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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6335563" data-attributes="member: 4937">But you are going to anyway...BUT.... you don't really believe that because there is a big but coming.Yup.It's always interesting to see how easily players break to one side or the other of this question as if there was an easy pat answer that always works for all plots and all player ambitions and behavior.And yet to one extent or the other its the only game going.  Even so much as choosing a game system and a setting dictates where the game is going and the players are expected to follow along.   I've yet to meet the GM that allows each player to create a character using a different rules set - one guy has a Jedi from D6 Star Wars, another a 6th gen Tremere vampire, another has a HERO system superhero, one guy has a GURP 100 pt TL 7 police officer, and another is playing Donald Duck stated up from Toon.  It might be an interesting experiment, and it would probably make a great comic book in the right hands, but I don't think it actually happens.  But what sort of game is possible is at least in part dictated by system.   Further, system generally informs setting (as a necessary consequence) and further the setting itself precludes and dictates the sort of characters you play.   A mutated cacti martial artist is a great Gamma World character and works pretty well as a PC in game inspired by China Mieville's fantasy works (or other weird fantasy), but is a NPC in a Chill campaign and probably has no place at all in 17th century historical pastiche swashbuckling setting.   And even when in theory you could fit it in because there is enough weirdness going on to allow it, you don't always have a game system that allows for it in a way that is balanced with other character options.Any GM that doesn't realize he's dictating the game in a myriad of ways is a DM that is blind, and any player that doesn't realize he has some obligation to follow along is heading for a train wreck.   The real question isn't whether the GM is dictating the game or whether the player should follow along, but what sort of demands that each player can make on the other's game and enjoyment of the game are really reasonable.   It's a trivial matter to postulate a character concept that offends a GM's sensibilities in a way you'd be sympathetic about, we just have to start breaking the grandma rule to discuss the details.   Once we establish that there is an actual limit to the demands one player can make on the other, all the rest is just negotiation.   Pretending that there is this one absolute rule and one side of the negotiation you have to come down on to make games work well (or better, or at all), is to be really blind to the actual nature of the game.</blockquote>

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