Tuesday, 11 September 2018

Character Rebuilds

Once it was decided that we would proceed with the same characters into "Storm King's Thunder", some of my players mooted the possibility of adjusting their characters to more closely resemble how they would build them, rather than how they were presented in the Basic Set. Which is cool - I'm a convert to the notion that you should be able to rebuild your character at opportune times to better represent the character you want to play.

When performing a character rebuild, I have one iron rule: the core concept of the character must be maintained. By and large this will be treated as a retcon - this is the way the character has always been. That being the case, we don't want that to be a huge shock to the game. So if the character has always been a Dwarven Cleric who uses a battleaxe, he shouldn't suddenly become an Elven Wizard who uses a trident!

I have two lesser guidelines to be applied: you really shouldn't change the character's race (and probably not the subrace), and you probably shouldn't change the character's ability scores. Neither of these is quite so absolute, since these things tend not to be quite so clearly established within the fiction of the game, but if you get to the point where you're wanting to change those things, you're probably better off with a whole new character.

You'll note that I haven't said you can't change the character's class (or subclass). That's because the boundaries between some of the classes are at least a little flexible - an archer-Ranger could probably become an archer-Fighter (or vice versa) without too much difficulty, while a Paladin could probably become a Fighter without too much grief.

Two other things to consider, though:

Firstly, a character rebuild should generally be done only when an opportune time arrives - D&D 5e provides three such ideal opportunities, as the characters enter a new tier; alternately, my current game has an opportunity due to moving from "The Lost Mine of Phandelver" to "Storm King's Thunder".

Secondly, any given PC should probably only be rebuilt once in the course of his career. If you're feeling the need to chop and change more often than that, it's probably better to retire the character and start over.

As above, though, neither of these are my iron rule - they're both guidelines.

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