D&D General Who “owns” a PC after the player stops using them?

[Thomas Shey]

Okay, I'm sorry. I should have written: It is a fact that the character created belongs to the player, even if not all agree. Just like an artist designing an original character while not under contract owns their character.

Not until you define "belongs" in a context that everyone agrees it applies to. I don't consider a creative product to "belong" to anyone outside an economic/legal sense, so your "fact" here is subjective.

 

[Thomas Shey]

As DM, I'm quite happy to run solo sessions for wandered-off PCs, depending what they've wandered off to do. In my view it's no different than when the party splits during a session e.g. when a scout PC goes on ahead, as I run that solo too (i.e. the player and I go to another room) if I can.

I'll do that briefly, but I'm not doing it for an extended period. Anyone who expects otherwise will be disappointed.

Which strikes me as odd: you don't have a problem with one set of instructions yet you do with another. If the player's departing instructions go something like "Please leave my character out of future play", IMO those instructions should be followed - and with rare exceptions it's trivially easy to do. Even if the PC has a place of importance (e.g. has become the local ruler), it's easy enough to have the PCs only ever be able to meet with an adviser or vizier or whatever in the future, instead of meeting the actual ex-PC noble.

As I said, its an issue of scale and impact. One is trivial; one is anything but.

 

[billd91]

Which does bring up a tangential (and probably rather corner-case) question around character poaching.

If I-as-DM am running a game and I've seen your really cool character in play in another DM's game and know that character is now retired, I'd say it would be highly unethical of me to arbitrarily say - without asking either you or the DM - that character has just blipped over to my world and is now an NPC there. Not only am I violating your ownership over the character, I'm violating the continuity of the other DM's setting as she thinks that character is still in her world.

There’s no violation of any other campaign continuity. Copying some else’s character does absolutely NOTHING to anything the character is from, whether another campaign, a book, a movie, or whatever. Stealing ideas, whether characters, adventures, or sites, is broadly practiced and normal for home games and has been since the beginning. How many Drizzt or Aragorn clones have people played over the decades? Or, for the superhero gamer, Wolverine or Captain America clones? It’s kind of weird to get squeamish about the ethics of doing it 50 years into the hobby… unless you’re publishing it. Then you are bound to get permissions and make acknowledgements. But for your average home game - no harm, no foul.

 

[grimmgoose]

I think there's nuance here - the DM and the player hold joint custody. The character "stays with the DM", but if the DM wants to keep the trust of the player(s), they need to be good stewards of it.

 

[lall]

Side stepping from philosophical debate into the realm of practical.

If someone leaves my game, what can he/she realistically do to stop me from using character as I see fit in the game he/she isn't part of any more? If the person by any chance even finds out that their PC is being used in the game as NPC.

Pass a law.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Pass a law.

In practice, even if the law could be passed, investigation and enforcement wouldn't exactly be a high priority for any law enforcement.

 

[lall]

All of those unanswered 911 calls…

 

[overgeeked]

But even copyright law allows derivative works such as fan fiction

It really doesn’t.

 

[MNblockhead]

Another D&D 'problem' that could be solved if only D&D players (especially DMs) would have a conversation with their fellow players rather than deciding it's better to never ever ask forgiveness than ask permission once.

Sure, but I would never have thought to have covered this in a session zero until I read this thread. It could be useful and interesting to start a session zero wiki page here in EN World.

 

[MNblockhead]

Bob doesn't own the chair, nor the peanuts; but he does own his character. That's the difference.

Think of it more like Bob brought a chair of his over to use during the game, and has left it at your house. You haven't seen Bob in years and yet (assuming you're a reasonable person) you're still not likely to donate his chair to Goodwill before at least attempting to get it back to him and-or ask what he'd like done with it.

That's up to Bob. If he knows the group wants to keep his character running yet refuses permission anyway, that's maybe not the nicest thing for him to do but IMO he's well within his rights to do it.

What about pre-gens? Not trying to be snarky, I'm actually curious. My initial thought is in a one-shot with pregens, claiming ownership is not very reasonable. But if a player starts with a pregen and plays it for a considerable amount of time, I would consider it that player's character.