The Blog of Roon

Dipping a toe back into Game WISH with number 42:

Do you ever reuse characters from game to game? When you reuse characters, what do you bring from game to game: a name and a personality, stats, or more? What kinds of characters do you reuse and why?

I do reuse characters, but with limits.

I have never reused a long-running character. Any game I’ve been in long enough to have such a character ends up entwining that character with the setting and the other characters such that just yanking them out and replanting them won’t work. At all. Juskinah belongs in Zakhara; Afletana belongs to Hommlet and Elmo. Shirley makes absolutely zero sense outside of Victorian England (and precious little inside it, but that’s another story).

This is a statement of history rather than intent. Some of my long-running characters might be transplantable. Rat, for instance. To transplant them, though, I would want to transplant their histories, too—which brings up a point I hope someone has mentioned before me: game design and character transplantability.

D&D3e gaming depends pretty heavily on a world conception, typically a closed-ended one—mappae mundi contain the whole world, few or no unknowns, no strangers, no lost cities or realms, relatively easy travel. Moreover, no D&D game world contains all, or even a major subset, of the possible D&D races, classes, characters, monsters, societies, etc. This is a major brake on transplantable characters; they can’t take their world, and their history within that world, with them. Not saying this is bad or good, just saying.

Everway, on the other hand, starts from an explicitly multi-cultured, multi-worlded, open-ended perspective. This makes transplanting characters ever so much easier. Yes, Aquamarine comes from this world over here, through these gates, where…

(No, I don’t have a character named Aquamarine. Nick the name if you want to; I thought it sounded cool.)

The interesting thing is, you don’t need a multi-world system to facilitate character transplantation. All you need is a repeated construct through which characters can transition from one game to another. Ars Magica characters transplant easily from one covenant to another, histories intact, just as Everway characters can enter a new game by going through a new gate.

Short-term or one-off characters I am very willing to transplant; how much I take with me depends on circumstances. I’d love to play Aino and Ahti in another Ars campaign, with or without their brief covenant history. Stolid, capable, practical Bellis was a terrific character, and if I don’t play her again I will certainly play someone like her. (She deserves a special campaign; I won’t play her just anywhere. I finally decided to pull out of the Monty Haul campaign when I realized that Bellis would be wasted on it.)

I’ve also been known to reuse character concepts, without the baggage of history or stats. Fiera the werepanther has shown up in Rifts and again in Zakhara. Similar personality, obviously similar abilities, but expressed in two worlds and two game systems.

I’m basically in agreement with Ginger that the more fleshed-out the character, and the longer the history, the harder it is to transplant. As hard as it is to say goodbye to heart characters, they are the very characters who must remain in the worlds that gave rise to them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2003 at 9:28 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.