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

[Thornir Alekeg]

Back when I first got into the game, late '70s, it was the norm. We played the game in the back room of a local hobby store. We played on Saturdays, and during the summer, on Tuesdays. Kids would ride their bikes there from all over town to play, but as a result you never knew who would or would not be there, players and DMs constantly shifted. All games were essentially pick-up games. As a result we all had the "stable" of characters, all of whom had been played from 1st level. A couple might be reserved for adventures by one of the more frequent DMs, but usually it was just the DM announcing what level character was needed and and people would grab what they had.

For me that all started falling apart after a few years when a new group of younger kids started playing there, and they would pull out characters that had a treasure list that was insane. "You know the rod, staff and wands table in the DMs Guide? My character has all of them" Or two different people in the game would each have the Hand of Vecna, or both Stormbringer and Mournblade.

That was when I found a steady group to play in and started a real campaign.

 

[Gnimish88]

Growing up in rural Alaska, I had probably half a dozen characters who survived long enough to play among the 3 or so GMs I played with. This was seen as perfectly normal, since there were only 6 or 7 gamers available and 3 GMs available, and everyone knew everyone else. Made cheating out characters pretty much impossible. After college, I had a character I played in a campaign until I moved to another city, played it in 2 more short lived campaigns and 2 cons and eventually retired back in the original campaign 3 years later! The games were all pretty much BYOC with the GM not really scrutinizing them, which led to some frustratingly unbalanced situations (see bad game experience thread), but I had alot of fun and this was probably the best developed character I ever had in terms of personality and was not terribly kipped out in terms of equipment and the character only made it to 7th or 8th level.

These days, it does seem like people are less attached to the characters and have less motivation to bring them to new campaigns, but if I had to put my finger on it, I would say standardized rules for creating characters over 1st level have probably done more to change the practice of porting characters then anything else.

 

[JoAT]

I kind of do that...I might come up with an idea for a character or personality (or even a really good name) I like, and then the game I play him in dies in one session. It seems like a waste, so I might bring over to another game with different stats and levels, but the same general concept and personality.

For example, I had a really cool 1st level human sorcerer in the Sunless Citadel, but the DM quit halfway through. So then I brought in a 6th level version of him into the Temple of Elemental Evil game another guy was running.

This is me, as well - I do have a big, thick folder of characters, but as a general rule, most of the stuff in it is a bunch of character history, personalities and concepts, with some notes for character defining powers (a character's ability to turn into a fox, another's tattoo of unknown magical power, ect.) Whenever I'm going into a new setting, or system, I choose a character, re-create it (unless the setting or system is too diffrent and is incomatable with the characters I have), and then play it, until I feel that the character's life as a character has reached a logical conclusion. Then that character becomes retired.

In about 11 years, I've only had one character even come close to this conclusion, and that's one I'm playing in a current game. Most of the time, the game just dies after a couple weeks, and the character goes back into the folder, maybe with a few more notes for personality development, and stuff. It's kinda annoying, really...

 

[Rel]

You see, back in the day, we didn't have "campaigns", we had "adventures".

When we were 11-14, back in the early-mid 80's, most of our games took the form of "sleep over games". About once a month or so, one of the guys among our group of friends would convince his parents to let us all stay over. We would bring our books and a folder full of characters and then we would read the cover of the module du jour and see that it said "For Characters of 4th to 6th Level" and we would grab such a character from the folder.

This was usually followed by a brief period of haggling over who had to play the Wizard or Cleric and such. Then we would settle in for a 12-14 hour period of D&D and lack of sleep aided by the consumption of massive amounts of carbohydrates and caffeine. We would pretty much play the module from start to finish in one session after which treasure was divided and XP was handed out and we would go home and sleep it off.

The zenith of this style of play was the "Mr. Wizard" dungeon. Here we *gasp* did not use a published module. Instead the DM for the evening would run whatever characters we wanted to play through a dungeon of his own design. Characters of virtually any level or class were allowed and no matter how munchkin your character or items, Mr. Wizard would "balance things out" with his godlike powers. I could tell some outrageous stories that would make terms like "railroading", "nerfing" and "DM vs. Players style of play" pale by comparison. I won't. Suffice it to say that Halaster has nothing on Mr. Wizard when it comes to being crazy and in charge of a dungeon.

It wasn't until my late teens when we started to play what could even loosely be called a campaign. But as soon as we did, we rapidly become more sophisticated about it and the idea of just bringing any old character to the table quickly became anathema. Nowadays we don't even consider migrating a character from campaign to campaign. Especially since we switch genres and systems often.

 

[Treebore]

I think it is easier to let people import their characters from other games nowadays. Just say, "Sure you can play your old character, as long as all stats are within racial maximums and the value of all your items/treasure does not exceed the DMG's guidelines."

That way, even if they are lying/cheating, it is still within the games parameters.

Besides, i am of the opinion that they get out of the game what they put into it. If they want something based on lies, more power to them. It just makes me feel better knowing how much their personal lives must suck. They never know why, either.

 

[jerichothebard]

The first half of my gaming career was an interesting time - same group, 3 or 4 rotating DM's, same campaign world. We all had 2 or 3 (or some of us, more) rotating characters in a couple genres, which we would play depending on how we felt. Most of our characters, even a new one we wanted to start up, started at first level and were just nursemaided along until they caught up to a reasonable level of competence. I don't remember ever making a character of higher level until long after that group split up.

No overarching meta-plot, or at least, not one with a lot of intrigue requiring specialized DM knowledge.

It was fun and interesting and, as someone else said, the action of the moment was far more important than the action of the world at large.

That being said, there was, with the same group, during the same time period, another DM (someone's older sister) who ran what I would now think of as an actual, linear campaign, and we never played those characters in another game.

Good times...

jtb

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

We used to do this all the time in middle & high school. It was mostly a group of maybe 15 of us that played D&D on anything like a regular basis, usually at lunch or on weekends. Since you never knew who would be playing, or how long it would take, we used to drop in and out all the time. If someone didn't have a character that was of the right level, we would just pull out the Rogues Gallery, and randomly pick a character out of the book that was the appropriate class and level. Most of what we played were modules or single adventures, the campaigns I knew about were reserved for the "Serious Roleplayers" who were usually older than everyone else (usually someones older brother and their friends). I had an elf that went from Basic D&D to Advanced and played under probably 6 different DMs over 5 or 6 years. Was it consistant? Hell no, but it was fun. Plus, as has been mentioned before, making up characters was a very common downtime activity. I have a notebook that probably has 50 characters in it that I never played, just because I had time to role them up.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

We used to do this a fair bit back in the day. In high school, there were three groups of us that would often play together as one big group (8-12 people) at lunchtime, and characters would migrate back and forth.

It was actually kind of cool, since between the 3 GMs we had pretty much every module made and we'd share them back and forth. So, for example, we'd play Keep on the Borderlands as a big group over a couple weeks at school, but then each group would play In Search of the Unknown seperately. Since the treasure was pretty much pre-determined, we didn't have too much trouble with people ending up with overpowered stuff.

 

[Saeviomagy]

We did this in high school - we'd bounce a character from world to world through different adventures with different DMs. There was no campaign, just a lot of different dungeons.

However, it was really really bad. Different DM's did different stuff. Once, a character sold "rings of fire resistance" to the rest of the party, because a DM had taken him through an adventure that handed them out willy-nilly. The next adventure we were in featured fire-based creatures. Which we were basically immune to.

One DM ended up using a grudge monster to kill us all (ie - a dracolich vs level 4 characters). Someone used a scroll of 'create metal' to try to drop a giant block of iron on it, and it reared up and caught it before it fell...

I think we all stopped playing after that.

 

[evileeyore]

I've never transferred a character sheet, but I do reuse the same character over and over again.

I know the personality like the back of my hand. Whatever level, i know how that character thinks. Regardless of abilities or stats. I've used him the old red books, through 1e up to today (3e). Heck I am playing him in a PbP here at EnWorld.

--EvilE--