Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 8955480" data-attributes="member: 86653">Don’t write a campaign. Write a world filled with monsters, people, factions, and adventures. Fill out a hex map and let the PCs explore. Write scenario hooks for your world and let the players pick and choose their way through them. If the player writes a good backstory, it will have built-in scenario hooks for you to use. Bad backstories are OC fan fiction. If they’re a good player, they will always bite those hooks. Bad players write backstories without hooks or refuse to bite the hooks they wrote into their character’s backstory. That’s easy enough. Purely random generation with no backstory or a random backstory and/or scenario hook. That would really suck. Pre-gens, nothing but pre-gens…You could eliminate the same list of stuff with purely random creation and bringing back player skill. Include relationship and motivations as part of random generation. As long as each level gives the PC something, it’s not a dead level. Optimizers tend to call levels without huge jumps in power “dead” when they still get things like hit points, to-hit bonuses, spell slots, etc. when they’re no such thing. The “useless” character is a function of relying too much on the game’s mechanics to handle everything and not enough on player skill. A character without huge bonuses is considered “useless,” when it’s just lack of player skill and imagination. I’ve seen (and played a few) so-called “useless” characters who left the rest of the party in the dust just because the player simply decided to actually try instead of just throwing up their hands and giving up on the “useless” character.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="overgeeked, post: 8955480, member: 86653"] Don’t write a campaign. Write a world filled with monsters, people, factions, and adventures. Fill out a hex map and let the PCs explore. Write scenario hooks for your world and let the players pick and choose their way through them. If the player writes a good backstory, it will have built-in scenario hooks for you to use. Bad backstories are OC fan fiction. If they’re a good player, they will always bite those hooks. Bad players write backstories without hooks or refuse to bite the hooks they wrote into their character’s backstory. That’s easy enough. Purely random generation with no backstory or a random backstory and/or scenario hook. That would really suck. Pre-gens, nothing but pre-gens… You could eliminate the same list of stuff with purely random creation and bringing back player skill. Include relationship and motivations as part of random generation. As long as each level gives the PC [I]something[/I], it’s not a dead level. Optimizers tend to call levels without huge jumps in power “dead” when they still get things like hit points, to-hit bonuses, spell slots, etc. when they’re no such thing. The “useless” character is a function of relying too much on the game’s mechanics to handle everything and not enough on player skill. A character without huge bonuses is considered “useless,” when it’s just lack of player skill and imagination. I’ve seen (and played a few) so-called “useless” characters who left the rest of the party in the dust just because the player simply decided to actually try instead of just throwing up their hands and giving up on the “useless” character. [/QUOTE]

Verification