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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6793194" data-attributes="member: 5834">I care not that you reject it. I play this game to participate in a fantasy story. If you play it for some other reason, so be it.My audience is the players. I build my game to satisfy them. Writers that write stories often see the reader as a participant in the story. All the writing tricks writers use are intended to draw the reader in as though they were there with the character. Sure, a reader knows they aren't really there logically. But when writing is done well, you feel invested in the story and drawn into the characters and actions occurring, often empathizing with or analyzing the story as though you are there watching the events.The difference with a role-playing game is you happen to be one of the characters in the story. Your direct actions drive the story along as the writer puts characters, events, and setting about you and lets you attempt to build your character through his interactions with his surroundings.Because a player is given a character to write hardly means it isn't a story. Knowing the outcome of a story makes that story quite boring. Even writers often like to let the characters lead them somewhere they may not be aware prior to the character's arrival.I don't worry about balance. I want appropriately built characters. I want them to do be built according to roles in fantasy stories. So when a player plays that character, they feel like they are playing a particular character they liked. If they make Bilbo Baggins, they should feel like a highly effective, stealthy rogue with some fighting ability. If they make an Launcelot-type, they should feel like an extraordinarily skilled fighter capable of defeating numerous enemies in battle. When they make a Raistlin-like wizard, they should feel like that powerful, mysterious figure capable of wielding magic in an extraordinary fashion. You are correct. Balance is thrown out there far too often. When I see it, I figure they mostly mean numerical balance much like they attempt to do in video games like WoW, mostly so PVP is balanced enough so that any character can effectively defeat any other character. That type of balance is poisonous to a good pen and paper role-playing game. It overrides creativity and makes fantasy archetypes bland and inappropriate, so you don't get the experience of playing a fantasy role inspired by fantasy fiction. I love how people claiming RPGs aren't stories completely ignore the fact that nearly every RPG creator, every one I know of including the original creator Gygax, listed as their inspiration numerous works of fiction in nearly every version of D&D created. D&D was very much inspired by a desire to create a game that allowed people to participate in a fantasy story. It was inspired by Gygax reading tons of books and saying, "How do I make a game where I can be this character I love to read in this book? How do I make mechanics that allow me to tell a story and have an interesting and appropriate way to resolve the interactions in the game?" It has always been incredibly obvious from the time I picked up the books way back when that Gygax was trying to combine his love of fiction and his love of war games into a game that allowed you to play a story in a fantastical world. A cooperative story with an unknown outcome determined by a combination of DM and player creativity and game mechanics.</blockquote>

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