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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5149921" data-attributes="member: 4937">By all means, but you are still missing the point.  Let's say I want to play 'The Flash'.  That's my character concept.  The first thing you might think is, "Well, obviously, you can't play the flash as a low level character, but persumably at a sufficiently high level you can play 'The Flash' as a character".   But that fails too.  Do I need to point out why?How about Time Stop at will?  Let's say I want to play 'Hiro Nakamura'.  This fails for the same reason 'The Flash' fails.But reading the entry on 'Teleport Through Time' only proves my point.  Mechanically, its easy to say, "Ok, now you are back in time."  But this fails utterly on practical grounds, and the entry that you've been linking to only serves to suggest why this is true.Ok, sure.  Despite its high costs of entry, it's one of the most powerful and most often overlooked spells in the game.  Leaving aside the point that it creates dominated NPCs rather than actually extending your physical form into new bodies (likely to reason PC's avoid it), lets imagine the situation where I create some sort of XP mill and start cranking out these creatures.  At some point, this too fails, and for reasons that have nothing to do with mechanics.Mostly serves to prove my point.And in a different way, mostly serves to prove my point.  But I can make the point more simply by saying, "Divination", and leaving it at that.This point is a bit more subtle than that, and I suspects its one that people are going to disagree on.  Indeed, let's look at the Bard, because the Bard really highlights the problem.  But let's say that you have a skill like, "Comedian", and I've min/maxed my comedian skill to the point that I can really 'slay 'em' with my jokes or at the least can emulate the effects of Tasha's Hideous Laughter.  Now, what did I say that was so funny?  I mean sure, I can in a narrow way mechanically create the effects of being funny, but is this mechanic in and of itself satisfying?  To get the idea what I'm going at here, let's compare my 'Comedian' skill to a character that has min/maxed balance, or climb, or jump.  I can define mechanical outcomes for balance, climb, or jump as well.  However, the mechanical outcome in this case is pretty much exactly the same as the narration of the event.  I make a climb skill check, and with a successful roll I can climb the wall of smooth ice by virtue of my extraordinary.  How?  Don't know, but at least for me it doesn't seem to matter.  But in the case of a weaponized joke, it does seem to matter.  Now, you might think, "why should it?"  Let's imagine the novelization of our role play.  It's pretty easy and satisfying to narrate how Jack the Climber was able to climb like a spider up the glass wall.   But, how satisfied with the narrative would you be if all the dialogue for Bob the Joker was simply, "Bob said something funny..." or "Bob snapped a witty remark in reply."?  Wouldn't you want to know what Bob said?  Merely saying that Bob is so funny that he can provoke gales of uncontrollable laughter doesn't make the character witty.Merely saying that Bob can invent things, doesn't make the character creative.Or in other words, there is some limit to how much mechanics can add to a character what is not present in the characterization by the player.  You can give mechanical support to a players characterization, but you can't create that characterization out of mechanics alone.  It's easy to mechanically create the character who is 'the greatest swordsman in the world' and your average player be satisfied by the results, even when that player isn't (and especially when that player isn't a great swordsman).  But a player who isn't witty who wants to play a character who is witty is likely to be disappointed regardless of the mechanical support we make available.Interestingly, merely being 'attractive' or 'persuasive' is alot easier to do in a mechanically satisfying way, which is probably why you often see 'persuasive' skills, but almost never see a 'comedian' skill.</blockquote>

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