Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6682957" data-attributes="member: 2067">In fiction (including novels), sure. But that knowledge nukes the fun of the game for a lot of players. In-character, you have no reason to expect that Earth WON'T be invaded. But you do have this guy a few miles away who has staved off at least a half-dozen alien invasions already. This is why it's a "transmedia" issue, so I think it gets close to the heart of things. In linear fiction such as movies and novels, none of that is much of an issue, especially when it's self-contained within the story - when the protagonists are supposed to be unique, exceptional characters whose adventures you passively absorb. But games have different requirements, different rules they should follow, and in D&D one of those rules is "your character can end permanently in an underwhelming way." None of those exceptional protagonists is allowed to do that by the rules of their media, but your PC's are, because they're game constructs, not fictional constructs, and so they have more freedom. And when those exceptional NPC's exist in your RPG, they bring with them assumptions from their other medium. Put another way, the uber-NPC's were written as exceptional characters, but any PC ranger is a ranger in a world where Drizz'zt is already a ranger, any PC wizard is a wizard in a world where Elminster is already a wizard. And neither of those two yobbos is supposed to be what the story you're telling at your table is about, but they're also kind of impossible to avoid. I think this is why I'm most likely, were any of my players to seek out these NPC's, to say frankly, "They don't exist." Yep. I'm playing a DL game, and while I'm not familiar with the setting in much detail, I think in his telling, the War of the Lance never happened, so none of those exceptional narrative characters exist, so there's exactly ZERO chance of them doing anything that our party would have to pay attention to. It feels like you're working against the assumptions of the game as it's presented, though. There's stats for Elminster, and Drizz'zt is gonna fight demons with you this year, so WotC wants you to pay attention to their characters. The default is "Elminster switch is ON."That's also a problem - if the most interesting thing about your game setting has nothing to do with game elements, but you push them into the game anyway, they're going to be an awkward fit. Uber-NPC's are nearly always an awkward fit in your D&D games. If there's nothing interesting when they've left, then there's a big hole in the core of your setting because while it might be fun to read about brooding, rebellious badasses, and it might be fun to play as a brooding, rebellious badass, it's not fun to play as a character where the brooding, rebellious badass is clearly the exceptional protagonist of the world, and you're just scene decoration for it. If the most interesting thing about your game setting is novel characters, you've got a pretty weak game setting.(I'm not sure that's 100% true about FR, but perhaps some folks do!)</blockquote>

Verification