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View Full Version : System-hopping: Translating Characters



Maglubiyet
2015-03-24, 12:22 PM
This comes up from time to time, a character from one game gets brought into another campaign in an entirely different RPG system. Like, once we had a Call of Cthulhu investigator enter a cave that transported him to our current d20 swords and sorcery fantasy world. The player made a character sheet and translated the stats/abilities and we had a new 1st-level wizard, who served as an apprentice to another player's 3rd-level mage.

Or a Gamma World character whose mutations made him a perfect candidate for a superhero. So we decided that he had found the ruins of an experimental time-travel facility and was transported back to modern day New York for a Champions game we were running.

There's something cool about doing this. When you're looking at the new rule system you find little things that the original character didn't have because it wasn't available in the system they were created in, but make sense to add in the new one. They also lose abilities that aren't gameable in wherever they're going.

Anyone do this on a regular basis -- have one character travel between campaigns/game systems and maintain continuity?

Geddy2112
2015-03-24, 12:56 PM
If the character concept is solid enough, it can be adapted almost anywhere. I base a lot of my pathfinder characters off real people, usually from the 20th century, most still living. Lady Gaga makes for a pretty awesome bard...

We usually just play pathfinder, but we sometimes do 1 shots of (Warhammer RPG's, Star Wars) and we recycle concepts, particularly for NPC's.