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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 2430188" data-attributes="member: 99">I feel compelled to point out that, as has often been mentioned on these very forums, what makes for a good novel (including, perhaps especially, LotR) and what makes for a good game are not the same thing at all.  Novels are going to vary widely and there will be exceptions to any examples I draw from them.  But I feel that I can make a fairly solid generalization about gaming that the PC's are expected to gain powers and possessions through the course of the campaign.  The time honored manner in which this is accomplished is to Kill Things (yielding XP and therefore new and more expansive powers) and Take Their Stuff (yielding wealth and magic items).Let's posit a 1st level party and make no assumptions about their alignments or morality.  They arrive in town and hear of two possible ideas of what their PC's might engage in as a first adventure.  The first is that little Jenny has fallen down a well and is trapped.  The other is that there are Goblins inhabiting the old siver mines.Now from a purely mechanical standpoint, this is a no brainer.  You go Kill the Goblins (getting XP in the process) and Take Their Stuff (getting material wealth).  Helping little Jenny gives no XP (in the traditional model that rewards taking big risks and offing monsters) and she's unlikely to have much in the way of phat loot.Now of course characters with any real sense of morality at all are going to go help the little girl out of the well before they go off and slay Goblins.  But that's the difference I'm trying to underscore.  It's not necessarily that one mindset is more modern than the other.  It's that one is more heroic than the other.  I mean, consider which sounds better on your tombstone:Through arduous adventures and great risk to himself, he saved the kingdom and brought peace to the land.Through arduous adventures and great risk to himself, he got rich and powerful and nailed a lot of supermodels.Could it be that your preference is not precisely for non-modern style stories but more for players who like their PC's to be heroic?  If so, do you recognize that as a constraint upon the players (I'm not trying to imply that that's a bad thing, particularly if the players enjoy playing heroic characters)?One general understanding that I have with my players (all of whom are very close friends) is that I'm open to them playing non-Good or even occasionally Evil characters.  I've made it pretty clear that I don't want to delve into stuff that is too dark (like sacrificing innocent children for fun or profit) and they've never pushed that boundary.  But several of them DO like to play very mercenary PC's at times (like now) and I'm fine with that.  I recognize that it can be just as cathartic to depart reality to play an amoral, "what's in it for me?" type of character as playing a paragon of virtue.  Both are likely to be departures from our own outlook on life in the real world.  All I really care about is that the game is fun for everybody.I'm not equating a mandate for a heroic style game to railroading.  But it is a constraint upon the kinds of characters the players can play and, depending on the pool of players, might limit some of your options.  It might also place (slightly) more onus on the GM to come up with reasons for a party to follow a certain plotline.  The mercenary party will go after the Goblins in the silver mines simply because they're there.  The heroic party might question how this is for the common good.  But this probably works in the reverse pretty often too.  If you say, "Bandits made off with the princess!" then the heroic party will ask, "Which way did they go!?" while the mercenary party will say, "Yeah.  And...?"  But once they ask, "What's the reward?" then you've got them. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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