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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8627412" data-attributes="member: 82106">I cannot say how it is played elsewhere. The 2 longish 5e campaigns I played in mostly involved quite a bit of fairly gamist play. I mean, my 2 primary characters in those games DID have BIFTs and obviously a background, and I sometimes leveraged that. However I would say it was never a focus of play! IIRC the first game I set a goal for my character and tried to center the action on that (obviously the other players had their own agendas) but there were no profound dramatic needs involved, just "I'm doing this thing." In fact a lot of the adventuring was us being trailblazed into various scenarios that were at best very loosely related to anything our PCs really cared about. My character's entire goal was completely undermined as a result of one of them, and all his progress was just removed without so much as I got to even wager it against something. It was just plain pure gamist play with a veneer of characterization.The second campaign had a bunch of elements that drew off of my character's background (as well as stuff related to other PCs) but it wasn't like I said "I want to focus on THIS." I would say, in fairness, the GM probably would have elided it in favor of something else if I'd said "I am uninterested in this." I worked it to relate to my PC's personality and issues and whatnot, and it was OK, but nothing like really a narrative focus. Again, I would characterize it as gamist play (IE we were trying to gain levels as a main focus) with characterization being more just a side thing. Now, maybe other people interpret these things differently, I'd have to ask the other players in those games, but I don't think so. 5e IME is a mechanically improved game over, say, 2e, but in terms of what playing it involves, there's really no appreciable difference, and BIFTs and Inspiration are just grafted on there and don't really do much, if any, real work.</blockquote>

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