DM brought his PC from a another game he plays in as an NPC to our game he hosts.

[OpiumBear666]

Today I learned that our DM brought his player character, Sorel, a traveling halfling merchant that he plays as in a different game, as an NPC to our game that he is hosting. He has played as Sorel for months now from his other game and we have played with Sorel in and out of interactions with our group in our campaign for months as well, however I have just learned that it is actually his PC from his other game. In our setting he hosts he says this is Sorel's retirement years and him wanting to visit new worlds he had left unseen in his younger years, while in his other game its like he's playing the backstory of Sorel's younger years. I found this very clever and a fun mechaninc of world sharing. Have any of you had characters that shared multiple campaigns, PC, NPC or otherwise?

[Hackulator]

Today I learned that our DM brought his player character, Sorel, a traveling halfling merchant that he plays as in a different game, as an NPC to our game that he is hosting. He has played as Sorel for months now from his other game and we have played with Sorel in and out of interactions with our group in our campaign for months as well, however I have just learned that it is actually his PC from his other game. In our setting he hosts he says this is Sorel's retirement years and him wanting to visit new worlds he had left unseen in his younger years, while in his other game its like he's playing the backstory of Sorel's younger years. I found this very clever and a fun mechaninc of world sharing. Have any of you had characters that shared multiple campaigns, PC, NPC or otherwise?

I'm currently playing in a game that is the third or fourth game played in the same world, and many older characters are NPCs, figures of legend, or in the case of my paladin from the original game, a god.

I used to run a series of epic campaigns that alternated between epic good and epic evil, and the PCs from the prior games would generally take the position of BBEG (or BBGG if it was the evil party) for the current game.

I'm also currently running a game where old characters of mine and my friends from a previous iteration of the game are being used as NPCs.

So yeah, all the time :-)

[OpiumBear666]

I'm currently playing in a game that is the third or fourth game played in the same world, and many older characters are NPCs, figures of legend, or in the case of my paladin from the original game, a god.

I used to run a series of epic campaigns that alternated between epic good and epic evil, and the PCs from the prior games would generally take the position of BBEG (or BBGG if it was the evil party) for the current game.

I'm also currently running a game where old characters of mine and my friends from a previous iteration of the game are being used as NPCs.

So yeah, all the time :-)

Hey thats really cool, I haven't seen this before on my campaigns, I'm surprised to learn how common and creatively it is implemented. I would love to potentially PC as one of the NPCs I've encountered in this game, in another game, that would be a blast.

[Hackulator]

Hey thats really cool, I've haven't seen this before on my campaigns, I'm surprised to learn how common and creatively it is implemented. I would love to potentially PC as one of the NPCs I've encountered in this game, in another game, that would be a blast.

It's a combination of creativity and laziness lol. It's easier to use a character that already has a rich backstory and personality as an NPC than creating a new one from scratch. It also is a lot of fun when someone realizes their new character just had his ass handed to him by his old character lol.

[TeChameleon]

I've done that as both a player and GM- in the 10-year-plus D&D game I've been playing in, there was a 350-500 year timeskip (it... kind of varies because the DM forgot to write it down. Thankfully, it hasn't mattered much so far ) to start up a new campaign once we finished the first one. The DM gave the option for us to keep our characters over in a sort of 'king under the mountain'/'sleeping in Avalon' thing, and I was the only one that went for it.

Courtesy of an absolutely epic (in the classical sense of the word) finale, my character has all sorts of... interesting... myths around him, although thankfully (?), he really doesn't fit the image (short, rude, way younger than expected, and just generally kind of a jerk), so there haven't been any Beatlemania-type mobs around. Still kinda fun, though, since, given that the character gives exactly zero ****s, we end up with things like him offhandedly displaying knowledge he really shouldn't have around globe-spanning, rather paranoid secret societies founded by one of the (immortalized in myth and legend) former party members.

As a GM, my character recycling was less amazing, but still kind of fun- brought my PC from an old Shadowrun game in to one I was running to be a Johnson. Given his... quirks... it made for a reasonably memorable contact for my players, and they only plotted to kill him once (they stopped once I pointed out that they were plotting to kill the Johnson because the dangerous run he had hired them for turned out to be dangerous )

[Jay R]

I routinely use retired PCs as background NPCs in the games I run. An old paladin who now rules a keep, a retired thief who now has a Thieves' Guild, etc. I know how they think; I know what they believe in; I know what they'd do in any given situation.

A few years ago, I ran an original D&D game for some friends. Each PC had a mentor, who died in the second session, to set up the PCs' first quest. All but one of the mentors were oD&D characters I ran in the 1970s.

Of course, I'd never actually adventure with my own PC. But they make great background characters.

[Sariel Vailo]

Today I learned that our DM brought his player character, Sorel, a traveling halfling merchant that he plays as in a different game, as an NPC to our game that he is hosting. He has played as Sorel for months now from his other game and we have played with Sorel in and out of interactions with our group in our campaign for months as well, however I have just learned that it is actually his PC from his other game. In our setting he hosts he says this is Sorel's retirement years and him wanting to visit new worlds he had left unseen in his younger years, while in his other game its like he's playing the backstory of Sorel's younger years. I found this very clever and a fun mechaninc of world sharing. Have any of you had characters that shared multiple campaigns, PC, NPC or otherwise?

Elewen hyper highelf archmage and creator of a magic college. Also did a interview with strahd von zarovich and published the book.any adventure she partakes in she writes a book about. She eventually becomes a enchanter ,magic item enchanter,and spell seller. Everyting costs money she is also a tutor. Thus she has taught most people spells and sold scrolls.enchanted magic weapons
.

[Sariel Vailo]

My wizard named sariel vailo named after me just wishes to dance sing and perform. And with the bladesinger in 5e she shall.each wizard took a difrent path.elewen took her scholarly pursuits to paper.sariel shall sing them to the heavens.one will live forever giving lore and one shall sing.
In every bar and tavern if their is a dark elf singing thats sariel offers everything elewen does plus some inspiration mc bard.

[Darth Ultron]

Have any of you had characters that shared multiple campaigns, PC, NPC or otherwise?

As DM, I do this all the time. Characters from anywhere, can pop up anywhere.

I do like the 'fun' of no real explanation, but often enough I'll toss in a wild portal, crack on space time or Einstine-Rosen bridge.

In the past I've run two games set in the same times and place, with two groups. So each game effects the other game and everything crosses over.

[GungHo]

Yes. Mostly in retirement. I run a "legacy" campaign. Several of the PCs are descendants of former PCs and NPCs. Not necessarily the same player though, which was actually a good idea in hindsight. It's allowed for a lot of historical drift.

[OpiumBear666]

I've done that as both a player and GM- in the 10-year-plus D&D game I've been playing in, there was a 350-500 year timeskip (it... kind of varies because the DM forgot to write it down. Thankfully, it hasn't mattered much so far ) to start up a new campaign once we finished the first one. The DM gave the option for us to keep our characters over in a sort of 'king under the mountain'/'sleeping in Avalon' thing, and I was the only one that went for it.

Courtesy of an absolutely epic (in the classical sense of the word) finale, my character has all sorts of... interesting... myths around him, although thankfully (?), he really doesn't fit the image (short, rude, way younger than expected, and just generally kind of a jerk), so there haven't been any Beatlemania-type mobs around. Still kinda fun, though, since, given that the character gives exactly zero ****s, we end up with things like him offhandedly displaying knowledge he really shouldn't have around globe-spanning, rather paranoid secret societies founded by one of the (immortalized in myth and legend) former party members.

As a GM, my character recycling was less amazing, but still kind of fun- brought my PC from an old Shadowrun game in to one I was running to be a Johnson. Given his... quirks... it made for a reasonably memorable contact for my players, and they only plotted to kill him once (they stopped once I pointed out that they were plotting to kill the Johnson because the dangerous run he had hired them for turned out to be dangerous )

Elewen hyper highelf archmage and creator of a magic college. Also did a interview with strahd von zarovich and published the book.any adventure she partakes in she writes a book about. She eventually becomes a enchanter ,magic item enchanter,and spell seller. Everyting costs money she is also a tutor. Thus she has taught most people spells and sold scrolls.enchanted magic weapons
.

Hey thats all really cool and unique! I would have never thought of the some of these idea like having descendant PCs or having a campaign set hundreds of years after a previous one, dealing with the aftermath of the first. These all give me awesome inspiration, thank you!

[OpiumBear666]

As DM, I do this all the time. Characters from anywhere, can pop up anywhere.

I do like the 'fun' of no real explanation, but often enough I'll toss in a wild portal, crack on space time or Einstine-Rosen bridge.

In the past I've run two games set in the same times and place, with two groups. So each game effects the other game and everything crosses over.

Yes. Mostly in retirement. I run a "legacy" campaign. Several of the PCs are descendants of former PCs and NPCs. Not necessarily the same player though, which was actually a good idea in hindsight. It's allowed for a lot of historical drift.

I routinely use retired PCs as background NPCs in the games I run. An old paladin who now rules a keep, a retired thief who now has a Thieves' Guild, etc. I know how they think; I know what they believe in; I know what they'd do in any given situation.

A few years ago, I ran an original D&D game for some friends. Each PC had a mentor, who died in the second session, to set up the PCs' first quest. All but one of the mentors were oD&D characters I ran in the 1970s.

Of course, I'd never actually adventure with my own PC. But they make great background characters.

I really enjoy the unexpected encounter of having recognizeable npcs pop in from a wild portal or especially einstine-rosen bridge. Also the concept of running 2 different campaigns set in the same world and having the actions in one effect the other is truly creative, I bet my DM would love that idea.

[Knaight]

I've never used PCs as NPCs elsewhere, but I have iterated NPCs before if I have similar enough settings and different player groups. If I'm running high fantasy I have a couple of characters that fit that and have shown up two or three times with small improvements in characterization between that, I have some stock character types for bit characters in general, and then there's the space opera roster of crew members and enemy space pirates that I've built over several campaigns and can adapt to fit different settings.

[Benthesquid]

I haven't ever done this, with the exception of my Surprisingly Reasonable Ghouls, who while not explicitly the same characters, do tend to pop up in every game I run, and one of whom I will probably wind up playing as a PC at some point.

It does seems like an entirely reasonable idea- a ready made source of fleshed out characters with their own quirks and foibles can't be a bad thing, as long as the GM remembers to look at them through crosshairs.

[Inevitability]

I've had a former PC return as a vestige in a 3.5 game focused on those beings.

[Concrete]

Two of the PC's of my last campaign retired to start, respectively, a bardic collegium (a bard, duh), and a dueling school (a magus). This gives me a wonderful opportunity to introduce students of those schools in my current campaign, as the players will take part in an arena combat.
One of them as an opposing fighter, the other as a hype man, trying to turn the crowd against them.

[LordCdrMilitant]

I had the events of one Dark Heresy game immediately precede the events of another with a new party, and the acolytes and NPC's from the first game appeared as NPC's to generally get in the way.

When I run a third game, this will probably continue, since it won't be long after the first two.

[Lord Torath]

I brought a rigger I played in a Shadowrun campaign in as a Mechanic (she's now retired from shadowrunning) in a campaign I ran.

I think it's a great idea, as long as you keep them as NPCs, and don't let them steal the spotlight from the PCs.

[Geddy2112]

This practice is so rampant in my gaming group, that we are often trying to guess which character an NPC is. Sometimes I do it in reverse-an NPC from a game I have run is a character the next time I play.

One campaign I ran was a group of previous PC's who died and got a chance to come back to life. The boss fight of the campaign was a rival adventuring party made up of the antagonists/rivals (former PC's or NPC's of mine) of their respective campaigns, some of which were the person that killed said PC.

[ElFi]

In my group's next campaign in my ongoing Mutants and Masterminds 'verse, I plan on including several major characters from the previous campaign (they only take place about six years apart, so it's not much of a stretch), notably said prior campaign's main antagonist (who turned out to be a good guy plotting to take down the real villain), and two of the PC's, both of whose players have been informed and are very much on board with this plan, as well as a lot of characters who were either background details in the previous campaign or in small supporting roles.

Also, assuming our player characters manage to stop the end of the world in our current Pathfinder campaign and get away with their lives intact, our DM plans on making mention of them in his next campaign, set several hundred years later in a different continent of the same setting. And if my elven Alchemist survives, she might even put in a physical appearance, since said class gets immortality as a capstone.

TL;DR, no current experiences with this yet, but our campaign group has plans for the future incorporating such an idea.

[Potatomade]

My table does this, too. The BBEG and all of his inner circle are an evil party we did a while back, and half of the group is using characters from previous campaigns or their offspring. So long as the former PC turned NPC is either the BBEG, a cameo, or serving a purely support role to the party, there isn't really any problem with it. Especially if he/she is the bad guy. It makes the players in my group genuinely awed when they encounter an epic level PC turned heel. It fixes all of the flaws of a DM PC by making the goal of the campaign to murder the guy. And it feels good to play a campaign that's part of a shared universe, even if that universe doesn't exist anywhere but in the minds of your group.

[Sajiri]

Our very first game had a player create a half orc barbarian that was a great character, but the game eventually died off. Many years later the DM wanted to resurrect it, but we lost contact with that player, so the DM took her old character and turned her into an npc who is part of the party for the new game.

Not one we've done yet but the DM is planning a 'next generation' game. Basically it will revolve around a lot of the children of the very large cast of characters, including my own, from an existing game we did, and the older ones will likely all show up as NPCs. It will be weird seeing the character I played for a few hundred sessions suddenly an NPC though...

[Potatomade]

Not one we've done yet but the DM is planning a 'next generation' game. Basically it will revolve around a lot of the children of the very large cast of characters, including my own, from an existing game we did, and the older ones will likely all show up as NPCs. It will be weird seeing the character I played for a few hundred sessions suddenly an NPC though...

My group's solution to this has been to let the player who used that character still voice the character, and decide what their life was like in the interim period (with DM agreement, of course). That doesn't work as well if the NPC is meant to be plot critical in some way, though.

[DrewID]

I ran a solo campaign for a friend over the course of several years whenever only the two of us were available to game. His character was a thief and a con-artist who eventually had an official unofficial position with the local government. Fast-forward several years and that friend starts up a campaign for myself and one other player set in that same location: That character is a patron to our two characters, and that PC (now the chief spy for the local power figure) hires us to go do the running around and grubbing for information that he got tired of doing himself. Rarely showed up except to give us assignments, so there was no DMPC problem. But we knew what he was like and what he would do or not do, based on the best kind of back-story: a multi-year campaign.

DrewID

[FreddyNoNose]

Today I learned that our DM brought his player character, Sorel, a traveling halfling merchant that he plays as in a different game, as an NPC to our game that he is hosting. He has played as Sorel for months now from his other game and we have played with Sorel in and out of interactions with our group in our campaign for months as well, however I have just learned that it is actually his PC from his other game. In our setting he hosts he says this is Sorel's retirement years and him wanting to visit new worlds he had left unseen in his younger years, while in his other game its like he's playing the backstory of Sorel's younger years. I found this very clever and a fun mechaninc of world sharing. Have any of you had characters that shared multiple campaigns, PC, NPC or otherwise?

Back in the 70s it was pretty uncommon for people to take character with them to whatever game they were playing. Eventually DMs cracked down on it.

[Cozzer]

Me and my group never bring the actual characters from one campaign to another, since each of them takes place in its own homebrew setting, but we do have quite a bit of fun with expies. They usually have very, very minor roles though. It's a way to effortlessly give a bit of color to tertiary characters.

[Driderman]

Back when I played a lot of the various World Of Darkness games, I always had an NPC called Fast Eddie who drove a cab, in my stories (named after the software pirate my dad bought discs for the Amiga off when I was a kid).
The players didn't necessarily meet him or even hear about him, and I'm not even sure what he was, but he always had a part to play in some of the meta-plot stuff going on.

[TheCountAlucard]

Guess it's a matter of presentation. One of my former GMs has an obnoxiously powerful former PC that he'd presumably been playing for years. The stack of XP, cross-splat magical bennies (many of which were in theory supposed to be jealously guarded), and a capital-A Artifact just to cap it off, put him so far above the rest of us that his very presence in our city was the plot equivalent of a black hole.

We, ah, we weren't happy about that.

[Potatomade]

See, that's when you gotta make the goal of the campaign to take him out. So long as the GM is game, of course. It always makes a better story when the BBEG is legitimately imposing, and the way to do that is make him the pinnacle of what PCs themselves can achieve.

[Guizonde]

in my setting, we have between 30 and 100 years forward jump between campaigns. we met the previous pc's and actually had a tag team of the 70 year old ex-pc's and the late teens/early twenties new team (hell, i rp'd one ex-pc's granddaughter, who'd hooked up with the friendliest giant npc. dude was willingly broken statted for humor's sake, never took the spotlight but was adored by all). next campaign, we found the old recordings of that band, and every campaign, we've got very active continuity. this goes for everything: weapons, gear, signature kit, hats, notes, habits... it's all tied by the "scavenger's guild", so there's a bit of an in-universe reason for why the same characters keep showing up. history is written by the victors.

to be done carefully definitely. it's not a time for mary sues, and for a dm to use ex-pc's they need to know the pc's personality inside out.