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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MDSnowman" data-source="post: 1552470" data-attributes="member: 6255">I am the friend in this story (I would have anwsered sooner, but I like to sleep late and watch Law and Order in the afternoons  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/paranoid.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":uhoh:" title="Paranoid    :uhoh:" data-shortname=":uhoh:" /> ). When Alzrius described this book to me it seemed like someone had suddenly entirely thrown out the very concept of playing a character, in favor of playing someone who will consistently do 2.4 points more damage while swingng a long sword. When I create a character I start with the characterthen I go back and work from that. For example I play in a sunday night game, and anyone who plays it will tell you that when I first started my character, Gara, was very optimized... 12th level fighter, and if he was any more specialized with his fullblade the DM probablly wouldn't have felt bad revoking all his other weapon proficienies. Now after a few sessions I realized just how shallow he was as a character, he was utterly useless unless he was within five feet of a bad guy and swinging away. All this is to say that I understand the desire tio min/max your character... and that doesn't bother me, but I realized a crossed the line when I made Gara. He had less personality than the fullblade he was swinging. I started talking with my DM and we came to a decision. Gara was going to get possessed by a demon, and would go from being a Fighter 12 to being a Fighter 10/ Tainted Warrior 3 (thank god for level ups) I didn't do that because he might get a natural armor bonus to cover his somewhat lacking AC, or because I'll get to cast firestorm at level 8. No I did it because while making wisdom checks to retain his sanity may be a dangerous prospect, it's worth the effects in the story. Suddenly Gara finds his comrades in awe of his will, but now just waiting for the other shoe to drop and him to become homocidal. Meanwhile Gara gets to explore himself and question how his own ammorality may have caused this to happen to him.Bottom line: I like rules, I've seen Role Playing without rules before and it always seems to degenerate into "I shot you!" followed by "Nuh uh!". D&D has rules.. and that's a great thing. But when you start making those rules more important than the story you're telling you've missed the point of role playing as opposed to Videogames and the like [Yes I love Final Fantasy games, but I play them for different reasons than I play D&D]. The reason that you see so many people up in arms about "roll playing" is because of products like this, or half-assed dicussions of a fighter's place in society next to 200+ pages of feats, prestige classes, and new equipment. Yet those half assed discussions and loads of feats and prestige classes are at the same time better than number crunching to make a more efficent character. At least with the feats and prestige classes there's more chance for your haracter to be one of a kind. If you're following a spread sheet through character generation however you're going to notice every character you play looking very very similar. My reaction was half born of this fact, and half born of the fact that someone I respect as much as Alzrius thought this was a good thing.</blockquote>

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