I encourage my players to change aspects of their characters as needed. Storywise, the changes can come about for their PCs through stages of epiphanies, training, subtle evolutions, refocused qualities, finding that niche role or signature, or even to make drastic changes, and even entire rewrites. They don’t always take advantage of this.
One of my players has attempted to play a character that he has stopped gelling with. When setting up encounters applicable to a PC’s forte doesn’t result in a player finding that spark or initiative to join the scene, it might be a time for a PC tweaking.
I’m pretty sure it’s a lack of niche, because his character’s focus has often been redundant. The other PCs, for the most part, can already do or handle the things his PC can do, only better.
This particular player has had a great time, but assessing his PC’s contributions, he’s come to the conclusion that he’s going to refocus his character.
Fortunately, we’re using not-the-end, where traits can change without having to undo class levels or anything close to it. Hopefully, this will prove one of this system’s great strengths.
D&D has multiple mechanics that allow a player to tweak and/or completely rework their character from the ground up and anything in between - in the middle of the campaign changing potentially everything: feats, skills, powers, spells, class levels, and even race. Equipment is about the only thing that is not as easy to change… just expensive, lol.
Regardless of game, character development should be key. PC’s have an idea at the beginning of a campaign, and can change their thoughts at any point, so we as GM/DM’s should be cognizant of it. I’ve always tried to keep my campaigns open enough to allow for some change, while not allowing for overly drastic changes. I encourage my players to think about their characters before a campaign so they can come up with ideas to bring to the “Session Zero”, so we can have a decent starting point.
Most of my game-time over the last several decades has been Champions and other Hero System games. On more than one occasion I have allowed players to tweak (or even rewrite) their character after they played it a few times and discovered it either didn’t work mechanically the way they expected, or didn’t fit into the game they way they wanted.
I pretty much hold the same philosophy with most of the systems I run, although systems that use a completely random character generation method I might hesitate at. It’s never come up, but the nature of 100% random is to take when the dice give you and figure out how to make it work - and my players usually approach it knowing this.
What needs be said pretty much was said. I like flexible. I want to fix it when a player says “This is not working.” The point of the game is fun and if you are struggling with you character you are not having fun.
Even if the game does not allow a rework, I would.
I always allow people to tweak and arrange in early sessions. And small tweaks later.
I had a guy want to redo he class after several sessions after using abilities in play. So I gave him a quest. If he finish a job he’s been given, without using major class abilities, he will switch to the new class. The temptation remains.