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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JamesonCourage" data-source="post: 5901262" data-attributes="member: 6668292">My players do. From experience. Sorry your views differ, but I'm not really going to be swayed on this front. Too much personal experience tells me otherwise. You're speaking of "build" and I'm speaking of "disparity." Since the PCs are protagonists, they are afforded luxuries that NPCs don't have, whether this takes the form of fate points or something subtler (like social skills being able to be rolled against NPCs but not PCs), the base assumption of the PCs succeeding at mundane tasks relatively easily ("Say Yes"), and the like.These are all factors as well. Was the game built for special PCs? Are they assumed awesome and the best, and the rules reflect that? Are there exceptions to the PCs that are not made to NPCs? Do the PCs have privileges that NPCs do not, such as Fate Points, social skills, the "Rule of Cool", or the "Say Yes" mantra behind them that gets them a good amount of mundane stuff without much hassle (that many NPC peasants might love to have behind them)?While many of these mechanics are meta in nature, they no doubt affect the PCs. Since "the PCs are protagonists" is a metagame statement, that's no surprise. However, the mechanical implementation that is then inserted into the game to make this statement realized certainly affects the PCs (even if it's at a metagame level). Thus the PC/NPC disparity I mentioned earlier, and the "inconsistency" that my players see in the game.Again, it's just taste. But, as it is taste, I was saying I'd rather the "PCs as protagonists" mechanics be easily added or subtracted, rather than baked in. Something like Fate Points accomplishes this goal well, as you can just turn the system on or off. "Now we get plot protection! Now we don't!" Easy as a lightswitch.However, something like social skills only working on NPCs but not PCs is baked deeper into the system. Sure, you can easily change that, too, but this is usually just a piece you're picking out. That is, there's going to be small changes all over the system that needs to be made in order to get rid of the assumption. Thus the statement of mine that you quoted:I feel that if the assumption is that PCs are protagonists from the get-go, it's usually baked into the game, rather than layered on. I'd rather something be layered on and easily removed than picked out piece by piece. That's all I was saying there, really. As always, play what you like <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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