Disown & adopt characters

Part of the updates I worked on last weekend included improvements to the way characters can be “disowned” and “adopted”. Here’s’ what these mean:

Disown a character – So you’ve got a character that you created, but you want to give them to someone else, or perhaps you just created them as an NPC. You can “disown” them so that they’re not in the list of YOUR characters anymore. When disowned, a character will appear in the character list as normal, but won’t have an owner. This means you can create characters, maybe as NPCs, and allow someone else in your game to adopt them. Ideal if you’ve just created a brand new game and want to create some example characters.

Adopt a character – If you see a character with no owner, you can adopt them. This means they’ll appear on your profile, and be under your control. Once adopted, you can make changes to their character profile.

Reasons that a character might have no owner and be “adoptable” are:

• The original owner has left the game, and the moderators chose to keep the character – perhaps because the character is important to the story.
• The character was purposefully created to be adoptable.

I can probably give many examples where this would be useful, but the one that comes to mind in my own experience is that the character of “Efof”, a 4-armed alien guy in my game Blue Dwarf, was created many years ago by a player who left the game. Efof was such a fun character and important to the story, so we kept him as an NPC, until I took him on as a secondary character.

There’s a video at the top of this post where I demonstrate how to disown and adopt a character. It’s pretty easy, have a watch!