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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8998724" data-attributes="member: 29398">Nothing.  It's up to the players whether they decide to care about each others' characters, and that can vary character by character even with the same two players.For example, I play in a game where we've all got multiple characters; and each other player has characters who are friends of one or more of mine, disliked by one or more of mine, considered rivals or love interests or whatever by one or more of mine, and so on.So if I'm playing one of my characters (A) I'll very much care about another player's character (B) who (A) is in love with, but if I'm playing a different character (C) I might not give a flying fig about what becomes of (B) and want to kill that same player's other character (D).We have, and I consider it an unacceptable failure when it happens to me.  Thus, I do what I can to ensure it doesn't happen (again).In theory.  In practice we have game logs that largely take care of such things.The risk there is having to retcon things that in hindsight should have been obvious all along; which for me is a complete non-starter.For example, the player of Dwarf #1 might place a Dwarven realm in the Althasian Hills as his home.  Fine...until a few years later another player running Dwarf #6 places another Dwarven realm in the Thraci Hills...meaning that Dwarves #2-5 could have been from there as well if that choice had existed at the time.  Never mind that the sudden emergence of a Dwarven realm in the Thraci Hills might cause all sorts of retroactive knock-on effects elsewhere ("Crap - we were getting slaughtered near there in that Flame of Chaos adventure, we could have gone there for refuge had we known it existed!" <stink eyes all round> )Retcons are a very hard no, so let's not give them reason to rear their ugly heads. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />By sheer chance and against long odds (as such things are and always have been randomly rolled for in our systems) the very first character I ever played was a high noble - a prince first in line to a throne.  Not that it gave him any advantages in play - in fact, it probably shortened his lifespan considerably: as he was a crown prince I decided he was used to a) giving orders and b) his word pretty much being the law, but he wasn't in his homeland (nor even on the same world!) and the rest of the party quite understandably didn't take well to such a high-handed attitude.  Some murderous infighting later (very long story!), he was dead.I don't think I've ever hit nobility on those tables again.Incredibly, a long time ago some players were rolling up characters to bring into my first campaign and side by side (and I watched these rolls) two players almost simultaneously hit "high noble" at what was then something like a 2-in-1000 chance.  One turned out to be a crown prince, the other was a prince second in line to a different throne.  "Yikes!" says I-as-DM, because as the adventure was set within the realm of the second one, with the crown prince's realm fairly close by, it naturally made sense they'd come equipped with bodyguards and so forth; their introduction more than doubled the party size and way more than doubled its power (the party was 1st-2nd level at the time).Didn't help 'em much.  The second-in-line guy died pretty fast, while the first-in-line guy did OK but retired after that one adventure, went home, and died defending his realm from invasion.</blockquote>

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