There are three reasons you might need to incorporate a new PC into an ongoing campaign:
1. One of the PCs dies or is otherwise permanently removed from play (goes insane, etc.).
2. To replace an un-fun PC.
3. A new player joins your group.
Not penalizing players for bringing in a new PC is a given, but how do you actually introduce that new character into the game?
One slightly silly (yet eminently practical) approach is “The Magellan.”
The Magellan
“You seem trustworthy. Would you care to join us in our noble quest?”
In this scene from The Gamers, one player’s mage PC dies and is replaced with a virtually identical character (Magellan, hence “The Magellan”) — who is immediately accepted into the party because, you know, he’s a PC.
From a suspension-of-disbelief standpoint, this approach is pretty silly. What right-minded group of adventurers, spies, space smugglers or superheroes is going to accept a new member without reservations of any kind? Depending on how roleplaying-intensive your campaign is, it might be entirely inappropriate.
From a practical standpoint, though, the Magellan accomplishes one very important thing: it gets the new PC — and more importantly, that PC’s player — involved as quickly as possible. No sitting around for half the evening, no waiting three sessions until the perfect moment arises.
You know Jen’s character is going to become part of the party, so why not just make that happen? It’s also not without precedent: this sort of thing happens all the time in movies (particularly action movies), so it’s not going to be a complete surprise to your players.
The Magellan works best when you make some effort to weave the new PC into the story — more than the GM did in The Gamers, at the very least. If the PCs are part of an organization, that offers an easy in: their superiors say, “Here’s the new guy. Make him feel at home.” In less structured campaigns, you might need an introductory scene to bring the suspension of disbelief down to reasonable levels.
On balance, I like the Magellan. In The Gamers, it’s funny because of how cheesy it is, how little effort the GM and the players make to pull it off and how much it rings true — we’ve all played or run games where this has happened.
But with just a smidgen more background work, the Magellan is actually a surprisingly practical and pragmatic way to introduce a new PC — particularly if you’re short on time.
There are many examples from the movies and television series on replacing a regular. In all cases, though, the writers have enough time to work a rationalization in.
Unfortunately, PC deaths tend to be arbitrary affairs. There’s also meta-game considerations; the other players know that the new PC is going to be part of the group, so the question is how much of a hazing ritual is going to take place before the new PC is initiated into the tribe.
Martin gave three situations. I think the Magellan works best for PC death, especially at the beginning of a session or when it’s just difficult to rationalize a new PC within the context of the adventure.
In the other two situations, there is usually time for me (assuming I’m GMing) to develop a rationalization (okay Tiff, I know you want to change characters; stick with Vara the Barbarian until the adventure is over and I’ll work Mayne the Sorceress into the next one).
For new players, I’ll simply ask them to join when there is a convenient spot (or Magellan them if they really want to play NOW!).
When new PCs come up in my campaigns, I usually ask for player feedback on how to integrate him or her into the group. It’s amazing how much the players appreciate this and how much better the new character fits in the group.
I recently tried to integrate a PC for a player into my Star Wars campaign who’d been away from our group for about two years. He didn’t want to continue playing the characters he was playing before (which would have been the easiest to return to the group). His new character gave us the opportunity for some great role-playing by being a character the players captured from the opposition who was a drug addict and wouldn’t be automatically trusted by the other PCs. The player did leave again after a few months in the group. I got the sense that it wasn’t because the other players were role-playing their distrust of the junkie, but that he had based his character on his online Star Wars Galaxies character and couldn’t be as high level as or do the same things he did in the computer game. We had worked together to come up with the addict concept because it would mesh with the current plot and be a challenge to play.
My point is that sometimes we have to realize it IS just a game and it is OK to Magellan.
Pulling a Magellen isn’t a problem, it’s more an issue of HOW it’s done. Standard dungeon crawl, a character dies and the player wants to quickly incorporate their new PC. Not a problem. But don’t have them appear *poof* and enter the game. Instead make them part of the next encounter. A prisoner of the monsters, running down the corridor to get AWAY from the next encounter (the rest of their party having met a noble death) etc., etc. Just a little stage dressing to allow them to be introduced “logically.” Running from an encounter (that then entangles the PCs) is a great way fro the new PC to show their vale to the party by turning back to the fight once they’re no longer massively outnumbered.
In fact, character chased into the party by villains is a MUCH better mechanism that “You’re sitting in a tavern . . . .”
It’s funny you should write about this, because this actually just came up in a game I’m in. My character commadns a half-platoon in a mercenary organization, and the new guy was added as a new recruit. Well, I gave him an opportunity to prove himself — I set up a fight against an NPC — and said NPC disarmed him in round one. With a stick. With that done, I felt I couldn’t rationally just “accept him.”
Well, I treated him like shit for a while — he was a relatively green recruit in a half-platoon of green recruits I was training — and I started to feel guilty. I think at this point that if the player and I hadn’t been friends for years there would’ve been trouble. But then the character, Elian, distinguished himself in combat, and Constantijn (my character) had a reason to appreciate him.
Now Constantijn is literally 1 HP from death (in a game with no res magic) and Elian is the only thing that stands between him and a horde of barbarians. If Tijn lives through this, there will be changes made.
I just wanted to share, I guess, and tell everyone that sometimes the dice work it out for ya.
T
I think a good way to do this is to “insert” the new player in the metagame. At whatever time you are going to put in the new character you can just say “Hey, I’m going to incorporate ****’s new character in soon. Lets find reasons that he meshes with the group so we can make sure he gets into the game quickly.” It still allows for roleplaying elements to be inserted, but it keeps that roleplaying from being the “well my character wouldn’t get along well with him . . .” thing that can go on.
I think Cedrictheblack has a point with how you introduce them. They don’t need to just poof in (Unless it is no concern that they just poof in. “Now why did the teleport spell go wrong that time!”), they can easily be written in. Putting them in as a prisoner is a good way that kind of forces them to be there in almost any encounter, but it isn’t a golden fit. Still, something that forces their character to be there as opposed to they just happened to be there, goes a little smoother.
Originally posted by myself at AlephGaming.com/blog
As I always encourage my players to role-play, I am almost always happy to let them sit around half the night as they get to know the new character. It provides a good chance for them to develop the character more fully, and it gives the other players a chance to get to know this new character, allowing for richer and easier role-playing to follow.
Sometimes, however, this just isn’t appropriate. Whether due to pacing issues, the PCs being about to embark on a harrowing quest which had built up a lot of excitement and anticipation, or players just not feeling up to spending the evening role-playing, another solution is needed.
The simplest and best solution I have found is to introduce the new PC as being a friend or family member of either the person who died or a survivor in the group. This makes the new PCs credibility easy to establish, without disrupting Suspension of Disbelief or stunting role-playing opportunities later on. Better yet, it lets the party continue onward as soon as they desire.
This method shouldn’t be hard for most people to accept. It provides role-playing opportunities for those who enjoy them, and allows them to skip arduous role-playing scenes for those who don’t.
An important part is the preceding line in “The Gamers” where the DM says something to the effect of “OK guys, I want you to roleplay this. You’re in enemy territory and everyone you’ve met so far has tried to kill you.”
I’ve also been in games where players have insisted that they can find new PC’s because they have “PC Glow.”
Me, I just try to introduce new PCs as soon as possible, and as interestingly as possible. Generally this is a challenge, but forces me to make more backstory that generally revolves around how the PCs are important.
I inserted a new character in the latest session of the campaign I run. It helped that the current players knew the newcomer, who had played with us in a previous campaign, well. The campaign is based on a ship, and the newcomer stowed away and unobtrusively made himself useful while still hiding. The other players soon realized that something was odd and searched the ship, eventually finding the newcomer.
As soon as the newcomer made his speech as to why he should be accepted in the crew, I arranged a fairly routine pirate encounter to allow the newcomer to fight alongside the party and earn credibility with the group. It seems to have worked well enough.
I like John’s approach of explicitly popping up to the metagame level– since the acceptance is going to be based on the metagame need, you might as well get group buyin. Plus this allows you to find out what your group’s “most stringent standard” is and work to beat that bar.
Now we are trying a “new” (at least for us) approach to this issue. We have come up to what we call “the Lost” effect (took from the Lost TV series). I mean, in the last campaign we were a bunch of characters broke from a prison. In the “party” were more PC than players (those were “virtual” PC, not yet rolled) but only those PC with players where “active” PC. When a PC died, we simply rolled a new PC any assumed that it was with the party as a virtual PC who reached the active PC status, as what happens in the Lost TV series. It worked well, and seemed a good, easy and reasonable “Magellan” effect as well.
In the next campaign we are going to be a crew of a space ship. I suppose we’ll do the same.
Quim
PS. Sorry for my bad English
I recently had to Magellan a new player into an Early Post-Apocalypse game I’m running. The player was visiting and, as it turned out, could only stick around for that one session.
The PCs had been sent by their community to try and make contact with the rumored last surviving legitimate member of government (since this is the UK I made it a member of the royal family – henceforth “the King”). They arrive at night fall at the next nearest settlement to where the King is rumored to be.
The locals are very stand-offish and are evidently lying about their numbers. The PC’s are escorted to a sealed off area of town where they are given quarter is an otherwise disused house. A nearby house is also occupied by another ‘guest’ of the locals and this is the new PC.
So the players try and integrate the new PC into their party in the usual way of going up to them and chatting. However the new PC is being very standoff-ish and utterly fails to do more than engaging in basic niceties.
The next morning the locals arrive en mass, pretty much confirming the PC’s deduction that they’re the missing army personnel that vanished after the collapse of civilization. they question the PC’s as to their loyalty and intentions towards the King, who they had instructions to kill if they turned out to be fake or unfriendly to their community). Once satisfied that they intend no harm they agree to escort them to meet with him… “Oh and take her [the new PC] with you; she’s been here a month and she’s a drain on our resources.”
It felt awkward and forced to me but the player had left me no choice, other than to leave her behind. Ironically when the player couldn’t make it afterwards the monarch sent her back to the army to assist them with her chemical expertise.
I like John’s approach as well. Walt brings up an important point, which is further highlighted by tsuyoshi. That is, the hazing that takes place before bring the new PC into the fold.
Tsuyoshi stated that his PCs harsh treatment of the new one was probably only tolerated because of a strong friendship between players.
I have seen this sort of thing go horribly bad with ooc arguments boiling over resulting in players leaving the table or worse, the group.
In my current game, this is happening now. I thought I had worked the new character into the campaign arc in a fairly logical manner, but after two sessions, the PC is still getting pretty harsh treatment. It’s not to the point where I’m losing any players from the group, but enough that I felt the need to call a “House meeting” so we could resolve the issues. It’ll be interesting to see how the next session goes.
I think the next time this occurs, I will take John’s approach and simply ask the group for assistance getting the PC in the party and the player back into the game.
“Virtual” PCs, or VPCs for short,are a great idea, and I’ve seen them used, and used them myself for my own PCs. I’d build a few characters (personality, history, and appearance only, if they’re not going to be used for a while, and also mechanics if they’re a likely alternate that might get used right away) then use them when my current characters suffered things that put them out of action or didn’t really have reasons to go forward and do the Adventure of the Week. For lethal games or those where everyone wants effective downtime kept to a minimum, but wants characters to have ‘time off’ from the story, the system works well.
It’s especially ideal for fleshing out military companies and large orgs, since the players have knowledge of what the VPC can do (their character would too, so it’s not the bad sort of metagaming) and they can explain the VPC’s presence at leisure, but also because it adds character without adding time on the GM’s part to develop the character.
One of the issues here is basically the same issue as starting a campaign with a bar scene and expecting role-play to result in formation of the party.
There MUST be meta-game level acknowledgement that the game requires a party, and the PLAYERS must work to make that happen. They can do so by purposefully creating PCs who will have common purpose to join together, and/or they can do so by using metagaming techniques to form the party.
The second part of the issue is how do you drop the new PC into an ongoing campaign. No matter what type of campaign, players expect at least some logic. Here again, it can help if this is considered during character generation. The players and GM should also both be looking for opportunities. And if all else fails, pinch your nose, look the other way, and bring the PC in.
The GM (and players) should avoid making a player sit through more than an hour or so of game session before being able to bring a new PC in. If more delay is absolutely necessary, let the player know. If a player loses a PC during a session, it may make sense for them to go home early. If their PC just can’t be introduced until halfway through the session, let the player know so they can make a decision about showing up late, or being prepared with a book or something.
When all is said and done, the game is supposed to be fun, and no matter how “realistic” or “in character” you are, the game is NOT a perfect simulation, so don’t make someone miserable in a misguided attempt to preserve aesthetics.
Frank
I had to do this with 4 new PC’s in my game. It worked better with the first set because the player took my advice on building his characters and ran with it, but I haven’t had significant problems so far. I just said “here’s what’s coming up in the game, here’s my idea for introducing your characters, make up characters to fit that idea”.
If people didn’t like my idea, I was perfectly willing to keep coming up with new ones until we found something that worked.
As far as my *players* are concerned, I expect them to pull “The Magellan” to the extent that they accept the fact that this *is* a PC and they *have* to manufacture a reason to allow this person in the party. That onus cannot rest fully on me or on the new player because the older players are the ones directly in control of the party.
I ask my players to manufacture reasons for their characters to do a lot of things. Recently we split the party because 8 PC’s was too unwieldy (everyone in my game is playing 2 characters). I didn’t get as much buy-in as I would have liked (only one player really sat down and manufactured a good reason for his characters to go along with the split), but we got it done.
This sort of thing is always necessary to handle OOC stuff that must be handled IC in order to make any sense, and your players should be aware of that fact and prepared to make the best of it.
Walt C: “Unfortunately, PC deaths tend to be arbitrary affairs.”
Well, there’s a huge problem to begin with. What GM is going to allow a PC to die in an *arbitrary* manner? If that’s acceptable, I don’t see why an arbitrary insertion of a new PC should pose any problem.
Rather, I think a PC death should *never* happen unless it would make for an excellent part of the story. The player should explicitly agree that their character’s permanent removal from the ongoing game is on the line.
Without that explicit acceptance from the player in a specific situation, that situation should *not* be allowed to remove the PC.
Give them enormous problems, okay. Drastically change their relationship with the world and/or the party, fine. Present opportunity to finesse/negotiate/struggle against insurmountable odds, excellent. But not arbitrary removal of the character from the ongoing game.
Bignose:
Arbitrary PC death is totally acceptable and expected in some flavors of games. And at least some of those flavors does not allow for arbitrary replacement.
In a simulationist type campaign, where campaign logic can be very important, it is important both that a PC dies when logic says he dies, and it is also important that logic not be defied in replacing the PC.
In a gamist type campaign, arbitrary PC death may be totally expected (for example in an old school D&D game). And depending on the campaign, arbitrary PC replacement may or may not be acceptable (having to sit out until the party gets back to town may be part of the “price” you pay).
Rather, I think a PC death should *never* happen unless it would make for an excellent part of the story. The player should explicitly agree that their character’s permanent removal from the ongoing game is on the line.
This is something that works in some games. Dogs in the Vinyard is one example. It should be noted that the player does NOT have explicit authority over their character’s permanent removal. The GM CAN introduce a conflict where the stakes are the PC’s life. In such a conflict, the player can’t give to avoid deadly fallout, because if he give’s he loses the stakes. But what DitV will assure is that the story where the PC dies will be good.
Frank
Hmm, thinking about the recycling thread also reminded me of the way we signalled a Magellan in my college Fantasy Hero campaign that then allowed us to quickly move on.
When a new PC dropped into the campaign, we just dropped him in (the first time quite literally, the PC was described as having been siting in a bar playing his mandolin when all of a sudden he was falling out of the sky into the middle of an encounter). Someone said something about “damn that wizard,” and after that, I announced a Magellan by introducing the new PC and saying “Damn that wizard gets around.”
By using a thinly veiled justification that was really absurd, it allowed us all to laugh at the absurdity and move on. Far better than spending an agonizing hour or two of “role play” that results in the new PC being run off, or worse, the new PC is about to run off and the GM breaks in with “You know, you’re supposed to have this guy join the party, now that you’ve screwed it up, you’d better fix it.” And logic and two hours of play go sailing out the window, oh, and the players never really forgive each other.
Frank
My group’s D&D game has actually had two new characters join up just recently as well, one due to PC death and one to a new player joining us (yay!).
I’d classify the replacement PC as having been brought in by Magellan: We met her unexpectedly, but found that we shared similar goals and needed something specific from each other. Pretty straightforward.
Presumably by arrangement with our GM, our new player, Daniel, took over a recurring NPC — not a Magellan at all. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out, as our characters disliked him as an NPC. 😉
In principle, Twilight:2000 was an ideal game for the Magellan – the party picks up a desperate straggler and bingo! it’s the new PC.
Didn’t quite work out that way in one campaign I played in. A couple of new PCs were being introduced, and all they had to do was to walk up to our group’s encampment in the woods and make peaceful contact. Instead, for some reason they decided to spend ages sneaking up our perimeter, loaded up for serious combat. Naturally we turned the autocannon on them.