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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6202941" data-attributes="member: 17106">Color me skeptical.That being said; it's a word that I'm using to describe the players. If the players are acting in a collectivistic manner, then the topic we're talking about (relative power between the classes) either changes massively in tenor or becomes completely irrelevant. If the players are acting selfishly, then it becomes more important. As has been chronicled here and elsewhere, it takes quite a bit of targeted effort to make a wizard or cleric in this game that's even useful, let alone overpowered.There are very few people who can or will try to create the internet phenomenon known as a "CoDzilla" and run it as a character in good faith during a game, or who will try to generate infinite wishes or pick out obscure polymorph forms or what have you. I think it's fair to characterize a player that does that as being subversive or antisocial in nature. In my experience with such people, that behavior in the game correlates pretty well with real-world megalomania and manipulitiveness and deceptiveness.I don't know whether you're targeting me specifically with that statement, but it's a really bizarre idea that lacks perspective. I suppose that if I or any other DM behaved in that way, it might have an effect like that, but I've never heard of such a thing happening. You seem to be inferring a great deal from one example.I suspect that the players' behavior is typically determined by things more tangible than diffuse differences in mechanical interpretations of rules.More to the point, I think power corrupts. The thing that encourages people to behave the worst is by giving them power.Since we're playing in an imaginary world, everyone's power is pretty much infinite by default, so the way to counteract that is to either have a DM who places a lid on everyone else (and is himself limited by the need to please everyone enough to keep them in his game), or by having a narrativist mechanical system for attaching consequences to behavior.***I also think that this quote really misrepresents important thematic ideas common to the underlying fiction. Combat is supposed to be easier than diplomacy. The nonviolent way is hard. A good character chooses it not because it's the easy way, because it's the right way. If it succeeded reliably, everyone would be doing it. A brave hero (among other character types) attempts diplomacy with the understanding that it may fail, and that it may never have a legitimate chance to succeed. These are all ideas that exist independently of game mechanics, but are represented rather well by the mechanical example we've discussed.</blockquote>

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