Sometimes, though, it's accurate...
I've often been accused of constantly correcting people. Its a purely automatic thing- I have to be paying close attention to NOT do it.
What do you guys think Tony Stark's (Iron Man) Intelligence Score would be?
- Thread starter TrueSpade
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Sometimes, though, it's accurate...
I've often been accused of constantly correcting people. Its a purely automatic thing- I have to be paying close attention to NOT do it.
JustinAlexander
First Post
You've got three unexamined premises here:
(1) PCs = NPCs. (Why?)
(2) This NPC should be a PC. (Why?)
(3) The chargen method for a Living campaign is the only possible chargen method for PCs. (Why?)
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but I think you'd probably benefit from examining some of those premises.
I don't think it's necessarily impossible. But you do need to take advantage of the things you have going in your favor: Namely, time and resources. As a writer, you've got days or months to figure out the stuff your hyper-intelligent protagonist takes seconds or minutes to puzzle out. You've also got the ability to tap other people to get their insight. And you've got the ability to go back and revise.
Neonchameleon
Legend
And off the top of my head I'm going to offer Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan, Alan Moore's Ozymandias and Tau, and Mike Carey's Lucifer as counterexamples. Alan Moore may be smart but he's not that smart.
And you have yet another advantage - you can start at the end and work backwards to find the character's reasoning, then fill dead ends that the protagonist would have seen in along the way. It's like starting at the center of a maze and trying to find the exit.
delericho
Legend
Because in the context of the Star Wars films (the very thing that the game is attempting to model), Luke, Han, and the rest are not NPCs. They're the protagonists of the stories, a role that in RPGs is filled by the PCs. (And, indeed, they're the very reason the classes in the game are "Jedi", "Scoundrel", and so on.)
Therefore, if a Star Wars game cannot model the heroes from the Star Wars films as PCs, then it's doing a bad job of providing the Star Wars experience - just as surely as if it failed to provide a suitable representation of lightsaber duels or starfighter combat. (And, indeed, the VP/WP rules in the first two d20 Star Wars games meant that lightsaber duels as written didn't work anything like those in the films - and so, whatever merits those games may have had, they failed as Star Wars games.)
Well, I rather doubt that the designers rolled the stats for those characters!
But I'll grant that that one is much more questionable. And, indeed, the whole premise of the 25 points is flawed - it's supposed to represent the 'average' results of 4d6-drop-lowest, but the analysis that's been done indicates that the rolled method is much closer to a 30-point buy. Even allowing for system mastery, and the ability to optimise a point-buy system, it's still likely that 28 points would be more suitable.
However, right or wrong, 25 points was the baseline that WotC chose for their "Living..." games. They decided that that would be the standard for PCs in their game. And it's also worth noting that that's already exceptional - the vast majority of NPCs use a 15-point array for generating their stats.
In which case, if they're going to exceed their own baseline, they're saying that those characters are not only exceptional, but they're exceptional even amongst PCs. But the evidence from the films just doesn't bear this out - Han Solo is a competent smuggler, but he's not a superman. ESB largely consists of him flying from one crisis to the next, failing to repair his ship, and eventually getting captured. In RotJ, he fails to be stealthy, he fails to hotwire the Imperial bunker, and he's a sufficiently competent general that he and all his troops have to be bailed out by Ewoks.
(And, yes, I know that the EU has decided that he graduated top of his class in the academy, and threw away a glittering military career, and has rebuilt the Falcon from scratch on more than one occasion, and... It seems that the EU is guilty of the same over-reverence for these characters.)
Luke, for his part, spends most of SW alternately being beaten up and running away. ESB sees him being ambushed, being shot down, failing the tests in his training, being defeated by Vader, and then finally being rescued by the very people he rushed off to save. And in RotJ he finally defeats Vader only by giving in to his anger, the very failure he was warned so strenuously about.
They have their successes, but they have a lot of failures as well. In fact, the characters actually joke about their own incompetence: "How are we doing?", "Same as always", "That bad, huh?"
(Or the prequel version: "We thought we'd come and rescue you." "Good job!")
In fact, that's a key difference between RPGs and the films and stories that form their sources - PCs in RPGs actually spend much more of their time winning than do the heroes of the books and films that inspired them. If anything, Han and Luke should be being pulled up to PC level, not placed away out of sight.
Edit: Actually... I think I've derailed this thread enough, and gone on at way too much length here about a pet peeve of mine. If you don't mind, I'm going to try to bow out at this point.
Nellisir
Hero
I think you mean Tao. And yeah, I'm still a few steps behind Lucifer. That said, I'm reading a hilarious and devastatingly critical essay by Raymond Chandler about mystery writers, the core premise of which is that mystery writers all too often require their characters to act unrealistically. Cops are imbeciles, evidence is not followed up, and motives are wildly improbable, all to make a clever puzzle.
Err, what are the writers researching, exactly? We're talking about Tony Stark, a guy who invents the future before it happens and runs around in a suit of flexible air-tight metal armor that can fly and shoot "repulsor" beams and has a force field and self-contained power (and has done so since 1963). And who turned himself into a cyborg who could summon the armor through his skin from inside of himself. He's pure science fantasy.
I think the Star Wars example is actually a decent fictional adventuring party. You start out with:
Luke, Ben, Han and Chewbecca (plus 2 Droids)
You swap out Ben for Leia.
Later you swap out Han for Lando.
The party splits apart a lot, but they all have different specialties and some unique abilities. The power gap between Han and Luke isn't all that different than that between a rogue and a caster at high levels in D&D 3.5E.
Saying that you'd like to be able to tell a story like "Star Wars" (at least the original trilogy) with the characters in it isn't an odd point of view. It's more complicated with the prequels which focus more on Darth Vader than a group of unlikely heroes.
Now, I agree that the last assumption is the weakest. But it would be pleasant to use a character like Luke or Han as an example of how the system can be used to emulate what we saw in the movies. That would be a very nice piece of system design.
I agree. But Star Wars is one of the very good fictional examples of a team story with a lot of characters involved in the plot in an important and interactive way. It fades a but by Return of the Jedi, but the original movie is a fantastic example of spotlight sharing for a team of heroes.
In the same way, I see it as a form of good superhero design to make a Justice League story (with Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lateran, and -- no kidding -- Batman) work well. It's not a requirement, but it is a strong point of system design.
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