Question about pen & paper RPGs

[SsnakeBite, the No1 Frenchman]

Do you keep your character through different games? I mean, it makes sense if you're playing different campaigns with the same group of players, but from I hear and read, it seems people even tend to keep their character when joining a different group. I guess with character sheets you can keep track of how your character has progressed and inform the new group of its stats, abilities, equipment and all that, but how can you tell if the guy isn't just making them up?

Hell, what if someone plays a campaign with one group, then another with a different group, during which their character evolves obviously, and then comes back to play another campaign with the first group? Do you just trust him to have not bulshitted you with how much he's improved? "Oh yeah, I totally gained a +33 Sword of Slicing Tarasks in half with a single strike with a different group. Honest. You can't ask them though, they live in Canada".

Also, doesn't that end up creating overpowered characters? I mean, I know it's possible for a character to die but from what I understand, it's a fairly rare occurrence and DMs avoid it as much as possible. So over several campaigns, you'd end up with a party made entirely of demi-gods, wouldn't you (in fact, if I'm not mistaken, it IS possible for a player character to become a god given the right stats)?

So does it just work under the honour system and people just roll new characters when the previous one becomes to overpowered? Or am I horribly misunderstanding and keeping a character across different groups is not a thing?

[YAKMAN is ICHIBAN]

I've just never understood this stuff, no matter how many times my brother has explained it to me.

[Deleted]

Yeah, typically you roll up a new character. If you keep characters from game to game, you'll end up with overpowered, as well as possibly underpowered, characters. With games that use a challenge rating system, like Dungeons and Dragons (at least up until 3.5, I don't know about the editions up to that), you need to have characters be roughly the same level or challenge rating (so you could have a party of, say 4 5th level characters, with one 3rd level character if that character had items, abilities, etc. that made him or her as powerful as the other party members). Otherwise, challenges will be too easy or too hard for different characters and you won't be able to divide it up accurately between them.

[Hurbster]

Hurbster is the name of my first ever Rolemaster character that I played in Uni, over 20 years ago now.

[pegasuswarrior]

Not if you go to another playgroup. Not for me anyway. OP characters where a DM has given them way too many special items vs players coming into the game with more legit characters.

[Dr. T is an alien]

It depends entirely on the people you play with, the DM, and the character in question.

If I am setting up a campaign for characters levels 5-8 and you want to bring in your lvl 15 paladin, that isn't happening.

If I am setting up a campaign for characters a few levels above what your character is, I will let you level him a few times but I may tell you that you left your +3 longsword on your mantle at home (mighty silly of you!).

If I am setting up a traditional campaign for level 5-8, your level 6 fighter can make the trip but all of his steampunk equipment fell off of your person as you passed through the magic mirror that brought you to my setting in the first place. I don't think his feats in musket proficiency will do him any good, unfortunately, but you can run him if you would like to play a character who spends most of his time bitching about visiting the Stone Ages.

[Mozenrath]

Dec 15, 2015 20:42:48 GMT -5 Dr. T is an alien said:

It depends entirely on the people you play with, the DM, and the character in question.

If I am setting up a campaign for characters levels 5-8 and you want to bring in your lvl 15 paladin, that isn't happening.

If I am setting up a campaign for characters a few levels above what your character is, I will let you level him a few times but I may tell you that you left your +3 longsword on your mantle at home (mighty silly of you!).

If I am setting up a traditional campaign for level 5-8, your level 6 fighter can make the trip but all of his steampunk equipment fell off of your person as you passed through the magic mirror that brought you to my setting in the first place. I don't think his feats in musket proficiency will do him any good, unfortunately, but you can run him if you would like to play a character who spends most of his time bitching about visiting the Stone Ages.

Yeah, similarly here. I haven't had this come up, since the people I play with like rolling up new characters, but if someone wanted to bring a new one in, it'd need to be done with a transition to fit the relative power level of the party and campaign.

[The Spelunker!]

If you want that, you can always go with official DND sessions of like Living Greyhawk and the like. Official stamped characters for that purpose. I've never actually had anyone sit down at a DND session with their own character from another game and just try to play it.

Amongst the around 100 people I've roleplayed with regularly it's been pretty rare. There's been a few players who've made new character sheets at starting level for a character they have used before. Then there's also a few instances of child of/relative of characters that are the exact same as the previous one, usually when a character dies. I've got one right now in my Dresden Files game that didn't have a good idea at creation so they ended up running their own wolfwere daughter from our previous Dresden campaign. We also ran an Exiles Marvel comic style game once, and I believe a few people took older characters they'd run and adapted them to the system we were running on.

However, I have had GMs reuse the same villains over and over from campaign to campaign, even across genres. I literally had to fight the same wildly uninteresting immortal satanic warlock in at least 2 super hero games and a Dresden games if not more that I'm not remembering, as well as that character popping up as a PC in the Exiles game. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea, but I think a GM really needs to think if players actually liked the character at some point, especially if it's a major bad guy. Imagine if every major faction in WWE had been led by Nathan Jones.

[Mozenrath]

Dec 16, 2015 0:26:07 GMT -5 The Spelunker! said:

If you want that, you can always go with official DND sessions of like Living Greyhawk and the like. Official stamped characters for that purpose.

Amongst the around 100 people I've roleplayed with regularly it's been pretty rare. There's been a few players who've made new character sheets at starting level for a character they have used before. Then there's also a few instances of child of/relative of characters that are the exact same as the previous one, usually when a character dies. I've got one right now in my Dresden Files game that didn't have a good idea at creation so they ended up running their own wolfwere daughter from our previous Dresden campaign.

Sort of like how a friend of mine keeps making NPCs or sometimes player characters of a guy with an Irish accent named Milo who wants to box people.

[Dr. T is an alien]

I forgot to mention a fun thing I had done for random new players. I had a pair of playable NPCs that were cursed. Their backstory was that their older brother was a wizarding prodigy as a kid who augmented them (making them stat monsters), but it ultimately broke them. They would basically resent their own personality every session or so (including rotating character classes), allowing the new player to try out the game with a stat monster (which helps cover their mistakes) without having to adhere to any preset personalities.

The brother was a Fighter/Druid/Rogue/barbarian (only one class available at any one time) and the sister was a sorceress/cleric (to a chaos god, of course)/rogue (strangely, she usually got played as a seductress)/ranger (again, only one class at a time).

[Dr. T is an alien]

Dec 16, 2015 0:34:23 GMT -5 Mozenrath said:

Dec 16, 2015 0:26:07 GMT -5 The Spelunker! said:

If you want that, you can always go with official DND sessions of like Living Greyhawk and the like. Official stamped characters for that purpose.

Amongst the around 100 people I've roleplayed with regularly it's been pretty rare. There's been a few players who've made new character sheets at starting level for a character they have used before. Then there's also a few instances of child of/relative of characters that are the exact same as the previous one, usually when a character dies. I've got one right now in my Dresden Files game that didn't have a good idea at creation so they ended up running their own wolfwere daughter from our previous Dresden campaign.

Sort of like how a friend of mine keeps making NPCs or sometimes player characters of a guy with an Irish accent named Milo who wants to box people.

We had a guy play an "Irish" barbarian named Sheamus who, amongst other things, had really committed himself to his hobby of determining which foods produced the smelliest farts. If we wanted to interrogate someone, we simply bound the prisoner in a closed tent with Sheamus. Worked every single time, especially with goblinoids (it was assumed their noses were more sensitive).

[The Spelunker!]

Dec 16, 2015 0:46:13 GMT -5 Dr. T is an alien said:

Dec 16, 2015 0:34:23 GMT -5 Mozenrath said:

Sort of like how a friend of mine keeps making NPCs or sometimes player characters of a guy with an Irish accent named Milo who wants to box people.

We had a guy play an "Irish" barbarian named Sheamus who, amongst other things, had really committed himself to his hobby of determining which foods produced the smelliest farts. If we wanted to interrogate someone, we simply bound the prisoner in a closed tent with Sheamus. Worked every single time, especially with goblinoids (it was assumed their noses were more sensitive).

I ran Sheamus myself in a Dresden Files game. He was an albino Luchador who's magical mask he inherited down the family line could turn him into a bear, El Oso Fantastico. He was only an albino cause I wanted to play it as Sheamus. Turns out Sheamus HATED clowns and ended up carrying around a folding chair he had blessed by the local priest to hit vampires and ghosts with. Oso was a joke pitch my GM called my bluff on, but it turned out super fun.

[EvenBaldobombHasAJob]

I would insist you re-roll your character. I mean, you can keep the same name/class/race/backstory as long as it fits the campaign world but everyone starts at the same level.

[Bad Moon]

New game, new character unless the GM says otherwise. And even when I'm "allowed" to bring over a character from game to game I never do, usually by the time a game comes to an end I feel like that story is finished and adding anything would only diminish the character.
I have made some legacy characters before though, a running gag in our group is that every half-elf I play is a bastard kid of my original elf character since they're always half-elf on the father's side and he always abandoned them.

[The Spelunker!]

Personally, I do have the bad habit of using my former player characters as NPCs in games I run. That's definitely gotta be a demerit.

[Bad Moon]

Dec 16, 2015 16:51:34 GMT -5 The Spelunker! said:

Personally, I do have the bad habit of using my former player characters as NPCs in games I run. That's definitely gotta be a demerit.

So guilty of this. A group of recurring antagonists in a game I'm running are actually pretty much just evil jacked up versions of my own player character and the rest of the party in a different game. I even made my own evil ripoff the leader of the group. I guess I can be pretty selfabsorbed when I'm really proud of a character. 

[Deleted]

Nothing wrong with using an old PC as a NPC if it fits the game and setting.

[Dr. T is an alien]

I have a few NPCs that show up in all of my settings. Dalamar the Dark from Dragonlance has been a constant in all of my settings and I love finding reasons to get clerical types to do things that Dalamar set into motion for his own benefit but they feel compelled to go along with it because others benefit as well (Dalamar pays his debts in one way or another, after all).

Another frequent NPC is Felix Leiter, though who or what he is changes every time you meet him.

In some of my settings my old dragonslayer character is a minor deity.

The head of the church is usually my old minotaur/paladin.

XXX is frequently the employer of the players.

[A Platypus Rave]

New Game new character is usually how our games run.

You can of course remake the same person but they are going to have the same stuff as everyone else...

[SsnakeBite, the No1 Frenchman]

Alright, the consensus seems to be that you can't import a character from a different group or at most, you can keep the character's identity but you have to re-roll them. Thanks for answering, everyone!

So what about if you're playing a new campaign with the same group as before? I mean, obviously if everyone else is starting with new characters, you're not gonna be allowed to keep your old one without re-rolling, but my question is more if, basically, making a sequel for a campaign is a common thing? Like, if a group really enjoyed a campaign and would like to keep going with a new adventure, they'd start a new, tougher one with the same characters and dealing with the consequences of the previous campaign.