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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7378994" data-attributes="member: 29398">[MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] has already nicely covered some things I would otherwise have said, so I'm just going to hit a few specific points here... Well, let's face it - it's not very often that much characterization comes out of what are in effect largely mechanical action declarations.  "This is a logical place for a secret door so I'll search for one" tells us maybe a bit about the character, but mostly that's just a simple Search declaration - not much in it; and it's unfair to point at this as a reason for any lack of characterization or personality.What we don't see in this example is all the lead-up showing how the rogue got to this point.  The agenda and reasons for being here would very likely have long since been established.  What the rogue thinks and feels at that particular moment would of course be up to the player to narrate on the fly, should she so desire; as would the decision of what if anything to sacrifice or trade off in order to achieve her immediate goal of stealthily getting into the castle.On a broader scale, characterization and personality mostly tends to develop during what we might consider as "downtime": while sitting around the campfire getting to know the other PCs, or via things done while in town between adventures.  Maxperson's wine-guzzling Dwarf is a fine example - the whole wine business is rarely if ever going to come up while in the field, but it's known to be an ongoing part of the Dwarf's character.  Agreed.There's very few if any RPGs out there where the characters don't in some mechanical form get better at what they do over the course of their careers; and "1st-level characters" is as good a term as any to represent those who are just starting out on their career/path/journey/whatever. Maybe, maybe not.  In an open sandbox-style game the PCs/players might blunder into something that's nowhere near level-appropriate!And this is something I just don't understand no matter how you try to explain it: why does it matter?In most RPGs combat mechanics are more or less vastly different from exploration mechanics and-or social mechanics; and any attempt to unify the three things into one overarching set of mechanics is an absolute mistake, and doomed to failure.The players get to make up stuff about their characters, and the DM gets to make up stuff about the world those characters inhabit.  Seems simple enough to me. <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=":)" />Well, that might depend on the specific goals the players set out.  If, for example, a player set out pacifism between races as a goal, a DM might introduce the Caves as a shining example of a situation where multiple races of sentient creatures live more or less peacefully in the same small valley...and theat player's/PC's challenge would then become one of stopping the party from killing everything in there. <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>

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