HI Community!
Recently, first time in my player career, I have reached level 11th. I choose to have an apprentice. My elven Mage was teaching Dwarven artificer how to be brave/useful. Unfortunately I had a trouble distributing spotlight among my characters and Dwarven girl is often forgotten. As I know my Elven character better and he is more powerful I tend to use him in battles. I never had a chance to step into second character shoes.
I had an idea how to fix this. I talked with my GM about possibility of retiring my level 11th character and only playing new one. He declined, as I have suspected, replying that it is impossible to revert my decision. That made me really upset because I wanted to play and now I will remove myself from the game completely as I don’t want my character to be forgotten and feel uncomfortable to play both.
My question is. How would you solve such situation from both GM and Player perspective. I’m also DM so it will help me decide in future. I know that each party has to decide themselves but what would you do?
And a follow up question. If you have second character and he/she reaches level 11th do you think its possible to retired first character too or only the second on as he is reaching level 11th. If that’s the case how would you retired the first one?
Yeah. I really don’t like that apprentice suggestion in the book. And I don’t see how the GM can stop you from retiring your 11th level Mage. Can’t the mage just shut themself into a tower? I find this reluctance weird and suspect the GM has some reason that’s not coming through in your explanation above. Why do they care one way or the other?
Ray Otus I think that DM read this as if I didn’t choose retire to safety my character cannot remove itself to safe place. I also chosen apprentice. I should also mention that we try to stop the end of the world. Maybe that is the reason. In my opinion it doesn’t matter if you retirer to safety if worlds end you end too, unless you are in other dimension.
Tell your GM it’s a game and they can’t tell you how to have fun.
I don’t want you to have impression that my GM is some tyrant though he sometimes takes rules very seriously.
Yeah, I don’t think there is a rule saying someone can’t retire a character. It’s a role playing game. You should be free to be who you want.
So the two options we’re discussing are:
* Retire to safety: If you retire you create a new character to play instead and work with the GM to establish your place in the world.
* Take on an apprentice: If you take on an apprentice you play a new character (the apprentice) alongside your current character, who stops gaining XP.
So in both cases you play a new character (either the entirely new character or the apprentice). The only difference is that for the first option, your old character is still available to play, while with the second they aren’t.
I could see the GM having misgivings if you’d chosen to retire your high-level character and then pulled them out of retirement whenever you really needed their abilities, but in the direction you’re going (having them vanish from play after hanging around for a bit with the apprentice), it seems entirely benign to me. I mean, you could even argue that it’s indistinguishable in play from you having choosen the retirement option from the outset, but the way that you chose to “establish [your new character’s] place in the world” was by them being mentored by your old character for a while, before the old character vanishing off to retirement (or some other mysterious high-level business of their own).
I think you should talk to your GM to see why they feel it would be a problem to ret-con your choice. If it’s a case of “you were given a choice of three options, you made your choice, now it’s set in stone,” that doesn’t seem like they’re being a fan of either your old or your new character.
Also, as Claytonian JP says, you can retire a character even if they’re not at 11th level yet. You could even choose to retire a first level character if you decided that you’d chosen a playbook that you weren’t really enjoying. There are no specific rules about that, because there don’t need to be – it’s just a natural result of the fact that a roleplaying game should be a team exercise where everyone is trying to ensure that everyone at the table is enjoying themselves.