D&D General Who “owns” a PC after the player stops using them?

[Irlo]

Heh, what you some of your posts take for granted is legally incorrect.

With regard to your own art in your own home, is more a case of nobody else knows about it, as opposed to you have a legal right to do it.

Many people create Superman artwork without permission. Obviously DC likes this. But DC still owns it and could do something about it if they wished. At this point, legal concepts like "transformative" or "parody" and "commentary" and other forms of "fair use" would become relevant. According to Wikipedia, DC Comics currently owns the copyright of Superman, after sorting thru certain legal disputes.

Interesting. I've been wrong before -- and I will be again!

 

[Blue]

Because asking permission would imply some sort of explicit or implicit ownership of that character image that I don't acknowledge as existing.

If I liked a character you made in a game five years ago, and I make that same character (same name, same build) in someone else's game, I don't owe you a phone call to ask.

...

Lanefan:
There's a fair-size difference between making a more-or-less copy of
someone's character (Lanefax) and playing it in a different game than taking over and using the actual original character (Lanefan) in its original game.

I certainly haven't been talking about that scenario.

There's way too many hypothetical scenarios being tossed around here to try and answer them all under one particular principle.

Um, you most certainly did say talk about that scenario. It's post #180 that I put at top. You wrote that a little less than 3 hours before claiming you never talked about that scenario.

 

[SableWyvern]

As the originator of that tangent in the other thread, I'll just say this isn't quite right: I jumped on someone's suggestion that a retired PC automatically becomes an NPC, and things went off from there.

Ah. I hadn't realised the post I jumped on was a response to something else (although that makes a few other posts make more sense now).

My point of disagreement is on a very, very narrow front, about anyone's right to influence a game they're not participating in.

 

[SableWyvern]

And that's what I would say is ridiculous. If you've put it up online, it's now available for distribution. If you're not charging for it, of course I can take it and print it and hang it on my wall.

It is my understanding that legally, you can't print it, but once you have a copy, there is no law against hanging it up on your wall. (My understanding may be wrong.)

And while the printing would technically a breach of copyright law, it's certainly not something where there is any consensus that it's immoral or unethical. In fact, I'm very confident that very, very few people on this board would seriously claim it is unethical to print a copy of an image found online to display to players during a private game.

 

[SableWyvern]

as she thinks that character is still in her world.

And she would be right.

PCs and NPCs aren't fixed, real objects that can only exist in one imaginary world at a time.

Saying, "This is Gorax the Destroyer" doesn't mean Gorax the Destroyer has just vanished from another game to appear in yours. Gorax the Destroyer can exist in any number of imaginary worlds simultaneously, and it does not create any kind of temporal rift, it doesn't threaten the stability or authenticity of any of those worlds, and the use of the character in one world has no bearing on it's use in the other.

To suggest that using a character in one game has an inherent, actual, real effect in other gameworlds, and that this effect occurs without the permission or knowledge of the participants in that game makes no sense. If the participants continue to imagine that Gorax is in their world, and only in their world, then within the shared space of their game, they are correct. Nothing anyone else can do will change that. The only people that control what happens in the shared imaginary world of an RPG are the people particpating in the game. No matter what things you choose to imagine in your game, my game is unaffected.

Edit: grammar.

 

[tetrasodium]

This has nothing to do with the point under discussion. History of the campaign is there. We're talking about appropriating them as an NPC without permission.

Why do you feel that the player A: deserves to seize control of the GM's game world by either controlling an NPC that comes up B: forcing the GM to retcon history & past events in their game world -OR- C: forcing the GM to freeze sections of their game world in carbonite without needing to express that expectation? All of those are very much far outside any sort of authority normally granted to a player. The GM is generally expected to maintain some level of continuity to the point that the DMG even discusses it, maintaining continuity without granting A or B to the player requires the GM to give the player C

Flag on play: "Hidden" and "unstated" are based on your table's assumptions of play. As seen from others arguing in this thread, these are default positions for others. Please don't try to speak for everyone as an attempt to justify a position.

Not just table. Can you point to any section of the PHB DMG or some other d&d5e book suggesting that a player has a player A B or C authority? Before you answer, a statement like "well the GM could change it so some other NPC takes the place of that retired PC" has been raised already in the thread and itis literally authority C. I'd be interested to hear book pagenumber & probably enough detail to find the section you feel grants a player one or more of those.

But addressing it as a seriously. A character who dies can be out of the game and not run as an NPC in future session, but asking that a retired character is not run in future sessions by the creator is impossible to do because it is disruptive and metagaming. I don't see how that tracks, it is already being done for one category of character.

It's easy to ask the GM to have that retired PC sever ties with the world so they never show up "bob appoints $othernpc as leader of the local flowershop guild and goes off never to be seen again". I gave two examples of an actual player trying to seize A B or C back in post94. Bob's interest in the retired PC was literally to use it for extra perks or metagamed information, asking his PC to sever ties or give him one of more from A/B/C is no disruption whatsoever. Alice could claim that asking it would disrupt her fanfic or out of game "roleplaying" if she had to ask me to sever her retied PC's ties with the world, but doesn't have much of a leg on that given that she never asked the GM permission & would have been told to find some other table if she did & expressed an expectation of A B or C.

 

[O-Castitatis-Lilium]

Player "owns" the PC, it's their character after all. They spent the time building it, playing it, advancing it as they decided; they shaped it into what they wanted them to be. DM has no right to it, unless the player gives them permission to use them somewhere else as an NPC in a quiet town or something, possibly even a tether to another campaign. I say this because growing up, I watched my dad and uncles play some of the same characters they are playing in the game I'm DMing for them now, if I were to have assumed that they were completely done with them and put them into the game, it would not only have been awkward, but I don't honestly know how they would have felt about that. As the DM I get control, or "ownership", over the world, the plot, the history of it, the story, the people in it, and I get to shape that world however I see fit; players only get to control a small drop of that through their character and their backstory, that's if you want to go based purely on who created what. I will be honest, this is an odd question to be asking, as the only reason I see the need to establish ownership is if someone is trying to write a book or something with someone else's creative IP. Outside of that, it seems like a no-brainer to say that the player owns their character, even after the game is done.

EDIT: Some spelling errors and a mix up on player instead of PC

 

[TwoSix]

Um, you most certainly did say talk about that scenario. It's post #180 that I put at top. You wrote that a little less than 3 hours before claiming you never talked about that scenario.

Sigh...why am I wasting time on this issue that isn't actually an issue?

The scenario where the player is still in the game has very different expectations than a game where the player has left the campaign for a significant period. The bulk of my posts are addressing the latter issue, not the former.

Basic principle: Your ownership over a PC extends only to the game and campaign in which it is played. If you leave the game, you no longer have ownership. If you recreate the character's image and history in someone else's game, it is still someone else's game; for all intents and purposes, it is a new character in terms of any obligation or courtesies owed to you.

I am in no way making any legal claims about ownership, copyright, or anything along those lines. I am discussing only the basic courtesies we owe to each other as gamers as part of the default social contract as I have encountered it.

 

[GrimCo]

Side stepping from philosophical debate into the realm of practical.

If someone leaves my game, what can he/she realistically do to stop me from using character as I see fit in the game he/she isn't part of any more? If the person by any chance even finds out that their PC is being used in the game as NPC.

 

[TwoSix]

Which does bring up a tangential (and probably rather corner-case) question around character poaching.

If I-as-DM am running a game and I've seen your really cool character in play in another DM's game and know that character is now retired, I'd say it would be highly unethical of me to arbitrarily say - without asking either you or the DM - that character has just blipped over to my world and is now an NPC there. Not only am I violating your ownership over the character, I'm violating the continuity of the other DM's setting as she thinks that character is still in her world.

Now this is probably an illustrative scenario. To my mind, it's obvious this doesn't impact my campaign in the slightest. What anyone else does as a spinoff from my campaign is essentially as impactful as a fanfic on the canon of a popular work.

It would become an issue if and only if someone involved though the impact of campaign B on the clone character would actually be allowed to have an impact on campaign A.