NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 4217681" data-attributes="member: 22779">Hong already addressed this, but, I'd like to chime in here too.  The vast majority of short story fantasy characters are in no ways "everyman" characters.  And, D&D has always, IMO, modeled short stories far better than novels.The problem is, novel form doesn't work in the context of a campaign.  Campaigns are, by and large, episodic, with each adventure being more or less self contained with a definite beginning, middle and end.  While you can string your adventures together fairly tightly, a la Adventure Paths, many campaigns are not so designed.  Those orcs you trashed at level one may have nothing to do with the demon cult you're currently stomping on.And that's where the novel form falls apart.  A novel form requires everything to be tied to a single (possibly quite complex) plot.  You don't put in a lengthy adventure in chapter 3 that has nothing to do with the overall story.  Many D&D campaigns, OTOH, do exactly this.  Trying to model a campaign on a novel form is far more difficult, and, again IMO, a far more frustrating approach to campaign design.  Someone earlier mentioned Star Trek and that's a pretty decent way to go.  Episodic.  Whether your campaign is sandbox based or plot based, it's pretty hard to have a single over arching plot that includes all the PC's without a lot of very heavy handedness.  It can be done, but, it's a very fine line to walk.Skeptic - I wasn't thinking so much in terms of G-N-S theory.  My thinking is that players are a thousand times more pragmatic than any character in a story.  If they are given something, by and large, they are going to push the boundaries of what they can do with it.  My group couldn't be the only one that saw clerics try to create water inside people's chests in 1e and 2e, for example.This is why you need to model magic in the game as a tool.  And, like a tool, it has to be specific to a limited number of jobs.  When the tool is too good, then all sorts of balance problems come in - Continual Light spells to the eyes, Create Water as death spells, etc. etc.</blockquote>

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