#i dont likke the idea of like. yoinking their pc for an npc yk

[venusmage]

I'm sorry about your D&D game. Can I ask what made your players and yourself decide to restart the campaign?

(Continued from another message: "I meant in terms of just stopping the game versus continuing without the kicked player versus restarting. It's not a judgement thing I'm curious on your thought process. I think a lot of groups have gone through this.")

Oh, absolutely groups go through this all the time! Two of my players are also DMs that have had games fall through or stop due to people leaving or getting kicked. It's always a huge bummer for everyone involved. Our game's been running since mid 2021 - so that's a lot of (almost) weekly sessions. We were on session 67 I believe. I've got 900 hours logged into roll20 and a good 750+ of them are just the one game I've been running. As a DM it hurts because you put sooo much time and effort into setting it all up; having it just suddenly end totally sucks. It sucks for the other players, too, who just wanted to get together and play.

It's not the first time for us - two players at the very start of the campaign didn't vibe with the table and ended up leaving, which is totally fine! It's the first game I've ever grabbed people together to run for, so it wasn't an already established group that all had experience together yet, if that makes sense. Once they left we kept playing for nearly two more years until just recently.

When it happened I basically asked my players what THEY wanted to do. The PC of the kicked player was integral to the plot of the campaign, so do we find some way to write them out? Do I turn them into an NPC? Or did we want to restart the whole game, giving myself and the players an opportunity to try some new things? I'm not as inexperienced of a DM as I was in 2021 and felt like I could make a more cohesive game for my table. The players were excited at the idea of taking their PCs in slightly new directions to make it fresh, especially since we've been playing together consistently for a while now and the awkwardness that comes from roleplaying with new folks is gone. They've been having a blast changing builds, designs, and backstories around and we're all super stoked for Waterdeep 2.0!