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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9344036" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Hey if that works for you, that's great.  It's my experience however, that the difference between me writing a story on my own time and my own enjoyment (+/- how many views it gets when I post it online) is different from working on a game world and adventures I want to share with my friends.If they're not enjoying themselves, I feel I've wasted my time.  Now I want to examine this last sentence you typed about "Making sure the players get everything they want is not".Taken on face value, what is wrong with making sure the players get what they want out of a game?  I'm pretty sure you mean that to say "giving the players what they want on a silver platter" or putting the game on easy mode- which isn't the case for me.The players have to earn the things they want.  But if they want to be a Sailor and have at least one seafaring adventure, this is what will happen:"I see you took Sailor.  Were you hoping that would come up in game in a major way?""Yeah!  That'd be cool!""Well, I don't have any ship adventures planned.  And historically, my experience with ship adventures is one or all of the following- you get attacked by a sea monster, you get attacked by pirates, your ship sinks and you wash up on some distant island or land of adventure and have to find a way off it.  What I'm saying is, I'll give you that adventure at some point, but I can't guarantee it'll be the stuff swashbuckling dreams are made of."And if that isn't something they want, they're more than free to not be a sailor.  But I want to try and give them what they want, even if they have to wait for and invest time and energy into the game and face challenges to get there.In my new game (first session complete!), I told everyone that I couldn't guarantee that their backgrounds would come up in a timely manner, so I made a generic "adventurer" background they could use.  Only two players took it, the other two are a Guild Craftsmen and an Urchin, respectively, because that's what they wanted for their characters.  The setup for the game was that they are all characters from different worlds, so the Guild Craftsmen is a repairman from a higher tech setting who took "water condenser repair" as one of his Tool Proficiencies, which led to this exchange:"Going to be honest here, Tim, I'm not sure that will ever come up.""I don't need it to, that's my character's background, he repaired things.""Ok, that's fine."  Now what he doesn't know is, I did think of a way or two to make that relevant to the campaign since that discussion, as part of the campaign revolves around a lost civilization of planar travelers (appropriated from TSR's Treasure Tales), so I can work with that.  And maybe when it comes up, he'll have his moment of "wait!  I know what that is!".Or not, but either way, it doesn't cost me much to try and make it happen.  And there's a lot of very tough challenges between where he is now and when and where that will occur.</blockquote>

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