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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nagol" data-source="post: 8007562" data-attributes="member: 23935">I am not a hard-fast 1 PC per player in many campaigns.  In others, I am, it depends strongly on the table experience I am looking for for a particulalr campaign.However, I have had poor experiences in the past with particular players seeking extra-special attention / advantages from maintaining a variety of PCs part-time and coordinating their abilities and resources (such as freely sharing magic items and cash) and trying to jump back and forth between PCs in games where that was not the expectation.You lose ownership of the PC as soon as you utter the words "I'm not playing that character any more."  The immediate inference is "so someone else has to"  so that someone takes complete ownership of that instance of the character.  The former player has no more say -- at all -- in the NPC's actions, reactions, or choices.  It does not matter if the player is sitting at the table every week or left the game  permanently and is 2,000 km away.  Just as I will not tolerate a DM telling me how to run my PC, I won't tolerate a player telling me how to run a NPC.  I may ask for advice, direction, or insight so as to maintain the character's apparent personality, knowledge, and preferences, but that ask is certainly not mandatory.  I may even delegate the NPC to player control to ease my workload, but again that is completely discretionary and subject to change.Now in a multi-PC game, you can certainly set a PC aside without retiring it, but if it is retired, it becomes a NPC.  If you want it back as a PC, I'll take a look at what's happened to the NPC since it retired and decide if it still fits the campaign before allowing it back.As an example, in my last 3.5 campaign, the group had a major falling out with their Wizard. and the PC was retired.  He effectively usurped control of what the group wanted to do because only he had the power to travel to and from the adventure locale (a dwarven city cut off since the great devastation) and he didn't want to do that adventure.  The PC did express a strong desire to "get in" with a college of wizards so when the PC was retired, the NPC went off to pursue that goal.A few members of the party discovered much later that the Wizard was selling tours to that adventure locale to those interested in its history and development.  The player couldn't recover that character as a PC even if he wanted to because his circumstances were so strongly altered between being retired as a PC and what it had become.  (That, and I would not expect the other PCs to accept him back as a member).</blockquote>

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