A question I've had simmering in the back of my mind for a couple decades

In many places through the years (most recently, many of the EGG articles in Dragon, but that isn't the only place), I've read references to an interesting phenomenon. Players having characters that they take from game to game.

For instance, I've seen this reference mostly regarding cons and tournaments where players would not have a character of the appropriate level to join an adventure. Note: And I'm not talking about the "Living" whatnot games. Most of the references I'm specifically talking about are from the early days of AD&D, before the organized "Living" campaigns.

I've seen these tales of a new player joining a group, and there being a comment, "but this is the lowest/highest level character I have." Or the nightmare games where the regular players would have their characters attack and kill the new player characters to get their magic stuff. And the new players would comment (usually in an article in Dragon) about how their character(s) barely escaped that game.

What I'm talking about here is kind of difficult to explain without looking up and quoting all the references (especially from Dragon years ago), but basically it seems that AD&D players from the early days had specific characters that they would/could take from game to game. They wouldn't make up a new character when joining a game -- they'd pull out an established character that they supposedly have played before.

Only once did I actually encounter this kind of thing in my own gaming career. A new player was going to join my group, just for one adventure, and he brought with him a collection of characters that he had been playing. At our game table, he picked out one character (out of his notebook of PCs) of the appropriate level to match the other PCs, and even had a mini already painted and ready (picked out of a mini box he had for all his PCs). This was not a matter of him making up a character specifically for my game, but rather him picking from his virtual stable of already played characters. This player only played with us for one game session, and I never again personally met anyone who did this.

Every other player that joined one of my games created a new character specifically for that game. I did the same when I joined someone else's game.

I mean, sure, I have the character sheets for many of the characters I have played over the years, but I'd never even think to bring one of them directly into a game they weren't specifically created for. I might make a new character based on the same concept (if I hadn't been able to fully play the concept with the original character), but I definitely would not show up to a new game with a notebook of old characters.

Have you ever experienced this? Does this practice continue?

Quasqueton

I used to do this all the time back in the 80's. Not at all since then.

Heh - I actually remember the last moment I stopped. I brought a beloved 1e cavalier from a game at home into a local Mensa game during college. In the first encounter, we had to ride through a mountain pass guarded by a dragon who demanded tribute. The evil dragon sassed off, I played the character and charged forward - and was promptly and efficiently eaten.

I don't think I've tried to migrate characters ever since.

I have never experienced it myself, because I usually insist that a player makes a new character for a game. Because most of the players I know started around the same time, and are in the same circle of friends, we don't have too many people showing up wanting to use other characters from other games; even if they did, chances are it was a game I or one of two other DM's ran!

9 times out of 10, it's just easier on the DM if they make up a new one based on a ground-level of specifics, instead of custom-fitting one to what we're playing now.

Gary Gygax apparently had a lot of this going on, or at least acknowledged it back in the early days; in fact, the old "Tomb of Horrors" adventure was designed to be a "player equalizer"! (For those players who bragged about their "powerful characters" but who got them without very challenging play to get that way).

I never did this per se, but I do recall in my younger ("so much younger than todaaayyy...") days having "on file" a variety of pregenerated characters. Heck, when you weren't playing all that often as a kid the most fun thing to do was just generate character after character.

In my experience, this was very common in many groups in the 70's and early 80's. At some point, GM's realized that it didn't work very well (primarily due to balance problems) and mostly stopped doing it.

Ony time I ever allowed it was at a Con I attended back around 1980/81. I know of people who try to do it, but not in my games.

Heh - Isle of the Ape was another equalizer. Mr. Gygax was tired of seeing high level characters that didn't really spend their time earning their levels. His theory was that the people that had sjipped up levels too fast would fall down to the variety of challenges in the Isle of tha Ape.

Back on topic, I don't recall having anyone bring a sheet for a character from another game to my table. For my small group of friends, we had a similar affect since we didn't really have a comprehensive campaign. It was more like a series of vaguely related one-shots. However I have seen "Character Stables", and given the number of character sheets in some of them, I doubt all of them were really played from 1st up to whatever level they were. Most of the sheets looked suspiciously unused and the players were ... shall we say rules light in their knowledge. Coupled with the fact that their only reference to where they picked up X magic item amounted to "in this one game" instead of having any amusing anecdotes to tell, I concluded that most of the "Character Stables" I saw were bogus.

Quasqueton said:

...Players having characters that they take from game to game. ...

Have you ever experienced this? Does this practice continue?

Quasqueton

Click to expand...

Even as a youngun, this just seemed wrong to me. Never did it , never allowed it. I didn't want some other DM's disfunction infecting my game. I was comfortable with my own brand of munchkinism, thank you very much... But, as EN says, I did have a stable of characters that were ready to go outside of regular games that were of various levels. Most never got used at all...

After a couple of early experiences (aged around 15), I've not allowed players to bring in characters from 'outside'. Occasionally, I've carried over 1 or more characters from other campaigns I've run or played in, if it fits with what we're going to be playing.

A couple of people have asked and I'm happy to help them design something like a character from another game. It'll be a new character, but we can normally find something close to what they used to have.



One guy I knew used to play variations of the same character for each campaign that he played in. He took this character along to someone elses campaign:

He'd reached 5th level in one campaign, 4th in another, 7th in another etc, etc. He'd added them all together to come up with a 39th level wizard, which he was trying to use...

Funnily enough he was told to take it back home. And got dice thrown at him!

This was common in my experience. If the DM was running a game for, say, 6th-10th level characters, then the player would be expected to furnish one that he had played from 1st level. That was important - no 'cheating' and making up a character at 8th level. Players seemed to have a lot more invested in their characters, back then. At a pinch, players could opt for a pregenerated character from a module - Beek Gwenders of Croodle, or whatever. This was always considered an inferior choice, though.

I recall that one player of mine, who had dropped out of the game, reluctantly allowed a newbie replacement player to play his character. Whenever we saw him afterwards, the old player would always ask:

"How's Raven, Bill? I hope you haven't gone and got him killed."

Weird in retrospect, but it seemed perfectly normal to us at the time.