(This is the twenty-ninth installment of Dice Tales, an ongoing series of posts about RPGs as storytelling.)

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Following on a suggestion from last week’s comments, let’s talk about situations where you’re bringing a new character into a game that’s been going on for a while.

This isn’t something most game systems really address, at least in my experience. (The world of RPGs being as broad as it is, I’m sure there are games out there that do talk about it, and give you tools for dealing with it.) New characters pose both narrative and mechanical problems: how do you work them into the story? And how do you make sure they can keep up?

The indie film The Gamers, which is a thoroughgoing lampoon of D&D-style gaming, mocks the narrative side of this. A mishap causes the party’s wizard to be killed by his own friends, so the player rolls up a new character while the story continues. A little while later, as they approach the dungeon where they expect to find the main villain, they encounter the new PC standing alongside the path.

GM: Guys, please, I want you to roleplay this. Remember, you’ve never met this guy before. The last guys you met tried to kill you, and you’re standing in the ruins of an evil cursed castle. Just — act appropriately.

New PC: Hello! I’m Magellan, a traveling mage. I notice your group has no wizard.

Other PC: You seem trustworthy. Would you care to join us in our noble quest?

New PC: Yes. Yes, I would.

Why is this guy standing around outside the dungeon? How do the other PCs know he isn’t working for the bad guy? Why should he trust a group of random strangers? All of these questions get brushed off. Because on the one hand, introducing a new character to the party should be a big deal, an opportunity for all kinds of story around how he earns their trust and finds his place in the group dynamic . . . but on the other hand, everybody knows that’s the new PC, and going through all that stuff feels like jumping through a bunch of pointless hoops. They already know they’re going to accept him, and time spent investigating his background and finding out what he’s capable of is time not spent moving forward with whatever story the group was in the middle of telling. So while the extreme of how quickly he integrates is definitely ridiculous, having the PCs welcome him in without all the questions they should realistically have is kind of understandable.

Part of the reason they can bring the new guy in so fast is that the player has clearly made a character who’s interchangeable with his old PC. The players in The Gamers are terrible at roleplaying, so personality changes are pretty much a non-issue, and he didn’t replace his wizard with a paladin or anything like that; he made another wizard, who literally takes the old wizard’s place in the marching order as the party continues on. Which brings up a second issue with new characters: where do they fit in?

This isn’t so much of an issue in LARPs, which are generally big enough that the dynamic is less tightly-knit. Joining an ongoing LARP is more like starting at a new school, in that you have to find your own clique, your corner of the larger game where you can fit in. It helps especially if you can talk to the GM or other players beforehand and get a feel for the social layout of the group, both IC and OOC; if you want to play with your friends, you make a character who fits in with whatever they’re up to, and if you know what type of character you want to play, you look for an area in the story where that will work. Because you’re not going around and doing everything with the same group of people, it doesn’t matter as much if you’re overlapping with another player’s concept — so long as it doesn’t get to the level of “you showed up to prom in the exact same dress”!

But it’s harder in a tabletop game. Because the group is so small and so unified, it leaves less room for fresh additions. If the new PC is replacing an old one (because of character death, a player leaving the game, or some other reason), do you shape the character to fit that vacant niche, or do you try to bring in something different? If you’re just adding a new PC to the group, how do they make their own niche, their own role in conversations and combat? Early on that can be relatively easy, but later in a campaign, all the usual things that need to be done are probably represented already on somebody’s sheet, and the characters are used to doing those jobs. The new character runs the risk of playing second fiddle to somebody else’s skills and knowledge, and (to switch metaphors) feeling like a fifth wheel in the well-oiled group dynamic. It’s a bit like marrying somebody who has a group of really close childhood friends: even if they like and accept you, there will always be this body of shared history that you aren’t a part of.

These aren’t insurmountable problems, but they do require care and consideration on the part of the whole group. It helps a great deal to think of it from the angle of, what kind of story do you want to make out of the addition? When you roleplay with the new PC, what will you be doing and talking about? One useful approach is to build the character’s background in a way that provides pre-existing connections with one or more PCs. If the new person is a relative or a school friend or somebody else familiar, then the players can spend some time working out backstory that will, at least in part, take the place of the shared experiences the PCs have built up through the course of the campaign. They can also figure out how their characters are accustomed to interacting, which cuts down on the amount of trial-and-error RP that tends to happen otherwise. This lets the new PC start out as a trusted ally from the start.

Oddly, it can also work to go the opposite route: set up the new PC to be a source of conflict and tension. This is what we did with the Mummy campaign I played in, and it turned out fairly well. The premise of Mummy assumes that all the PCs were broken in some fundamental aspect of their psyche before they died and got both resurrected and fixed by the Egyptian gods; when we had to bring in a new guy, well into the campaign, the player and the GM set him up to be broken in exactly the right ways to trigger one of the other PCs’ traumatic memories. Now, for this to work it needs some countervailing pressure, a force (be it mystical, organizational, or whatever) that pushes the PCs together — otherwise it’s inexplicable why they don’t walk away or try to kill one another. But if they’re all destined to fight a battle together or ordered by a superior to work as a team, then the antagonism can serve as a story engine, giving the PCs some real meat to chew on their way to settling down in a more functional dynamic. It’s a localized version of what you might do at char-gen, crafted with a particular eye toward giving the new character a running start on the RP front.

But even if you sort out the story hurdles, there’s still some mechanical issues to take into consideration — and that’s what we’ll talk about next week!