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="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9251726" data-attributes="member: 8461">I see it as exactly the opposite: PC exceptionalism run amok.Leaving aside the issue of how rare it is to run into a player who does this (other than to say that I wouldn't categorize it as being "exceedingly" so), I agree that players thinking beyond what's laid out is a good thing, but when it's done in the context of the course of play. Characters who are established before the game even begins to be "special" in a way that no one else is seem to overlook the idea of exceptionalism as being – not an initial state that they begin playing with – but as a status that they earn over the course of the game. If a character wants to bring back magic to a world that's lost it, that should be a campaign goal that they're working toward (ideally with the input and contributions from the rest of the group), not something that they've already accomplished in their backstory.It's the same reason why I agree with the idea that a character's backstory should be their first three levels. If you can't come up with a way of making your character interesting besides saying that they start out being able to do the impossible, then to my mind, that's not much different from wanting to start the game at level 20 when everyone else is at level 1. You're already doing things no one else can do, and are likely expecting to have a major impact on the setting and its people, simply by being who you are, before session number one has even started. "I'm the one who changed the world" should be how you finish the campaign, not how you start it.And in all honesty, characters who are defined by being special right from the get-go seem to work against the group's fun anyway, at least in my experience. My friends still talk about the time one of them (hitting a series of exceptional rolls) killed a lizardman priest who was levitating inside the top of a hollow tower where they were fighting (on the staircase that hugged the inner walls of the structure), and then jumped onto his floating corpse and used his own weight to ride it down to ground level, delivering a healing spell to the barbarian who had fallen a few rounds previously, saving his life when said barbarian was one round away from dying. No one talks about the character who's backstory was that he was the son of Mystra, goddess of magic.</blockquote>

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