D&D General Who “owns” a PC after the player stops using them?

[overgeeked]

If I-as-DM am running a game and I've seen your really cool character in play in another DM's game and know that character is now retired, I'd say it would be highly unethical of me to arbitrarily say - without asking either you or the DM - that character has just blipped over to my world and is now an NPC there. Not only am I violating your ownership over the character, I'm violating the continuity of the other DM's setting as she thinks that character is still in her world.

That’s something I think you’re ignoring or skipping over. Your use of the character in no way prevents the DM or player in the other game from using the same character. It has literally zero effect on that other game or its continuity.

 

[MNblockhead]

Side stepping from philosophical debate into the realm of practical.

If someone leaves my game, what can he/she realistically do to stop me from using character as I see fit in the game he/she isn't part of any more? If the person by any chance even finds out that their PC is being used in the game as NPC.

Well, what I've learned from this thread is that this depends on player, how strong the player feels about the issue, and whether you want to continue playing with them in the future.

This wasn't even an issue I've thought about in the past. But if someone in my group felt very strongly about it, it would try to honor their wishes in terms of NOT using their PC. But I would not necessarily honor their wishing of what their PC was doing in a game the player was no longer playing in. In my example in an earlier post, if the player said "I don't want my PC to be castellan of the party's stronghold", I would have honored that and if we could agree on a story of why the PC left the group, I might work that into the campaign. But if the player were to start dictating that I make changes to the campaign or world to fit the player's vision of the PC in a game the player was no longer than participating in. No. The PC just head off and disappeared. If the players has an issue with that, I guess I would be comfortable with losing that player for potential future games as well.

 

[Maxperson]

Sure, but they don't automatically become an NPC, that needs to be transferred by the player.

Sure it does. The game world has characters in it. If a character is played by a player at the table, it's a PC. If it's not played by a player at the table, it's an NPC. If the player leaves the game, the character remains in the game world and has no player playing it, so it automatically ceases to be a PC and becomes an NPC. It is unreasonable to expect the DM to track you down if you've left the game in order to see what that character would do.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

If I were an originalist, and spent hours poring over the 1E rulebooks attempting to divine their meaning - and I'm not, but let's assume I were - I think it's clear there are circumstances (lycanthropy, transformation to undead, divine ascension etc.) under which a PC explicitly becomes an NPC under the purview of the DM.

I don't think that applies to characters who are retired. I mean, what if the player wants to pick up the character again later on?

"I'm sorry, Mike. You can't play Blackbeard Burt. He was dismembered and eaten by vrocks three sessions ago."

Seems a bit rude.

 

[Lanefan]

And she would be right.

PCs and NPCs aren't fixed, real objects that can only exist in one imaginary world at a time.

Saying, "This is Gorax the Destroyer" doesn't mean Gorax the Destroyer has just vanished from another game to appear in yours.

Ah, there's a difference between us then: to me there's only one Gorax the Destroyer, and if he's bashing around in my world he can't simultaneously* be wreaking havoc in yours. And yes, if the Gorax from Speiadeia in my world just appeared in your world, that by extension has to mean he just - somehow - disappeared from my world.

* - the exception being if Gorax has been cloned, but IME that's pretty rare...and clones tend to want to kill each other anyway if they exist simultaneously.

Gorax the Destroyer can exist in any number of imaginary worlds simultaneously, and it does not create any kind of temporal rift, it doesn't threaten the stability or authenticity of any of those worlds, and the use of the character in one world has no bearing on it's use in the other.

Well, yes it does if there's only one Gorax.

It's a question of treating the characters as if they are real people.

To suggest that using a character in one game has an inherent, actual, real effect in other gameworlds, and that this effect occurs without the permission or knowledge of the participants in that game makes no sense.

I'm saying instead that it in fact does make sense that such cross-world effects can happen if-when characters jump worlds, and that it's unethical to do things that would cause those effects without the permission of the affected world's DM. Again, it just comes down to asking permission - and not being an asshat if said permission happens to be declined.

If the participants continue to imagine that Gorax is in their world, and only in their world, then within the shared space of their game, they are correct.

Except either the imagination of those people or the imagination of the other people is now based on an error, as (barring some really twisty-bendy in-game physics!) Gorax can't be in two places at once.

Nothing anyone else can do will change that. The only people that control what happens in the shared imaginary world of an RPG are the people particpating in the game. No matter what things you choose to imagine in your game, my game is unaffected.

In which case one table or the other isn't being true to in-game causality.

 

[Lanefan]

Side stepping from philosophical debate into the realm of practical.

If someone leaves my game, what can he/she realistically do to stop me from using character as I see fit in the game he/she isn't part of any more? If the person by any chance even finds out that their PC is being used in the game as NPC.

Depends on your relationship outside the game. I only run games for friends, so not only is it highly likely the ex-player would sooner or later find out, it's possible that if the player doesn't like it there'll be some harsh words said - hardly good for a continuing friendship.

 

[Lanefan]

Not until you define "belongs" in a context that everyone agrees it applies to. I don't consider a creative product to "belong" to anyone outside an economic/legal sense, so your "fact" here is subjective.

I've written thousands of silly poems etc. over the years. Never made a cent off 'em. They still belong to me, though.

 

[Lanefan]

What about pre-gens? Not trying to be snarky, I'm actually curious. My initial thought is in a one-shot with pregens, claiming ownership is not very reasonable. But if a player starts with a pregen and plays it for a considerable amount of time, I would consider it that player's character.

Yeah, that's fair.

I';m thinking pretty much exclusively of campaign characters here, rather than con games or one-offs.

 

[Lanefan]

That’s something I think you’re ignoring or skipping over. Your use of the character in no way prevents the DM or player in the other game from using the same character. It has literally zero effect on that other game or its continuity.

Well, IMO yes it does in that the same character can't be in two places at once. I'm not talking about making a clone or copy of the character, I'm talking about Jocasta from your world now being Jocasta on my world and not yours.

 

[SableWyvern]

It's a question of treating the characters as if they are real people.

But they're not real people, and it's very important to understand this.

Whatever else may be the case, behaving as if characters from roleplaying games or other forms of fiction are real, and can suffer harm based on how they are written or imagined, or that one person can disrupt another person's imaginary world just by imagining it (or elements of it) in a different way, seems deeply concerning to me.

I don't feel qualified or comfortable to take this particular line of discussion any further, so I'll leave it at that.