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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 2220172" data-attributes="member: 99">I understand why you would draw some of your conclusions and some of them hold a certain validity but I'm not sure I see the "equal share" issue from the same philisophical point of view.  Let me 'splain...I started this campaign differently from how we've done things in the past.  Historically we do a character creation session sometime between a couple weeks and a month prior to campaign kickoff.  We make our characters (more or less) and start putting together background ideas, not necessarily in that order.  For the next few weeks we would e-mail the GM, fleshing out the backgrounds even more until we finally all came to the table with very complete ideas of our PC's backstory, personality and goals.  This started to become a total pain in the butt.The problem was that each player had built these guys up so much in our minds that we had very firm ideas of what they would and would not do.  And these ideas did not always work well with the rest of the party.  One guy would decide that his character's goal was to strive for peace between the Orcs and Humans and another would swear vengeance against the Orcs who killed his family.  It would seem to take forever before we could get over our PC's personalities to actually function as a party.So this time around I told everyone that we would spend the first two hours of the session making characters and then start playing.  Anybody who wrote more than half a page of character background would be given an XP penalty (this was mostly a joke but it made my point).  The characters got made and played and their personalities were established in game instead of prior to the game.  This has worked very well for us.But this change in the start of the campaign has not changed who the players are and how they function.  The Casual Gamer types (the Barbarian's player is one of them) sit back and just enjoy the game taking place at the session.  And the Storyteller/Method Actor types (I'm using Robin Laws' player type designations) are e-mailing me every other day about what they are doing during the downtime or how they are trying to construct new allegiances to various power groups and so forth.  These are the players who drive the campaign and the Casual Gamers are more than happy to sit back and enjoy the ride.Does this mean that I'm more likely to build plotlines and story around the Storyteller and Method Actors than the Casual Gamers?  Hell yes.  But it isn't because I like the Casual Gamers less than I like the other guys.  Quite the contrary.  I like them and value them as players and (perhaps most importantly) consider their playstyle valid.  And what they don't want is to have the story revolve around them.  If it did then it would force them to work more and think more and make decisions that they don't want forced upon them.  That's not why they are at the session.  They're just there to hang out and have fun.Now, geting back to my original point, this doesn't mean that I'm going to capriciously kill their characters.  I would never fudge against a character.  And, in fact, I don't fudge for them either.  But if I were the type of GM to fudge rolls in favor of the PC's then I admit that I'd probably be more inclined to do so for a PC that I'd built a lot of the campaign around than one that was just along for the ride.The final point I'll make is that I'll just bet this wouldn't be a big deal to the players involved either.  When the Barbarian got killed most of the other players (particularly the Storyteller/Method Actor types) said (essentially), "Dude, that totally sucks!" to which the player of the Barbarian said (essentially), "Oh pshaw!  It's just a game!  Besides, now I get to make another character."</blockquote>

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