What if you have your D&D campaign going, and the players are having a good time … except one of them, who’s bored? Maybe they’re bored with their character or combat or the way things are going, and now figuring out a way to pick things up a notch for this player falls to you, the DM. Do you let them revamp or replace their PC? Do you make combat more difficult? Making things more complicated, if the other players are having fun, will adjusting for the bored player ruin it for the rest of them?
That’s the question Larry H. brought to us in a message to 3 Wise DMs. In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about their experience with bored players, sometimes being the bored players, and the things they do to try to accommodate players who aren’t having fun in the game with their characters. They even get into some extreme character tinkering, like the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or “Rockwell,” a character who could wake up as any of three characters every the morning.
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2:00 A listener question from Larry H.: 2 players are having fun, but one player is bored, is it OK to let them revamp their character?
4:00 Who’s fault is it if the player’s bored with their character: the player or DM?
10:00 Those “Oh Shit!” moments: Putting combat-optimized PCs in more challenging situations
15:00 Combat shouldn’t always be the best option
18:00 What makes a character interesting to play and for how long?
20:00 When and how should you let players revamp their character or bring a new one to the table?
25:00 How do you avoid party awkwardness when you swap out or change a PC?
34:00 How far is too far? Do you allow retroactive multiclassing, for example?
41:00 Red flags that could mean the change is disrupting your group
45:00 More extreme ways to spice up characters and make things … more interesting
56:00 Tips to make combat more challenging for a min-maxer
63:00 Final thoughts
So I listened to podcasts and had a question based on this. You talked about revamping characters and my question on this is, revamping between subclasses seems to be easy to do, but revamping full classes is why harder. If the player wanted to change class would you be far more likely to encourage the retiring the character, or start multiclassing from there going forward. Where as simply changing the subclass in general is fairly simple a change, thou probably a quest still to do.