familiar-characters
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Storyboard: Keeping your roleplaying fresh
The big problem with marriage is the same problem you have with always going to your favorite restaurant. Sure, you like the menu, and maybe it's even extensive enough that you could eat there every day for a month without having the same thing twice. But eventually it's just not going to be fresh. You've had everything on the menu, and from here on out it's just the same burgers until the end of time. And so you wind up leaving the restaurant and eating at a fast food place, and then you wind up in divorce court. You are not married to your roleplaying characters. But you're still in a situation where you're inside of this character's head at all times, and eventually you don't even need to guess what happens next. So just like a marriage, you need to keep things fresh even when you know your character inside and out. Which is trickier than it might sound, but still eminently doable. And it might even be that as long as I'm making the marriage analogy, some of the same advice applies.
Storyboard: The advantage of familiar characters
It's kind of fitting that my character most prone to wandering has wound up in several different games now. She's existed in one form or another for years now, and while she's hardly the only recurring character I've used, she's certainly the one most prone to hopping into another game. While the are always setting-appropriate changes to her backstory, core elements of her personality and history remain, so that by this point it's quite easy to figure out how she fits into a new game even if I have to hammer out the specifics. This leads to an obvious question: Why? It's not as if I can't come up with other characters, nor is it that she's always the best fit for the game. For that matter, she's not even suited to every possible setting. So why keep playing the same character? There are a few different reasons, all of which show off the advantage to playing the same character across several games instead of starting fresh every time you step into a new world.
