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Sometimes, inDungeons & Dragons, the best-laid plans, or parties, go awry. As a Dungeon Master, it’s your job to take on the arduous role of judge, jury, and executioner. You decide what monsters get thrown at the players, what rulings to dish out, and how to handle story arcs. While fun, this responsibility also comes with the unpleasant duty of maintaining peace at a table.
This requires a level of maturity and diplomacy from the Dungeon Master, as the person running the game, and, because the decision is so solitary, can feel hard to take on. But, for the sake of a game, sometimes a player has to go.
Evaluate Your Reasons
There are lots of reasons Dungeon Mastersremove players from games.Sometimes these reasons are for the safety of the players in real life, and sometimes these reasons boil down to asimple lack of cohesionwith the party orinterest in the story.
Ultimately, your reasons are your own. But there needs to be a reason, orelse you may come off as exclusionary.
Before ejecting a player from your game,review some of the offensive behavior.Is their character murdering their way across Faerûn, or being disrespectful to people at the table, out of character?Is it repetitive, even after discussion?Or is it scheduling issues?
Some players justdon’t work well at certain tables.This is no one’s fault. Roleplay-heavy players may draw out sessions in combat-oriented campaigns, or vice versa. Other times, you may realize the content in your campaign is difficult for the player to handle, andthe best option is to advise the player to seek another game.
You are allowed to draw those boundaries.In fact, you should!Ideally, a lot of these issues will be addressed in session zero orcharacter creation, but it’s hardly possible for everyone to predict how they’ll behave, so issues will often reveal themselves the longer you go on.
It isnotyour job to mediate issues beyond what takes place in the game.
Take It Away From The Table
As mentioned, there are a lot of factors that go into having a player leave, andevery situation is going to be a little different.That being said, when asking a player to leave, do not do it at the table.
This will createan embarrassing situation for everyone involved,even if you want to address an issue cropping up at the moment. Instead,find a good time to meet or call so you two can discuss the problem at hand, preferably alone. This will allow the potential problem to be minimized slightly.
Stay Honest
While there’s no harm in a little cushioning while letting someone down easily, in most cases,it’s best to be honest and straightforward with your grievances.Organizing, planning, and running a game isn’t simple, and if a player is disrupting the game, you need to make sure you’re on the same page when telling them to leave.
The goal is to be honest with the player, but not offensive.
Have The Conversation
Be gentle but firm.If you’ve made up your mind, you have to be direct. No beating around the bush, address the issue, and then tell them how you plan on moving forward.
Having a template going into talking to them can be useful.For example, if your player is known to cancel at the last second, and it’s gotten to the point of disruption, you may want to approach the situation like this:
If you aren’t confident with what you want to say, trywriting it outandreading it to yourself.This can help you figure out what to sayandhow it comes off.
You may also want to soften the departure, especially if you and the person in question are close.
Something like “Hey, I really appreciate you as a friend, but I don’t think our game has what you want in a campaign” can go a long way, but adding on “I can ask some of my friends if they’re running a campaign that better suits your style,” can go even further. Perhaps you two caneven work out a returnin the future,if the player seems to be open to change.
If someone is leaving on bad terms, stay polite and civil, but don’t keep the door open for a return.
If you’ve discussed rules in session zero that are being violated,this is the time to highlight what may have happened.
There may be hard feelings.Before talking, you may want toaccept that this could change things, even if you say all the right words. It’s a delicate situation, and assuming that this person is your friend, you aren’t aiming to hurt them. It may happen, anyway. Acknowledge that you’re able to only do so much, andstay respectful!
What To Do With The Character
The player is out, but the story continues. So, what happens to the character and any plots surrounding the character? You can do a couple of things here, with varying degrees of work going into each.
Write Them Out
Some Dungeon Masters may write out the character,reaching into their backstory and having the character go off to seek other adventuresor to finish off a plot hook they may have never gotten to. This is, objectively, theeasiest way to go about this.
The character leaves, and the players continue on. In cases where the player doesn’t have much of a backstory for their character, things get a bit harder!
Ask The Player
Assuming that you’re on good terms, you can always reach out to the player and ask what they want to do with their character.This puts some of the autonomy back in the player’s hands.
Death
Uh oh! Sometimes a good death canhelp motivate the players.It can also help create a new plot thread or Big Bad.
However,you should avoid killing the character out of vengeance.It may come off as childish. If that’s your sole motive, there are better ways to send a character off, regardless of the terms the player and party ended on.It’s far better to move on.
Worse, if the player finds out the party made their character into a miniboss or took joy in eradicating a character they (conceivably) spent time on, it can dredge the whole nasty business back up. Be careful with this one!
NPC-ify Them
For people you’re closer to, you may want to make their character into a shopkeep or guard. Perhaps they decide to settle down after a long career in adventuring.This is a great way to keep it respectful and let there be an end to the story.
This also leaves it open for the player to potentially return, if they come back to the light.
Move On
Have you ever watched a TV show where a character just sort of… appeared, despite being in very few of the prior episodes, if at all?
Yeah, do this, but reverse.Just take the character out.If you don’t care so much about a cohesive story, or you and your players all agree it’s best, just fade the character from existence.Keep what plot still works, reapportion it, and pretend as if it never happened.
Mass Hallucination
Who doesn’t love a mass hallucination? While it may be lazy writing in books, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having the player character beone massive myconid-spore-induced hallucination.Fun for the whole family!
Impostor
If you really can’t shake the idea of having your players maim something,you may want to consider revealing the former player character to be a doppelgänger.Perhaps they had stolen another adventurer’s guise and were playing a long, long game of infiltrating the party.
