Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7343461" data-attributes="member: 29398">Though it's a poor referee who intentionally kills off a character just because it's problematic in that way.  For better or worse, the referee has to remain neutral even if her game world will suffer for it.That said, IME if the party (and sometimes the players, but most of the time this stays in character and doesn't get too meta) feels a particular character is going to be annoying or problematic they'll often take care of matters themselves via PvP, either blatantly (walk up and kill it) or subtly (hang it out to dry sometime in a tough fight).And generally take far longer to roll up, which is a glaring red flag problem across many game systems.Also a problem, but this time the root of it can come from any or all of: system; DMs giving unwarranted plot protection; players unwilling to accept the bad with the good. Agency aside, it's not acceptable for the referee to kill off PCs who are "wandering off the reservation" merely because they are doing so.  It's the referee's job to hit that curveball.Yes, and if the referee has done a good enough job of worldbuilding then the game world should be robust enough to handle whatever the PCs throw at it.Story, on the other hand, is a different question; and here a referee has to be at all times halfway prepared to rip it up and go to plan B.First off, I far prefer character-specific goals be something that arise out of the run of play as the player/PC learns more about the game world and-or plot arcs.  Having a very vague career goal e.g. "I wanna be the richest man in the land" is cool, as it can help define a characters personailtiy and basic motivations, but anything more specific than that e.g. "I want to free my brother from his arranged marriage to the wizard's daughter" risks being ignored (or at best done as an out-of-session solo trip) if the rest of the PCs turn out not to give a damn and decline your request for help.And no, the referee should never be forced to reveal twists and secrets before their time.Agreed except for the "go home and" part: characters are rolled up in front of at least the DM, thank you, if not the other players as well.But yes, there's a bunch of somewhat generic character archetypes (both mechanical and backstory) that can fit, or be easily made to fit, into almost any game world unless said game world has something odd about it; and one hopes the DM will have made any such oddities clear up front before char-gen begins.What about a campaign that'll last over a decade but during that time there'll almost certainly be slow but steady player turnover?This is my situation, and my answer is to have in place a solidly-built world in decreasing detail the farther one gets from the core adventuring area; with such details of geography-culture-history as an average PC would know or can easily find out posted online on the game's site for any player to read (though whether they ever do or not is up to them).  As the adventuring enters or hears of new areas or learns previously-unknown historical information, that gets added in.Example: for my current campaign, part of the historical write-up is a list of all the past Emperors of the (remains of the) empire in which the game began and is still largely based.  Among them are Kallios I (ruled for several decades about 350 years ago) and Kallios II (a shorter reign about 170 years ago)...but it wasn't until some PCs actually met Kallios in the present day and learned he's a not-that-evil Vampire; that he'd been so since close to the end of his first reign; and that Kallios I, Kallios II and the person they're meeting now are all in fact one and the same that I put those particular little details next to his listings. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><side note: I'm no novel writer but I think if I ever did write any they'd center on this Kallios guy - so much story to mine around him> <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Props for the line "...open a preformed can of character..." - love it!That said, something generic is always a fine place to start; which you can then flesh out as the game goes along...and again, I posit that the future story that will arise out of the run of play is more important than the backstory anyway. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Lanefan</blockquote>

Verification