bryant

WISH 42: Reusing Characters…

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? If you GM, do you like to have players bring in existing characters? Why?

I don’t ever reuse characters… wait, that’s not true. I’ve used Mange (half-orc barbarian) more than once, but that’s because I intentionally use him as a test character for 3e games. Any time I don’t want to burn a “real” character concept on a game before I know if I’ll like it, I’ll trot him out. He served as my NWN character as well.

Hm, and you could say I’ve reused Constantine as well, if you again count computer games. But there’s not much roleplay per se in those. Still, OK: I’ll say I reuse characters for the purpose of coming up with computer game avatars. And now that I think about it, those two games are the only computer games I’ve played for extended periods of time. Maybe there’s a reason for that; I’ll have to experiment.

In pen and paper games, however, I don’t generally reuse characters. I do reuse concepts; I went through half a dozen iterations of the bright young noble before I went on to something else. In some ways, my travelling backwoods feng shui master from Rob’s UA game is very similar to my cleric of Mercury in Carl’s 3e game. I reuse (and remix) concepts, but not characters.