Whose "property" are the PCs?

[ThirdWizard]

I like him enough as a character, that even if he fell to evil, became sour and went on a killing rampage, I'd still find a challenge and an interest in playing or hearing about THAT version of Majoru.

I think you are in the minority in that you play multiple versions of the same character. It doesn't make much sense to me, either. You act like its the same guy in multiple universes, so how can he meet himself without some kind of planar travel involved? In effect, you bypass the entire situation, since the character is never static. One day he can be evil, the next good, the next a barbarian, the next a sorceress. For most people, once something happens to a character you can't just go back and say that it never happened.


On another note, has noone here ever gone back and played their retired characters for "one last hurrah?" I remember we had a group that retired after escaping Carceri, returning to Ysgard and brought together a large number of barbarian tribes to forge an empire. A year or so after ending the campaign, we returned to the adventurers, aged a bit, running their empire, but trouble brewed, and they had to try and stop Ragnarok.

This wasn't the first time we've done something like that. It's fun to revisit old campaigns and take the adventurers after retirement and throw things at them. I recall their was a book about that... but I can't remember the name. He was an old guy with a magic axe. There was some interesting inspiration there for that kind of thing.

If you mess up the PCs, then you can't do that.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

The questions/comments posed by the original post:

If a DM creates a world and the players create PCs for adventures within it and then the campaign ends, if the DM wants to run another campaign in that world at a later time-period, can he/she decide what happens to the PCs?

Answer: you betcha. The DM can decide whatever he/she likes about what happens to PC's. The DM can port those PC's over to an entirely unrelated campaign and use them as NPC's. The DM can take one of those PC's and play it PERSONALLY in another campaign as a PC and nobody has any legal - nor MORAL NOR ETHICAL - reason to say boo. It might be discourteous, or rude to hide the characters origin as the PC of someone else but it's all make believe. Just because I want to play Superman, Batman, or Wolverine in an RPG game of supers it has absolutely no moral, ethical, or legal ramifications for me to sit around a table with friends and do so. It similarly doesn't matter if I'm running that game of supers and kill, maim, defile, or ridicule Superman, Batman, or Wolverine. Same applies for any PC that I find ANYWHERE, created by ANYONE.

In other words, are the PCs the creation of the players and thus their personalities and decisions are under their control. Or, can the DM just "decide" that after the campaign ended that this PC becomes evil, this one dies, etc. What do you guys think?

This is where it gets just a tad dicey. People seem to be interpreting this as being a question of publication, profit, IP and LAW. It is merely a furtherance of the above-quoted question - does a player control a character in a game that I'm running even if that PLAYER is no longer actively involved in my game?

The answer is still the same. The DM can do anyting to those characters in his game that he wants to. It's possibly not very polite to treat a former players contribution to your campaign as if it has no value to you - but then it's not very polite either for a player to believe that his character is so precious that it can no longer be altered in a DM's campaign without personal approval (even though you AREN'T a direct participant any more.) If a DM WANTS a former players further input, hooray. If further input isn't wanted or needed, well frankly that's okay too. It might be nice that if a player wants to spend the rest of his real life comforted in the knowledge that his PC has a life of its own in that campaign that the player would enjoy and approve of (even though he has no right to expect that) that a DM would be willing to treat that character accordingly with more respect and honor than if it were just any other NPC.

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).

I heartily agree. If you want to talk about publication of characters/campaigns for profit, Intellectual Property rights, and LAW, well feel free. But this thread, near as I can tell, really wasn't and isn't supposed to be about that. Category (a) also holds no interest whatever for me. Since people obviously do still want to talk about it I would request that it be taken to a seperate thread, particularly since it is a clearly seperate discussion that has no bearing on (b) and (c), even if THEY have bearing upon (a).

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

While it is true that I have not had much DM participation in PC creation (take THAT Jesse Jackson!), it isn't because of DM dullards or uninteresting campaigns, its because I have no need for their input, other than the odd name of the appropriate region of origin for my PC.

fusangite
I just don't see how this is possible. Wouldn't you find it difficult to talk about your character's family, for example, if you don't know if the society is matriarchal or patriarchal, if you don't know how large family units are and how property passes between members, whether the household is the locus of economic production, etc.? Similarly, if the character is sleeping with women when he is adventuring, and has a wife at home, is that transgressive or expected? Should he feel guilty about it?

I usually bring all of that to the DM in full color, and tell him to change what he wants during the approval process.

To this date, not one word has been changed. In some cases, my background overwrote the DM's work.

S'mon
It isn't (& I think/hope Danny would agree!)...

100%.

Man in the Funny Hat
Answer: you betcha. The DM can decide whatever he/she likes about what happens to PC's. The DM can port those PC's over to an entirely unrelated campaign and use them as NPC's. The DM can take one of those PC's and play it PERSONALLY in another campaign as a PC and nobody has any legal - nor MORAL NOR ETHICAL - reason to say boo.

In case you couldn't geuss, I'd disagree with that statement from start to finish.

As for the MitFH's post about fusangite's formulation:

(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

The 3 are intertwined as far as I am concerned.

If I created the campaign world, its my IP, and if the Player created the PC, its his IP. If he leaves the campaign while it is active, his character will remain at most a static NPC, and then only if the player likes the way his PC has ended up. Dead PCs remain dead, live ones stay alive up to a normal life span.

At my tables, no PC has ever or ever will experience a major change of state without the player's active involvement or consent. Once that player leaves permanently, I leave his creation alone.

I expect people to treat my PCs in the same way I treat theirs...an application of both Kant's Universality Principle and Biblical teachings to "do unto others."

Furthermore, as ThirdWizard has pointed out, if you mess with the PC in the player's absence, it's damned hard to have a nostalgia adventure.

My buddy R. lives out of town due to his studies. He returns 1 or 2 times a year for a visit (and always entertains the possibilty of moving back), and when he does, we game. Were I to warp his PCs in his absence, that wouldn't be possible.

 

[S'mon]

If I created the campaign world, its my IP, and if the Player created the PC, its his IP. If he leaves the campaign while it is active, his character will remain at most a static NPC, and then only if the player likes the way his PC has ended up. Dead PCs remain dead, live ones stay alive up to a normal life span.

Have you ever had players leave your game on bad terms BTW? Of the hundreds of players I've GM'd for, some have left on bad terms and left behind PCs I don't like. I may give them a swift (albeit heroic) death. Whereas PCs I like become rulers & live a long time...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Oh YES!

Lets just say that criminal charges...not related to IP...were involved with at least one of them.

Another left because I didn't spell something out to him.

In each case, the characters were immediately written out of the campaign, never to return, but none have ever been killed.

And, for the record, one PC was pretty middle of the road, and the other was downright fantastic.

 

[fusangite]

I just don't see how this is possible. Wouldn't you find it difficult to talk about your character's family, for example, if you don't know if the society is matriarchal or patriarchal, if you don't know how large family units are and how property passes between members, whether the household is the locus of economic production, etc.? Similarly, if the character is sleeping with women when he is adventuring, and has a wife at home, is that transgressive or expected? Should he feel guilty about it?

I usually bring all of that to the DM in full color, and tell him to change what he wants during the approval process.

To this date, not one word has been changed. In some cases, my background overwrote the DM's work.

What kind of GMs are these? I can't imagine being a GM and not bothering to define the culture, economics or public morality of the civilizations in my world. What kinds of background material do these GMs produce? How do campaigns cohere if they don't bother defining these highly necessary things when they build worlds?

I've only had one player, in my 18-20 years of GMing, try to define the politics and culture of his society of origin uniltaterally. I didn't even know what to do with the write-up he sent me so I mostly just ignored it.

I think what this correspondence has reinforced for me is how many different ways there are to play D&D.

The 3 are intertwined as far as I am concerned.

I think the point the Man in the Yellow Hat was trying to make is that what is right can tell you what the law is or should be but the law can't tell you what is right. Thus, you can take legal questions out of a debates about practice and ethics without harming them, whereas you can't take practice and ethics out of debates about legal questions. So, the fact that what is legal, how people play and how people should play are intertwined does not mean that how people play and how people should play can't be discussed independently without difficulty.

 

[kigmatzomat]

What kind of GMs are these? I can't imagine being a GM and not bothering to define the culture, economics or public morality of the civilizations in my world. What kinds of background material do these GMs produce? How do campaigns cohere if they don't bother defining these highly necessary things when they build worlds?

Most DMs say things like "Greyhawk, but different" and leave it at that. Heck, I don't think I've ever known the name of a homebrew gameworld! Wait, I take it back. One campaign had a website so I knew the name b/c of the URL.

I've only had one player, in my 18-20 years of GMing, try to define the politics and culture of his society of origin uniltaterally. I didn't even know what to do with the write-up he sent me so I mostly just ignored it.

So you granted tacit approval by accepting the background as-is. That pretty much agrees with what DannyAlcatraz wrote.

I've done it as a player and had it done as a DM. I generally don't write up the entire world and if someone wants to play an India-themed character (as once happened) and I haven't built that area I'll often take the PCs work as a gift. The exception comes from irrational concepts that I can't figure out how to make work. I see no reason to throw out a perfectly good idea just because it wasn't mine. Now I expand it out further and integrate it more in the setting but I try to maintain the original idea given by the player.

By the same token, in the game who's world I know the DM had given the gnomes only a footnote that I expanded into a society and culture. When she posted additional expansions I gave her feedback that 9 times out of 10 she chose over her original idea. (Admittedly, part of that was she wanted them to rely on engineering over magic and I am an engineer.) The great irony to me was that I was playing a gnome druid in self-exile b/c he didn't really fit in with his people. That I'd created.

 

[fusangite]

I've done it as a player and had it done as a DM. I generally don't write up the entire world and if someone wants to play an India-themed character (as once happened) and I haven't built that area I'll often take the PCs work as a gift. The exception comes from irrational concepts that I can't figure out how to make work. I see no reason to throw out a perfectly good idea just because it wasn't mine. Now I expand it out further and integrate it more in the setting but I try to maintain the original idea given by the player.

By the same token, in the game who's world I know the DM had given the gnomes only a footnote that I expanded into a society and culture. When she posted additional expansions I gave her feedback that 9 times out of 10 she chose over her original idea. (Admittedly, part of that was she wanted them to rely on engineering over magic and I am an engineer.) The great irony to me was that I was playing a gnome druid in self-exile b/c he didn't really fit in with his people. That I'd created.

I think you design settings with an inherent modularity that my world-building process (and that of other GMs I work with) does not permit. I see what you are saying here but I think that this style of incremental and modular world building only works with certain kinds of worlds that, I would argue, tend to look like Robert E. Howard books or Greyhawk. I can't think of the last campaign I ran in which things could be incrementally added to the world by people who didn't have a fairly deep understanding of the overall world structure.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Actually it's pretty easy by the use of natural barriers, like mountains, oceans, or a lack of anything worth effort of hauling around. If your neighbor's products are identical to your products there's no reason to buy their stuff (excluding droughts and the like). When there is reason for trade, I use middlemen who build up the risk and
distance involved.

the Asian "setting" is almost completely isolated from the Europe setting on Earth, for instance. Using the Silk Road as an example; many people in different places could buy silk but few from the west bothered to sail all the way to Asia. Why? You could still make a profit by buying from the middle east. As a result, money from England was working it's way to China but there was no direct contact.

 

[fusangite]

Actually it's pretty easy by the use of natural barriers, like mountains, oceans, or a lack of anything worth effort of hauling around. If your neighbor's products are identical to your products there's no reason to buy their stuff (excluding droughts and the like). When there is reason for trade, I use middlemen who build up the risk and
distance involved.

the Asian "setting" is almost completely isolated from the Europe setting on Earth, for instance. Using the Silk Road as an example; many people in different places could buy silk but few from the west bothered to sail all the way to Asia. Why? You could still make a profit by buying from the middle east. As a result, money from England was working it's way to China but there was no direct contact.

Exactly; only certain kinds of worlds can be like this. You have to decide to make a highly earth-like world, culturally, historically and geographically to allow for apparently isolated yet highly predictable cultures like these. Furthermore, how the PCs will think about enthnicity and culture is also, to a fair extent, constrained by these requirements.

I'm not very interested in these worlds because they seem to have been done to death. So I'm surprised how over-represented they are even now.