NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6011886" data-attributes="member: 17106">Really? Seems to me that a lot of great authors can't let go of their protagonist and his/her perspective. I can see where that's not the only approach, but I don't see any integrity being compromised.I don't think that's true at all. A player can "let go" simply by deciding to take actions that support the story but aren't necessarily advantageous for the character. The decision to work in a party is a classic example of such a conceit.Them's the risks you take. Any creative process results in a great deal of garbage being produced (and unlike an author who has the luxury of drafts or a painter who can throw out his painting and start over again, you generally don't get second chances in D&D). The risk of failure is largely part of the fun. Even in the unlikely event that you do get a really poor narrative, it isn't the end of the world (though it may be in game).D&D rather reminds me of watching Battlestar Galactica, in that there's dramatic tension in the world, but there's also a sense of "meta" dramatic tension, as the audience is often left to wonder whether the story has completely gone off the rails, only to find that it hasn't.The DM, by convention. Then again, player suggestion is also important.I start out without rules, from a sense of cooperative storytelling (which I liked to do as a child). Then I ask myself: what do the rules add to that experience? My answer, from experience, is twofold.The first thing the rules add is limits. Without rules, you'd have people saying "I kill the dragon", "I jump the chasm", "I seduce the general" and so on, and you'd have other people saying "but you can't do that", "that wouldn't work", "that doesn't make sense". D&D sets clear limits as to what your character can do, grounding your actions in some sort of reality (albeit a fantastical one). You're only so strong, and a sword can only cut so hard, and a spell can only do so much.The other thing it adds is a sense of unpredictability. When you're watching a story unfold in the cinema, you don't always know what's going to happen, and that's exciting. If you're creating one with a group of friends, you know them and you know yourself, and that can become boring for precisely the same reason. The dice add an element of unpredictability. A character may die that even the DM wanted to live. A character may uncover a plotthat wa ssupposed to be drawn out for weeks with a simple lucky roll. Or maybe it just rains because of some percentile roll on a weather chart when you pictured the adventure playing out on a bright sunny day. Whatever the case, it spices things up to add in that random element.That's what I use rules for.</blockquote>

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