NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6119558" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] answered this - it's part and parcel of bogstandard fanatsy tropes (knights, nobles, peasants etc).This is another point where flavour and mechanical detail can come apart. For instance, in a Conan or pirate game, gaining loot is a big incharacter motivation for the PC, and the PC is going to haul it all out. But I could easily imagine playing such a game where, at the table, loot is not such a big deal at all, because the point of the game lies somewhere else (say, swashbuckling in the pirate game, and swords-and-sandling in the Conan one). So there would be quick narrations of hauling out loot, but little or no tracking of it as a mechanical matter.Because it's about situation, not just setting. The GM Hussar critised tried to turn the desert into situation although, from Hussar's point of view, there were no dramatic stakes. The siege, on the other hand, takes the city - a situation in which the players are already invested - and intensifies the dramatic stakes.I am 100% with Hussar. This is exactly the sort of "crazy wizard did it" that I had in mind in my post upthread. It's not as if someone created this family, as NPCs in the game, and then extrapolated out their behaviour - "Hey, I know, they might have built this castle and labyrinth for experimenting with ancient Sueloise magics." Rather, Rob Kuntz (? relying on memory here) wanted a dungeon, and came up with one, and then NPCs and backstory were created to give it a home in the setting.This is exactly the sort of metagaming in the deployment of NPCs that I was describing upthread - NPCs and their motivations are created so as to supply the game with situations that the players can confront via their PCs; situations are not being extrapolated from pre-given NPCs.</blockquote>

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