Sepulchrave II
Legend
I love character building. Especially in 3.X.
It's like painting a picture. Or maybe translating a difficult concept into a foreign language. It can take quite a while to choose your palette, or dialect.
Marrying mechanics and concept together is intensely creative for me, and illuminates some kind of hidden process in my brain.
I find that appropriate mechanical relationships - although entirely symbolic - preserve an internal sense of verisimilitude for me which is otherwise difficult to attain. It's a personal aesthetic thing; I love the way that symbols interact generally, and I like symbolic languages because they force the brain to operate in ways it wouldn't normally.
Con is a symbol (or a sign), as is HP or AC.
When we use these terms, we are speaking a secret language to one another.
When we share how a character is built - and there is no value judgment implicit in that term - we are communicating our cleverness, our inventiveness, and our aesthetic when manipulating this symbolic system. Our mastery over its contents, or our appreciation of the nuanced ways in which the various pieces can fit together.
Well-crafted characters generate interesting plot hooks by themselves.
It's like painting a picture. Or maybe translating a difficult concept into a foreign language. It can take quite a while to choose your palette, or dialect.
Marrying mechanics and concept together is intensely creative for me, and illuminates some kind of hidden process in my brain.
I find that appropriate mechanical relationships - although entirely symbolic - preserve an internal sense of verisimilitude for me which is otherwise difficult to attain. It's a personal aesthetic thing; I love the way that symbols interact generally, and I like symbolic languages because they force the brain to operate in ways it wouldn't normally.
Con is a symbol (or a sign), as is HP or AC.
When we use these terms, we are speaking a secret language to one another.
When we share how a character is built - and there is no value judgment implicit in that term - we are communicating our cleverness, our inventiveness, and our aesthetic when manipulating this symbolic system. Our mastery over its contents, or our appreciation of the nuanced ways in which the various pieces can fit together.
Well-crafted characters generate interesting plot hooks by themselves.