Traveling Characters: When Your Love For a Character Exceeds The Lifespan of Your Game Group
January 7, 2009 by e
Filed under Dungeons & Dragons, Geek Life
It’s more than just a rogue. It’s Tarissa, the busty and brawny human that can go from sugar-sweet flirt to sinister assassin in the blink of an eye. You crafted her backstory with love, sweat, and tears.
She’s been the most fun you’ve ever had roleplaying.
You spend all week at work daydreaming about what trouble she’s going to get into on Saturday night.
Then…
Your gaming group disbands.
Oh noes!
What I Would Do
I’ve been lucky. Mielka and Joelle’s groups will be resuming in the near future after a short holiday. But I do miss Mar’Kessa. When the 4e version of Eberron comes out, I’m thinking of how to bring her back.
Since I write campaign logs for my games, my characters are out in the open for all to see. I get attached to them and from the feedback I’ve gotten, several of you have gotten attached as well!
I think the easiest way to keep a character would be to write a new segment of backstory that bridges the gap between the old campaign and the new.
Using Mar’Kessa as an example, I could write about how and why she left her old adventuring group (most likely because of the “other” drow, who she sarcastically dubbed Salacious).
If the new group was starting back at level 1, the backstory could include reasons why her skills are a bit rusty. Did she live off the land and try to come to terms with the death of Eko the gnoll? Maybe she just decided to hang up her bow, since she was so bad at shooting things in the first place.
If the new group started at a higher level, the backstory could include a tale of adventure where Mar’Kessa picked up a few new tricks. She could find Frank the half-giant cleric and go on crazy adventures with him. (I still wish that I had Frank’s player in my new group. I miss that guy!) Actually, what I really see Mar’Kessa doing is some sort of Sweeney Todd operation… a respectable shop wherein she can deal out vigilante justice… or maybe just steal stuff from people she doesn’t like.
Either way, a simple bridge story is a great way to resurrect a well-loved character should you not want to roll up a new one.
What Have You Done?
Vote below!
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E. Foley is a geek girl extraordinaire. She writes amazing online dating profiles for geeks and non-geeks, helping clients all over the world find love. Her writing can be found at Examiner.com, Dating Sites Reviews, and elsewhere as a ghostwriter. By day, she is the Copywriter at ThinkGeek. She lives in Maryland with DaveTheGame and her adorable cats, Mr. Peanut and Don Juan. (Email e, or follow @geeksdreamgirl on Twitter.)
My favorite character was [drum roll] Darius Whiteplume, transmuter, entertainer, Harper, spy… The scourge of Faerun’s dark forces. Oh, how they knelt before my power! Begging for the justice they did not deserve, and a Harper was not required to give! Oh yes they… Then the DM and his wife got divorced, and that was that.
I am toying with playing a revised version, first in a likely Greyhawk 4e game, but now in a 3.5e Eberron game. I imagine the dread Whiteplume angered someone of great power who flung him from the world he knows to one where the laws of nature and magic are not quite the same… Like an architect who finds himself in a place where gravity is reversed, aptitude is great, but the rules have changed.
Darius Whiteplume´s last blog post..Sponge Bob is soooo last year…
I haven’t yet, but I plan to soon. Have a great swashbuckling fighter I’d like to resurrect for an Eberron or Forgotten Realms campaign. He used to be part of an e-mail Eberron campaign a few years back. Of course, I’ll have to somehow find time for that if he manages to find a game.
And yes, E, Anna and I LOVE Mielka, so don’t do anything rash with her, okay?
Dead Orcs´s last blog post..Happy New Year Year! & A Bit of An Inauguration
@ Dead Orcs – Mielka’s already died once! Hehehhe… hopefully Hybban is merciful to her.
Suck it up and roll another one, that’s my motto. I’ve got a good dozen old characters of varying levels in my old D&D folder. Some were more developed than others and some I looked upon more fondly than others.
The bubbly Halfling Cartographer (2nd Ed. Thieves Handbook I think) with a dark obsession for making every dungeon map “perfect” to scale, causing many a frustrated moment between party members as he paced out every room and corridor.
The unpredictable and aptly named Dwarven Fighter/Cleric Farkin (Randomly rolled name using the table in the 2nd Ed. Dwarves Handbook, I shit you not). His predisposition to dashing into combat ahead of dimplomacy led to his name being used in vain on many an occasion.
Then there was Sylvara my Half-Elven Bard, my most detailed character ever, consisting of close to 20 sheets of A4 paper containing her (and her pet war dog’s) character sheets, background info and family history.
I also remember my twin Rangers, Rygar and Rastan (ghey I know). My first, greedy attempt at role-playing two characters at the same time, who appeared so totally undimorphic as I couldn’t role-play them differently, that my DM decided that rather than be twin brothers, they were actually two halves of the same man, who embarked on a quest to make themselves whole again.
These were but 4 of my favorites from the time I spent playing D&D. Others included a Human female Invoker obsessed with fire, a Half-Elven Fighter/Mage/Thief (because I just had to) and a stereotypically dull, dark and brooding Paladin.
None of these I could even think about modifying for someone elses campaign. Not level-wise anyway. Some never reached level 5, while most never reached level 10, but removing any of those hard earned levels to fit another gaming group would be sacrelidge. Conversely, adding levels would be cheating myself and my character out of valuable role-playing experience.
Perhaps I have been lucky in that most of my campaigns have started out from level 1 and that I have only ever had two role-playing groups and the love for my characters has never diminished in the 10 or so years since I have played D&D, but I still could never bring myself to modify a characters levels and abilities to fit into an existing campaign.
It’s probably because I really prefer DMing to playing, but I’ve never been attached to a character I’ve played. They could die, I’ll just roll another one.
As for Mielka, it is in the hands of all of you players and Fate (or dice). The DM will not be partial to any character.
Hyb’
Well, I’ve not made more than a single positive experience on resurrection or bringing back old characters into a different campaign…
Well as I said, not more than one – save for my cleric of Waukeen (Maíre was her name), which lived on even after the old group disbanded…
Still, I think it’s usually best to start over again, because there are certain expectations you have into the behaviour of your character and you depend (usually) very much from the companions that you have. For example a rogue -> assassin, is easy to play in a not-so-good campaign, but it will give severe problems with the paladin of the new group. But even the same “lineup” in terms of alignment and group-classes would end up in a different rogue and I for my part have the feeling that resurrecting an old character mostly leads to unfulfilled expectations and a severe loss, since your last memories of your character were pretty good and you loose all that at the moment you’ve put him/her into a new one.
TheLemming´s last blog post..Descent Boardgame
I love making characters for pretty much any system I can get my hands on so I generally go new for each game, but there is one that’s travelled through 3 or 4 games because the games were related and she’s just so much fun
A couple of my very favorite characters have made returns, but never quite the way I expected.
First, Lillian, my very first character who became the mayor of the little town we saved in our campaign, returned as an NPC (with my permission) in a new campaign based in the same geographic environment. It was fun to see her back, but I got to move on to a new character.
The second time I had a character return was actually a planned occasion. Our group decided we liked our characters so much that when the campaign ended, we talked the DM (with only a very little persuasion) to run a “in 5 years” campaign with the same cast. So we all got to play them again, just a few years older.
stupidranger´s last blog post..Surviving the Crazy Times: Beginning Again
For every game my crew starts, we roll new characters. It was never a second thought. My old group, sometimes we’d roll characters just to see what we could come up with (the mutant animal options in the old palladium TMNT game was great for that and left me with entire stuffed folders of characters who were never played).
It wasn’t until my wife threw a fit at having to create yet another character and write yet another background that I took a second look and started to consider reusing characters.
Soul Existence´s last blog post..Scum and Villainy
I voted other because I don’t necessarily play the same character, but do play legacy characters. I like to play the children or grandchildren of my old characters when possible. I also once ran a game where I used an old PC of mine as an NPC leading the group (which was made up of his own son as well as the son of one of his old rivals).
The Pretentious Fool´s last blog post..MK vs. DC
I have two characters I would LOVE to bring back…
1) Darsan(True Neutral Human Cleric of Kelemvor) – He is a long greasy haired human in Forgotten Realms who before adventuring was working as an Undertaker. He was the only human I have ever played and I fell in love with him.
Play Tactics – He is a full on caster, favoring necromancy he views dead bodes as “raw material” and has no problem raising his foes to fight for him.
Roll playing – Mostly silent but quick to start a philosophical argument. Negative and morbid most of the time but brightens up and becomes an instant optimist when death is involved.
2) Thal(True Neutral Warfoged Artificer) – Thal crafted dozens of original magic items for the world of Eberron. He was working as a researcher/librarian for the library of Sharn before becoming an adventure. Actually he never left the position, he brought new discoveries to the library and was so mush of an asset that they gave him the liberty to not only come and go as he pleased but also free rain and use of the facilities.
Play Tactics – His body is littered with attached magic items that enhance him. He fought like a caster but never hesitated to take out his great sword and get physical.
Roll playing – Nerdy and clueless. “fleshis” are a enigma for him, think Data for Star Trek when it comes to his personality but with no problem when it comes to emotions.
P.s.
Nether of the two ever died!
The campaigns unexpectedly broke up.
I’ve taken characters from games that died or fell apart and reintroduced them as NPCs when I GM’d. Most recently with Istara Kandorian, who was a mid-level Rebellion operative and newly-minted engineering officer in a Star Wars play by post game… and in an infinities game set twenty-five years later, she’s Fleet Admiral Istara Kandorian Serrano, commander in chief of the Republic Navy.
I’ve never re-used a character from a long-standing campaign, but sometimes I’ll create a character I just love for a campaign that fizzles out after only a couple sessions, and those I’ll recreate for a new game.
Speaking of old characters becoming NPCs, I’ve been playing Ars Magica on Sunday for about 8 years and my old PCs almost always show up as an NPC in the new saga.
Also I had a companion character that I only got to play one session before another PC chased him off into the farie forest never to be seen again. In the next campaign, which was set about 200 years after the first, I brought him back in disguise. I secretly decided that he had been sent 200 years into the future and moved from Wales to Egypt. Since he was a Spaniard, he had to pretend to be Muslim and change his name. No one else knew about this until the end of the campaign, but it amused me.
I had a gnome Cleric that was from Lantan and carried a Smokepowder pistol and once convinced a oorag that it was magical and he needed to look through the hole and push the trigger. i actually rolled a natural 20 on my bluff and he totally shot himself in the eye and our group got the drop on the rest of the group. cant remember his name for the life of me,
i reuse my charactors as NPC’s and villians at times. i dislike reusing charactors unless they didnt get a full playing time and i loved the name and or backstory.
Once made character who grew up to be a human fighter/rogue/wizard/duelist named Hart Thorn. He was one of my early attempts to play against my own personality. As such, he was an arrogant bastard. I brought him back for another campaign (the only CN in an otherwise evil party). Afterwards I created the back story that he had made epic level and had become a dimension hopping vagabond. From that point, i created about 3 more of his descendants, each similar but somewhat different. Even had one game where my gf was playing and I was DMing where she found out that Hart Thorn was her grandad. And she was an elf… Things got weird…
I usually DM, so when my friend offer to, I was so excited. I created a warforged barbarian with the arachni-chassis upgrade. He was Spyder Darkblade, using a black greatsword and his eight legged dropkick of doom to vaquish enemies. When my friend moved, and I went back to DMing, I would usually have Spyder hinder or assist the PCs in some way. My best moment with spyder would have to be being enlarged by the party’s wizard and then killing the final boss with a column ripped from the wall. SQUISH!