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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6389436" data-attributes="member: 2067">Cool idea for a campaign!Can I ask what stops the "professors" from solving all the real problems, leaving the PC's to do only the menial work? What's stopping this from turning into basically what people complain about when they complain about Elminster and Drizz't and Mystara in the Forgotten Realms: the PC's are just shoe-shiners?I ask because there's two major examples I can think of this kind of thing being major in a setting. The first is of course the Potterverse, and the other is the story of Naruto (which even in its most recent incarnations is basically a war fought by teenagers). Both share a common theme: the reason that Adults Are Useless is because there is some great powerful entity of darkness and malice from before the precocious protagonists were born that the adults are all scared senseless of confronting/admitting to, and only Our Heroes (often lead by a Chosen One formed out of the chaos of fighting back that darkness and malice for the first time) are basically ignorant enough to be brave (and then in too deep when they're not ignorant). They've also got super-special unique powers that make them or their leader the Chosen One who has some sort of special bond with the Big Bad -- a sixteen year old with a special super unique power can trump even an ancient evil. Potter and Naruto deals with this by making their respective titular protagonists the Chosen One and having everyone else play a support role. The other characters get their moment in the sun (and are key for the protagonist's success), but they are clearly in a support role. The Adults do big things, but the event is SO BIG that they can't do everything and the Protagonist is uniquely suited to confronting the main villain in various ways, making them the strategic choice. Typically in an RPG setting, it's less about one special person, and the game is generally less big on "secret histories" that get revealed as great power (due to how that screws with a player's ability to determine for themselves what kind of hero they are), so I would think you've had to deal with it. Or if you haven't (because you haven't had PC's that explore it that much), it might be worth thinking about. Why don't the grown-ups fix their own problems? And how do the PC's rise above their educators to become heroes that those educators then admire? How does our druid trainee character become a hero that the 20th-level archdruid Gardner admires?</blockquote>

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