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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5634363" data-attributes="member: 4937">Now that this thread seems well and truly dead, I'm going to practice some necromancy.  In this way, no one can accuse me of killing a lively debate.  I'm raising a morbid one, and all too likely, it's coming back in a less pleasant form.   Still, there was something that really bothered me about this thread when it was alive.When I think of a 'character concept', I pretty much never think in terms of what the character is like at any point past first level.  As such, I almost never think of a 'character concept' in mechanical terms.  To me, a 'character concept' denotes the fluff which will inform and motivate how you role play the character.   A typical character concept in my game might start with, "Jack is the third son of a minor noble, and he's leaving to seek his fortune."  It certainly doesn't tell you his class, much less an array of feats and classes.  But it starts to tell you who the character is, what they've done up to this point, who they know, what they care about, and why they aren't staying safely in the village away from the scary monsters.  If there is some crunch you can use to make the outcome of your propositions match the expectations generated by your fluff, then so much the better but generally speaking, a character concept will work just fine with the most generic of crunch.   There is no need in fact to have anything other than 'fighting man' as the mechanical implementation of a concept.  You can run a dwarven aristocrat just fine by taking 'fighting man' and redressing it.  Mechanically you are identical to a 1st level human fighter; your character concept nonetheless lives regardless of the rules that explicitly support it.When I here a character concept described in terms of what the character will be mechanically at 20th level, I cringe.   First of all, D&D has never played as well, as quickly, or as entertainingly at 20th level as it does at 3rd or 5th or even 10th.  Secondly, how do you know?  Chances are, most characters aren't going to survive a journey from 1st to 20th anyway, and if you already know where they are going to end up, the journey couldn't have been very meaningful anyway in my opinion.  Thirdly, D&D has since the beginning been heavily weighted toward rules that told you what your character could do, and almost none that told you who your character was.   The only way to tell who your character is in D&D is through a character concept, but if your idea of a character concept is solely a list of what the character can do, then it feels to me almost like you are abandoning role play entirely.   That might not be an entirely bad thing; D&D still plays just fine without any role playing in it and if that's what you enjoy, more power too you.  But, I would hope you do that because you know what you like, and not merely because you like what you know.One of the many things I hate about PrC's (which I again insist are the single worst thing about 3.X) is that they tend to encourage a very very narrow range of PC concepts.  Most PrC's seemed to not only tell you who you were, but seemed to insist that everyone in the class was basically indentical in personality and concept.   To those that used and embraced them, it seemed like your PrC became your character concept, which to begin with was pretty sad because most of them time you'd be 6th level or so before you could begin taking a PrC and it would be several more levels before the PrC mechanically allowed the 'concept' of the character.   To the extent that a character concept is about mechanics, it always felt to me that your character needs to fit to those mechanics immediately.   If your character doesn't get his defining ability until 10th level or something, it doesn't feel to me like the defining ability ought to be the character's defining trait.To pick on Danny, because he's an oldby and can take it, if your character concept is 'Swampthing', then how in the world is 'Sorc/Cleric/Geomancer/M-T.' the mechanics?  Doesn't that skip most of the game before your character even is well, himself?   What do you do with a character who dies before they become a Sorc/Cleric/Geomancer/M-T?   Are they a nobody?  Is the game satisfying to you before your concept has reached its fulfillment, and if the concept takes 15 or 20 levels to do that, then aren't you guilty of enjoying the destination and not the journey?  Or, do you just consistantly start at 10th or 12th level, and complain about how the combat in D&D is so slow and the game is too complex because everyone has four classes and a vast portfolio of abilities to track when they are 'just starting out'?  I don't get it.  This style of play is utterly foreign to me.  Where did you learn it?  What's it like?</blockquote>

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