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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 3607063" data-attributes="member: 9053">I think that a lot of this depends on how the character you're trying to emmulate matches up with the system you're running in. Okay that was a no-brainer, I suppose, but to take it beyond that, I'd say that a lot of it is based on the campaign style and expectations.I'll give you an example of a character that I had a heck of a time playing in D&D. He was designed very loosly to be like D'Artagnan from the Three Musketeers. The idea was that he was a young man who wanted to be the greatest swordsman that ever lived.  Now we were starting the game at low levels, so I wasn't going to be that at the start of the game. What I told the GM was that this character wanted to study, train, and live his life to be the very best at something. He knew he wasn't yet, but he was going to be walking that as a path. He was going to be cocky as all get out, but he was smart enough to know that he didn't know all that much as of yet.So my GM decided he liked that idea and rolled with it. A few sessions into the campaign, I was pretty unhappy, because the GM was running the game like most campaigns: based on level appropriate challenges. It was at that point where I figured out what you need to do in D&D to give players who are looking to emmulate a particular style of character from another source: you have to run encounters that are outside of the "challenging" level.What my GM did after we talked about it was put me in situations where I would often fight other duelists that were simply of lesser skill than I was. He still had challenging encounters (this was a VERY tough campaign) but he'd also run people against me who just weren't as good as I was. More than that, after a while, my character started to develop a reputation for being a great swordsman, and NPCs would comment on it. What's more, I had a strong skill at Knowledge: Nobility, which my GM used to reflect the duelist culture, so I was able to show proper respect to those people that he simply told me had the reputation for being better than I was.The most important thing was: if all I ever ran into were people who were as good or better than I was, and who treated me as some no-named curr, I was never going to have that feeling of my character's dream coming true.You can fill in the blank with similar character concepts for other classes: how is a rogue ever going to feel like the Mouser if he can't ever sneak up on someone or pick a lock or disarm a trap without it being the hardest thing in the world?For my money, the biggest culprit in creating this issue is the module. How many modules, even good ones, only have encounters that are at the party's EL or above it? That's where the problem starts.I'm not saying make your games easy by any means, I guess I'd just say that you can make characters feel more heroic and like the movies and books people have going through their heads by letting them be the tough guy heroes now and then before hitting them with the EL+4 challenge battles.Whew!--Steve</blockquote>

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