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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5469339" data-attributes="member: 4937">The most obvious problem with making a comparison to Rand is that Rand as a character isn't merely more important than most NPC's, but that he's also more important than the other PC's.  In a social game it just isn't generally acceptable for one character to hold that much spot light.  Successful RPG's generally have a team based structure, and so must eschew the single protagonist model of most literature.  My comparison to the concept of Ta'vaern was to the very concept itself, the idea that the universe was molding itself around you, conforming to your decisions and your presence in such a way that you couldn't help but be important.  That is how I see my PC's; not as direct analogues for particular characters, but as critically important threads in the wheft of the universe.  When a PC dies, and is replaced by another PC that new PC by his very nature as being a PC was already a destined individual all along.  The fallen PC was a destined individual, but his destiny was to go to this point and not necessarily any further.  Because I can't see the future, because I'm telling story in both a linear fashion and without full control over the game, I can't gaurantee any particular outcome.  So certain things become retroactively known to the participants as the story unfolds.  In the case of Sturm, for example, his death and replacement doesn't actually in fact make him replaceable.  No other character could have achieved what he achieved, and until the moment of his death the character who eventually carried on his work was not capable of carrying it.  Sturm is still essential to the story even in his death.  A PC that dies in the story is still essential to the story, regardless of whether someone comes along to carry on their work.  Are they as central to the story as someone who doesn't die?  Maybe and maybe not, but one of the rewards of playing well and not dying is that you role in the story is increased.But he could have been.  We know that Frodo is important to the story because he succeeds (for certain values of success).  We know from the beginning that he doesn't succeed by accident that there is a destiny being played out.  But if Sam for example takes up Frodo's mantle, it doesn't diminish the story or the believability of the story, it merely makes it a different viable story.  In fact, there is some reason to believe the gods of the Middle Earth do indeed have Sam along as a back up plan to Frodo, as the one other free person in middle earth who has a reasonable chance of carrying the ring to the Mountain.  In the same fashion, the gods of my campaign world are neither all powerful or all knowing and if their plans are foiled then they too have plans within plans.  All of that becomes the story.Concievably, it could.  There are points in the most likely projectable path of play where character death could seriously derail the story I envision, not merely because of character's becoming highly important to the plot and depth of the story but for other reasons like the difficulty of adding a new PC to the game at a time when its difficult to explain the appearance of a new character.  But ok, it's not like my plot is inflexible.  If the campaign 'derails' as you put it, then its not hard to put back on track because it never had a single set of immovable rails to begin with.  If the PC's lose, then instead of looking at this as failure, we can look at it as losing round 1, and instead of starting a new campaign from the point of Keeropus's triumph, maybe the surviving PC's now have to face Keeropus in the aftermath of the consequences of his victory.  And that could be a good story too.I'm not at all offended.  I think alot of the problem is simply trying to explain a game when a demonstration would be far more descriptive.  For example, I find your description of play rather baffling.  I gather you are playing a low drama game with a lot of amateur theaterics and a high purity of role-play?  I can't figure out what your stakes are, or what your conflicts are over if you neither engage in frequent combat nor do you have your PC's important to the setting.  Do you play play for play's sake?  How does your table cope with players overruling another players right to characterize?  I have never heard of a sitaution where groups not only voted other characters 'off the island' but socially survived that sort of thing.  Half the players I've ever met would be outraged if the other players tried to tell them what or how to play.  How do you sustain a story line with an apparantly ever changing cast of faces?  What do you mean by a story in this case?  Do you have any sort of rising action at all?  Do you have a central theme or conflict you are trying to resolve?  Or your antoganists in fact more reoccuring than your protagonists?  Do you ever even a real possiblity of denouement, and if not, why have you foresaken the thrills of wargaming and dungeon crawling for theaterics without even gaining the larger trappings of story?</blockquote>

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