One of the Phoenyx' long-running, very active games is taking a hiatus all of a sudden. Not for GM reasons, but because a good chunk of the current setup hinges on a single character, and that player is bowing out temp-to-perm. This happened to one of our live games, too... Carl had built a campaign on an interesting hook in a character's past, and the player moved out of town. There doesn't seem to be any good solution to this: TV shows rarely survive the replacement of a central character's actor (with some notable exceptions), and at least in my experience, that doesn't generally work so well in games either. At least in a PBeM, an incoming player has often been a lurker, or can read the archives; few of us can pull from an audience for our live games, or give them videotapes of the sessions. And that assumes you can replace them in good taste - if they're out for reasons outside their control it may be callous to replace them, yet unfair to the other players if you don't. And yet it's fun/meaningful/sometimes irresistible to customize games to the characters in them. Has this worked really well/badly for anyone? Do you usually build "escape hatches" into your plots in case something happens to a keystone character (in game or out), do you just avoid plots heavily dependent on a single PC, or do you just hope for the best? -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
