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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pbartender" data-source="post: 5647876" data-attributes="member: 7533">Sure...  but he same applies.  If you intend on staying in that completely new field, you begin to train and retrain (multi-classing and retraining!) so you can excel in that field instead of your old one.  You may hang onto a few of your old skills that provide an unexpected benefit, but much of your previous education may fall away, unused and forgotten, to make room for fresh knowledge.  In the long run, you end up in pretty much the same place...  A character statistically optimized to be a professional adventurer and hero, but with, perhaps just a little odd but still useful baggage on the side.  Think about it this way...  The penalty for failing at heroic adventuring (whether voluntarily or reluctantly) is very often death.  Why would any one caught up in adventuring for any length of time not strive to improve their odds of surviving by improving the skill and abilities that are best suited their particular adventuring role?The problem with that premise is that many RPGs, and certainly most modern main-stream RPGs, presume that the characters are heroes to start with, even at their weakest and lowest levels.  They aren't designed to handle that trope.It's truly difficult to build a character that represents the "the reluctant hero, the hero who isn't really cut out for the job but has to manage and grow beyond their limitations" in most games.  It's a popular trope in fiction, because the author has sole and complete control over the outcome of the story.  It's a less viable trope in RPGs, where the character has to deal with the other characters, NPCs, monsters and the campaign world in general, which are all outside the control of the reluctant hero's player.Unless, a DM has geared his game toward handling reluctant, unprepared heroes, such characters will tend to die quick, painful and unlamented deaths.That's why each ensuing edition of D&D has given players slightly more powerful characters at 1st level...  It's because no one is clamoring to be less skillful and die more often at lower levels.</blockquote>

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