How To Handle Players That Leave Mid Way

         It may be the hardest part of the RPG experience, when one of the members asks to leave the story, and thus bringing a tearful end to their character. For some it may feel like breaking up with a close friend or a lover, as characters become a tightly knit group in which all players invest their time in to bring to life. Yet the problems of real life sometimes rear their ugly head, and a player has to bow out, thus bringing up the question, "What to do with the character they wrote for?"

         The easiest thing to do is to kill off the character or leave the group for some reason.  How they die or leave should be left up to the original player. However, if the player leaves suddenly, and in a unfavorable way with the rest of the players. The character's death should be written by the RPG creator, with the death being as graphic or terrible as they decide. However it should be noted that doing so can sometimes personally offend the original player and harm friendships outside of the RPG.

          Another way is to see if another player will take up writing the character, pulling a double duty between the two characters. This may seem like the easiest option for characters that have become beloved by many of the players; however the surrogate player should go in understanding that they will need to adopt not only the character's emotions and personality, but also the writing style of the original author, on top of having to write for not only one character but two.

         The last option is to have the character adopted by all the players, to have the actions of the extra character added into events, and even add dialogue from that character into some conversations. This one while the easiest, also has the possibility of creating the greatest inconsistencies, as each player could believe that the character should grow in a certain way, or simply leave the character to stagnate.

         There is no easy answer as to what everyone should do when a player leaves, and as I will cover in a future post, the chance that all the players that start a RPG will carry it through to the end is nearly impossible. As such the creator of the RPG should decide early on what will happen to a character when a player leaves so they will not be caught off guard if or when it happens.