Captain Anorak's
Guide to Gaming
Carrying characters from game to game
Some gamers seems to regard it as normal behaviour to carry
characters from one game to another. By this I mean playing the same
character in games run by different GMs, perhaps even set in different
game worlds. I find this disturbing.
Sometimes when I run Call of Cthulhu, a player will produce
a character from his gaming case, which he has played before, and
announce that he intends to play it in my game. This fills me with
unease. He has played this in the CoC gameworld as run by other
GMs, and that may not be like my interpretation of it. So that character
may have had experiences which would be impossible in my game.
Nowadays I don't allow Cthulhu player characters to have
magic. (After I ran my first CoC game,
The Spawn of Azathoth,
I realised that this was a really really bad idea.) But many other
GMs do allow this. So I would have to check a character over to
make sure he has no spells, magic items or other tricks. And more
generally, I want a character that's appropriate to the game - not
every character will fit into every scenario. Yet some players are
affronted by such high and mighty behaviour from a mere GM (who after
all is only there to serve their pleasure) and get all upset - they
regard it as their natural right to take their favourite character
into any game they like.
Another problem is that two characters might have played the same
scenario in different groups. Imagine I'm playing a hack fantasy game
(let's call it AB&C) and I join an existing group with my experienced
27th Level character Lemsip the Barbarian. Now during a game our
characters are talking about past exploits and I mention how I entered
the dreaded Dread Dungeon of Dreaded Dread and slew the dreaded
Dreadmaster himself in hand-to-hand combat. At this point my fellow
adventurer in the group I've joined, Clearasil the Mighty, pipes up
with 'Ah yes, we played that adventure too. I also slew the Dreadmaster!'
Now clearly this isn't possible - we can't both have slain him.
There's worse. I've heard that in some gaming groups, it's normal
practise to have characters jumping back and forth again and
again from one game to another. For example, suppose I'm playing Lemsip
the Barbarian in two AB&C campaigns -
in a game GMed by BA Felton on Tuesdays and in a game run by Weird Pete
on Thursdays. So in BA's game on Tuesday Lemsip is in some isolated
jungle somewhere. Then on Thursday he's in a deep dungeon in Pete's
game, where he finds various magic items and gains some experience points.
Then the next Tuesday, he's mysteriously back in BA's jungle again, but
now he's got this extra equipment and experience apparently from nowhere.
In this scenario he gains yet more treasure and EXP, which he then uses
in Pete's dungeon.
That might sound like totally ridiculous gaming to some people, but
I've heard of gamers who actually play like that. I find it pretty fucking
unblievable, but apparently it does happen.
After The Trouble, Gary Gygax went and brought out a new RPG called
Dangerous Journeys. I've not played this, but as I understand it it's a
generic roleplaying system for any gameworld. Now here's the special part:
a character has a 'character core' which can be moved from one gameworld
to another. So you can be playing a heroic armoured knight in a fantasy
gameworld, then port the same character to an SF gameworld to be some
equivalent kind of SFey fighter-type. The game has been expressly designed
for carrying characters from game to game. This just can't be right.
And, of course, 'favourite character' means 'most powerful character'.
These gamers like their characters high-level. They don't like starting
new characters because new characters are still human and might be killed
by as little as ten bullets to the head. You don't want to play a weakling
like that when you've got a 98th level monstrosity that you've been
building up for years, who could take on all the Norse gods at once armed
only with a toothpick* and win.
*Yes it was a reference to The Black Sun.