Experiences When RPs fall off, what happens to your OC?

[JyoMonty]

As the title suggests, I'm curious what you all do with your characters when you start a RP but it ends abruptly?
I find myself looking at my google doc of OCs and think, "Man, you didn't get a chance to really spread your wings, huh?"
It's fairly bittersweet because I'm proud of what I made but disheartened when their first outing just ends.

To answer my own question, I do like to at least see if I want to RP with them in a brand-new setting.
And I simply like looking at them and can see an overall history of my creativity.
So, what about you?

 

[nerdy tangents]

I tend to not get too attached to my OCs. I might have them pop up as background characters in future stories (a little Easter egg for myself) but otherwise I just put em in my archive of roleplay ideas that didn’t get started and keep moving on.

 

[-Random_Person-]

It really depends on how long the character was in the rp before it ended. Sometimes, I write a small little blurb in docs abt how that character would have ended up like after the ending. Other times, I forget them, or use them in my own personal little writing projects, and sometimes I see if they would fit in a different RP. Honestly, I only tend to do something with them if I spent a lot of time with them, or if I put a lot of effort into making them.

 

[RascalRoadkill]

Usually I just end up recycling them if I feel like they didn’t reach their full potential as characters. Like, if a thread of a certain genre falls through and I join a different one of that same genre, I tend to use them again there in the hopes they can get a full story out of it and to save myself some brain space. Now, that does come with the ability to be flexible and not shoehorn them in too much, since all threads and settings are different and I like to fit the setting. Not even the full character a lot of the time, maybe just recycling some traits I really enjoyed. Not all the time, since I like to play new characters pretty often, but if there’s a good opportunity and they didn’t reach their potential before I tend to use them again.

 

[Edric Blight]

Mine die tbh or get “re-skinned.” Basically what I mean by that is that I just make a new OC but use a different name and possibly a different face claim but keep them pretty much the same as the OC that never got to get used.

But most of mine just die lol. Rip to all the lost OCs.

 

[DragonSlayer57]

If the rp doesn’t get far I’ll recycle them, but basically fix any and all flaws of them. Usually I’ll just adapt to the rp and change the oc where i need them to. If it was a decently long rp and it stopped midway, I’ll just write a short little blurb about what i think their future would have been like.

 

[Vox Angelis]

It heavily depends on how much I liked the concept of a character I created. It's more likely that, if I really liked a character and even got so far as to commission art of some concepts or actual characters, I'll recycle them for a later RP, otherwise they just vanish in the sea of abandoned stories.

I have hundreds of commissioned artworks so it'S waaaaaay more likely I'll reuse the same faceclaims in a cycle instead of coming up with something new now though. Gotta make use of all that spent money

 

[Idea]

For the most part my characters just sit on my saved character list when an RP dies. It is a little saddening - after all, I am both a planner by nature and someone with the approach of fully committing my efforts to making my characters something I can feel proud of having made, “worth it in of themselves” as I tend to say, which means underneath any character from dead RPs are mountains of discarded possibilities, plot threads, interactions, arc and so on that could have been and likely won’t be. I really do feel that feeling of “it’s disappointing I’ll never get to see the potential of this realized”.

At the same time, that principle I have exists in part because I know most RPs won’t last. I make my worlds, characters and worlds something I can be proud of having made in part because even when things die, even if I see it going nowhere, I can still feel proud of what I made and like I didn’t waste my time. This notably also includes the character sheet coding itself, in which I try to be creative and fitting to each character, even on a more standardized sheet like my D&D template, and occasionally I pull something I feel is pretty great.

This isn’t to say, however, that there is never a re-using of my characters though. The most common case is fandom characters, which I tend to re-use a lot. It’s a consistent world, and provided there is a close enough or fitting enough plot, I feel the character really fits in properly even if re-used. It also helps that this is usually group roleplays in which I feel it’s a less significant distinction between premade OCs and new OCs for the roleplay. I did try to experiment with adding a pre-made OC section as well, and I plan to do so again for the next edition, even though it wasn’t really something anyone went for. That list was mainly composed of some of my favorites, some OCs initially made for battle/colosseum RP, and some reworks of some of my first OCs from here and other sites.

Some of those OCs were part of very small set of exceptions that I have at one point or another re-used. Morois is a special case among those as well, as she was brought to a new RP that was a sequel to a previous dead RP.

In sufficiently similar settings (or RPs that take place in the same setting, even if non-fandom), the character might be referenced or show up as an NPC. There have even been occasions of my OCs and their associated setting becoming a bigger project for me. This usually results in compilation worlds which combine a lot of my disparate ideas into a single setting which I try to make cohesive. To date the most developed has been my Euphorium setting, though the Waken Isles and one other I have in works may come to rival it.

Lastly, many OCs don't really get re-used, but they do have spiritual successors, this mostly happening in characters that never even got to be used or character for the same plot with different partners. In such occasions I'm largely building the same character but with a few differences. I guess that's similar to a prebuilt OC, but I do feel it has more flexibility because there is no pretense that it's to be the same character, and as a result I can more easily discard things that would've been significant to that other character. There is a limit, but that limit is usually at the very cause of why I felt the character fit that RP in the first place.

 

[Frownist]

For me it really depends on how much I liked the OC. If I liked them then I usually end up recycling or reusing aspects that I liked about them. If not, off to the void with them, lol. I especially like the recycle characters for fandom role plays where I don’t have to change much. If the roleplay was pretty long then I usually just abandon the character, as I feel like they've already reached their potential.

 

[ViperBite]

Mine die a thousand deaths. It’s too much of a hassle to recycle imo.

 

[GrumpySwallow]

I just save them for future use in another RP. I make my own art of my characters, so I'm gonna use 'em, dangit!

 

[catbounty.]

Generally, mine die, even if I've invested serious effort into planning and drawing them (RIP). I've always been inclined to fresh new OCs for every RP I start anyway, and the characters I create are so peculiar to the individual plot that I wouldn't even know where to begin unraveling to make 'em work elsewhere, lol.