D&D General Do you transfer characters between campaigns?

[Bedrockgames]

I'm not talking about the "default" or "standard" according to the books. I'm talking about what people actually used. And, as I mentioend, outside of B/X or BECMI, 3d6 (especially in order) was not common by any means IME. YMMV, of crouse.

I think on that front it varied a lot at the time. Things were so fragmented back then. I remember going to one group and they had two GMs running one game. And another where the GM made everyone's character for them. I won't pretend to have a handle on how this was approached outside my small circle of gamer friends (for us 3d6 was the norm, but some a allowed you to place them where you wanted, others did it down the line)

 

[UngeheuerLich]

If the character has a reason to be in two different campaigns and if the transfer only happens during downtime and not in the middle of a dungeon, I think there is no problem.

Otherwise it seems quite questionable.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Ah... the crazy things we do as kids...

Indeed. There was absolutely no need for him to try to pull that one off. Cheating at playing pretend is generally a low deal.

I've long been a bit of a softie as a DM. But back then, when a player cheesed me off enough, I could be vicious. Kobold with a Nine Lives Stealer. Level-draining undead, rust monster, then a shoot trap to a dragon's lair. If I recall correctly, this particular one involved a disguised succubus and a trip to the Abyss.

 

[Baron Opal II]

So, my fighter Bob is playing in different groups, different settings. He levels up in group A and gained a magic item Friday night, so when I join group B the next afternoon on Saturday, he is higher level and has a new item which he didn't have last week.

I don't see how the other players in group B, who now see the "new and better Bob with his shiny new toy", could be okay with that.

It depends. In general, in the circles I gamed in, the DM knows that Bob spends time in Aphonion, but when you sit down to play in The Shardlands Bob may not be available. For the next three months of time in the Shardlands he's on a different plane. You'll have to make a new character. In three months of game time, Bob steps back through the portal and is ready to go. This would not be a surprise to Bob's player.

Or, several people do that, so it's a benefit everyone enjoys. Or, he might have a new level, but the sword is only enchanted in the other campaign. It can depend on the relationship that the different DMs have with one another.

Things like this, of course happened. Or someone would bring in an old PC from a campaign from a different group that hasn't been played in years. The current DM reviews the old PC, and if everything is cool, it gets played.

This too.

 

[jasper]

This varied with the group and the trust level. Some times you multiverse hopped to another dm. Other times you cloned your pc.

 

[jasper]

Isn't this essentially Adventurer's League play?

Yes it is. and the bad dm is still a thing. Who would want Jasper to DM? He is such a p...Beep.

 

[cbwjm]

I might have taken the same character concept to a new game, but generally not the same actual character. More than likely, even the same concept would have been rare as I'd probably play other concepts that I have kicking around.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

I rarely find myself joining campaigns that start above level 1, let alone level 3, so it often seems braggadocious to have a character who claims to have been on prior adventurers when they can't even swing a sword twice in six seconds.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

When I run I have no problem letting players pick up character of appriopriate level from previous campaign that is in the same setting or the character has canonically ended in a place where it could make sense for them to got to the campaign's next setting.

 

[TorgoTheWhite]

Outside of organized play, no.

I remember when I was a young teenager and I invited a new player to our group. He asked if he could bring the character he'd been playing in. He showed up with a high-level paladin with a holy avenger and 18s in every stat. Now, as an adult, I can see that the right thing to do would to simply say that he has to make a new character instead. As a kid, I ran an adventure with a bunch of level-draining foes and more or less engineered the character loosing his paladin status. He later admitted that he had made that character up entirely and had never actually played him in a game before.

Usually, you can kind of tell because any character that the player had a true attachment to will have a whole bunch of remembered character traits and great canonized story.. vs stats and an unprepared, "hohum" response to situations.