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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shayuri" data-source="post: 6018854" data-attributes="member: 4936">What makes a good book, or movie, or epic poem, or other kinds of nonparticpatory story, is not necessarily what makes a good RPG. I say this not to debate your point, but suggest another way to frame what we said. Star Trek, and Game of Thrones and all your examples are stories written by one person, or a small group of collaborating people, intended to be experienced passively. They don't have to worry about dice, or strange people deciding to do totally unexpected things, or the ghostly spectre of balance. They dictate what happens all the way through to the end. That level of collaboration cannot exist in a game, and if it did it would no longer be a game. The two types of storytelling are fundamentally distinct, and can't really be compared side by side.I don't think any of us intended to suggest that the story of an epic game is not important. Nor do I think any of us were saying that powerful characters weren't attractive to play. Even Bob the 4th level fighter encompasses quite a bit of power fantasy and wish fulfillment for the typical roleplayer. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I get the feeling you've got your own ideas about why epic games fail so often...which is fine. You run a lot. Your perspective is knowledgeable. It's just a little strange to see you ask our opinions...then argue against completely different ideas. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I'd also like to add that a very very powerful character can be more difficult to create well. This is because most of their story is backstory...it's in the past. They've already made it to the top, and all that has to be laid out. Batman has his origin story, and countless tales of clashes with Joker and Penguin and all the rest, leading up to make the character he is now. That's a lot. And for someone who wants to create a detailed, plausible and well-realized epic character...well they may not have to duplicate that feat from scratch, but it's going to be a lot more work than the demands of a 1st level character who's just beginning their adventuring careers. That's to say nothing of the increased difficulty and time needed to actually build the character mechcanically, which is significantly higher than lower levels.None of this is intended to represent an opinion that epic games are bad, or wastes of time, or otherwise shouldn't be attempted. I'm enough of a gearhead that I like the exercise of mechanical character construction at that level, even if I'm not terribly 'good' at crunching those numbers. And I like the opportunity to play characters that would otherwise be totally inappropriate in any sane game of lesser level. I like epic games, in short. Even if they tend to die quickly.But I also recognize that they have a lot of hardships they have to endure...and that more than anything is why most go belly-up so fast. I don't see any big backlash against epic games. I think a lot of people avoid them BECAUSE they tend to dissipate, and that may be the only reason they don't want to play/run them. Others feel they're too hard to justify the effort...too hard to make characters, too hard to challenge without overchallenging, too hard to keep plots challenging and interesting...and so on. They're not wrong to feel that way...they just don't get everything out of it that some other people get, and so the cost/benefit analysis flips away.Just like you're not wrong to like such high powered games. Clearly you get more out of it than they do and those rewards continue to outweigh the increased costs, so you continue to want to do it.It's all good!</blockquote>

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