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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9251886" data-attributes="member: 8461">The question of whether or not the character is a "generic fighting man" strikes me as being less important than what this character does over the course of the campaign. You say that a narrativist style of play allows for the character to not be well-determined, but that doesn't strike me as being specific to narrativism; literally nothing about what a character will do (which, again, strikes me as the most important aspect of play) is determined beforehand. Regardless of their stats, the character is going to be as different from their predecessor characters as you make them. Even if certain abilities from other classes, races, etc. are closed off to them, that strikes me as far and away less important than what they can achieve during the life of a campaign. You'll still be talking about how they united the Seven Kingdoms to overthrow the Demon God and founded a new bloodline decades from now, long after you've forgotten exactly what their stats were.I would suggest the opposite, in point of fact. Leaving aside that overturning convention before play even begins basically puts the backstory front-and-center from the get-go (since at that point there's nothing else about the character to establish their dynamic when the game's first session gets going), the idea that "you'll like this thing you don't like if you find someone who does the thing you don't like well" strikes me as a poor principle. Yes, it's good to try new things, but it's also good to respect the idea that people simply don't like what you like, and that they're not wrong for doing so. If you don't eat meat, repeatedly insisting that such-and-so's hamburgers are the best thing ever and that you absolutely have to try them comes across as insensitive more than anything else.And it's nice that you had a blast, but in all honesty that doesn't sound like it proves the idea of overturning convention very much. If anything, it shows that you don't need to do so in order to run an interesting character, since most of the specifics that you relate regarding his origin and his powers could be easily utilized without having to contravene the setting. You can have an interesting/mysterious background without it having to directly contravene how things work (recall what I said before, about how even exceptions to the rules can be defined in the context of the rules), the same with developing powers, etc.I don't think anyone is hostile to the idea of character concepts created by players. I think they have a problem with (or at least a suspicion toward) players specifically designing characters whose concepts break the conventions of the setting they (the players) know that they'll be playing in. And it's one that I share, since as I noted before, someone who designs a character whose central conceit is "the rules don't apply to me (even where other PCs are concerned)" tends to raise big red flags.</blockquote>

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