Dead Games and PCs

[hoverfrog]

You know all those characters that you create that never make it into games or characters that you make that appear in a game that then fizzles out before you even get to advance a level?

What do you do with them? Do you try to fit them in to another game, leave them in your folder, turn them into villains for your own games, or something else? I'm curious because a few games I've been in have recently stalled or stopped altogether and I don't want to just get rid of my PCs that I've spent ages creating.

[Nizaris]

The last game I was in died due to unexpected but understandable circumstances and in it I was playing an elan factotum/artificer (yes, Dr Who reference) and my party had (through good diplomacy and world saving) secured a abandoned tower and the land around it as ours by the king. So we made a town. Now that I'm running a game of my own, players are villains in that city (one of whom played with me in said previous game.) Both of our characters survive and are NPCs, even six centuries later.

[Water_Bear]

My experience is that old PCs make poor villains, and vice versa. Even when built with the same rules, they are designed for very different things. A villain is typically fighting alone or with a horde of mooks, and can rely on having access to resources PCs can't always acquire. PCs on the other hand are always part of a team, so their builds are going to be more specialized by default.

That said, reusing old characters is good for several circumstances. Obviously, as a Player it is good to have back-ups in case the worst happens in any given game, and old character ideas can help inform your future builds. As a DM, there will always be room for mini-bosses or NPC Adventurers, so having a stack of old sheets is useful.

[PaigeXenon]

After a campaign where I had 3 characters killed i started ritually burning my character sheets. This seems to to have extened to characters of campaigns that end before there time. All the players willeet up if we know the campaign has no future and we will have a mamorial for or charaters. I know its very weird and seems like waste but i am not a very good dm and have a hard time adding them to new campaigns.

[Madara]

They sit in this folder, on a shelf, with no space for themselves, covered in dust.

Its all very sad. :smallsigh:

[Kuulvheysoon]

Since I'm usually DMing, I tend to incorporate my old PCs into the world as NPCs. Like my Fighter/Warblade that was looking forwards to Deepstone Sentinel.

[eggs]

Anything to save time statting out secondary NPCs when I DM.

I rarely reuse characters directly in games, but when I've really liked a build concept, I've redone several of those (the noir detective-exorcist and the slimy goblin scientist come to mind).