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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8006298" data-attributes="member: 29398">Massive disconnect here.The PC is being retired by the player thus is (for now or forever) no longer adventuring; but the player still controls what it does in its retirement.  This can be as simple as saying "I stay in town and do spell research for a few years." (which really needs little if any further input from anyone until those few years are up) or as complex as "I hire a ship and a crew and where the map is blank, I go." (which probably means a night in the pub sometime where you and the player determine what becomes of this voyage).Reprise his ownership?  Ownership never left the player in the first place!Ah...something's beginning to dawn on me here - are you coming from a strict standpoint of "a player may only ever have one PC in the campaign world at a time"?  Because if this is so, there's another big disconnect: as both player and DM I expect players to end up with several (or more!) PCs out there in the game world, of whom one or two are active at any given time.In the game I play in, I currently have nine.  One is in the party we'll (I think) be playing tonight.  Another three are in three other active parties, each currently on hold while we play this one.  One is retired for now; one is retired probably forever, but they are both still mine.  One has in effect made herself a hench to another player's PC and if asked I'd hand her over either to that player or the DM.  And two who I had thought were long-term dead were recently found and rescued (one) and revived (the other), so in that party I'll have three active PCs if-when we get back to it, at least for the remainder of that adventure. (I've good in-character reasons to split 'em up afterwards)Retiring my PC from adventuring is my choice, and a common enough occurrence. Retiring my control over that PC - particularly if I'm still otherwise in the game - is also my choice and mine alone, and is an extremely rare occurrence. The two choices are not tied together.That, and often I'm retiring one PC in order to cycle another back in; and in a year I might reverse the process.  Gets boring playing the same one all the time. <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=":)" />If that PC's player is still in the game the PC is the player's to control.If that PC's player has left the game I'll only use it with the player's permission (if I can contact said player) or I won't use it at all.  The exceptions to this are a) having old characters reappear in something like a dream sequence, that has no lasting impact on anything or b) active PCs touching base with retired characters to keep up friendships, exchange info, and the like.Even if that player is still sitting there at the table?This touches on a whole different can o' worms, that being adventuring NPCs and their status within the party.  I treat 'em just like PCs, as do the players; mostly because the PCs in the fiction would treat them as just one of the team.Again a hard one-PC-per-player stance; I'd almost always allow the player to run both; even more so in this case because it's the other players (as PCs) seeking out that character.</blockquote>

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