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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MrMyth" data-source="post: 6462917" data-attributes="member: 61155">So, is the requirement simply having a 'good enough story' to sell you on? What if they had a better story? "I sold my soul to Ashardalon, a fiendish dragon, in return for the power to avenge my parents. But once successful, I grew to regret my dark pact. Until Vanathar, Exarch of Bahamut, offered me a chance for redemption, and I swore myself to the service of Bahamut. I began to find balance between the darkness and the light within me - and one day learned why such powerful figures were interested me. The blood of dragons ran in my veins, and if I could unlock the power of its magic, perhaps I could finally have control over my own fate..."All of that would seem coherent from a story standpoint. Would that make it more acceptable than a story that you felt wasn't well-designed? Would it matter if someone was coming into the campaign at a high-level with all of this as backstory, or if this developed organically over the course of a game? In a game I play in, we actually have something awfully close to this - a Fey Pact Warlock / Wild Mage Sorcerer. They didn't choose that combo for power reasons or min-maxing. The character is supposed to be the half-fey child of their former character, who was left in the feywild, and grew up in accelerated time while wandering the planes, before finally calling upon their fey connections to enter the mortal world and take up their mother's cause. Thus, a character with fey powers and wild magic. In terms of mechanics, the player just wanted someone who could cast some cool spells to hypotize enemies, and then hit them with a big glowing sword. They *could* go Eldritch Knight, but that misses out on the fey element, the chaos of wild magic, the coolness factor of a pact blade, and the selection of enchantment spells that they were interested in. They didn't want those features because they thought it would be a killer combo in every fight. They wanted them because they thought it would make for a fun character to play - and made sense with their vision of the character. Sure, I can understand feeling like many folks choose a weird multiclass blend of classes entirely for power reasons. But that doesn't mean it is the only reason one might do so. More importantly - do you impose the same sort of scrutiny and restrictions on single-class characters? Do you require the party wizard to justify why they learned the spells they know? If the Evoker happens to choose Sleep because it is an effective spell at low levels (as compared to a damaging spell), do you deny them that option? Do you reserve the option to veto feats if they don't match the background for a character? It just seems like a dangerous road to start down, deciding what is or is not an appropriate story, and what decision can and cannot be made on that basis. If you feel something would legitimately be unbalanced and problematic in the game, I get that. But declaring that the creative inspirations of other people are irrelevant if they don't mean your own personal standards... for myself, at least, I'd be real worried if I had a DM that took that approach.</blockquote>

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