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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6258085" data-attributes="member: 42582">Those are good points which I was wondering about but hadn't properly thought through when I made my post.If the fictional positioning of the PCs never changes, that sounds pretty boring - in the D&D context, the most boring dungeon crawl ever, maybe. But as you point out, once fictional positioning changes then it can open up new opportunities which some players may be better at exploiting than others.When I look at 4e (to choose an uncontentious example!), the idea of everyone getting a paragon path or an epic destiny seems to be to give every player a chance to get something rewarding both mechanically and in terms of fictional positioning. For this to work as an antidote to min/max-caused imbalance, three things have to be true: (i) the designers have to achieve decent mechanical balance across the different PC build elements; (ii) the players have to choose elements which deliver the improved fictional positioning that works for their PCs (eg if I want to play a scholar I choose the right sort of path); (iii) the GM has to engage equally with each of the players' chosen improvements of fictional positioning (eg frame scenes where being a scholar matters). Spelled out like that, it's quite demanding on both the designers and the GM! If anyone gets it wrong, skilled players can spot the break points and play to them in their choices.The analogue in Traveller would be a player who works to get his PC head of the diplomatic service, but the GM never frames interplanetary political disputes.D&D in particular has such strong traditions about the GM's power not just in framing scenes, but in deciding what those scenes will be about, that it's hard to see how opportunities for optimisation can be avoided even if the focus is on fictional positioning. 13th Age at least provides an interesting model on the PC build side: its background system means that each player can choose fictional positioning for his/her PC which is mechanically equal across PCs (common bonus pool, metagamed setting of target numbers); but it still relies on the GM getting step (iii) right, and you can see this issue being played out in discussions on the forum about how to handle the player-input aspects of 13th Age (and it's further complicated by the fact that both Icons and One Unique Thing are distinct moving parts from the backgrounds).The above probably isn't very coherent - just some thoughts prompted by your reply.</blockquote>

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