What will you not allow?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ultraviolet

I have no problems with similar concepts for characters used again and again. Since we play the same sorts of campaigns there is a limited number of fitting characters.

That's just hard even for me to imagine. My campaigns have very little repetition.

In my last two cycles of campaigns in San Diego, I had a campaign about a team of low-end supers created by the Australian intelligence agency that deals with occult threats in the universe of the Laundry Files; a campaign about adventurers in an alternate history where the Ming Dynasty ruled most of the Earth; a campaign about 14-year-old magic students at an English university in 1300; a campaign about superheroes in a largely player-defined early 21st century; and a campaign about long distance traders in a Bronze Age world with seven humanlike races and mostly spirit-based magic. That kind of variety is typical of what I run.

As for what I play in, I took part in three campaigns with one San Diego GM: one about cinematic pirates in the Caribbean; one about adventurers in Dragaera after the destruction of its capital city; and one about supers in an early 21st century world where superpowers were the result of a (mostly) sexually transmitted disease.

I think it would be really unlikely that a character could be carried over from one of those worlds to another. And that kind of diversity of worlds is something I look for in gaming, both games I run and games I play in. Really, I don't want a standard fantasy or supers or outer space game; I want a game that explores a premise and works out its implications. So that's a big influence on my expectations, I guess.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That's just hard even for me to imagine. My campaigns have very little repetition.

My gaming falls into two styles:

D&D, with groups where very few characters are part of long-term parties, or tied to one world. Moving characters between different DM's worlds is entirely normal and expected.

Games -- mostly GURPS -- where characters are a fairly fixed group, and tied to a world. I've played two THS campaigns, where it would not have been ridiculous for characters to cross over, but they were in different parts of the solar system, and had different GMs. In the same way, it would not have been utterly ridiculous for characters from a 1930s horror setting to show up in the WWII campaign, or WWII characters to show up in a campaign in the 1960s, but it's now clear they are all in separate worlds, under the same GM.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Icelander

....

The last session of the game was a huge battle between their forces, but fittingly, perhaps, it was never established exactly who won.

The players still want to pick up the game again, play out that last session to the end and determine who wins. It's been some ten years since this was.

I submit this in contention of my claim that PCs ending up on the opposite sides of a civil war does not need to be a defeat 'at the game', it can be an awesome win.

Yes, the game can certainly be played that way. In the game I'm currently playing, it probably wouldn't work, for various reasons. Perhaps one day I'll play that way. But not this campaign.

Originally Posted by trooper6

2) With few exceptions, no reusing characters. Characters live in a world. They are tied to that world. You can't just take a character from one world and pop it into a campaign in a different world.

I've got one character I keep trying to use in various campaigns. The campaign always dies, or goes in a direction that has me bow out. So she doesn't really have a world she "belongs" in, and I keep trying to use her. If I actually got to finish a game with her, I think I'd leave her there.

I have to adapt her to each setting and point cost, but the basics of who she is easy to fit into a lot of games.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I think it would be really unlikely that a character could be carried over from one of those worlds to another.

I think you may be overestimating what some people mean by 'the same character'.

I mean, in some cases you really can plausibly carry over the exact same character and maybe change a few nouns in the backstory if needed. (DFRPG-equivalent games anyone?)

But you can drag the 'same character' into wildly divergent contexts. I mean, the 'high-school AU' is a significant fan-fiction phenomenon where the author takes the characters from some piece of media and transposes them into Generic High-school Drama. I've witnessed the process of plotting out how to render the imperial family and some of the major plot developments from The Codex Alera (a fantasy world with a loosely Roman reference society and elemental magic) in a technothriller/near future SF setting. (I'm not sure how well that would have stood up fully developed but it was definitely thought out significantly.) I've got a character originally developed as an angel for the online game Nexus War that I've translated into (and played as) a D&D cleric and a Witchcraft psychic.

[naloth]

I've had a few cross over characters. One was a DND cleric (Le Croix), that was first repurposed as more modern part of a supernatural investigation team (formally Catholic), then ended up as a Brujah Vampire (ex-Catholic vampire). He last appeared in a Supers game as an NPC that was head of a Catholic inquisition cell deciding if metahumans were evil to be punished...

As for a banned trait: Mute. It's just terribly annoying or not worth the full value.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

But you can drag the 'same character' into wildly divergent contexts. I mean, the 'high-school AU' is a significant fan-fiction phenomenon where the author takes the characters from some piece of media and transposes them into Generic High-school Drama. I've witnessed the process of plotting out how to render the imperial family and some of the major plot developments from The Codex Alera (a fantasy world with a loosely Roman reference society and elemental magic) in a technothriller/near future SF setting. (I'm not sure how well that would have stood up fully developed but it was definitely thought out significantly.) I've got a character originally developed as an angel for the online game Nexus War that I've translated into (and played as) a D&D cleric and a Witchcraft psychic.

Well, I actually have two different responses to this one.

(1) Yes, well, I'm aware of that kind of fanfic, but it's a variety that I never think of looking at; I don't understand the appeal.

(2) But let's take this seriously. You might, for example, run a high school AU RPG based on Dracula, where you have a Romanian exchange student come to study at a high school, and then weird stuff starts to happen. But that would not be the same as a single player in a high school campaign saying that they were going to run either the adult Dracula from Stoker's novel, or an adolescent character with all the same traits who was just dropped into that campaign out of the blue.

If you wanted to have a high school AU, I think you would want players to go to considerable effort to explain how Vlad, or Mina, or Van Helsing worked as characters in that setting—to translate them, as it were. It wouldn't be just a matter of turning a Vampire: The Masquerade character into a GURPS or Big Eyes Small Mouth character. It would be rethinking the whole character story in terms that made sense for a high school setting. For example, you probably would not make Vlad an elderly man! And you would want the characters to fit into the particular high school you had made up, and to comment on the high school trope and take off from it creatively. Just dropping Bram Stoker's character into some random high school, without thinking about whether that high school was one where it made sense to have a vampire, or a serial killer, or an elderly Romanian man, be present, would be poles apart. It's not something where you get to decide unilaterally that you're going to do it because you just want to do it, and the devil with the impact on the GM's vision.

I mean, I suppose you could be doing it for comedic effect, in a spirit of "well, we're not taking this seriously anyway; it's just goofing around." But I never, never run campaigns in that spirit, and I don't want players who approach them that way.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Well, I actually have two different responses to this one.

(1) Yes, well, I'm aware of that kind of fanfic, but it's a variety that I never think of looking at; I don't understand the appeal.

Never gotten the appeal of high-school AU stuff either, but I have enjoyed other varieties under the 'character[s] translated into a setting different from their original canon' umbrella. It gives a shortcut to having reader investment in at least some of the cast.

In tabletop character development, I'd say it gives a shortcut to having a character concept you care about playing.

Originally Posted by whswhs

(2) But let's take this seriously. You might, for example, run a high school AU RPG based on Dracula, where you have a Romanian exchange student come to study at a high school, and then weird stuff starts to happen. But that would not be the same as a single player in a high school campaign saying that they were going to run either the adult Dracula from Stoker's novel, or an adolescent character with all the same traits who was just dropped into that campaign out of the blue.

If you wanted to have a high school AU, I think you would want players to go to considerable effort to explain how Vlad, or Mina, or Van Helsing worked as characters in that setting—to translate them, as it were. It wouldn't be just a matter of turning a Vampire: The Masquerade character into a GURPS or Big Eyes Small Mouth character. It would be rethinking the whole character story in terms that made sense for a high school setting. For example, you probably would not make Vlad an elderly man! And you would want the characters to fit into the particular high school you had made up, and to comment on the high school trope and take off from it creatively. Just dropping Bram Stoker's character into some random high school, without thinking about whether that high school was one where it made sense to have a vampire, or a serial killer, or an elderly Romanian man, be present, would be poles apart. It's not something where you get to decide unilaterally that you're going to do it because you just want to do it, and the devil with the impact on the GM's vision.

I mean, I suppose you could be doing it for comedic effect, in a spirit of "well, we're not taking this seriously anyway; it's just goofing around." But I never, never run campaigns in that spirit, and I don't want players who approach them that way.

Sure, all that seems...basically obvious.

But both ends of that scale are potentially described as playing the 'same character' in the high school game and the original...uh, whatever genre game we're proposing Dracula was played in. (I mean, original Stoker Dracula's not really cut out to be a PC anyway.)

[AlexanderHowl]

I would love to run a game with a female:male ratio of 4:2. It is usually the reverse or worse.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ransom

To the cross-playing question, I (being male) have played female PC's on occasion without it being a big issue. As a GM I have yet to encounter a player who wanted to play a character whose gender did not match their own, though I have always said that it is allowed. Most of my players tend to play PCs whose personalities are pretty much the same as their own. This is actually something I've had to think about for my current fantasy campaign, as my player rosted has swung to 2 males and 4 females. I'm not sure if that will have implications for the social dynamic of their wandering about a medieval fantasy setting.

Down in San Diego, I had a spectrum. I had at least one woman who never played male characters, and one man who never played female characters. On the other hand, I had one woman who almost always played male characters. I myself go back and forth.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

But both ends of that scale are potentially described as playing the 'same character' in the high school game and the original...uh, whatever genre game we're proposing Dracula was played in. (I mean, original Stoker Dracula's not really cut out to be a PC anyway.)

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. 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 problem isn't usually a big one for me, because I describe the setting in a bit of detail, and ask to have characters who fit into that specific setting. If the premise is "the secret paranormal investigations branch of Australia's Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation has recruited people with extraordinary capabilities as a rapid response force, and your character is one of the recruits," that puts some constraints on character concepts.