>players text me about their backup character>call me between sessions to flesh out the lore of their backup character>send me their backup character sheets>show me slop of their backup character>ask me to worldbuild new stuff for their backup character>only had their current character for 10 sessionsHow do I politely tell my players that I do not give a flying fuck about their backup character until their current character is no longer playable? I want my players to be invested in their current character and not jump ship to a new shiny character idea every few sessions. And no, I don't allow them to play new characters until their current one is dead or outside the campaign area.
>>92740428>And no, I don't allow them to play new characters until their current one is dead or outside the campaign area.So you're being pointlessly stubborn and come whining to us about an easily solvable problem.
>>92740452It's not about whether or not I let them play the character, I'm asking about some ways to run the game that make the players care more about their current characters instead of running off to new ones.
>>92740428Do you want them to be more invested in their current one, or do you want them to stop bugging you about their next one? Because these are different things
>>92740428Idk either way they do this. In The only games where this actually makes sense (OSR) they don’t…
>>92740489Exercise some creativity regarding requirements for being allowed to switch to a new character?There are tons of ways to do this, and they (luckily for you) mostly involve information about the new characters that your players are giving you. You can set up plot hooks to introduce the new character, have the PC's hear rumors about adventurers that conveniently resemble the new char's your players have been feeding you info on. You can do side sessions w/a player playing as the new char who hasn't met up w/the rest of the PC's yet. This could also be in the form of an entire 2nd party doing other shit in the world that the PC's hear about from time to time (and/or they hear about the PC's) until their goals meet up. Then boom, everyone gets to play a new character for a bit if they want, and you have the old PC's leave the game for a while.If you're lazy, add a healthy dose of "a wizard did it" level of excuses as to why their old PC's got on a bus and left and if the players have buyer's remorse, just use "a wizard undid it" to fix it (like in the Left For Dead games where the party just finds a new member conveniently in the next broom closet after an old PC dies, but with more banishing/planeswalking/kidnappings to meet your commitment to the veracity). TLDR your players clearly want to be running different PC's for variety or want to change characters, and you can use that to your campaign's narrative advantage.
