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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8338118" data-attributes="member: 6670763">Does this reply to the paragraph you quoted?Would you say that characters who are 1) bound by social obligations and vows of allegiance, 2) solve other people's problems as a disinterested party, and 3) overcome their challenges by thorough research and cunning diplomacy make for good protagonists in a Sword & Sorcery story?I am generally in agreement with that. In Sword & Sorcery, you don't generally have a happy peaceful starting situation that is being disrupted by an outside force and an expectation that the protagonists will set things right by returning them back to the status quo.Though I'd be very careful to use betrayal sparingly and for times where it will have strong impact. If the first two people the PCs work for both betray them, you send the players the message to never take on any jobs. I think that can cause a lot of problems further down the road.But I think it can be pretty neat to have NPCs try to cheat the PCs out of money rather than stabbing them in the back. For example, a merchants appearing unhappy when the party shows up to claim their reward because he didn't expect to actually have to pay the money he promised.I'd been toying with just such an idea myself last months. A party united by a common oath to find and slay that evil wizard who wronged them should work pretty well.There's a couple of neat Sword & Sorcery stories that happen pretty much entirely as disruptions while the protagonists are traveling between A and B.I think it's a vastly superior way of running adventures in general, but for Sword & Sorcery it's absolutely mandatory to not have a script that demands that the PCs are going through specific scenes. Distrust and backstabbing is a big part of the game, as is sudden and unplanned violence. There's also both the thing of cutting your losses, and taking stupid risks just because you're really pissed at one guy in particular.Even more than in other styles of fantasy, the journey is the destination. It needs to be a fun and exciting ride, and if at the end the heroes stand with nothing to show for their troubles, that's perfectly fine.</blockquote>

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