Game Wish 42: Reusing Characters

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 42: Reusing Characters

Do you ever reuse characters from game to game? When you reuse characters, what do you bring from game to game: a name and a personality, stats, or more? What kinds of characters do you reuse and why? If you GM, do you like to have players bring in existing characters? Why?

While I prefer to create a new character from scratch each time, I have reused one character, (the now infamous Karl Tolhurst). As I said in the previous Game WISH, I prefer characters that closely mesh with the world's settings rather than generic archetype in generic worlds, so for most games that entails creating a specific character for the game world in question.

The one character I have reused had a lot of changes to his back story, taking him back two years earlier in his career, to a point before the tragedies that were a defining point of the original character concept. Arguably it's not really the same character at all. I'm not going to rule out reusing a character in the future, but again I'll rewrite the backstory and change aspects of the character to fit in with the new game.

As a GM, I'm not really bothered whether the players recycle old characters or not, as long as they either fit my world and can be modified until they will fit.