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Old 12-07-2017, 08:35 AM   #137
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
Default Re: What will you not allow?

Well, following on John's lead, let me be clear about what I object to.

*X wants to have their character, who was formerly played in world P, travel from world P into my campaign world Q. I can imagine that I might allow that IF I were running world Q as one world of a multiverse. But a lot of my campaigns are set in worlds that are not part of multiverses, and I'm not going to allow alternate worlds to be elements of the setting unless I want to explore a theme that requires alternate worlds. And even if I created a multiversal setting, it might not be able to encompass that particular world P: Maybe I'm assuming that all timelines have the same natural laws, and a world with magic or supers doesn't fit, or maybe I'm having only two worlds on opposite sides of a portal and don't want visitors from other worlds.

*X wants to have their character have exactly the same biography they had in another campaign, including all their adventures in that campaign. That would require me to know what all those adventures were, and to verify that they were all possible in my campaign. In particular, it would require me to have the places where they took place as locations in my campaign. And I may have designed a world where those places don't exist; or I may have set the campaign in the real world, at a specific historical moment, and again those places may not fit on the map. Rather than try to deal with that, I want the character's biography to start fresh.

*X wants their character to be the same age, sex, race, etc. That's not an absolute prohibition. But there are cases where a campaign imposes restrictions; for example, I might run a school-based campaign where all the characters are 14, or 18, or one where the school only admits one sex (though in that last case I might allow a character of one sex who pretended to be of the other).

*X wants their character to be at the same power level that they gained in previous campaigns, with whatever goodies they acquired. That's just flat out, in most cases. I normally define a budget for character creation, and players can have what that budget permits; they don't get to say, "Well, in Joe's campaign, Amaranth acquired a Ring of Awesomeness that does A, B, and C, so he should have a Ring of Awesomeness here."

*X is describing their character in ways that take no account of the particular setting I've proposed. That's not something I can actually prohibit. It strikes me as bad roleplaying; but I don't insist that all my players be skilled roleplayers. But I do feel unhappy if they don't make the attempt, or don't care. My feeling is that, if I described a particular setting, and they rated that campaign favorably, they were saying they wanted, or at least agreed, to play in that setting; I want them to engage with it, to make use of some of its elements in creating their character.

I don't think that, for example, what Kromm is talking about violates any of those strictures (well, possibly the one about age, sex, and so on). So I'm not objecting to that, I don't think.
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Bill Stoddard

I don't think we're in Oz any more.
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