People do these things anyway. People gleefully import characters wholesale from other settings and expect it to be accepted that they come from another time and place, often bringing with them plenty of baggage. It's flagrant disregard for the rules of the setting and the game as it exists, and it's a hallmark of bad roleplaying...
And yet it doesn't have to be. This is an element of fiction that's always been very popular, and in some games (such as most superheroic ones), the idea of slipping from one world to another doesn't seem that far-fetched. So let's talk about why it tends to be done and how you can actually do this without being obnoxious.
Bringing in the slidersBefore I go any further, I want to stress that this is not simply the act of making a character who is similar in concept to a character from a previous game. That's not even an issue. I have characters I've played in several games, but that was a case of liking a character and porting over the important elements to a new setting. What we're talking about is making Mitch from The Matrix Online the same person as Mitch from DC Universe Online, as strange as that might seem.
Generally speaking, I've seen people import characters from other settings for two reasons, both of which are fairly benign if not very well-considered. The first is that they want to stand out. They're bringing in an old and beloved character, aren't too familiar with importing to another setting, and want to make sure they're seen as a unique and beautiful snowflake. This sort of player is usually on the younger end, although that's by no means a rule.
The second reason is because the player in question isn't familiar with the game's setting, and so she winds up using an import as a viewpoint character. As the rationale goes, since the character in question is new to the world, she wouldn't know anything about the setting, so everything needs to be explained. This is a bit more uncommon and isn't usually immediately evident because the person in question isn't trying to be a unique snowflake, but it still comes up.
The problem
Naturally, no matter what the reasoning behind bringing in a character from another universe, there are some problems involved with the approach. First and foremost, it's implying a link between two universes, a link that, from a narrative standpoint, needs to be explained in some fashion. After all, if there's nothing special beyond a random character being dumped into a totally different world, why not just make the character fresh within the existing game world?
But really, it's that part about the existing game world that's going to rub most people the wrong way, and the fact of the matter is that it's hard to blame them. Whatever your intention, by putting into the game a character who is explicitly from another world, you're breaking up the entire fabric of the game's verisimilitude. The game gives you a wide variety of options for character types, multiple backgrounds, and possible points of origin, and you're essentially saying that you don't want to be bothered with any of that. It's the same as the kid who showed up at your house dressed up for football when you said that everyone wanted to play basketball, the sense that what you want to play is more important than what anyone else wants.
Even in games where parallel universes are acknowledged specifically -- City of Heroes springs to mind -- there are still rules in place to govern how the other universes work, how someone crosses over between them, and so forth. If you aren't happy playing a character who exists within the context of the game world, why are you playing the game?
Put simply, it's forcing a major setting shift on everyone who interacts with you for no real benefit. Nine times out of ten, it's a completely meaningless shift to begin with, since you're not interacting with other people from the original world in the first place. If you need a rule of thumb, take your idea of a direct import and file it under your characters not to play. But with that being said...
Making it workYou can make this work. With enough patience and enough dedication, you can make almost any concept work. But this one is going to rely on a simple principle: There is no right answer.
If your character has to have come in from another world, that's fine. But you also should provide a perfectly believable and understandable explanation of where they came from that is perfectly mundane, one that explains every single thing that would otherwise be explained by their world-displaced nature. Traumatic injury, starvation, delirium, and a nice touch of disassociative disorder should round all of that out nicely, while we're at it.
And that's as far as you can ever take it.
To an outside observer, it should never be clear whether your character did in fact come from another time and place or just has a very specific and consistent delusion. There are no firm answers, no definite explanations, and no stunts that can't be explained within the context of the normal game world. Whether or not he or she actually comes from another place rests entirely upon each individual character to decide, and you may very well never know.
You might argue here that this makes the entire exercise pointless, to which I can only ask: Why do you actually want the character to be from another setting? What is it supposed to add to interactions? And how, exactly, does introducing ambiguity to that harm the overall exercise?
If the character is only interesting when he or she has hopped realities, then he or she isn't interesting. It's better to work out a different system.
As always, you can sound off in the comments below or via mail to eliot@massively.com. I have no expectation that this week's comments will spark the debate that last week's column did, but I'm not really talking about the big game on the horizon at the moment. Next week, I'm going to talk about what happens when you and another player both fill in some of the blank parts of a game's setting with mutually incompatible answers.
Every Friday, Eliot Lefebvre fills a column up with excellent advice on investing money, writing award-winning novels, and being elected to public office. Then he removes all of that, and you're left with Storyboard, which focuses on roleplaying in MMOs. It won't help you get elected, but it will help you pretend you did.
