Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="airwalkrr" data-source="post: 2918530" data-attributes="member: 12460">I dislike the 10th level bard with an 8 charisma as much as I dislike the divine metamagic chain spelling cleric with no deity and no background, just for entirely different reasons. The player with the ineffective bard is simply on the opposite end of the spectrum. The character may have a great background and be a wonderfully detailed character with a rich personality, but if he can't contribute anything to the group other than humor, I'd rather not have him along. Such a character is all roleplay and no crunch, while the patronless cleric named Etoh is all crunch and no roleplay.For those mentioning the Enworld storytime board, yes I realize that is there and I lurk it from time to time. It is fun reading. But I do not think the posters there are representative of the gaming community at large, which is where my discussion was headed. Yes, but Gary is full of great stories about rp experiences as well. The games that I hear him talk about in articles as well as the Gary Gygax Q&A thread describe both crunch and rp. I have no doubt most of them were powergamers (and still are), but they were also great storytellers. I guess what I am trying to say is a hero without a story is not much of a hero at all. When your story amounts to "I critted the dragon for 250 points of damage and he failed his massive damage save. Isn't that awesome? And it was the first round too!" you aren't really telling a story, you're describing a statistical phenomenon.I'm not saying players should do exhaustive research on their characters. I'm just saying that having a character concept is something that seems woefully lacking to me these days. I didn't do a lot of work creating Dravus. I just needed to create a new character one day and thought "hmm, a half-orc wizard who thinks he is a god might be fun" and I went from there. It didn't matter that I hadn't written up a background for him. I just got a character concept for an insane half-orc mage and developed his background as I played. Whenever I was in character and talking about Dravus' past, I would jot notes down everytime I made something up which made Dravus what he is today. But the point is, I roleplay him. I can tell you all these things because they've simply come up. An NPC asks where he is from and he replies "Greyhawk," not because that is what my background says, but because it made sense at the time. Another character asks whether his mother was human or his father and he replies "My dear mother, Sylvania, a powerful sorceress, was human." Having Suloise heritage made sense if Dravus was a wizard. Many players I know never even get into situations where they will mention these things because they don't roleplay and wouldn't roleplay much even if they were in these situations.These kinds of things didn't happen in my first ad&d game. I played a sadistic half-elf mage who loved fire spells. Our party included a wise and cautious ranger who was our resident sage, an uppity (no pun intended) halfling thief who always stretched things to the limit and got himself in trouble repeatedly, a noble fighter who fought for his homeland. We didn't spend a long time thinking up backgrounds; we hadn't really played many RPGs before. But our characters all had personalities and we had some great memories. The first game I DMed was similar, with a bard who liked to bathe in public fountains, a rogue who never seemed about to learn from his mistakes which were many, and a cold-hearted monk who was always the straight man of the group and harbored harsh secrets about his past. It's just so rare that I see personality in characters these days. Sure, it is all over the story-telling forum, but for each post there I bet there are dozens asking for help optimizing a character, discussing the best feats in the game, trying to design uber spells or classes, and working out the best magic item combos.</blockquote>

Verification