"Imported" PCs

[War Golem]

I was just reading through the ELH/Rolemaster thread, and saw yet again a concept brought up that has always made me curious - allowing players to bring their existing character from someone else's campaign into your own campaign.

Is this common? Do most DMs find themselves confronted with this situation? Would you ever allow this?

I'm not sure I've ever had a player ask to "import" an existing PC into my campaign, but I sure wouldn't be inclined to allow it, and even if I did, you can bet I would edit the PC to the extent necessary so that it would be fairly similar to what a brand new PC would look like (adjust level, stats, magic items, etc...). If they still wanted to play their revised, "imported" PC after that, well, that would be their call.

I run a homebrew campaign; I suppose this might be more of an issue when a player moves from one campaign to another within the same game world (FR > FR, for instance)?

 

[Tsyr]

Sometimes.

It depends on a lot of things. World-hopping is a no-no. But if the character was created on Greyhawk, I was running a campagin in greyhawk, the in-game time periods were similar, and the character was the right level, I would allow it.

 

[James McMurray]

Although I've never been asked to allow an import into a game, I have thought about it (mainly due to threads like this one). I would allow it, however, if the character's power level was out of whack (either too low or too high) for my current campaign, I'd discuss editing the character with the player. If they refused to lower the PC's power level, then I'd flat out say no. However, if they would rather not raise the power level, that's fine by me, so long as they realize I won't be putting on any kid gloves to keep their favorite character alive.

 

[Fenes]

Show me the PC, let me modify it to suit the campaign, inform me what the goals and background of the PC are, and anything balanced with the rest of the group goes. World hopping? No problem, there are enough portals in the FR.

 

[JoeGKushner]

In my youth, I belonged to several groups. I DMed one that shared players in other groups that I played in. Occassionaly the groups would cross over in a sorta DC/Marvel comics event that was pretty cool. Occassionaly, there would be stragglers or other lost souls who couldn't go home without going through some difficult mission. Sometimes they didn't want to go home and stayed.

As long as the other GMs and I were on similiar pages, it wasn't a problem. One GM gave out a lot of magic so when such players came to my campaign for long term investments, losing said items was usually part of the penalty. It's usually involve a large fight where numerous things were destroyed ala fireballs and lightningbolts or disintegrates targeted as said items. Other options were that the items were native to other campaign and failed to function at full power, if at all.

It can be a real blast sometimes!

 

[War Golem]

ummm... right, so where's the problem?

I pretty much am in agreements with all the responses so far... but in browsing through the threads for months and today the ELH thread, there seems to be constant complaints about "munchkin" and "powergaming" players potentially exploiting certain rules (either in an official rulebook or in some DM's home game)when they bring over an imported PC.

But how much of issue is this really? From the few responses so far, it doesn't sound like it .is much of an issue... in which case I will henceforth ignore those arguments in other discussions that focus on the need for something to be "balanced" so that wannabe munchkins can't exploit it when importing one of their PCs.

Cheers.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Re: ummm... right, so where's the problem?

I pretty much am in agreements with all the responses so far... but in browsing through the threads for months and today the ELH thread, there seems to be constant complaints about "munchkin" and "powergaming" players potentially exploiting certain rules (either in an official rulebook or in some DM's home game)when they bring over an imported PC.

But how much of issue is this really? From the few responses so far, it doesn't sound like it .is much of an issue... in which case I will henceforth ignore those arguments in other discussions that focus on the need for something to be "balanced" so that wannabe munchkins can't exploit it when importing one of their PCs.

Cheers.

To be honest, I don't think that powergaming is a problem in certain areas of the game. I think that a lot of it depends on the GM. Now I'm not just talking about GMing style or the group's style, but the GMs skill in handling players and rules. Some newer GMs have a hard time understanding that their word is final. Others don't want to compromise friendship and feel that if they are making demands of a character, that those issues may crop up in the friendship.

The call for balanced rules is a good one. If Palladium had some sort of inner balancing mechanism like Effective Character Level for some of their O.C.C.'s, Rifts might be easier to GM for some. Then again...