Dd

Players just abandon their characters and start building new ones from scratch at 2am? That's lame. Even if their characters die, I thought the common practice was to develop a few characters so you'll have them on deck in case your current one goes inactive for whatever reason. Right?

No, we'd have people come & go from out-of-town and join the campaign. So not everyone was building new characters; just everyone new (and new people were involved maybe half of the time).