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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Helldritch" data-source="post: 8564986" data-attributes="member: 6855114">You see, there are two schools of thought for this.The first one is yours. We see it all the time in movies. The character is already powerful, do wonderful, never misses and never ever fail. Guess, what? Series and movies like this get boring pretty quickly, might feel good when they are written but actually perform poorly with the audience and are soon forgotten.The second one is where the character evolves through the story(ies). Ho the character fails, makes mistakes but means well and tries to improve. Especially good series/movies will have some character die at some point with no coming back. Strangely, these characters can become quite powerful but they will be liked and loved by the audience because the audience will be able to relate to these characters. The possibility of failures is what makes a character interesting.The best campaigns I ever had were those in which some characters died and were replaced by another. Not a new roll up character, but an henchman or a hireling that got promoted to "player character" status because of the premature death of a character. Whenever people struggle to achieve something, the memory of the struggle is long to fade. Players will not remember the easy times, they will remember when they barely made it but succeeded.And even more strange, almost universally all the time, the player that took the promoted henchmen/hireling just forget his previous character and love the new one. The dwarven cleric in one of my current group died and was replaced by an NPC cleric of Lathander that the group had saved from petrification in the underdark. The player does not even remember the name of her dwarven cleric! She had rose to 6th level with her previous character but strangely, playing Vala, the cleric of Lathander, rescued from being a statue for eternity feels much more rewarding. She is now 11th level, and the backstory of Vala constantly improve as the player is asking questions on the background, brings more to table than she ever did because she wants to discover what was Vala before all this.When the backstory of a new 1st level character is so ludicrous that even a 5th or 10th level character would have trouble doing the same thing; do not be surprised when a player feels let down when the character isn't able to do the same thing as is written on his/her character sheet background. When the backstory is made this way, no wonder that some players take failure with so much hard feeling. But MY character should not die! IT DID ALL THIS AT FIRST LEVEL! Well, that was in your impossible story my friend. Not in the game itself. Try making a nobody that becomes somebody! That will be, my friend, a story you will remember all your life.</blockquote>

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