How do you feel about a player who wants to play a famous fictional character in your game, like Drizzt, Riddick or Gandalf? Do you let them or ask them to come up with something more original? How much do you adjust the game world or homebrew mechanics to support it?

That’s a question one of our listeners recently asked on the website, and Thorin, Tony and Dave have come across it before. As DMs who’ve played PC knockoffs of Hulk Hogan, King Arthur and the Buddha (two of them currently), they’re certainly not against the idea, but there’s a lot of ways it can get complicated. What if a player wants The Power Cosmic at first level? How do you make that fit into your medieval world?

Hear what the 3 Wise DMs think is OK and not OK in running pop-culture clone characters, and how they make them work in their campaigns.

4:00 An we’ll played clone character is better than no character

7:00 Recreating pop culture is the root of all role-playing games

11:00 What if that kind of character doesn’t fit the world you’re building, or you’re not familiar with the property it comes from?

15:00 How “Not Iron Man,” “Not All Might” and “Not Ang” played out in Dave’s games

17:00 How to make bad-ass character concepts fit first-level power scaling … and how it can go wrong

20:00 What do you do if the other players aren’t on board with having that character in the game?

25:00 How we try to handle players who have issues with other people’s characters

35:00 What do you do if the player decides to change the character concept later in the game?

43:00 What if someone wants to be a seemingly impossible PC, like The Silver Surfer? (And then we figure out how to do it)

46:00 Do you push the player to change the character to tell their own, unique story

50:00 How character development makes every PC unique over the course of the campaign

55:00 How much homebrew should you do to make a character concept work?

63:00 If your player has a character that inspires them and will keep them engaged, let them play it

66:00 Character we’ve always wanted to play but haven’t … yet

75:00 How character stories are developing in our games

83:00 Final thoughts