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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 2418008" data-attributes="member: 10201">We don't disagree. I wanted to try playing a character consumed by hate, as it's an emotion/motivation that i really don't understand in real life. I've never been able to hate, really. [Another long-standing goal is to play a character driven by greed--something else that is largely foreign to me.] And i wanted to just let fate unravel and see what happened. Sure, i set him into the story at a particular point, where really only a few goals were likely (success or frustration), but other things could've happened, and i still didn't know how i'd get there. It wasn't about the story, it was about playing the character. In this case , acharacter backed into a corner with not a lot of options, and a single-mindedness.Have you seen Babylon 5? One of the things we know from, i think, episode #1, is that two of the major characters are going to die with their hands locked around each others' throats. Yet, how we get to that point (which is more scripted than anything i had in mind) was still fascinating, compelling drama. And, by the time we see it in context, it has a totally different meaning than was first implied.And, in fairness, i'm sure that's what the GM did. I'm not trying to blame him. My point is that a game that had explicit mechanisms for talking about narrative goals would've prevented the problem. And, honestly, it wasn't the letting my character succeed that was half as anticlimactic (though that certainly was a hollow victory) as putting him in a situation where the Big Bad had essentially already been defeated by forces completely outside of the PCs' realms of influence and without our knowledge, so that i was essentially just doing mop-up.I may have been unclear. I didn't create a character whose goals i didn't want to accomplish. I created a character where the journey to the goal was the interesting part, not the goal itself. Think of it like this: you want to prove to yourself that you can win a marathon. You train, you buy equipment, you diet, you train some more, you're all prepared. The day of the marathon comes, and due to some fluke nobody else shows up, so they give you the gold medal, without even having you run the race. Would you be satisfied? Similarly, i *did* want my character no succeed--though i didn't expect him to, it was certainly a goal--but if he succeeded, it should've been through hard work, and lots of interesting gameplay. As is, i succeeded in killing an "archenemesis" that i didn't actually have any in-game interactions with, making the whole "he's my archnemesis" thing feel really contrived.Yeah, and the GM could've exercised any of those options. He didn't. There was no one behind the Big Bad--just unrelated other threats. We'd already bent the rules a bit to make the character; he was disinclined to bend them further to keep him around after accomplishing his goal. Also, putting other people onto his list would've required completely rewriting his background.You may be right--it may have simply been a poor choice of PC. Mind you, he *was* inclined to accept multiple plot hooks and reasons for adventure--he just prioritized one of them. So long as the Big Bad wasn't in evidence (which had been a reasonable amount of the time), he'd've been perfectly willing to do other stuff. He was doing other, completely unrelated, stuff when the Big Bad showed up. I very carefully crafted his personality and background so as to avoid that one-trick-pony pitfall. Up to that point in the campaign (~1.5yrs), we had *always* been either facing that Big Bad (or his minions/machinations), or dealing with something else because he was nowhere to be found. At no point, prior to the introduction of my new PC, had the group ever chosen to go after a different threat/goal while dealing with that Big Bad was an option. So it simply hadn't occurred to me that they ever would.</blockquote>

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