30 Days of D&D Day 28: A Character You Will Never Play Again

A character I'll never play again? Well, pretty much everybody I've named here is a character I'll never play again. Maybe we'll go back to the game with Dolly in it, I dunno. Probably not. And that's kind of the way it is in my D&D circles (and my gaming circles in general).

 

You make a character for one game, and you play that game to its conclusion (or to its fizzle) and that character goes into your personal portfolio, as it were. We don't sit down and go "Okay, we're going to start at 6th level. Do you want to make a new character at 6th level, or bring in a previous character you've gotten to that level?" Maybe some tables do that; it's an interesting conceit, certainly. But perhaps especially because we have so many homebrew games in so many homebrew worlds, each character is made for that time and place. Unless the hypothetical 6th level game is Planescape, there isn't any way for many of those people to be in the same world, in the same country. Level would be the least of our issues!

Now, thematically speaking, characters I make moving forward will be different from others I've played in the past. I'll take different feats. Make different race/class combinations (hopefuly. I mentioned my Tiefling habit). I'll focus on different goals, different skill sets. Or that's the idea, anyway. Though I'll almost certainly make more fighters, I'll never make another Brigid, a human fighter with power attack, cleave, et al, and super specialization in longsword. I'll never make another Kate Walker, dual wielding pistols and tinkering with clockworks. I avoid reusing names, even.

On one hand, it's sad to leave characters behind in this way. On the other hand, it isn't as though we don't talk about the games we've played, laugh over the situations we got in, marvel at the badass (or dumbass) things we ended up doing. It's part of our shared history, friendship, companionship. "It's only a game", but it's obviously far more than that.