Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9536888" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I mean, that's fair, but realistically, with the way people play characters today, if it takes almost five years for the character to be revived, that actually means the character never gets revived, because the campaign ends long before that. Campaigns that hit a third year are rare. We cannot design a game expecting that most groups hit that point. Because most don't.Except that it is, if you don't start from three assumptions that are just flat not true about most games today. I already mentioned one, but I'll do both here:1. Most campaigns run for several (3+) years, and have mostly cohesive participation across that time.2. Most campaigns have players running several different PCs, which they rotate through regularly.3. Creating new characters is very simple, takes very little time, and requires no special investment from the player.The vast, vast majority of players are not interested in the second. They want to play one character at a time. Hence, if you're "handed an NPC" to play, that's effectively being told "okay, this is your character now, have fun!" And a lot of players just...aren't interested in doing that. Pregens are not well-liked, for good reason. They tell you what you WILL play, rather than allowing you to decide for yourself what you wish to play.The first, sadly, just...isn't true of most groups. Even groups run entirely with friends. I am quite well aware that my DW game is a rarity for having had a relatively stable group for so long....and even then, none of the people who started this game are still in it today, except me, the GM. I would love it if most campaigns could be expected to run multiple years. That'd be an awesome world to live in. The sad fact is that we don't, and designing a rule system dependent on such things isn't going to magically change that fact.The third hasn't been true of any edition of D&D created by Wizards of the Coast, and I would personally argue it wasn't even all that true at least by late-2e and probably a bit earlier. Blame it on Dragonlance, blame it on Tolkien fanboys pulling D&D away from the influences of Howard and Leiber, whatever--but the simple fact is that even creating a late-2e character could be quite the ordeal, and the general expectation of player investment into said character at creation, not exclusively after many campaigns, was already much higher.</blockquote>

Verification