Your throwing out a bit too much nuance there in order that you may paint my position as nonsense. In fact, your leaving so much out I'm going to go ahead and label this a flat out mischaracterization...
Of course it did. Making the point for why mechanics are necessary and speaking for their accurate role cannot be placing to much focus on them. It's exactly the right amount of focus.
But you're assigning that role (also) to characterization, which is misplaced. Mechanics are how the system resolves uncertainty, they're not constraints on characterization, unless you're putting undue focus on them.
Here, look at this next bit:
Of course you can. But if you conceptualize your character a certain way and then that gets put at stake, then you risk the whole character conceptualize breaking.
I'm not talking about mechanical permission. It's like your not even listening to me.
Total mischaracterization again. I'm not asking for permission or for my PC to have protection. The mechanics are there simply as boundaries so that my character conception doesn't get broken mid game. It's not about protecting my PC from anything. It's about protecting me as the player. There's a great difference there.
This is what I'm talking about. You, on the one hand, tell me I'm misrepresenting you looking to the mechanics for protection of your character concept and then immediately say that understanding the mechanics prevents your character concept from being "broken." You're saying exactly what I'm saying, only you think I'm saying something else.
You're looking at mechanics as a way to determine what character concepts won't be challenged by those mechanics. As you say, you're looking to protect yourself from disappointment in not achieving the character you want to have. Or, at least, that your character concept won't ever change even if it might die. This is definitely looking at the game from the point of view of trusting the mechanics to protect your characterization. [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s posts scream this -- you cannot alter my character at all except to harm/kill it, unless magic. This is an idea of an inviolable character, one that is static but played in a game where things are fluid (zero to hero for D&D).
I'm saying that this is a poor way of considering the game -- you're putting on a straightjacket from the start. You might decide to play this way after consideration -- I still love playing and running 5e, for example, and it codifies inviolable character concepts (at least from the DM side). But, I don't codify how to play according to this, I just use this when I play a game because that's how that game plays. If I didn't want to play that way, I'd play a different game (and do). Understanding that the rules serve the game and not the other way around is huge, and I'm hoping you can make the step out to where character is at risk -- not just the life of the character, or its things, but the very nature of the character itself. This can happen regardless of rules. You should look at a system not to find out what it protects so you can play there, but how it works to put things at risk, so you can risk those things.
D&D is bad at risking character. It's an overgrown wargame (and I love it). As such, it puts the risk more on your hitpoints or your numbers, and not on what makes the character the character. It doesn't have a good mechanic for risking the concept at all, for finding out unpleasant (or pleasant) truths about the character in play. You can do it, but the system isn't written to risk these kinds of things, so it's more ad hoc than structured. Hence why magic exists and often breaks these rules in hamfisted ways. Yet, even there, the system has so well trained players to believe that this one thing they have control over is the inviolable character concept that it's very, very hard to break free of this thing. But, D&D (and other games that afford extensive GM authority and very limited PC authority -- for you Max) isn't the only way to play, and it certainly isn't a very good model for how to think about RPGs in general, even if it's, by far, the most popular. People like Apple and Windows, too.
The game mechanics or session 0 need to tell me what kinds of characters can't be created by the rules. Some are obviously explicit rules. Some are implicit, like the character that never loses a fight cannot be made in a D&D game (that's because the mechanics don't support such a concept. I'm not aware of any game that supports that concept).
Oh, I strongly disagree. You absolutely can make this character. You're just risking your concept in every fight, which is uncomfortable for those that are used to inviolable concepts.
You are misunderstanding. I'm not talking about playing a character that THINKS he is too strong to lose a fight. I'm talking about the literal god given truth of a character that is to strong/lucky/whatever to lose a fight.
Your point above is about a PC that THINKS he is too strong to lose a fight and I agree those can be played in any system (well, not in ones that put PC thoughts at stake). Either way, the point is irrelevant to the concept I'm referring to.
Hmm. Name me a character concept that is absolutely true and not what the character believes to be true (ie, thinks). You're drawing a line that's impossible and declaring my position can only exist on the far side of it. Well, you've drawn your line so that everything exists on the far side of it, so you might want to back up those goalposts to a place where someone might be able to score.
