Whose "property" are the PCs?

[Majoru Oakheart]

For those who don't get the emotional kick, use the word "grandmother" instead of "character." So "Bob's character became an evil, baby-killer who wears puppy skin underpants" changes to "Bob's grandmother became an evil, baby-killer who wears puppy skin underpants." Now imagine this being told to a half dozen people who will believe it as if it is gospel.

Wow...that's a bit of a stretch though. My grandmother was a real person in real life. The character is a bunch of words on paper existing in someone's imagination. There is a difference.

I'm strongly of the opinion that the DM owns the character. It actually brings up another interesting point. In my games if I need to work something into the story, I have no qualms about saying "A man walks up to you, he is your old Uncle Bob. He was a very dear friend of yours when you were young and was always there for you."

Now, would you view that poorly? Is it an example of the DM changing too much about your character without your permission?

I've always viewed the character creation process as taking a story made up by the DM and playing a part in it and influencing where it goes. For instance, the story would read: "A group of adventurers go on a quest to recover the Rod of Seven parts. The adventurers will be...What's a good idea for an adventurer, Bob? Alright, I'll give you control of his actions while we are playing then."

The DM is then given the power to change things about your character's past or future in order to fit his story, but you have control of him while you are playing. So if you say "I come from a small villiage in the mountains", the DM says, "Actually, there are no small villiages in mountains in my world, you can come from the plains."

So, the character isn't yours, per se, it is a combination of your ideas and the DMs. Which means you both have rights to it. The player can play it in another game without asking the DM, and the DM can use the character in his game without asking the player.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

If your DM has a copy of your character sheet and one day you simply walk away from the game and never come back the DM doesn't suddenly say to himself, "Golly, now I'm really screwed because I don't actually OWN that character and I can't run my campaign without Player X even though I have the character sheet!"

The best thing I can liken this to is actors in a television show.

Take Star Trek. Captain Kirk probably wouldn't be the same played by anyone other than William Shatner. Mr. Shatner brought about half of what we know as Kirk even if he didn't write the scripts. I'm sure he put his input in and got some of his lines changed to the way HE thought his character would act, it's possible some of the background of Kirk was made up by Shatner and a writer thought it was a good idea and included it.

However, if Shatner decided to leave the show while it was on TV, they could recast the Kirk part as someone who played the role differently. It would still be Kirk since the person in charge of the show says it is, but it would be different.

Yes, I know it's slightly different than this in that the player has more input into his character than an actor does in his, but it is the same concept. When a DM recruits players, what he is asking for is a bunch of actors for characters in his story. He just gives them a lot more input into the scripts and their characters. It's still his story and his characters, he just asked you what you thought they should be before putting them in.

 

[fusangite]

In the interests of discursive clarity, let's identify the three categories of statements here:
(a) what people believe to be correct in tort/Germanic common law
(b) what people believe to be the de facto situation at the gaming table
(c) how people believe others should act

Once we disentangle these things, I think we'll arrive at a clearer debate. Personally, I'm totally uninterested in discussing (a) and am confining my comments to (b) and (c).

 

[Nyeshet]

I wouldn't.

However, upon ending a campaign, I would ask each player what their PC's future wishes / intentions are, and I would make a note of them. Later, if PCs came upon an area where an older PC might be, I might have local stories and legends about the PCs, and it is possible they might hear stories about later adventures the PCs went on (based on what the player said their PC intended to do), etc. I cannot recall ever having had a player meet their former PC as an NPC, but that was mostly due to my feeling that it could seem sureal or unusual in some manner. How could I be certain that I was playing the character exactly right, for instance? It just cuts back on potential problems, really.

Now, I have no issue whatsoever with the PCs meeting an NPC from a former campaign during a later campaign (including such characters are cohorts and family members of the former PCs, etc). Those are the provice of the DM. The player can say all they want about what their character would or would not do, but they cannot say what their PC's brother, cohort, or son would do.

 

[haakon1]

Old Characters never die . . .

I frequently use old pc's as NPC's. Even though they were created by the players, they're part of the campaign world and I think it provides a sense of continuity. However, I never make them evil or look foolish. I usually seek input from the players on how their characters would have turned out if they had stopped adventuring. They usually end up as business owners, minor nobles, local priests...etc...

That's what I do too.

I take my cue on this from Greyhawk traditions. Mainstream D&D spells like Tenser's Floating Disk or Bigby's Hand and Mordenkainen's whatever were created by real player characters in Gary Gygax's original campaign, the Greyhawk campaign played in Lake Geneva, WI from the mid-1970s onwards.

In the Days of High Adventure (AKA, the early 1980s, the First Edition/AD&D era, the Hair Band era, the Pre-SUV Age), TSR published a booklet called "Rogues Gallery" that gave the stats on a lot of former PC's from Greyhawk, with the specific goal of using them as NPC's. I did so enthuiastically with a few, like Robilar, and I got ideas from others (like Lizard Man and Centaur PC's are OK).

So, my on-going adventures treat old retired PC's as NPC's. Not every PC gets used, and none of them get played "against character" or in a demeaning way. They are meant to be retired heroes, paragons for the new heroes to look up to who provide an example, a way to humanize the game, and (as in Austin Powers) a "Basil Exposition" character to explain the world to the PC's in a friendly, trustworthy, but in-character way.

I worry less about old players being mad about that (after all, it's flattery), but I do worry a little about the new heroes feeling overshadowed. I try to avoid that by making sure the new heroes are the heroes. The old heroes may do things in the background, train new heroes, provide intel/reasons to go on adventures, and even raise dead on occassion, but they won't adventure with the new heroes, and they won't show up to save them . . . though once one of the old heroes flew to the rescue arriving AFTER the PC's had won a titantic battle by their own hands.

I have, on one occassion, allowed the transfer of a retired character from another campaign into mine. They were both Greyhawk campaigns, with a similar level of magic, etc. That NPC has been played by his old player on occassion, but is normally a colorful bit of background -- one of the guys in a cloak in the inn at the Keep on the Borderlands, who just happens to have WAY more backstory than the average Joe NPC.

If a player wanted to use a PC from my campaign in another campaign, I'd be fairly psyched about it, but I'd want to work out how he moved, assuming a more complex explanation than, "Yeah, he walked from Bissel to Greyhawk City" was needed.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

I have no emotional attachment to my PCs at all - since I'm not personally invested in whether they succeed or fail in their goals (except inasmuch as the consequences of their actions make for an interesting story for me to play them through), it doesn't matter to me what happens to them after I leave a game or the game ends, though I might be interested to hear what the DM does with it.

I certainly wouldn't object to even drastic changes - the one time when I left a campaign before it ended and the DM chose to have my character continue as an NPC, my objections to how he was used rested more on the DM's unimaginative ideas as to what would be cool and his misunderstanding what the character was interested in, but those were part of the reasons I left the game in the first place.

In other words, it doesn't matter to me if the DM has a character I once played do something I don't think I'd ever have the character do, unless it's just dumb and uninteresting - and even then I'm just bored and disappointed, not outraged.

I don't identify with my characters in any way, though, which might go some way to explaining why I don't feel proprietary towards them.

 

[Falkus]

I'm strongly of the opinion that the DM owns the character

Why? Is he the one who wrote five pages of description, personality and background? Is he the one who chose the characters race, alignment, stats, etc?

Now, would you view that poorly? Is it an example of the DM changing too much about your character without your permission?

It is if my character's background contained details about how his entire extended family was brutally murdered in order to eliminate their claim to the throne of Almania, and no explanation for why this Uncle is alive is provided.

The DM is then given the power to change things about your character's past or future in order to fit his story, but you have control of him while you are playing. So if you say "I come from a small villiage in the mountains", the DM says, "Actually, there are no small villiages in mountains in my world, you can come from the plains."

Irrelevant. That's simply a GM approving or disapproving of a character background before the game even begins.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

$0.02 more from a lawyer (who deals in IP)

S'mon
I as GM am entitled to write and publish stories set in my world that refer to PC X and their existence whether the player agrees or not. However if I want to make PC X the protagonist of my story, I would ask the player their permission & not do it if they declined

Steveroo
In other words: "What's mine is mine, and I'll keep it! What's yours is mine, and I'll take it!" As a self-styled "copyright specialist", S'mon, I'd sure like to know which part of the Fair Use doctrine you THINK you're looking at?!?

Fair use usually applies only for things like academic use, and does not allow the use of the entirety of the copyrighted material in any case.

Once again, to use the Thieves' World example (which most closely resembles the RPG situation), the story writer can refer to events and characters of the shared setting freely- but to get significant use or change another writers' character requires that writer's permission.

This, I think, is what S'mon is saying.

 

[S'mon]

I think (now I'm sober) fusangite was right and I should not be confusing law and morality. I will say though that neither has anything at all to do with Fair Use* doctrine, it's all about the social contract at the game table (or PBEM, or LARP). It's normally the case that the GM is the final arbiter of what that contract is, since he can drop players who disagree with him, but some groups have rotating GMs or a different structure and may have particular ideas about these things. None of these ideas are wrong as long as everyone at the table agrees as to what they are.

*Which is rather more extensive than you imply, Danny.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Why? Is he the one who wrote five pages of description, personality and background? Is he the one who chose the characters race, alignment, stats, etc?

No, but he is the one who asked that the character be made in the first place and the one who enabled it to be something other than a story written on a piece of paper. Once it enters his world, it becomes part of the world, whether you like it or not. He has now existed since before you started playing him and will continue to exist after you finish playing him.

It is if my character's background contained details about how his entire extended family was brutally murdered in order to eliminate their claim to the throne of Almania, and no explanation for why this Uncle is alive is provided.

I agree, completely contradicting what is written is bad. (although not impossible, the DM still has absolute power over even the characters) If the character's background doesn't specify what happened to his family though, and the DM just makes it up without consulting you, is that bad?

Irrelevant. That's simply a GM approving or disapproving of a character background before the game even begins.

This is just one example, most characters in a game are HEAVILY influenced by the DM. When the DM says you cannot take this PrC or this feat or this spell, he is restricting your options for your character background and personality. He is really giving you advice on how to make a character. When he says the game takes place in Greyhawk, in the County of Urnst, that further gives you further advice and actually fairly restricts your choices. It means certain things are accepted: drow are evil, the population is mostly human, elves are mostly restricted to their own country, etc. If you write a background that disagrees with any part of the world, the DM will likely make you rewrite it. Even if the DM hasn't told you to rewrite anything, he has collabarated in that character just by telling you his house rules and the setting.