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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 2791411" data-attributes="member: 26473">I wasn't intending it to be universal - I was expanding on a description of how I approach parties filling in for their deficiencies, and the consequences of creating a gimped character, in the games I run.I have a question about this: what precisely is a "diplomatic style of campaign?"When a poster writes about creating characters that will flatly refuse to participate in a series of adventures because (1) it doesn't fit the character's optimized mechanics or (2) the character is gimped by a 'personality quirk,' and expects to be allowed a new character when this happens, that hardly seems like someone interested in effectiveness over the course of the character's career - it sounds more like, "I want to play the best possible character for every situation," like characters are clubs in a golf bag."I didn't know my character might end up on a ship/crossing a desert/encountering undead/getting in a tavern brawl/accompanying a princess to court" is justification for changing characters in the middle of the game? Wow...that's just...wow... :\ Perhaps I'm having a hard time understanding this way of thinking because it's so foreign to the way I organize my games. For me, an adventure is designed around a series of encounters, and a campaign around a series of adventures - the encounters that make up an adventure, and the adventures that make up a campaign, generally share some sort of unifying element. A lucky, skillful character will generally experience three to six campaigns in the course of an adventuring career.One of my current Modern campaigns consists of eight adventures, with each adventure comprising from three to more than a dozen individual encounters, all taking place within a five year span of time. An encounter could be primarily combat oriented, or investigative, or focused on social interaction, or involve overcoming a natural hazard of some kind - this is representative, not exhaustive.Our present adventure is composed of four encounters, beginning with a combat encounter that spawns a short investigation, followed by a social encounter, another combat encounter, and an encounter that I'm at a loss to classify since it could play out a half-dozen different ways depending on what the players choose to do when confronted by it.Each of the other seven adventures in this campaign is again comprised of a variety of encounter types, with each lending itself to different combinations of skills and abilities. Some encounters are highly combat-intensive, others are dominated by social interaction, and others could be resolved several ways as determined by the players' choices.These encounters may take place in a plethora of environmental conditions: burning deserts, snow-covered mountains, dense forests, underground, on the ocean, in villages, towns, major cities, in any season, in diverse weather conditions, day or night.(And all of this was written from behind something akin to the 'veil of ignorance': at the time I prepared the encounters and adventures, I had no idea who the characters would be in this game, except within certain broad parameters based on setting constraints - once the characters were submitted, I began adding additional encounters to the adventures as "drop-ins" based on the character backgrounds, goals, and so on, and will continue to do so based on player and character initiative.)Now you tell me: presented at the outset with an outline of the variety of potential encounters that comprise the adventures decribed above, how would you optimize a character for the whole of this campaign?You can make the character quite good at something, surely, but to say that there are circumstances in the course of this campaign in which you'd rather play a different character because your character isn't optimized for interacting with native villagers, or because your character isn't optimized for urban warfare, or your character isn't optimized for operating in a hostile environment like a scorching desert or a twisting cavern complex will not fly with me - you knew that the game would involve tremendous diversity of situations and conditions from the outset.What I expect from the players is this: If you make a ranged-combat specialist, then that character will stand out in ranged combat encounters and must work to overcome inherent limitations in melee combat or social or investigative or stealthy encounters - if you are a player in my game (and wish to continue being a player in my game...), you don't suddenly say, "No, my character wouldn't fight in tight passages underground because he doesn't have the feats and the equipment to be good at it, so I'll play something else instead now."To me, a "good challenge" is one that taxes the character's abilities, rather than one that plays directly to the character's strengths.Really. Well. Huh.That's just sad. :\</blockquote>

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