't really have long term plans for a short term character can I?

[tokek]

I try not to switch characters. We are just wrapping up a 1-20 campaign that’s finishing after just short of 3 years and we are 50/50 on avoiding switching. You get a lot of character depth after that length of time together.

The one player who got into a real habit of switching eventually had to leave the group. Constantly switching to new characters with no connection made every switch harder to pull off well and the attempts to do so became disruptive to the whole group. It’s very hard to drop a new character into a group dynamic that’s built for more than a year without them being a bit peripheral for a while - or without trying too damn hard to grab attention.

[RogueJK]

Basically never, but the group is okay with it if someone wanted to. We have one group member with "character ADD", who often changes at least once throughout a campaign. But everyone else, myself included, typically stays with the same PC through completion.

[Kane0]

In my long games usually someone changes a character every 6 months or so. One guy tends to do the majority of those, though we all die and choose not to come back every now and again.

[Snowbluff]

It's not something I usually do at all. I did play a 4e game where I rebuilt a character, but I just did some tweaks. I kept the same character but just fixed some options.

[Leon]

Once.
Game in 2019 I chose to switch because it was impossible to enjoy the chosen class with another player actively breaking the same class as much as possible.

I always have a back up character incase something happens to the first but have rarely needed it and on one occasion I remade a character because the DM was not supporting the mechanic at all that the class relied on. Swapped from Barbarian/Archivist to Barbarian/Cloistered Cleric (Barbarian was a legacy of being a werewolf for a extended period)

[Bundin]

Once, because not only was I less engaged with the class mechanics, but we finished a major story arc. That ment that the character could leave without haveing to explain away why he suddenly stopped caring about the state of the region. We were level 8 or so, the DM referred to the retired character a few times, as quite powerful individuals tend to be talked about for a while. Even when they're living the quiet life in some town.

New guy conveniently just arrived from some faraway place, explaining why noone ever heard of him :)

I don't mind players changing it up, as long as it doesn't derail a carefully laid out plot for the DM. If it would, wait for a good moment, or work with the DM to pre-emptively remedy it.

[Spo]

Played only one campaign that went from lvl 1 to 20 (Waterdeep/Mad mage). Started monk until killed at lvl 4. Then fighter to lvl 9 ten he retired with chock gold. Then druid to 15 who retired bc adventuring in the dungeon was too dangerous. Had original monk rezed and played to lvl 20. So in two years of weekly games three times.

[Arkhios]

It usually depends whether I've been overly ambitious with my expected character career (read: predesigned full 20-levels-character-build) or more reasonable with my expectations and planned only a few levels ahead at most. If it's the former, I probably grew upset with the result and begged and growelled at my DM's feet to let me change the character (sometimes to no avail). If the latter, I've usually been quite happy (or at least content) with the character even if it has had some flaws I didn't take into account earlier. Usually those flaws could be made bear fruit by creative thinking, anyway.

Regarding the former, the last time I had this situation was almost 20 years ago, so I guess I've just grown old.

Regarding the latter, I've had several long-term characters during the years I've played various editions of D&D (and a smidgen of other RPGs), and more often the campaign dried out before I grew tired of the characters, and when it didn't, I think I've had most of my characters remain the same from the beginning to the (often abrupt*) end.

*the death toll has been quite massive for my characters. Maybe bad luck or maybe just poor choices. Or both. :smallbiggrin:

Currently I have three ongoing games, and in one of them I can have all the characters I want (because I'm the DM) :smallbiggrin:

In the other two, I have a character I'm quite fond of, and I have no intention of making a new one. Sadly, on the other, my character-that-I'm-fond-of died recently and I'm playing a substitute that the DM said would be short-lived and I should get the actual character raised from death soon enough. However, that game is currently un-/fortunately on a forced hiatus because a couple in our group decided to multiply together and their spawn makes it difficult to play after work on weekdays (as we used to) and my weekends are already quite packed full with other things to do. Maybe we'll catch at least one session next month (I hope).

[Psyren]

It's very, very rare that I change characters mid-campaign. That would usually be preceded by something cataclysmic, like an unrecoverable TPK, or some big IRL shakeup in the group. I have retrained a subclass or feats here and there though.

[5eNeedsDarksun]

Since we've been playing 5e, once. That was very early on, after 2 sessions I believe; I just couldn't get into the character the way I thought I would.

Otherwise, the longer I go, the more connection I generally have with the character. Even if it's so-so, I think back to the few times we started campaigns at higher level and how much harder it was to care about a character I 'built' rather than 'grew with'.

[GlyphicEngineer]

In both of the long-running campaigns I've been involved in, all of the players tended to swap out characters fairly frequently, myself included. Both were sandbox games in which not every PC would have an incentive to be involved with every potential arc, so those PCs would do their own thing for a bit while their players brought in new characters to continue on with the action. Or the party might get long-term separated, in which case we'd do the same. We also would occasionally pause the main campaign to do side arcs focusing on other parts of the setting, in which case the whole group would roll up new characters.

In both cases, the characters we built would continue to exist after we were done with them, having their own adventures elsewhere in the world, and potentially turning up later as either NPCs or to once again fill in a missing slot in the party. They might be graduated to primary PC if one of the previous ones left the party, died, or became too powerful to continue as a party member.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed the system. It left me free to roleplay in accordance with my characters' personalities and aims without having to come up with insincere reasons why they'd be sticking with the party in a situation where it made no sense. For example, if the party was going to meet with the setting's Pope to receive a job from him, and my uberheretical necro-alchemist was worried about getting smote directly to Hell, I could just roll up a sorcadin from the Pope's faction and ask the DM to have the Pope send her with the party. As evident, this also allowed me to play characters with diverse goals and factional alignments. It would occasionally get a bit weird- one of my earliest side-arc characters became one of the campaign's main villains as an NPC, and my sorcadin wound up fireballing my necro-alchemist in the face during the climax battle, but overall it made the game more fun.