Question about the character vault

Hi everyone,  I've got a question about the character vault that I haven't been able to answer by googling.   Once a character has been imported into the vault - are all the statistics about that character locked to their values at time of import? To make this more concrete - let's say I import a character (Mean Joe Greene) into my vault after finishing the Lost Mine of Phandelver.  He's a level 5 fighter at the time I do the import.   Joe is one of my favorite characters, so I pull him into the vault hoping that I'll be able to play him again sometime in someone else's game.  As luck would have it, a few weeks later, I find another group that will take Joe, and I import him into the new game.  After a few months on the new game, Joe has advanced to level 8, and the campaign is over.   Now I go looking for yet another game I can play with Joe...and I find a third game.   If I import Joe into the third game, would he be level 5 (since that's what he was when I imported him) or would he be level 8 since he leveled up in the other game? To have a version of Joe who is level 8, would I need to import him into the vault from the second game, after it had ended? I think this is basically a data management question for the coders.  If each character exists as a unique file on the roll20 servers and the vault is just a pointer to that file, then I'd expect the character to advance.  This would be really useful for players.   On the other hand, if importing a character to the vault is actually creating another snapshot of the character and storing it in a different place, then I could see the character never advancing, which could be useful to game masters who might benefit from having a place to put NPCs on ice for future use....but I guess that would mean you'd need to export your character from each game to keep up with advancement in the scenario I laid out.   Any thoughts appreciated. 

Imported characters are a snapshot in time. If you want to take another snapshot of Joe at 8th level, you'd need to import him to the vault again.  Characters imported into a game are a fresh and distinct copy.

If you imported Joe to the Vault at level 5, exported Joe into a game in which Joe leveled up to 8, and then imported Joe into your Vault again, there would be 2 versions of Joe in your Vault unless you deleted the level 5 version after exporting that Joe to a game.  Each time you import, it doesn't overwrite an existing entry.  You could have multiple versions of Joe at level 5 with different inventory (or whatever).  It may get a bit confusing if you have too many Joes in your Vault though.

Oh, excellent clarification!

You can change the character name to something like "Mean Joe Greene Level 5" before importing into the Character Vault, then renaming back to normal for play. You could save a version of the character at every level as a retrospective on their rise to power! :-)

Rabulias said: You can change the character name to something like "Mean Joe Greene Level 5" before importing into the Character Vault, then renaming back to normal for play.  Good idea. Might start doing that, before importing a Character to C-Vault.