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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5683273" data-attributes="member: 3820">It might, but here's the thing -- if it did, it would guide the story away from the players' choices and interpretations of the them by necessity. It makes the players' selections of characters and activities secondary to some Greater Work, and I think that's usually a mistake where RPGs are concerned. I think it's better gaming to have a theme that the GM stresses by including appropriate opportunities for thematic choices, and then sees how the players and characters react. That'll also teach you something, and I think the responses will be more genuine and heartfelt if the players aren't answering for someone else. Is that determined at character creation? Or is it mandated by the GM at a given point? Do the players pick who carries the main question at any point? In a broad sense, but do you think it's a good idea to say "we have a good and a neutral character already, you should play an evil character to embody temptation" to a player? To go back to the previous example, all our characters are good, but in very different ways (none of which are formally stamped with an alignment). Imposing these roles is clearly an artificial act on the GM's part, be it alignment-based or anything else where you ask someone to play the role of a questioner based on the abstract idea of "what questions we should ask" instead of the specific "what questions would my character ask". I think that's mainly true if the game is running as a dictation: this is the theme, this is what you would be concerned with, this is what your characters need to do. I'm not sure that's a valuable approach.</blockquote>

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