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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8659335" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, though it does tend to help build a portrait of your PC. So, for instance The Wizard had all his powers invested in a staff (basically because it was a way to game the point system). That both begged the question of what the nature and origin of this staff was (which figured into a couple adventures IIRC, though its been so long I cannot say much about the details) AND of course led to "Oh, and if the staff is stolen/lost/broken then the character is hosed!" which was an obvious flaw for the GM to latch onto!Right, and I think we even got that back in the day. We were actually pretty friendly to the idea of building more elaborate backstories and whatnot than a lot of groups (maybe because by the early 80's we were old enough to play in a bit more mature way). I recall that the Traveler campaign I ran at this time also had characters that the players had fleshed out backstories for to a higher degree than normal. Like the Merchant character's Free Trader wasn't just some random ship. In the first adventure he was searching for his father and his father's ship, which they found drifting frozen in space. Between recovering it, fighting with the insurance company and the bank, repairing the damage, etc. he ended up with basically a standard mortgage! This was the sort of play we were always after. Champions was pretty good, though I guess the guy that owned it lost interest or something. Its like we ALMOST understood Forge-esque narrative play, but not quite. Like I said before about Apocalypse World, until someone constructed the conceptual framework, the leap to a different method of play could not happen, not even if you had a game that could in principle do it. I think this is similar to how D&D itself required a conceptual leap, all the ideas existed already, but when I saw D&D in action was the first time it all came together in my mind, the full concept of an actual RPG. People often discount, or fail to recognize at the time, conceptual jumps like this, but they are real things. They OFTEN come with a new set of terminology.</blockquote>

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