What will you not allow?

[khorboth]

A couple of other things I've experienced which have resulted in me not inviting people back:

Someone who is only there for combat and adversarial number-crunching. About 10 minutes into a role-playing heavy session, she said "Can we roll some dice already?" in a very bored, whiny voice. I know some people play that way, but it's not my style.

Refusing to describe their character's actions. I was running an over-the-top supers game and included a mechanic where a PC could buy a critical success with a special "hero point" if the player also included an epic description. She spent the point, but didn't describe. I prompted her for description, and she wanted time. I gave her time. I gave her ideas, and so did the other players. After 10 full minutes (I timed it) I prompted her again and she gave a bare-bones description. Later, she pulled me aside and was upset because I "put her on the spot" despite the mechanic being clear from the beginning. I explained that this was COLLABORATIVE storytelling and that she was expected to contribute. It didn't go over well.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by whswhs

In fanfic, that may be true. But in an RPG context, when I hear about someone playing "the same character," it seems to mean someone who makes few or no adaptations.

You've had very different experiences from me.

Originally Posted by whswhs

And in any case, what Trooper6 was talking about seemed to be people who not only wanted to use the same writeup, but also wanted to have the same biography . . . with the fact that the person had died conveniently erased.

The entire "biography" is a work of fiction. There is no "official" biography of a nonexistant person (ask any long-running superhero about their many biographies). A new iteration of the character with any changes to the biography (including just deletion of the "Last" events) is not "fraud" or "lying" or "faking" or being "dishonest" to the character.

The character doesn't exist.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by Bruno

You've had very different experiences from me.

I'm with Bruno on this. With one exception, I've never seen any player want to play the same character in an entirely different game. Sure, I've seen a few people want to play a previous character in a new game in the same world (happened a few times in Heavy Gear and BattleTech), but I've never seen anyone want to play, for example, their favorite fighter from D&D in a Star Trek game.

Originally Posted by Bruno

The entire "biography" is a work of fiction. There is no "official" biography of a nonexistant person (ask any long-running superhero about their many biographies). A new iteration of the character with any changes to the biography (including just deletion of the "Last" events) is not "fraud" or "lying" or "faking" or being "dishonest" to the character.

The character doesn't exist.

That may be a bit harsh, but I agree. They're fictional people. If you are not comfortable reusing or re-exploring one of your previous characters, that's perfectly acceptable. But, some of us might want to see the character in a different game.

Maybe we liked the idea for the character, and the game they were made it wasn't a good fit but we still want to explore them. Maybe the GM didn't give the character a fair shake. Maybe the game petered out and you really liked the character and wanted to give them another try.

I would hope that a GM would examine the character from the point of view of their game, not just that they might have been used before.

[adm]

Reusing characters;

It depends, are we effectively taking the John Wayne approach to acting? i.e. The leads in The Searchers, The Quiet Man, and The Conqueror are the same basic character.

Or the Christopher Lee approach? i.e. The roles in the various Dracula movies, The Man With the Golden Gun, and the various LOTR/Hobbit movies are the same arch types, tailored to the scripts.

I find the Christopher Lee method to work well, the other, not so much.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by adm

Reusing characters;

It depends, are we effectively taking the John Wayne approach to acting? i.e. The leads in The Searchers, The Quiet Man, and The Conqueror are the same basic character.

Or the Christopher Lee approach? i.e. The roles in the various Dracula movies, The Man With the Golden Gun, and the various LOTR/Hobbit movies are the same arch types, tailored to the scripts.

I find the Christopher Lee method to work well, the other, not so much.

Arguably, neither, but closer to the Christopher Lee method. It's more like the reboot/reset version.

And that's closer to player styles. John Wayne played John Wayne. Jerry plays Jerry. Christopher Lee plays the character he's presented with. Keelia plays the character she's presented with (only a bit more goofy than you might expect--or want).

Think of it like taking a character from one media source and putting them in another. Say, you took Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, as an example. After running through Tom Clancy's game, you decided you really liked the character. You join a Cyberpunk game and want to run Jack again, so you make him for the new system and join the game.

ETA:
As for the other part of it, think that you had made Seven of Nine for a Star Wars game. She doesn’t quite mesh. She works a bit, but not terribly well. You like the character, but didn’t like the way the game went and want to give them another try. So, you join another game, this time, a Traveller game. After updating the character, she, again is interesting, but doesn’t mesh properly. After a while, you join a Star Trek game and realize this would be the perfect place for her, dust her off, update her history to bring her into alignment with the new system and world and jump in.

[JMason]

In the past I had a blanket ban on Weirdness Magnet, as my style at the time of "make something explode" GMing and WM didn't mix well. I've also had to ban Eunuch (back in 3rd edition) and Anosmia (No sense of Taste/Smell) due to a player who would always take these. But that was all years ago. I don't know if there is any trait that I don't allow currently.

The one thing that I don't tolerate anymore, is players that don't want to be playing the game I'm running, but still join. This may seem odd, but I bet it isn't as uncommon as it may seem. Some folks think they they are being a bad friend if they don't join in your game. They want to be part of the social aspect of hanging out, which is fine. It becomes an issue if they don't actually like the game, and bring negativity and non-constructive criticism to the group.

I had one player (a long time player and friend) who, after running a DnD 5e campaign, became enamored with that system. He became very critical and negative when I ran a GURPS DF game. He even left the game for awhile, then invited himself back, because he "felt bad" about "ignoring" his friends. Against my better judgment I let him rejoin the game, and the negativity and criticism followed.

This culminated to the point that after logging into our group chat the day after a session (that was definitely an "off" game) and seeing a long list complaints and comparisons, and I finally had enough. I told that player, in a not so cordial way, that I wan't going to run a game I didn't like and that he shouldn't be playing in in a game he didn't like. We haven't spoken since.

[trooper6]

Originally Posted by Bruno

The character doesn't exist.

For me, the fictional character does exist. Within their world they are real. I work from a method actor stance as a player, and tend to prefer to GM for people who are compatible with that. The character grows and becomes a real fictional person with their own beliefs and thoughts and behaviors. And I come to that character with respect for that. It is about knowing a character and respecting its self-ness and internal consistency so that a fan could say, “No, Han shot first. We know him and he would shoot first.”

My character Gianni from whswhs’s THS game is my character but also has his own integrity that was created through play with whswhs and the other players. He is played by me but He has his own character, so much so that the other players by the end knew what was in character for him and could call me out if I were behaving out of character. And Gianni resisted even me. I wanted him to open himself up and become more tolerant and open to the world. And I tried to have that happen, but Gianni didn’t want that to happen. And the events of the game made it so that he never got to be where I wanted him to be emotionally. He got better, but it just didn’t turn out the way I wanted. Being betrayed by his potential buddy who turned out to be a ghost in a bioshell, the toxic meme that almost had him kill his daughter. That sort of stuff made him retreat when I wanted him to move forward. And I do think just deciding he would no longer be closed minded, or just changing his established backstory to make it easier for him to open up would be dishonest and a betrayal of the character. And taking a character with an established backstory and a life and just...ripping them out of their world and plunking them in some other world (barring some in character justification like world hopping that happens in the game itself)...that is really horrific to me. I played Gianni for three years, he has his own life to me— One I can’t just decide to transplant to a 1940s Noir Detective Game, even though the archetype could basically work. But he is not an archetype, he is a person.

I know lots of other people don’t treat their characters that way. But I do. For me characters have weight and I wouldn’t betray them. And I don’t like having it in games I GM, it tends to indicate an incompatibility of play styles—so it is a thing I don’t generally allow.

Now Mark asks a really interesting question—what if you have a character you only play once? That you don’t have a chance to explore? That runs into one of my exceptions. If the character hasn’t been played long enough to become real, to become integrated into the world (usually a character starts becoming its own person after 2-3 sessions for me), then they could be ported into one of my games if they made sense and would be changed to actually fit into the world. But only if they hadn’t died in their old game and hadn’t become alive yet.

Mark also asked how would I know if a character is reused—I ask. I also tend to make the characters with the players one on one, so I’m there for the whole character creation process and we have lots of discussions on how to make the character set up to best become alive.

Over on rpol I’ve seen people advertise in GM Wanted. They would write: “I have this character named this who has done this, I’ve played them in x different campaigns and I’m looking for a GM who will let them into their campaign.” I am never that GM. A person who has a character they want to play disconnected from the campaign...not for me as a GM in general.

The major exception, of course, is a beer and pretzels game or a one shot or something where characters are interchangeable and not really personalized... but I don’t tend to run games like that.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

I've never seen any player want to play the same character in an entirely different game.

Ditto.

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

I would hope that a GM would examine the character from the point of view of their game, not just that they might have been used before.

Take the character that's the source of my nickname: Dr. Kromm. He has been a villain in a James Bond 007 campaign, the chief medical officer of a moon colony in a Space Opera campaign, a naturalist in a Call of Cthulhu campaign, an inventor in a GURPS campaign, an alchemist in a different GURPS campaign, a physician in an Unhallowed Metropolis campaign, and a good half-dozen other people. He has also appeared relabeled as "Dr. Schaum" a couple of times. He's always stereotypically Germanic (perhaps somewhat offensively, I'll admit), not wholly sane, and scientific-minded (skilled sometimes at medicine, sometimes at natural sciences, sometimes at engineering). Each version was tailored to the campaign: fields of expertise, backstory, and even accents changed considerably. But there's no question that the "mad Germanic scientist" archetype and "scatterbrained scientific idealist" personality were essentially the same.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Well, it was good enough for Michael Moorcock . . . The only question is whether Jareth's last name started with a "C."

I had to look this up... huh.

Yeah, the character's original last name did start with a 'C', not my doing though, the GM saddled him with a family name...

Over time he's have a few last names, I went with Mooncalled a few (quite a few) campaigns back and it's sort of stuck since.

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

With one exception, I've never seen any player want to play the same character in an entirely different game.

I've played Jareth in (in kinda this order) BECM D&D, 1st ed D&D, Ars Magica, MERP, 3.5 D&D, NERO (Boffer LARP), another Boffer LARP, Castle Falkenstien, Amber RPG, and now GURPS DF.

I've made 'the character' (as closely as possible) in EQ, EQ2, and WoW... but it's just not the same.

[corwyn]

Originally Posted by whswhs

My current fantasy campaign started out with a man playing a male character, a man playing a female character, a woman playing a male character, a woman playing a female character, and a woman playing a female character who was pretending to be male. The first of the five has withdrawn, and we now have another woman playing a male character.

That reminds of my second campaign ever. 4 players and a GM, all female other than me. In spite of that, there were still 2 male PCs so I joined in and played a female character. We ended up with a fascinating "romantic" triangle, mostly me flirting with the male Paladin, because it irritated the female bard (but not the player) who had designs on him.