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="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9252339" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, what you and [USER=6684958]@bloodtide[/USER] and [USER=8461]@Alzrius[/USER] et al have made apparent to me is that the ACTUAL objection, the root of where we differ, is purely an agenda thing. You all seem to be thinking of playing an RPG purely in terms of a sort of 'gauntlet', where everyone starts out with minimal (or even non-existent) privileges to violate the default rules of play, which are focused on some mix of sim and maybe gamist considerations, but are often cast in terms of regulating what fiction is allowed (IE you have to reduce the orc to 0 hit points and then you must describe it as dead). Benefits are earned strictly through a demonstration of skilled play. Now, that has been filtered through the more 'trad' 2e/5e kind of approaches that emphasize embedding story arcs in the prepped fiction and potentially some degree of GM management of outcomes for 'more fun' (and I'm not trying to fight with any of you about the degree or nature of exactly which things each group considers OK, it will vary).The point is, you all object to the 'Last Mage' not because it breaks some hypothetical and probably undefinable 'consistency', but because it allocates some sort of perceived benefit to a given character, and thus it scans in this sort of post-Gygaxian concept of play as 'unfair'. Meanwhile I think I can speak for a number of posters here, at least myself, whom I have some familiarity with in saying that this sort of 'fairness', and the related concept of "every single thing you get to write on your sheet had to be earned from the GM" just doesn't apply in the way we think about play at all. Not to say I don't hold that the various PC's should probably all have equivalent 'plot power' and it would probably be an issue in most games if one player's character was the focus of play. However, I don't think players 'earn stuff', I think the reason why in, say, BitD, we start out with more limited abilities is mostly because it provides room for the story to evolve. If your crew was Tier 5 on day one, then where's the narrative going to go with that? I also grant that we willingly engage in a varying amount of gamist play and BitD DOES engage that, but I feel like that is at most only one of several considerations. Like, it isn't that important if one PC has a mechanism that can much more easily kill bad guys than another (Takeo kind of had that, I could ALMOST always defeat whatever the current bad guy was in a swordfight). However, being able to get into that fictional position is more important in BitD, and doing so without the GM unleashing catastrophic consequences, etc. For any given character type in that game there's always some way to get what you want. We all will never really see things the same, as FUNDAMENTALLY different goals produce different value judgments on play and rules. So, this 'Last Mage' example, to me its just an interesting character concept. Yeah, by D&D rules that character might be a bit more effective than others, but that's normal for D&D! (despite its neo-Gygaxian elements, oddly enough).</blockquote>

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