Listening to one of the Quinn’s Quest podcasts where he’s asked players of his Stonetop campaign about their memories of it. Several of them have mentioned the characters ‘living on’ and thinking back about them and honestly, that’s quite alien to me.
It might be my neurodiversity but once I’ve stopped playing a character, it’s rare that I ever think of them again unless it’s the ‘no shit, there were were…’ stories that RPG geeks swap.
So what stays with you from past games? Do you still have that character in your head? Do they keep living on? Or is it ‘done and done’?
As a Forever GM, this question isn’t quite the same for me, but usually I remember where things went most off the rails, or unusual or unexpected situations that came up because the players refused to see or do the obvious and insisted on being unhinged. As for the PCs, usually the ones I remember as the ones that were adopted from other IPs or don’t quite “fit” in the setting.
We just started a Starfinder 2E game, and one of the players is playing an Android Operative (fine) that can’t remember who his previous owners were except that he has an urge to refer to organic beings as “meatbags”, he has considerable assassin/violence training, and refers to everything in olde timey fake-latin style names.
Basically half HK-droid from Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, and half 40K servator.
Which, fine, but neither of those are Starfinder, and obviously neither of those are universes known to people in Starfinder. When I pointed we could just play either Star Wars or Rogue Trader, he responded that he didn’t want to play those, he just wanted to reference them while playing this.
I had a DnD group in which the bard was played like Job from Arrested Development. In Rifts, one of my PCs built a custom suit of power armour with repulsor beams in the hands. My first RPG ever, 2nd edition DnD, there was a fighter with a wood allergy so he had to get custom built equiment without any wood or plant fiber in it.
Characters live on, definitely. Whether they are my PCs or NPCs, they’re fictional characters, so their ‘lives’ are as real as those of characters from any book I read. Granted, they’re not as compelling as Hamlet, Natasha Rostova or even Dr. Stephen Maturin, but for many of them, I’ve spent much more time with them, making up for any lack of relative artistic value.
Honestly, I probably spend more time thinking about fictional characters, from books, TV or roleplaying, than I do about people I went to school with. At least the boring ones, those who weren’t friends, funny, interesting or cute, which honestly accounts for about 99% of people.
As a forever GM, I mainly remember the characters from the odd occasions I get to play! One was a halfling bard, Taywise. Cowardly, but at a pinch was actually quite a good fighter, he had a huge ego and named the adventuring party after himself, their first encounter when they defeated a large group of orcs, during which Taywise only landed the coup de grace on an already almost dead orc, was recalled in song as ‘The Heroic Taywise and the Devastation of the Orcs’, and so on. Was great fun to play and my constant self aggrandizing wound my other players up no end!
In terms of NPCs, my players still talk about a Necromancer which spoke with the voice of Goldmember from Austin Powers. Wasn’t intentional - for some reason the voice just came out of me! He was only supposed to be a throwaway side quest but the players loved him so much, he kept coming back.
