Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9158140" data-attributes="member: 4937">]"We" here referred to the gaming group I had in the early 1990s.I mean aside from the fact that those characters don't live an adventuring lifestyle at the time we meet them, why not?  I wouldn't necessarily want to live out Luke's 10 years as a farm boy doing chores either, but it wasn't because of his power level but rather the stories he was involved in (that said, he appears to have gotten up to a lot of mischief and daring in that period).  The base game starting assumption of WEG Star Wars RPG is that you are a new recruit to the Rebel Alliance not a super-hero.  We starting the play the game back then expected to start at a little below the level of the X-Wing pilots not named Luke in A New Hope, or Rebel Commandos that accompany Han in Return, and maybe a little above the level of the hapless naval troopers that get gunned down defending Leia at the beginning of A New Hope. Well, first of all, this is only relevant if you think Star Wars is a superhero game.  But secondly, why not?  Why are people expecting to get their prizes without paying for it?   And aside from that, one problem all RPGs have, even ones written to be superhero games, is the more powerful characters become the more difficult it is to tell meaningful stories.  The comic books are filled with this problem where the power level of the characters waxes and wanes solely as needed by the story, so that they don't really bear much scrutiny.  How fast is the Flash?  Always exactly as fast as he needs to be to win, but never so fast he's not challenged.  And this doesn't change regardless of how fast the antagonist or the problem to overcome is.  So in one story he's barely faster than a fast human, and in the next he's faster than the speed of light.  His reflexes change from moment to moment according to the dictates of the plot.   Speedsters are always in superhero stories.  But try dealing with them in a superhero game.If you start quantifying things in order to game with them, you soon have requirements of consistency that artists in non-interactive media don't have to deal with.  If your players have agency, you soon find that you can't rely on players jumping through stupid hoops in order to have a story.  Players will use their characters powers creatively and intelligently all the time and not merely as creatively and intelligently as needed to just barely solve the problems with some dramatic tension thrown in.  Every single RPG system starts breaking down eventually if it allows the PC's to power up.  It happens for example in Star Wars D6 as soon as you get characters with 7D or 8D in dice pools with access to force points.  That's characters with probably like 50 to 60 dice total at most before the system is going to start cracking.  You probably could modify the rules to cope but you'd increasingly be coping.  This happens in every game.  Games with scale go out of the scale you can deal with or imagine.  Games with linear fortune mechanics hit the point the bonuses to succeed are greater than the range of the fortune, eliminating the interest of the chance and reducing the interest of interaction.  All high level play in all systems is problematic.  So why be in to much a hurry to get there?By the time you get up to Vader, or Batman, or whatever, the game engine is breaking.  Batman doesn't even make sense in his own universe.  He makes even less sense if you game him.  So don't be a hurry to get there.</blockquote>

Verification