D&D General Do you transfer characters between campaigns?

[Clint_L]

Many of my players did NOT care for the idea of their character bouncing around, because there was a lack of an overall narrative. That seems to be the big draw for many. Honestly that's a bit of a surprise to me, because players often also seem very character-focused... but perhaps bouncing characters between different campaigns makes the character seem less real/legit, cheapening it.
Better for the character to have a single, true arc within a single narrative, is probably the idea.. at least, that's all educated guesswork.

This is my thinking as well. Which is not good or bad, inherently, but it struck me as an interesting shift from how we played back in the day, when the storylines seemed less cohesive and characters often wandered freely between campaigns and DMs. Indeed, Gygax's own games were often described in those terms.

I think that it reflects how "story first" has become, to a certain degree, the underlying paradigm for how TTRPG players now see their characters, even in systems that we don't necessarily think of as emphasizing "story first" play.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Haha! Dusting off a Great Pumpkin analogy is pretty solid. Maybe I can save that analogy for a NPC demon that keeps mysteriously using pop culture references from across time & space to speak nonsense phrases to my high fantasy PC's. He also said; "You're in The Jungle Baby, Now you're gonna diiieeeee!"

That screams Dungeon Crawl Classics to me.