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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 9251932" data-attributes="member: 6785785">Who says that the other characters aren’t similarly special? The initial suggestion was that the idea of the last mage then sparked similar ideas for other characters. And isn’t that what the GM is doing by making all the decisions of what’s allowed ahead of time? But this need not be the case. Or at the very least, need not be as severe as many expect. To what purpose? Is there? So what? Isn’t this only a problem if the GM has already decided what play will be about? Again, what is the purpose of this setting? For me, the purpose of any setting is to offer up dynamic play. That’s the primary function… anything else is secondary at best. So I want any ideas I come up with to be invitations to the players to take them and make them their own. I think this is the main thrust of the OP, and I think the vast majority of fantasy fiction supports this idea. It seems to be premise as endpoint rather than premise as starting point. Well, again, there are plenty of oddities and plenty of flat out absurdities in Middle Earth. If you accept Tolkien’s world as being on a consistent chassis it’s because he very much used the kind of post-hoc rationalization that’s been mentioned. You cited several of them yourself. Other than that, I think comparing author as world builder to GM as world builder has some real problems in these sorts of discussions. I mean, if the reason the GM designed the setting that way was because they didn’t want to deal with magic, then why not just say that? Why leave any room for ambiguity by hiding the motive behind a setting element? I’d be much more sympathetic to someone saying “I really just don’t want to have to manage spells and magic for once” than I would someone offering up a concept that makes my wheels turn and then they shoot down the concept that I came up with. Sounds like the GM already does! Which seems to be the problem with that uppity player coming along with ideas! It’s a total non-factor in my decision making. I don’t really care. But I definitey lean more towards wanting to play Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, not Luke Skywalker in Flash Gordon. Luke’s only interesting in his own story. I don’t really want characters and setting to be so unrelated in that way.</blockquote>

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