Moving characters between campaigns

[John Dallman]

However, neither allowed brining in a character from an external group. I think this comes down to play style but there was also some concern about whether an imported character had been just written down or been played.

With a little experience, such characters are easy to recognise. There's hardly any need to persecute them: their players usually can't handle them effectively.

The commonality I'm seeing in those who did so is that they were playing in clubs. Specifically, D&D clubs.

The club where I first encountered it was a university's Chess and Wargames society. You needed to be organised as a club to book rooms in university buildings. This club predated D&D, and role-playing had budded from the wargaming side.

 

[Esau Cairn]

We've had the same characters jump from game to game within the same campaign (Stormbringer characters who ended up in the Dreamlands & thus, effectively, for a session or three, Strombringer became CoC), and we've allowed porting character fluff over from campaign to campaign on occasion: Hey now, isn't Isra (in Coriolis) lot like 'Terrapin' in T2k? -- Yeah, so? But mechanics? Nah. Not at all. Overripe situation for powergaming, no unique character growth, & DNA needs to stay in-world.

 

[gss000]

After I started playing when I was in elementary school back in the early 80s, I joined the D&D club at the local library where I played and DMed. The organizer had no problem with us bringing in our own characters from other games mainly because we didn't have ongoing campaigns or time to do much character generation as I recall. For most people it wasn't a problem, but there were a few who were upset when I asked them to not use their artifacts their character conveniently had - which was awkward for me as someone who was 10 or 11 at the time. Allowing people to transport characters from other games just didn't seem worth it to me as time went on. Although if I was running a shared universe with people, I could see it.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I’ve rarely seen it, personally.

I part of a long-term group in which the campaign world was shared by 3 DMs (I was one), and characters were used “as needed”.

I participated in one group where a bunch of Monty Haul god-killers were nuked by bowling in an otherplanar bowling alley…with spheres of annihilation. Nobody let those PCs in their campaigns anymore…

Beyond that? I have some concepts I’ve designed and played in multiple systems, but only with my personal understanding being that these characters were not the same, but manifestations of a life force manifesting across realities. IOW, something akin to Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, Eternal Companion, and other characters. (Amusingly, the one with the most variants was never played in any form.)

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I've moved characters around, but accepting that its just a different iteration of them, complete with a somewhat different backstory.

 

[pogre]

Yep. In the early days in this area it was not only common, but expected. A D.M. would occasionally forbid a certain magic item, but otherwise you would have a few characters you would bring to a game. It was largely gone from by the scene in the early 80s.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Back in the day, just about anytime a player wanted to transfer a character to one of my campaigns, it almost always was some nonsense character with all 18s, homebrewed artifact-level magic items, or came with a "pet" dragon.

These days, heck, I still run into that stuff from time to time. I once asked a player if their character was AL-legal and they said yes. Later, they made a comment about getting really lucky when they rolled their stats. And when their druid had a wolf companion and I asked if that was a reward they got in an adventure, they said yes but then couldn't tell me which one.

 

[Umbran]

We never had a group of player large enough to do that. We did have two DMs and two campaigns but we never transferred a character from one group to the other. There was no need.

Same here - we didnt' have a community of gamers in my town. By the time multiple folks in my group stepped up to run games, they did it with different games - one running D&D, another running Marvel Super Heroes, and so on. Moving characters between these would have been goofy, at best.

 

[TarionzCousin]

We had four or five regular DM's when 1E was going strong. Everyone moved characters between DM's.

Until JF implemented his "kill over half the PC's with unnoticeable traps and no-saves death spells, then give the rest wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too many high level magic items and millions of gold pieces" technique. When I saw that, I declared that no characters who had been through a JF dungeon could be played in my games.