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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Burrito Al Pastor" data-source="post: 4680632" data-attributes="member: 27303">Oh, but they are special snowflakes, their existance does mean they are meant to solve certain things, and sometimes they are supposed to be the best just by nature of their existance.The PCs are not special because they're blessed, or destined, or heroic, or just plain awesome; any of those things may come from the fact that they're special, but the real reason they're special is because they're the PCs. The're different and better and more important than NPCs because the PCs are being run by the players, and the NPCs are not.The PCs are meant to solve the problems that are placed in front of them in the world the DM places them in.The PCs are special for exactly the same reason that DMPCs are a Bad Idea: the PCs are the stars of the story, the story should be about them, and the world revolves around them as a result of that. The mysterious stranger in the bar doesn't randomly select the PCs to approach with an unusual buisness proposition; he selects the PCs because they're the PCs. If he selected a party of NPCs who then went on to rescue the princess and save the world and the PCs stayed first-level dirt farmers in their poor village, the game gets old fast.This doesn't even have anything to do with power level. If the game is in a world where extraordinary adventures are quite common, then those adventures aren't extraordinary anymore; they become ordinary, and ordinary becomes boring. Broadly speaking, players don't play RPGs to role-play the life of an unremarkable person who does unremarkable things in an imaginary world; they want to be an extraordinary person who has extraordiary adventures in an imaginary world.You have more leeway for this sort of thing in high-magic or high-technology settings like Eberron; Eberron is a sufficiently extraordinary world that, while ordinary things can still get boring, you can get by quite well with merely uncommon things. Extraordniary things are still a good idea, though.In a low-magic setting, you have almost no leeway for this sort of thing. If you're not extraordinary in a quasi-historical setting like, say, A Game of Thrones, then you're a farmer, and you will be a farmer all your life, and you will not have adventures beyond rounding up the chickens.The PCs are special snowflakes, because if they weren't special, they wouldn't be doing anything interesting.</blockquote>

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