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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5845087" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm glad you asked.To answer this question we have to answer the question, "Why do we play RPGs?"  And the obvious answer is of course, "To have fun!!! (and learn stuff, and meet people, and excercise our creativity...)"  But of course, like any true answer this immediately raises more questions, such as, "Why are RPGs fun?"  And the answer to that question is, "Because we are humans and humans like to play and in particular they like to play by imagining themselves in situations which are on some levels implusiable but on other levels plausible and they do this almost from birth without any prompting as part of the natural way that humans learn and interact with each other socially."But eventually many people tire of these imagination games because they run into a very serious problem: in them, you are good at everything.  All though its not immediately obvious, this problem saps all the joy out of childish imagination games sooner or latter.  For one thing, as people get older, they increasingly like to be challenged and to overcomes challenges in their play, but when you can imagine anything you like, then it hardly is a challenge.  Moreover, this leads to an inherent problem familiar to any child who has played cowboys and indians, storm troopers and jedi knights, cops and robbers, space marines and aliens or whatever kids play these days when their eyes aren't glued to a glowing recetangle.   And that problem is, namely, "How do you determine who shot who?"  For, if everyone is hyper-compotent you quickly have this discussion:Kid #1: I shot you!Kid #2: No, you missed.  I shot you.Kid #1: No, YOOUUU missed.  I dodged and shot your head off.Kid #2: No, you missed, I triple shot you!Kid #1: This is pointless, let's just go chase girls and comtemplate fermentation.However, a few happy souls, let's call them nerds, eventually discovered how to make the game fun, and they did so by discovering the first law of role playing: "Thou shalt not be good at everything."  This profound law meant that you couldn't always hit, and you couldn't always dodge.  Some mechanism had to exist to determine when you succeeded.  At first they took turns, but this quickly grew boring because it was predictable and unchallenging.  Then they decided to resolve conflicts with a game of 'rock paper scissors'.   Eventually they moved on to polyhedral dice and complicated rule books, and role playing as we know it was born.But every rule in every rule book and every die that has ever been thrown at every table pretty much exists to ensure Celebrim's first law is enforced.Without it, then you are reduced back to taking turns or the inability to resolve who shot who.  It's in the limitations on what you can do that all formalized games thrive.  If you could move your peices any way you wanted, chess would be boring.   The interest comes from overcoming your limitations.  RPG's are the same way.Sure but the PC can't be, because it would violate the fundamental law.  And the NPC shouldn't be, because the DM shouldn't be protagonizing himself.  So, while it may be possible in the real world for someone to be good at everything, in the game world it should never happen.Well, that's a wholly different issue.   It's perfectly possible to play as a team of superheroes were everyone on the team is better than ordinary humans in everything or even better than extraordinary humans in everything, so long as no one on the team is better than everyone else at everything.  You must be weak relative to the other players in the game at some sizable fraction of challenges to be poised by the game, so that everyone works together and everyone has fun.  And you must be weaker than some of your foes in the game for essentially the same reason.  Being better than a NPC at everything is not an issue because the NPC's are literally, as their name suggests, not playing.</blockquote>

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