(kinda funny...read your list again. It makes it sound like plot isn't emergent, but predetermined and managed by the players.
Not predetermined - quests may go unfullfilled (eg if the players have two goals for their PCs, or even conflicting goals, and go one way rather than another), and player choices about action resolution happen in the course of play, not before play - and are the single biggest shaper of plot.
Otherwise, thanks for the reply, you'll get some more XP when the tap is turned back on!
Balance shouldn't require a lot of sacrifice and work on the part of the end-user to come into existence.
Agreed. I find it strange that it's sometimes presented as a holy grail to which we can only aspire after much questing, but never actually reach.
if I learn that e.g. some spells or feats are better than others, I may purposefully choose not to pick them for my character during the design phase, should I have the feeling of wanting more challenge.
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Character design choices can be much more easily be justified in-characters
I think this is a good point, but one which the game could be more upfront about.
In AD&D, the rulebooks just came right out and send "If you choose to play a magic-user, it will be hard at first but you'll end up dominating the game." (Mearls had
a good post on this in the early L&L days.)
Modern D&D rulebooks seem much shyer about saying "Take this if you want to be broken, but take this other thing if you want to be challenged". It would be good to go back to the more old-fashioned transparency.
Now maybe you might feel that fighting the Ogre (or whoever is the "top" opponent each time) is a more "shiny" spotlight than fighting a minion... Again I think there's some competition assumption there. But still I think this is indeed fair, that a Fighter is supposed in fact to be best at fighting, and the one the groups look at when a battle starts, just like the Rogue is the one the groups look at when there's a trapped area to bypass and so on.
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I agree that "hero and sidekick" is something most group wouldn't like, but that's again because of the competition mentality (and because Combat has become by far the most important part of the game for most gamers, but not for me). Everybody wants to be equally good to the others all the time. I'm not saying this is wrong, but just that I have no problem with a game where you're good at different times.
Is there more than a semantic difference between "comparison" and "competition" in this context? I'm not sure, but if I had to choose one of those two words I'd choose "comparison" - the two PCs aren't in
competition, but in comparison between the two the one fighting the orc seems like a sidekick to the one fighting the ogre.
I think one reason for that is that, in an RPG, fiction matters: althoug mechanically and mathematically the tougher PC vs ogre may be no different from the lesser PC vs orc, in the fiction one battle is more significant than the other, because against a more serious threat.
I think the same comes up in the "good at different time" issue. I've got nothing against that - although in a game in which combat is significant, I want to parse "different times" as "from round to round" rather than "outside combat". But different systems, which don't give combat such priority, can take a broader view of what "different times" means. Anyway, however exactly "different times" is cashed out, I want it to be the case that, overall, when a comparison is made, no PC obviously dominated the contributions made to the game.
If I've read you right, I don't think we're very far apart on the principles here, though we may have different preferences about the details and techniques of implementation.