D&D General Do you transfer characters between campaigns?

[AlViking]

We used to transfer characters pretty much intact from one game to the next back in ye olden days of the 20th century. Since then I've transferred a character or two but basically redid them for a new edition as a brand new character. One dwarf in particular somehow managed to stumble into quite a few dimensional world-altering portals. We eventually killed off the guy who had just become an NPC in my wife's campaign.

Now? Now I occasionally copy a character or have the son of an old character show up, but outside of public play like AL I can't imagine just bringing a different character in. I think part of it is just that you level into mid levels relatively quickly now.

 

[Dragonhelm]

I had one time when I played a wookiee Jedi in a friend's Star Wars game (homebrew World of Darkness system). He was a great character, but there were personality conflicts with other characters. So he got written out.

I landed up transferring the character to another friend's d6 Star Wars game, and it went great! Such a better fit.

Meanwhile, I created a whole new character for the original campaign, and he was a much better fit.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't generally have enough GMs of the same system to make such a thing feasible. Even if I did, I don't think I've ever had a GM who would have been particularly keen on such a thing, for all the many reasons folks know of (e.g. you never know how generous or miserly any previous GM was, it's exhausting to check over every single detail to make sure there's nothing hinky, the introduced character may or may not even fit into your specific game, etc.)

 

[Retros_x]

I don't really transfer characters, but I did play the same character concept twice, because I had so much fun the first time or felt it was not explored enough. In both cases the second iterations developed quite differently because it was each with different groups and different interactions, different DMs.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Usually, you can kind of tell because any character that the player had a true attachment to will have a whole bunch of remembered character traits and great canonized story.. vs stats and an unprepared, "hohum" response to situations.

Yeah, you can't really fake the attachment that comes from leveling a character up over time, earning things through danger and excitement.

It's like It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. It's all about sincerity.

 

[TorgoTheWhite]

Yeah, you can't really fake the attachment that comes from leveling a character up over time, earning things through danger and excitement.

It's like It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. It's all about sincerity.

Haha! Dusting off a Great Pumpkin analogy is pretty solid. Maybe I can save that analogy for a NPC demon that keeps mysteriously using pop culture references from across time & space to speak nonsense phrases to my high fantasy PC's. He also said; "You're in The Jungle Baby, Now you're gonna diiieeeee!"

 

[payn]

No and I do t think I’d want to. I like ending journeys and starting new ones for characters.

 

[bloodtide]

Yes. I'm a big fan of this and strive to keep it alive and active.

Once it was common.

It fell out of popularity as so many games have such limited focus. The players make an anti-undead group for the short campaign of only kill the lich.

I do love mixing thing up.

 

[Distracted DM]

The West Marches style of play is sort of based off of the original premise, but these characters are all still tied to one West Marches Campaign.

The closest you might to your original citation is Adventurers League- but that's not taking characters between campaigns, they're basically bouncing between sessions/one-shots.

Many of my players did NOT care for the idea of their character bouncing around, because there was a lack of an overall narrative. That seems to be the big draw for many. Honestly that's a bit of a surprise to me, because players often also seem very character-focused... but perhaps bouncing characters between different campaigns makes the character seem less real/legit, cheapening it.
Better for the character to have a single, true arc within a single narrative, is probably the idea.. at least, that's all educated guesswork.

Edit: Thinking on it further, some of these players didn't like the idea of West Marches either, because the narrative is largely made by the players' own ambitions... It's not typically overt and wholly GM/designer-constructed like a premade adventure. It's a slower burn.

I HAVE had a full WM game of players that enjoyed the aforementioned lack of driving GM narrative (I did have some low-key background stuff going on, but it was not at all the driving factor). So I guess this might just be a personal preference thing from player to player.

 

[overgeeked]

That's basically the opposite of my experience.

Back-in-the-day, PCs died regularly and it was common to have multiple characters in a given campaign (even concurrently) so transferring them between campaigns wasn't that common.

Today, especially in D&D 5E, it seems to be the norm. Players will spend an inordinate amount of time building a character, working on their "build," writing up their massive backstory, etc and will drag that one character around with them endlessly trying to insert them into every game they play regardless of how well they fit.