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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 5971091" data-attributes="member: 19675">Nice story!I have to say, though, that I come to a slightly different conclusion.  The first 10 years of gaming, I played only D&D, Traveller, TFT:ITL, and Champions (aka HERO), and I played each in distinct ways, but system mastery was always a driving force.I picked up a few more games in the next 5 or so years...and then, in the 1990s, I played in about 80 more systems...and about halfway through that period, I had an epiphany about gaming.  Inspired by DC's & Marvel's series centsring around tales of alternative versions of popular characters (like Batman in Gotham By Gaslight), I realized that a character concept could be "setting neutral", and modeled in a wide variety of games.Since that point, while system mastery was still key, it was no longer the driving force.  Like your player's husband, I put PC concept first, and the only reason for achieving system mastery became the facilitation of modeling the concept in my head.I can even pinpoint the event: I decided to stat out the PC Slapstick (a clown themed, sociopathic mercenary) in HERO, GURPS, Torg, RIFTS, D&D and another 8 or so systems.  (I still have several of the sheets for him, too.)I think that once you get into a "concept first" mindset as your predominant design method, the mental shackles of rules light/rules heavy kind of fall off.  I no longer care about assumptions about how a RPG assumes things should work.  All that matters is that the PC makes sense within the context of the game, whether or not he is "powerful" or "optimized."</blockquote>

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