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="Zak S" data-source="post: 6606621" data-attributes="member: 90370">Effective or not, it's still a character with not only accumulated gear and ability, but also one with a name and a personality. And contra some interpretations of the now-disproven original GNS theory, you can care about "beating" scenarios AND what your character is like AND the direction of their fate all at once.Yes, but if you're interested in challenge you wouldn't WANT to alter the rules that way. You want dying to be a thing that causes real loss. (Real: you lose the ability to play a game in a certain way at a certain time-no more playing Gorg the veteran 6th level rhino-rider, now you have a new role as Ghork the Third, pony-owner.)There is what you'd call "gamist" failure --Mario restarts at level 1. But until you take off the ONLY G/ ONLY N / ONLY S blinkers you aren't realizing that a level 6 murderhobo is not a mere echanical pawn to most players, even the most tactical ones. It is a character (in the full sense) with goals and which is interesting in itself.You lose a whole fictional invention. Like taking a drawing you made and not only burning it, but vowing never to redraw and build on it.A character is always a work in progress, and the uses to which a character can be put are not constrained day to day.For example, Connie's character Gypsillia is the murderhoboest of murderhoboes. She's half-elf and can't even remember half what kind of elf half the time. She plays to win, or to start trouble, and has no long term goals. But she is also loved, she is drawn and redrawn on countless character sheets.She wears a helmet made from a dead pig's head, she's going to be tattooed on the players thigh. She is an idea that the player likes to think about. This character is 5 or 6 years old. She has a storied history and connections to other PCs. She has a unicorn, she has a role in the group, she has in-jokes.And taking her away would be a real loss, not a fictional loss. How? Like this:If I go "You can't play D&D anymore" that's a real loss. A kind of game is closed to you.If I go "You can't play X specific character anymore" I have described a narrower, smaller, but still real loss because each unique character is a way of playing the game, almost a new game in iteelf.Just as saying to an actor "you can't be in Hamlet ever again" is a real loss, so is saying "You can't play Guildenstern in Hamlet any more, no matter how much you like it". Taking away a character is real.And "murderhoboes" are as real as any other character to the people who play them, even if you exist at such a remove from this playstyle that they all seem the same to you.</blockquote>

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