Reoccurring Characters

[Spectrum]

I was curious if anyone out there ever recycles old characters as a PC or as an NPC. And if so do you make changes to suit the game setting, tweak it slightly or just flat out clone it and start from scratch? I know I'm gulity of doing this with a couple of characters.

[Blue]

Definitely. My former PCs generally wind up as NPCs since I never get a chance to play them anymore.

Also because when I quit playing fifteen years ago I pitched out 300+ home made characters. The only ones I know from memory are the onces I played as PCs. So I can reproduce those and introduce them. The others.. I just scavenge for ideas.

[BoloOfEarth]

My best friend is a player in my game, and he's occasionally tried to run various games. Unfortunately, the games rarely get off the ground. After a few years, I had enough never-run PCs to form an NPC hero team in my own game. :)

The only problem with former PCs as NPCs is that you most likely have a personal attachment to them. And if the players do anything that will harm / embarass / hinder those NPCs, you may not be objective in the game.

One of the worst games I ever ran had the players investigating a now-retired former PC of mine. (In my own defense, it was one of the first games I ran.) I was so partial to the NPC and hindered the players' plans so much that everything was a real mess.

[MoonHunter]

I am shameless in this category. Change the special effect and create a mini-conception and nobody knows a thing. I had to do this alot, as I was juggling two campaign groups and 16+ Players.

I had 20 or so generic template characters (Brick types, Speed Types, Mentallists/ Magiks, Blasters, etc). I would periodically adjust them by 1.5(X) with (X) being the average number of experience points spent in the group. Need a supervillian team? Grab the generic templates and throw on a new name, decription, and a one word (phrase) description of their personality, repeat until you have enough villians.

[Of course excellent notes are essential. That way you can reuse even these disposable or quickies. A few of these quickies evolved into important characters in the campaign stories. They eventually evolved their own sheets and got all the effort they deserved]

Need NPC heroes? Do the same darn thing.

In fact. Sometimes I even used the PCs sheets from 20 or so experience back. File off the serial numbers. Change some special effects and they become cool characters.

(Be rude, copy the PC sheets at current experience. change things around to make them villians. And watch them have the fight of their lives).

In specialty campaigns (one where heroes were Angels/ Demons/ and Gods, with their descendents), I made 8 or so generic types based onthe opposition. I rotated them around and change the descriptions enough that they thought I had written up the 128 villians they encounter in those 5 months of gaming, where I had spent no more than 20 or so minutes a week outside of play on that campaign.

It is just a speed thing. Grab what you need. File off the serial numbers. Use as needed.

Sure I write a number of cool villians and heroes, but the rest are unimportant to the campaign story and only get as much work as they rate.

["V"]

I had a couple of characters that my players *thought* I was simply recycling. Basically in a number of campaigns (different systems, different genres) I had two recurring NPCs. One was a cryptic young woman who gave the impression of knowing more than she let on, but nonetheless was a useful foil and plot hook for the PCs. The other was a rather fatalistic warrior type.

It was only after they'd appeared for about the third time (in a Call of Cthulhu campaign, after prior appearances in AD&D and Champions) that my players - though not their characters - realised I was being sneaky rather than unimaginitive and that these npcs were actually the same individuals (in fact the female npc was a variety of parallel-universe copies of the same individual, the warrior was a dimension hopping eternal-champion type). The cross dimensional megaplot got resolved a couple of campaigns down the line when the PCs got directly involved with the threat these two rogues were facing.

[Lord Mhoram]

I've brought character from one campaign to another, rebuilt or rebooted before. Primarily someone I didn't play long enough.

I use old retired characters as NPCs.

The best use of recurring characters happened due to my wife. I was playing a mystic martial artist, who had a student. Part of his superpowers came from the fact he had been reincarnated numerous times, and he had multiple lifetimes of Ch'i training to draw on, that let him do total highend comic book powers with it.
My wife ran the Sidekick as an NPC. The sidekicks name was Jennifer, and Lesslie (da wife) liked playing her as an NPC. One plot had a guy that Jenny was in love with, but was an evil guy selflessly give himself to save a city. He was also one of the special reincarnates.

So in the next campaing that I run, she reinvents the next incarnation of Jenny, as a superhero, and I run Eric as an NPC- with a sort of dark past. And I really like Eric.

The game after that we build Jenny and Eric as PCs, when someone else ran and gave the GM pages of backstory.

Each incarnation was different, but kept the kernal of attitude, base powers, and personality the same. Background details for each life changed completely for each incarnation.

So not only did we move from NPC to PC, not only did we reincarnate PCs from campaign to campaign, we did the reiteration internally.

[MarkusDark]

I actually like using PC's old characters against them as NPC's. I tend to run games in the same circle of people (guess they really like my games). Everyso often, I will throw one of their PC's from another game into the current game as an NPC. It is fun to watch their reactions - especially when they had cheesed their original characters and now they have to deal with them as villians.

However, the emotional attachment thing is sticky in these cases. Because of the way the plot went, I wound up killing a player's old character. It was a character he hadn't played in over a decade but he was a little put out by it. Not overly so but still a little bent.

Just a heads up.

[Agent X]

Originally posted by MarkusDark
I actually like using PC's old characters against them as NPC's. I tend to run games in the same circle of people (guess they really like my games). Everyso often, I will throw one of their PC's from another game into the current game as an NPC. It is fun to watch their reactions - especially when they had cheesed their original characters and now they have to deal with them as villians.

However, the emotional attachment thing is sticky in these cases. Because of the way the plot went, I wound up killing a player's old character. It was a character he hadn't played in over a decade but he was a little put out by it. Not overly so but still a little bent.

Just a heads up. Yep, that is a little dicey. (Heh, dicey - Champions, dicey, Anyway...)

My pet peeve with one of my GMs was his use of MY dnpc in a game with two of my teammates. I was not there nor did I have any prior notice of what was going on nor was there any reason for me to think my character was intended to be involved in the subplot. It was positively creepy because the plot was not something that I had ever envisioned or wanted to be involved with my PC-NPC dynamics.

[MarkusDark]

Originally posted by Agent X
Yep, that is a little dicey. (Heh, dicey - Champions, dicey, Anyway...)

My pet peeve with one of my GMs was his use of MY dnpc in a game with two of my teammates. I was not there nor did I have any prior notice of what was going on nor was there any reason for me to think my character was intended to be involved in the subplot. It was positively creepy because the plot was not something that I had ever envisioned or wanted to be involved with my PC-NPC dynamics.

I just got done with a player and his DNPC. Often they just have "DNPC - Jenny Curtis - Lab Assistant" and I say to myself, "Well you are at a Hero base 24/7 - how is your Lab Assistant in on it? So I have them flesh out their actual relationship with their DNPC's so I know how they envision them interacting with the PC and I can find out how to hook them in.

[Killer Shrike]

In all my campaigns for the last 15 years I have run what has now become known as "persisted worlds". The characters and events of games past are progressed forward off screen. On several occasions Ive had old characters current storylines crisscross the current campaigns. When the original player is still around I bring them in on it and have them run the character. Most players find it fun to recap an old character in this way. Also, since events that happened in past campaigns are persisted, some players that were around back then use those past events as spring boards for thier current characters, or as fodder for in-character references to major events (assuming appropriate bg or knowledge skills).

This has been a major part of my past campaigns, and in fact its become so ingrained that its always kind of a bummer to start a new continuity in a new game setting rather than rebooting an old campaign world.

[MoonHunter]

Rather than recycle game mechanics, I often do recycle personalities. I use actors and characters from TV/ Movies/ Books as the templates for NPCs. It allows the players an immediate understanding of who NPCs are and what they are like.

The tool allows players to know the extras are somewhat important, but that they are throw away characters.

Note the difference in reaction: a confused looking detective in a rumbled trench coat walks towards you vs Detective Columbo rambles over to you.

Three policemen walk over arguing with each other. Curly and Moe are slapping each other while arguing, as all three advance in police uniforms. (Other common cops are Laurel and Hardy, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Abbot and Costello, and of course Friday and Smith.)

You see the advantage of this in terms of personality and understanding of the character. These characters are constantly recycled into and out of every campaign.