Former Characters a question...

[AV]

In the first game that I ever played, I came in late into the adventurings and mass murders of a trio of hitmen. I eventually more or less became the guy that wasn't a killing machine but did the things that the killing machines couldn't. These killing machine guys (The "Trio") as we most affectionatly called them, have come up in almost every other game that I have played. They were a fun and unbelievably talented group of hitmen and they were relativly unexplained to the point where they could have been from about any game world with humans in it.

Do you think that this is a good idea? I mean to integrate these great characters (and they truly were great, allbeit imbalanced), into our more recent games. I can see arguments for both sides so I want to know what you think.

Thanks for the time...

[Mike Holmes]

There have been a number of threads on this subject, or something similar. Not that I can remember any, or think of how to search them up...

But the issues are pretty straightforward. If you have fun doing it, then go ahead. But it may possibly be a sign of some inability to complete the story of these characters. Some have theorized that people play the same characters repeatedly often because of the fact that there is no closure on the stories surrounding the characters in each game. And without that closure, the players want to keep playing these characters.

Do your games just run out with no conclusion? Or do they have definite ends?

OTOH, some characters may just be Mythic in nature. As such, their tales could just go on and on, and never have any closure except in terms of the smaller episodes. Do you tend to play episodically, or in a serial fashion (all plots can go on for multiple sessions until they work out naturally)?

Perhsps these characters are so good that and end would be a shame. Hard to say from an external standpoint.

One thing is sure, however. If you never, ever play any other characters, you're missing out on the variety that RPGs can provide.

Mike

[M. J. Young]

AV, I'm a bit confused on exactly what you mean. Concerning the Trio:

[*]Is this being considered as a group of recurring NPCs who appear in another game world? Or[*]Are you talking about bringing your player characters into new worlds?[/list:u]Either way, I generally favor it; it's just that you should be thinking about it in different ways depending on which of these you're doing.

Certainly in Multiverser we take player characters from universe to universe; part of the point is that we enjoy building up great characters with never-ending stories--you finish this and start that, or you leave this and maybe come back to it later. But there's a built-in mechanic for doing that, so there's a pseudo-rational reason for the presence of the characters in new worlds, giving them continuity. This same explanation can be (and has been) used to provide recurring villains who appear in many worlds, particularly in the role of nemesis to a specific character. It can work well--but for a lot of players, it needs to make sense.

On the other hand, if you're just talking about having the same characters in completely unrelated game worlds, that works--but you have to lose the continuity.

In terms of player characters, that means you have to start them as new people with new histories, given the same personalities and general background, and try to integrate them into the new game world. For NPCs, it's easier, but you have to remember that this is not the same person. (I actually made that mistake once--I was playing in two different games by the same referee, and he had characters in them who were so similar I made the mistake in one game of assuming the character had knowledge of the other game world. The referee admitted that in his own mind the characters were somehow metaphysically connected, but he wasn't sure how.) You can use the same "metatypes" effectively in different worlds, but you should color them a bit differently on some level or it starts to seem goofy.

--M. J. Young

[Jack Spencer Jr]

I'm going to side with Mike here and say if you're having fun, go ahead, but add that maybe you should ask yourself why you are having fun.

[AV]

I would first like to say thanks for the comments.

Secondly, the idea that I was trying to get across though I failed because i was in a rush was that the characters that keep showing up are now NPCs but once were PCs.

A recent game of Technocracy has very efficiently killed off two of the three in the Trio, while Robert Itschner is missing (one of the former PCs, in technocracy was suped up with nano-tech to change his appearance). We said that it was a good idea to close the guys' "files" like that.

Itschner has made it into the game that I am running and I hope to bring his story to a good solid conclusion as well.

Thanks Again