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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6343551" data-attributes="member: 4937">So lately I've really been stuck by how my idea of a character concept is completely at odds with what most people think of when they say that they have a character concept.To give an example, if you had asked me about a character concept for one of my PC's I might have said:"Well, I'm interested in exploring the idea of an elf with their inherent long life and view point, in the context of how the march of history can create cultural divisions.  I think it is interesting how in elves, one generation might be growing up two centuries or more after another.  And I'm interested in exploring the concept of 'feralness' in the context of increasing urbanity and increasing civilization.  What does an elf whose ecosystem has stopped being a wild forest become flagstone, tile and slate look like?  I'm also interested because this seems like a good opportunity, in exploring and trying to personify 'Chaotic Neutral' as a truly intellectual and philosophical position, rather than simply being treated as 'random' or 'zany' or 'chaotic evil lite' as I've so often seen.  So put that all together, and basically I'm thinking of playing this elfish street kid, the gang member if you will, with longstanding place in a thieves guild who has seen generations of human thieves come and go, and who is now finally outgrowing being a petty criminal and wondering what more there could be to the world.   He has this elfish, and highly romanticized view of crime, where he sees the goal of crime as an artistic one and he wants to transcend the bad art around him and create something beautiful and worthy of song.  I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, but I think ideally that we'd be looking whether he ends up a hero or a villain or somewhere in between.  I'm looking to find ways where I can apply the notion of theft in abstract ways so that it has an unexpected meaning, like 'stealing a country', 'stealing memory', 'stealing truth', or 'stealing a myth' or something like that.  Ideally though I'd like to be surprised by how this turns out rather than plotting it."Now, equally I could have also said, "I'm playing a CN Elven Thief/M-U."The two are in some sense the same, but they are in another sense completely different.   I'm describing the same character and both descriptions are essential to it being the same character, but one description tells me who the character is and what sort of choices he's likely to make and the other mostly just tells me what the character can do (especially if I'm treating CN as a mechanical marker of some ability, like evading detect good/evil, etc.).  For simplicity, let's call the first "Who you are" (WYA) and the second "What can you do" (WCYD).  My observation is that increasingly players are quite sophisticated in devising WCYD concepts but increasingly less sophisticated in devising WYA concepts.  Indeed, many never seem to get around to WYA at all, which seems like it ought to be all right if we are playing a dungeon crawl circa 1978 but at the same time that is happening the writer's of adventures seem to want a literary story where it ought to matter quite highly WYA.  But all we are providing for the players is greater and greater depth to WCYD and almost no advice for talking the problem of WYA.First, do you think you prioritize WCYD over WYA when you think about concept and creating a character.   Secondly, discuss whether you think I'm right in observing that WCYD is dominating over WYA even in systems that seem like the designer had intended to avoid that problem (FATE and its derivatives for example).   I'd cite for example Burning Wheel as a system that seemed to want to prioritize WYA but which seems like from the examples of play and how I've heard it discussed to just end up mostly making WYA color for the WCYD.  Dynamically tagging your character seems to me to be highly prone to this problem, because if the player prioritizes (unconsciously) WCYD in concept, then the tags are going to prioritize WCYD.   Interesting WYA tags might not even come up and the player might not even be able to imagine them.Secondly, describe some examples of systems that you think very successfully encourage you to consider WYA in a thoughtful way.  In the case of tagging systems, what systems force you to think of WYA over WCYD.  What about them worked to change the way that you thought about playing the game.  What sort of guidance do you think you could provide at the system level in the case of systems that weren't hard defined by their setting (which seems to be the usual method of enforcing WYA)?   Speaking as a player, what is the ideal page count do you think for that sort of guidance - enough to really fire the imagination, but not so much you get bored by tedious detail that is stopping you from jumping into a game.</blockquote>

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