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: 9252096" data-attributes="member: 8461">I find it to be much easier (and ultimately more rewarding) to engage with elements that are found/developed over the course of play, rather than before the game begins. Working with what's there strikes me (and most of the players I've known) as being more rewarding than having most everything they want granted right from the get-go.Backstories might not be about accomplishment per se, but if you're starting off by being able to flout the conventions that everyone else has to work within, well...that's effectively the same thing. If you're the last mage in a setting with no magic, then in terms of your impact on the setting and the NPCs who inhabit it, you might as well be a high-level character. I mean, if no one could use magic, and suddenly someone came along who inarguably could, there's a case to be made that at least the local part of the game world would revolve around them to at least some degree, simply because of what they are.Which is, in my experience, why players want to overturn convention a lot of the time. Even if the GM doesn't decide to take their character's inherent qualities and turn them into the basis of the campaign, those same qualities are often things that mark their characters as being "above and beyond" everyone else, and the player tends to expect that to come up with regard to what they do. Said last mage is going to be able to show off that they're the last mage wherever they go, and will likely know that will color their interactions with every other character they encounter.I do agree that these are things which should all be reconciled in the group before play starts. I just don't think that reconciliation necessarily means that the player should necessarily be given (some degree) of what they want. I know that there's a school of thought that GMs shouldn't say no (i.e. "yes or roll for it"), but it's not one that I subscribe to.</blockquote>

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