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

[GrimCo]

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.

And that is the crux of the matter.

If DM and player are friends or at least good acquaintances, and player asks DM to not use his PC after he leaves game, DM will probably honor that request. If they are not friends, he might say ok and not use it, say ok and still use it or straight out tell person to go pound sand. Personally, i'm in the last category. If you come to my game as a stranger and leave it as a stranger, but your character is important in the story, i'll use it as I see fit and tell person to go pound sand.

Player owns his character in a sense that no one can take it away from him. It's a concept that resides in players mind. When he leaves table, he can use that concept at any other table, hell, he can reuse it at the same table in different game. But at the same time, when you enter the game, your character is copied in memories of all the others at the table, including DM. That copy remains at that table, and if the player leaves it, DM and group (but usually DM) decides what to do with it.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

The days of the dm taking a sheet and ripping it up are hopefully not a thing.

That said, we give DM license all the time to make stories. Say we finish and adventure and tell him what we plan to do, many times he comes back and says you did X there was this complication, but etc.

I would have no problem with a DM narrating a respectful story…your dwarf has been leading his kin in trading caravans and has come to be known as a brave (blah blah blah)…ok cool vs. He is turning tricks on the streets waterdeep…

As far as me taking the character and playing it elsewhere….what dm is going to interfere unless I try to bring him back to home campaign with a million rare items…

I play with friends and it’s perfectly reasonable. We would simply work it out.

“I guess we are moving on from
This group…but I really liked playing this cleric. John offered to run something…I am going to try and get him some levels!” Cannot see either side balking…

And if I was not playing the character why would I tell the dm NOT to use him as a colorful npc?!

Why can’t we all just get along?

 

[Lanefan]

But why are you assuming that it's the same character? I feel like it's really obvious that when you take a friend's character as an NPC in your game, what happens is the "clone or copy" situation as you describe it. Unless the DM who used that character has an insane multiverse theory that their game is always interconnected with all the other D&D worlds and your PC was literally plopped down from their home world and transported into theirs, what you have is always a copy or clone situation. Nobody that I know who uses inspirations from other worlds or games says that the character they are expying literally got plopped from another world. Why are you treating that as the primary case of PC-inspired-NPC when it is obvious that the clone or copy scenario is actually the most common one?

The bolded is in fact exactly how I've always viewed it, and I don't consider it an insane theory. So yes, the character is being taken from one world and dropped into another.

And it's not a multiverse theory, it's a universe theory: uni means 'one'. Makes a lot of things way simpler to grok, at least for me. When my character stands outside at night on its game world and looks up into the sky, the stars he sees might very well have other DMs' game worlds orbiting around them.

I got this idea from my first DM, who was doing his masters in astronomy at the time, when he showed us a picture of a real star and said "that's where my setting's planet is". I think he even tried designing star charts and constellations based on what you'd see if looking from that location in space, though I'm not sure how far he ever got with it. I just took this concept one step further by thinking "well, if his world can be out there, wny can't all of them?", and went from there.

 

[Lanefan]

The similar persons from "parallel timelines" is an established trope.

Indeed; and while it can be entertaining in sci-fi shows, it's a trope I soundly reject for my D&D settings.

 

[Lanefan]

That's not the question. It's a question of whether or not we treat our worlds as being a part of the same cosmos or not. They aren't. I can remove entire planes of existence from my game that you have in yours. My prime is not your prime. My astral is not your astral. You may have an abyss and I may have axed it from existence.

In short my game is not your game, so Gorax can exist in both and be treated as real people in each. There's still only one Gorax.

Where the way I see it, there's only one prime material and we all share it. I've even developed a rough-and-ready rationale for how-why physics work slightly differently (as meta-reflected by different rule systems) in different places.

 

[Lanefan]

There's a difference between you writing a poem all by yourself and you creating a character in a shared space. When you create your character for my game, you do not have 100% say so in that creation. As the DM I have the ability to tell you that no you can't be an elf since elves don't exist in my world. Your background, if any, has to be worked into the world that I am running. If you have any special ideas for your character that you want to happen, you have to run it by me and work it out. That ability means that the DM has a small measure of creative control over that PC.

The DM controls the setting, and it's then on me as player to make a character that fits in with the setting as the DM has designed it. That there's no Elves in your world doesn't give you any ownership claims over my Dwarf.

If it makes you guys feel better, think of the PC like a business. You have 95% ownership of it, but I own 5% as a silent partner granted to me by the creative control that I have during character creation. So long as you are in my game, you control what your PC does and says. If you leave my game, that character remains in my world as an NPC since there is no longer a player playing it and my 5% ownership gives me the ability to take it over.

My take is that even though I leave the game I still (and always will) retain that 95% (well, 100%) ownership until and unless I proactively hand it over to someone else. Yes the character remains in your world, but it's not automatically yours to do with as you please.

 

[Lanefan]

And I don't consider any of the creative works I've done to "belong" to me in any meaningful sense, so here we are.

And yet they belong to you anyway, like it or not.

Even if you want to release them into the public domain, I'm not entirely sure you can (at least in the US). That was the advice I was given at a GenCon seminar on legalities in publishing when I asked what would happen if I wrote an adventure module specifically for public-domain release: I was told it wasn't possible under then-current US law. Now this was 20 years ago, nind, and the laws may have changed since.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Being ethical and respectful toward the boundaries of fellow D&D players never stops because they are currently not looking at you and are away from the table.

Being ethical and respectful to the boundaries of fellow D&D players has somehow always been a hot button and divisive issue.

 

[Maxperson]

Where the way I see it, there's only one prime material and we all share it. I've even developed a rough-and-ready rationale for how-why physics work slightly differently (as meta-reflected by different rule systems) in different places.

In the one material plane model that Gygax envisioned, there are essentially infinite versions. Aerth, Oerth, Earth, etc. That means that 5 Goraxes.........Goraxi..........whatevers is right in line with that vision.

Personally I don't follow that model since we all have very different games. And it's not just physics. Entire planes aren't available at many tables.

 

[Maxperson]

My take is that even though I leave the game I still (and always will) retain that 95% (well, 100%) ownership until and unless I proactively hand it over to someone else. Yes the character remains in your world, but it's not automatically yours to do with as you please.

You don't get to control my game or dictate what I can or can't do, though. If you make a PC in my game, it's a part of my game world and that doesn't end when you get up and go. Nor am I forbidden from accessing that part of my game.