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="loverdrive" data-source="post: 9244194" data-attributes="member: 7027139">Even without going into the depths of "should we count not obstructing as support", the way 3e, 4e, 5e works does actively obstruct character-driven play.The most basic thing:There's a Cleric. Over the course of the campaign, she sees full coffers of church officials, she sees how her benevolent god constantly looks the other way when someone is suffering, she glimpses into the cosmic game of chess between the gods. By level 10, she is sick of uncaring gods who can't possibly comprehend the lives of mortals, she is sick of the cosmic chess where people of flesh and blood she cares about are nothing but pawns, she is sick of all of it. She throws her holy symbol into the dirt and spits of it....and congratulations! She just turned into a pumpkin and can't play the game anymore, because anything that is challenging for a cleric without spells is a complete breeze for the rest of the characters, and anything that is challenging for the rest of the character is a death sentence for a cleric without spells.Because characters consistently outgrow previous threats, you can't have a lot of pretty basic ways a character can develop (cleric abandoning faith, warlock going into a confrontation with their patron, fighter turning into a medic) without quite unwieldy workarounds that either at least somewhat diminish the weight of the character-defining choice that was made or create a lot of weird implications that necessitate a retcon or both.Beyond that, at the most fundamental level, party-based game inherently constraints ability of the characters to pursue their own goals, because one character can't feasibly do much, and then everyone needs to agree to do thing [X]. Good luck with that, if the thing [X] is unrelated or detrimental or both to the common goal of the party.</blockquote>

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