What people want and what makes them happy rarely coincide.

[Swordslinger]

You don't get to play the genre card because it doesn't apply.

People still read stuff like Homer, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Robert Heinlein because - through both time and genre - the characters still act like people. The stories are about the same stuff over and over and over again... And it's not swords.

But D&D is intrinsically about obtaining magical gear and special stuff. And it's about finding a bunch of stuff in dungeons your character wasn't expecting to find.

It's an important distinction because comic books are not about gear acquisition at all. Comic heroes start with their gear and stick with it. D&D is just not like that at all. If your enemy was using the great axe of thundering, next adventure you may kill him and now you will be using the axe. The axe is not something you'll leave on the floor as a comic book character would.

Change, in both abilities and gear, is an expected norm for a D&D character.

By setting yourself to one weapon, you're putting yourself in opposition of change, which like it or not, is a key principle of D&D.

In 3E anyway, you go from being a mundane warrior like Aragorn to some guy in full plate who flies around all the time like a superhero and likely has the ability to teleport a short distance. With such a giant genre shift, it seems silly to me that people would be so committed to sticking to one weapon.

Once Zorro starts flying around like Superman he ain't Zorro anymore regardless. Why does anyone care if he's still using a rapier?

[Nihilistic_Impact]

Because he still needs to slash the letter Z into the bad guy's shirts and cut open the damsel's blouse.

[Username17]

Demanding that your next weapon be a katana is exactly as bullshit as demanding that when you reincarnate that you come back as a dwarf.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

Demanding that your next weapon be a katana is exactly as bullshit as demanding that when you reincarnate that you come back as a dwarf.

-Username17

Demanding that the GM gets to decide what weapon you wield is bullshit, period. That's a sign of a damned control-freak GM who probably has trouble letting players decide anything for themselves.

[Kaelik]

Demanding that your next weapon be a katana is exactly as bullshit as demanding that when you reincarnate that you come back as a dwarf.

-Username17

Demanding that the GM gets to decide what weapon you wield is bullshit, period. That's a sign of a damned control-freak GM who probably has trouble letting players decide anything for themselves.

No one is saying the DM decides what weapon you wield, just which weapon you find. And it's mostly who you fight that does that.

So what you are saying is that it's not fair for the filthy mean DM to choose what you reincarnate as, and I agree, which is why there is a table that does it, because it's also bullshit when you demand that the reincarnate make you a dwarf.

[hyzmarca]

If picking a weapon is critically important for a character, shouldn't that be the player's choice?

Kill Bill emulates a great many genres and The Bride always uses a weapon appropriate to the genre it is emulating at the moment. But the Hattori Hanzo Katana is symbolic of her transformation from Bill's Protege to a master in her on right. In that regard her weapon choice is dependent on Bill's. If Bill wielded an axe made by the greatest axe smith who ever lived, then The Bride would have to get an even better axe from the same axe maker.

So what you are saying is that it's not fair for the filthy mean DM to choose what you reincarnate as, and I agree, which is why there is a table that does it, because it's also bullshit when you demand that the reincarnate make you a dwarf.

Of course it's bullshit. If you're going to demand that you reincarnate as a specific race, the proper choice is Prismatic Dragon. Or if you're using 2e Spelljammer material a Stellar Dragon.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Of course it's bullet. If you're going to demand that you reincarnate as a specific race, the proper choice is Prismatic Dragon. Or if you're using 2e Spelljammer material a Stellar Dragon.

Or, if you're using the third party even-more-complete joke book, a Nexus Dragon.

[Fuchs]

Demanding that your next weapon be a katana is exactly as bullshit as demanding that when you reincarnate that you come back as a dwarf.

-Username17

Demanding that the GM gets to decide what weapon you wield is bullshit, period. That's a sign of a damned control-freak GM who probably has trouble letting players decide anything for themselves.

No one is saying the DM decides what weapon you wield, just which weapon you find. And it's mostly who you fight that does that.

And the DM decides what enemies are around, and what weapons they use.

[Josh_Kablack]

Sometimes, restrictions on what type of stories are allowable inspire creativity that results in the creation of enduring myths. From Chuck Jones explaining how studio cost pressures and minimum short lengths caused the Loony Tunes crew to becoming masters at producing cartoons that were exactly six minutes long Citation, to Stan Lee working within censorship of the Comics Code Citation to more modern endeavors, like Lauren Faust having to meet current day E&I guidelines. Citation


But getting back to gaming, here are some discussion of how various systems support the general archetypes being argued about:

• Core 3e D&D with treasure drops from random tables and suggested marketplace GP limits and sale prices does a pretty poor job of supporting either type of character over the course of more than a few levels. As characters level up, they face tougher opponents and need weapons with higher plusses to fight them effectively - and if you roll on the treasure tables, such characters will usually find a weapon or two that's adequate for the job - but what type of weapon it is will be determined by random charts. Now, even if you are on the side that says "yay, that's great", there's still a major problem, because in 3e feats once chosen are a sunk cost and 3e D&D has a boatload of feats like Exotic Weapon Proficiency, Weapon Focus, Weapon Specialization, and Improved Critical that work only for one single weapon as well as other feats like Weapon Finesse, Power Attack, Improved Shield Bash and 2 Weapon Fighting that work notably better for a given category of weapons than for other weapons. These feats are a notable expenditure of character resources and a character who has sunk XWP, Weapon Focus, Greater Weapon Focus, Weapon Spec and Improved Crit into bastard sword as well as picked up 2 Weapon Fighting and Improved Shield Bash in order to get an extra attack vs low AC targets is mechanically right to hang on to his +2 weapons than to pick up that +4 Shock Greatsword from the dragon horde. Conversely, if it is instead a +4 Magical Beast Bane Greatsword, and the party is hunting the Tarrasque - than that character is mechanically wrong to keep using the weapon set he sunk 7 whole feats into.
  Amazingly, 4e manages to do the same thing, perhaps worse. 4e somewhat mitigates the feat sink problem with its retraining rules, but they are inadequate when a character has sunk more than one feat into a particular weapon, but as discussed elsewhere, the rules on 4e treasure acquisition are so nonsensical as to be incomprehensible, and the harsher buyback price for selling items means that characters should avoid as though it was a Gaming Den argument about CMwYCPHtC.
• Tome D&D with the RoW combat feats and BoG scaling enhancements in place mitigates a lot --albeit not all-- of the problems with standard D&D on both sides here. The Tome [Combat] feats pretty much eliminate feats that apply to only one single weapon, although there are still plenty that apply or apply better to given groups of weapons (2 weapon fighting, Combat School, Phalanx Fighter, Point-Blank Shot, etc), and it's a lot less likely for a character to stack a mess of Tome combat feats on top of each other just to fight in a way that just works with a given weapon (or small group of weapons) Thus, it's not as foolish for a character to pick up a found more-magical weapon that's outside of their Combat School as it is to do so with Core Feats.
  With BoG items in place, the only differences in how magic a given weapon is are: is it magic at all? what does it do aside from having a level-appropriate bonus? and is it an artifact? So it's a lot less likely for players to have to run the math on whether getting another +1 to hit and damage is worth giving up their Weapon Spec and Improved Critical feats here. While a BoG Wounding Weapon is a costlier effect than a Lesser Time Distortion Weapon, there's just not a clear mathematical answer to which one your character will be better off using and a player is thus free to decide to go with either on whatever grounds they want - whether that be the weapon's form factor, the character's personality, the weapon resale value, the rule of cool, or random die roll.
  However, these only mitigate and reduce incidences of the issues with core 3e and 4e D&D , they do not eliminate them. It's still possible for a character with 2wf and Combat School and only non-magic weapons to find a notable magic 2-handed weapon outside of their combat school, which will be a waste of 2 [Combat Feats] and just generally inferior for them to wield, and yet indispensable against certain types of DR.
• CHAMPIONS point buy pretty much only supports characters who fight the same way throughout most of their adventuring careers (changing only due to radiation accidents and major crossover events) If you want an attack that is a weapon, you pay points for that, if you want an attack that's a unarmed strike or heat-ray vision, you pay points for that. And in most cases it's not efficient to advance by buying major new types of attacks, unless you already paid points for a Utility Belt or Quiver of Trick Arrows - in which case it's cheap to add one more utility or trick. Now in the course of a single fight, you might get disarmed of your Norse Storm Hammer, or you might steal someone else's trick arrow to use it against them, but the rules set outright enforces genre emulation by saying that you cannot carry such things into the next fight unless you pay character points to do so. Where it gets a little weird is that the CHAMPs ruleset can support "guy who fights with anything" as an archetype. Daredevil's nemesis Bullseye has a power that's something like BLAST, OIF: Any handy object of appropriate throwing side and at least as hard as wood - allowing him to do meaningful damage with an impossibly wide range of throwing weapons. However the cost structure for such abilities are handled in a way that such a character will always fight with a variety of objects and never settle on a single one. Bullseye is *always* going to find weird things to throw for damage and he's never going to take up swordfighting or kung fu. This makes the choice to not have a particular signature weapon or attack every bit as constraining as the choice to have a particular attack.
• Feng Shui's "signature weapon" schtick means the system supports both characters for whom a particular weapon is a defining trait (James Bond) and characters who will use anything (Jacki Chan) in a fight. By spending a small-to-moderate character starting pick, a player character gets a particular weapon that is both more effective in their hands and immune to random coincidences. Signature weapons can still be stolen or broken as part of a specific villains scheme or main plot, but are never destroyed in random explosions and it's expected that the PC will recover or repair their sig weapon by the start of the next arc. That nicely reflects the way characters from fiction who use distinctive weapons tend to work, yet the system also supports characters who use a variety of weapons - they just pick some schtick other than Sig Weapon.
• SR4. Whether and how you upgrade your weapons is determined by your archetype in a way that's confusing and often nonsensical for what is ostensibly a point-buy game. You can use cash and connections to upgrade cyberware and bioware in-game, unless you have reason to care about your Magic rating or are already maxed out, or it's thursday with a waxing gibbous moon. If you want a magic sword, you fucking buy it at chargen, because bonding weapon foci has like the second highest BP-vs-karma cost discrepancy in the game, so you're probably not getting an upgrade to that in-game. Also, when I say sword, I mean katana, because in SR4, they are just like swords but with better AP, so you don't use a sword, ever.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Indeed. So at what point does it become "BAWWWW NON-RANDOM = BADWRONGFUN!!!"? When the chance of getting something you like is 90% over the course of the campaign? 99%? 99.9%?

Who knows? It I throw out a number it just becomes a meaningless statistic. First you have to state how often you're expected to upgrade both in-universe and out-universe, the relative power difference of the upgrades, how much weapon power contributes to overall effectiveness, and of course how long you expect campaigns to last.

In all three of these cases, weapon choice is a key defining trait of the character.

Yes, and two of those characters are really really shallow. It's not particularly their fault so much as the limitations of their medium, but Goemon is explicitly a less interesting character than Inspector Zinegata even though his characterization isn't 'uses a sword' but 'Don Quixote as a samurai'.

Mitsuragi I cut less slack for. Even within the context of the game (single-weapon fetishists) he has much less character development than one-game wonders like Yoshimitsu and Zamszimel or however you spell that, let alone Siegfried or Raphael or Sophitia.

I haven't seen Snow Crash, can't comment on it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

If you think you can encourage roleplay by outlawing something, you're an idiot. Forcing characters to switch up their weapons just changes their one-note character from "has a sword" to "is an elf."

That's not even close to true. If you outlaw mute characters or loners, that's a trivially easy way to encourage dialogue and cooperation which are facets of roleplaying.

Moreover, it is true that there will always be the rat flail players who couldn't tell a story even if their mommas were threatening to chop their fingers -- they'll always have to resort to cargo-cult storytelling elements like weapon fetishism or claiming that their character is 'like Sephiroth but in Eberron'. Several things come to mind about this.

1.) Not all weak storytelling is created equally. I know that you tried to head me off at the past by going 'an elf-fetishist has just as much roleplaying potential as a weapon fetishist!' but that just plain isn't true either. Drizz't is a really easy counter-example, but beyond that, 'weapon fetishist' is a self-absorbed concept. Sure, 'I'm an elf and elves are superior to you' is on the face of it as shallow as a concept as 'I like swords', but the DM and players can at least play off the elf-fetishist. Someone playing the half-orc or dwarf can get into a verbal argument with the elf player or the DM can have the city discriminate against elves or whatever. What the fuck are you going to do with the katana guy?

2.) Players are a lot more resistant towards changing things that appear to give them mechanical success than purely cosmetic success. Even if you design a game in such a way that katanas are in aggregate as equally good as dire flails and bow and arrows and show them the numbers, people will still see that the fact that they wielded a katana is what made them succeed. This is important because:

3.) Weak roleplayers do not necessarily stay weak roleplayers. It's been my experience that oftentimes a weak roleplayer becomes a strong roleplayer once they're exposed to some event or impetus that just 'clicks' and makes them want to try harder to achieve that feeling again. The 1d4chan wiki is full of such things. Now because they're weak roleplayers the chances of them having a character concept that can provide the hook and the mental leap are really small - but again, see caveats 1 and 2. There's no need to just throw your hands up and blindly stumble through the process, we do know two things about it. The first being that people are only willing to try new things if the consequence for 'failing' isn't too large and the second is that there are some avenues that are more fruitful than others.

Because you just said the setting doesn't support silk clothes. The setting either does or does not support silk clothing. If it does, than having a character wear silk clothing all the time is reasonable.

This is again stupid. My setting also has kings that head a large empire and prophecied champions in them. By DM fiat or the tides of roleplay or even the RNG, a player may for a temporary amount of time be or have one of these things without the game kerploding. Nonetheless, it still does not support a PC being able to choose being able to head a large empire at whim or be a prophecied champion.

Speaking of which, silk clothes? If I was running an alternate history version of Aztec Empires, sure, a Jaguar Warrior-General that killed and helpled himself to the loot of one of Cortes' entourage might stumble across a silk dress in the loot pile. And he'd be perfectly within his rights to wear it for a few sessions before it falls apart or we do a time jump or the campaign ends for one reason or another. That does not mean that someone can just up and claim that their Aztec warrior is going to run around in silk clothes all of the time. Because I as the setting designer, game designer, DM, and even storytelling group can come up with plenty of plausible reasons why there were silk clothes that one instance but not in others.

If you gave him a sword instead, none of this would change, but now his character aesthetic is dissonant with his actual character, and if you knew anything about characterization you'd know that this is a huge problem.

You know, every time you try to refute my point you just reaffirm it in the same way of trying to cure Franklin of deism.

His personality was built around the concept of wielding a scythe,

That's asinine. That'd be like me claiming that my personality for my Musketeer was designed around wearing red. Sure, I could give a paragraph-long spiel about red being the color of lions and love which is so important to his courtly virtues and etc. etc.. but it's just obfuscating the fact that it has nothing to do with my character's personality. The Punisher is murderous, creepy, soft-spoken, professional, and a military blowhard because he devalues human life, likes to bully others but isn't good at talking, uses a vaneer of professionalism to mask his amorality, and learned about how fun it was to kill people during the Vietnam War. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that he prefers an M-13 (even though that was the weapon he was using through the war) or wears a black shirt with a skull over it (even though that was the last thing his son gave him before he died and has the death symbolism la la la).

All that crap you're pushing is just chaff. It's a perfect example of cargo-cult roleplaying, trying to leech the cool of Magus and Testament and Death by imitating their demeanor through some vague sympathetic magic and also why I don't want to encourage it.

and it is as strong a personality as you can expect from a character slapped together in an afternoon for a D&D game.

I love the way you're trying to dance between these two points. 'My character concept is so intricate that it'd fall apart for want of a nail' and 'but it's a D&D game so no need to spend THAT much effort'. Please.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Sometimes, restrictions on what type of stories are allowable inspire creativity that results in the creation of enduring myths.

That part's intuitively (though not immediately) obvious, but for whatever reason people just aren't capable of seeing the flip-side of this argument. That is, that when there aren't some outside restrictions on the creative process people will put it on themselves anyway because no one can handle the thousands upon thousands of creative possibilities and restrictions that are possible.

But what's extra not-intuitive is that these self-restrictions tend to be inflexible and self-perpetuating. A creative writing class that lets students turn in 'whatever' are seriously going to have their students turn in more of the same kinds of stories over the semester than one which puts incorrigible (which is indistinguishable from random) restrictions on what they can turn in. The fact that doing so would also make students more motivated is just icing on the ass-shaped cake.

Hence the point of this thread.

[Chamomile]

That's not even close to true. If you outlaw mute characters or loners, that's a trivially easy way to encourage dialogue and cooperation which are facets of roleplaying.

...No. No, it doesn't. Previously, you had a mute character. Now you have a character theoretically capable of speech who just never talks. You aren't going to legislate players into a sense of artistry. Social interaction does not work that way.

Sure, 'I'm an elf and elves are superior to you' is on the face of it as shallow as a concept as 'I like swords', but the DM and players can at least play off the elf-fetishist. Someone playing the half-orc or dwarf can get into a verbal argument with the elf player or the DM can have the city discriminate against elves or whatever.

At which point elf-guy will shrug and not care. Is this guy a bad roleplayer or not? If he's bad enough to make a character who's entire personality begins and ends with "I like swords" then nothing, ever, will make him go any deeper than that. And hell, what do you do with katana guy? "A longsword-wielding warrior seeks to prove that his culture is superior to yours by murdering you." "Your chosen weapon is shunned as a symbol of some great enemy in the city you're visiting." Whatever. This isn't hard.

2.) Players are a lot more resistant towards changing things that appear to give them mechanical success than purely cosmetic success. Even if you design a game in such a way that katanas are in aggregate as equally good as dire flails and bow and arrows and show them the numbers, people will still see that the fact that they wielded a katana is what made them succeed.

I've seen this happen just as often with player's gushing over their awesome statlines. Like, from their race, for example. I've actually seen this more often than I've seen people attached to a specific weapon, except that sometimes the guy playing a Barbarian likes greataxes because d12s seem so big and impressive.

Now because they're weak roleplayers the chances of them having a character concept that can provide the hook and the mental leap are really small - but again, see caveats 1 and 2.

Building those hooks into the story is really easy. I once had a player who liked cats and was playing a caster. So I added a cat-god of magic to get her more involved in the game. It worked. This changed no rules. Get better at plot and characterization.

This is again stupid. My setting also has kings that head a large empire and prophecied champions in them. By DM fiat or the tides of roleplay or even the RNG, a player may for a temporary amount of time be or have one of these things without the game kerploding.

Can they start as an actual king of an actual nation that they are running? If so, then arbitrarily taking that away from them at a later date is a dick move. If not, then having previously been royalty is just fluff. Fluff they should not have to roll on a random table to have.

If I was running an alternate history version of Aztec Empires, sure, a Jaguar Warrior-General that killed and helpled himself to the loot of one of Cortes' entourage might stumble across a silk dress in the loot pile. And he'd be perfectly within his rights to wear it for a few sessions before it falls apart or we do a time jump or the campaign ends for one reason or another. That does not mean that someone can just up and claim that their Aztec warrior is going to run around in silk clothes all of the time.

But he still didn't start with those clothes. This is not a hard concept to grasp. If you allow characters to start out wearing silk, then you are a dick if you later on require them to abandon it because the dice said so. If you don't start with silk, it is less reasonable to assume that you'll always have access to it because you happen to stumble across it once.

That's asinine. That'd be like me claiming that my personality for my Musketeer was designed around wearing red.

If you are secretly Alexandre Dumas, you can say that and have a valid point. The point of using a character I made instead of better known characters with equally iconic weapons is that I made them and I can say with absolute certainty that the character aesthetic is built around using this or that weapon (or else that their weapon of choice was built around the character concept, either way the point is pretty much the same).

or wears a black shirt with a skull over it (even though that was the last thing his son gave him before he died and has the death symbolism la la la).

You're seriously trying to argue the skull shirt isn't iconic to the Punisher, and that anyone who decided to change that design to something else as determined by die roll shouldn't be fired for it?

All that crap you're pushing is just chaff. It's a perfect example of cargo-cult roleplaying, trying to leech the cool of Magus and Testament and Death by imitating their demeanor through some vague sympathetic magic and also why I don't want to encourage it.

You just listed off three strong, iconic characters who have scythe-wielding as a major component of their aesthetic and who would look and feel noticeably different if they switched. Even if their personalities would remain the same, the character would be different, and if you chose that weapon randomly the results would be stupid. Hell, let's do that right now. I'm going to roll a d100 and count down the PHB weapons list to see what I get, throwing out any result that takes me off the end of the list, this because I can't be bothered to count the weapons up and make a proper table and the DMG version is weighted.

The Grim Reaper now wields a greataxe.

Magus now has a spiked shield.

Testament now has a longsword.

Go find their respective fanbases and see how they react to your brilliant new idea of re-equipping the characters with randomly selected weapons. Particularly if you do so five or six times through the course of the story, and eventually they end up using a club.

The only one of those character's I'm intimately familiar with is Death. Because I assume you're referring to the Grim Reaper anthropomorphization, who is well known to absolutely everyone. Magus is presumably the Chrono Trigger character, however I still haven't gotten around to playing that game and I'm familiar with him only by name. I haven't got the slightest clue who Testament is, but google images informs me that it's some girl with a big red scythe. Whatever.

Either way, Hobbes' aesthetic started with the scythe because the scythe gets awesome crits and Hobbes is a Samurai. Any argument that Hobbes is trying to leech coolness from other sources by wielding a scythe can't possibly hold up, because I initially chose it for mechanical reasons. It couldn't have been integral to his character at the time, because at the time he didn't have a character. If you'd been paying attention, you'd have noticed that this is, in fact, my point. His character is built around wielding a scythe because the choice that he'd wield a scythe was the first one that I made with regards to his aesthetic. Do I need to rephrase that again, or do you get it yet?

I love the way you're trying to dance between these two points. 'My character concept is so intricate that it'd fall apart for want of a nail' and 'but it's a D&D game so no need to spend THAT much effort'

The character concepts do not fall apart, they're just weakened. You're arguing that we should make the roleplay worse in order to improve the roleplay. All three of my characters can still exist if their iconic weapons are removed, but their aesthetic is weaker.

[PhoneLobster]

I'm wondering what sort of characterization Lago thinks IS good enough for him.

He spends a lot of time pouring hate onto a large amount of potential forms of characterization on this thread.

He dislikes weapons, he dislikes favorite colours, he dislikes elf fetishism, he dislikes dritz, he dislikes resemblance to well known character archetypes.

What precisely IS a form of characterization good enough for your refined tastes?

Personally I don't think it's a good idea to hold RPG players to such high expectations. "Sword Guy who likes to wear red and is a bit like Zorro" is actually a pretty awesome character description for actual at the table RPGs. It might well be sorta crap in say a movie or a book, but your players aren't fucking writers and even if they are are not engaging in a medium with the same capability and flexibility.

Stereotypes and "shallow" characterizations are better than nothing and considering the limitations of table top RPGs are commonly also better than "Deep" characterization.

So again. Exactly fucking what IS actually good enough for you Lago? And how the fuck are you supposed to achieve whatever the hell it is within the limited media of table top RPGs in such a way that it actually IS better than the vast array of stuff you seem to be dismissing as "lame" with little or no excuse?

[DSMatticus]

I'm beginning to think anything that's been done before is too lame for Lago. Which rules out pretty much everything the average person will find interesting.

[Archmage]

Irrelevant nitpick: Testament, from the Guilty Gear series of fighting games, is a dude.

[Josh_Kablack]

Hence the point of this thread.

I remain unconvinced and wish to re-assert my contention that the actual point is "Frank and Lago don't get to game much anymore and so keep posting abstract theory arguments."

[Darth Rabbitt]

Irrelevant nitpick: Testament, from the Guilty Gear series of fighting games, is a dude.

I think it's kind of funny that a Guilty Gear character other than Bridget was mistaken for the opposite gender.

[hyzmarca]

The Grim Reaper now wields a greataxe.

I find that the Grim Reaper is substantially more menacing when equiped with a Chicago-style deep-dish pizza, personally.

Anyway, character background doesn't matter one bit. You'll have plenty of opportunities to flesh out your character during the adventure and that'll be far more effective than a detailed background would be.

The only exception is if your character is if your character completely static. Static characters suck. And I think that the point. Exactly the same with bigger numbers isn't character growth in any meaningful sense.

[Username17]

The Grim Reaper now wields a greataxe.

I find that the Grim Reaper is substantially more menacing when equiped with a Chicago-style deep-dish pizza, personally.

Anyway, character background doesn't matter one bit. You'll have plenty of opportunities to flesh out your character during the adventure and that'll be far more effective than a detailed background would be.

The only exception is if your character is if your character completely static. Static characters suck. And I think that the point. Exactly the same with bigger numbers isn't character growth in any meaningful sense.

Yes. Characters who don't change have no business having stories told about them. Although a substantial number of people are arguing for characters who are not literally static, but merely static with respect to initially imagined character progression. That also sucks, although not nearly as much.

Basically, they are demanding to play an Elothar Warrior of Bladereach. And yeah, that's actually pretty stupid. Not because it invalidates telling the character's story, but because it invalidates playing the character's story as a game with other people.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Although a substantial number of people are arguing for characters who are not literally static, but merely static with respect to initially imagined character progression.

Static in their progression. Right. I do not pretend to know what that even means, but I wish you and Lago the best of luck in finding new gaming groups.

[tussock]

Static in their progression. Right.I do not pretend to know what that even means, ....

You know how it's a bad thing when the DM railroads y'all into following his pet story about what the group will do and become without any substantive input from the other people at the table? The assertion is that doesn't change when it's another player doing it.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Although a substantial number of people are arguing for characters who are not literally static, but merely static with respect to initially imagined character progression.

Static in their progression. Right. I do not pretend to know what that even means, but I wish you and Lago the best of luck in finding new gaming groups.

Maybe we don't play the same way Frank and Lago play at my table, but none of my players really got bothered when another player played some sort of weapon master. I'm not really making an argument against them, but I am saying that I haven't seen the objection they have.

[PhoneLobster]

Complaining and hand wringing about "lack of character change/development" is... rather stupid really. It's another one of those "giant problems no one even noticed until five minutes ago when Frank and Lago needed to justify an unpopular theory". (especially in regards to such suddenly pressing major calamities as "guy who imitates zorro", "guy who wears red" and "guy who uses swords")

Complaining about mere potential "lack of change" from an uncertain, vague and possibly even non-existent "Plan" is even stupider. I mean aside from anything else I don't particularly see ANY support for organically generated Sword Guys in Frank and Lago's random attacks on characterization that is suddenly not good enough for them.

But most of all you simply cannot complain about a "lack of change" when your proposed solution, (constantly being forced into using new randomized items) is itself homogenous enforced and immune to change.

Being "Golf Bag/Opportunist Weapon User" is itself a "weapon style" usable to describe a character. Being FORCED to use that, on everyone, predictably, for the entire game, every time... that isn't character development. Nor does it generate interesting stories.

It just generates the same "story" over and over again, about the guy who keeps changing his weapon style every five minutes. Sometimes he changes to Sword sometimes he changes to Axe, but no one cares about those changes from a story or "character development" perspective because in five minutes he might suddenly change to Hammer or Whip.

And that's the thing. Changes alone aren't character development unless they come with some sort of stability and commitment, or are surrounded by drama and epiphany. Which a system where you can CHOOSE and care about choices can generate change you care about but an anti-choice enforced randomization system works directly counter to generating those results.

[DSMatticus]

Not because it invalidates telling the character's story, but because it invalidates playing the character's story as a game with other people.

The entire thing you do when you sit down and choose to make a character is a process of elimination. Every decision you make is the addition of a static detail. Choosing to be a fighter rules out the stories where your character is a rogue, wizard, or cleric. Choosing to be a wise-cracking smartass is ruling out the stories where your character is grim-faced, stoic, and serious. Choosing to be quick and nimble is ruling out the stories where your character is slow and clumsy. Choosing to have a softspot for farmers is ruling out the stories where your character helps nobles collect taxes from them.

If you forced a player to make their character switch from fighter to wizard midgame, they would say fuck you. If you forced a player to make their character stop being the wise-cracker and start being the super serious dude, they would say fuck you. If you forced a player to make their character start hating farmers because they met an asshole farmer, they would say fuck you. And if you forced the quick and nimble character to be slow and clumsy permanently, they would pretty reasonably say fuck you. Depending on how critical a detail that is to them (core ability for a thief, minor flavor for a wizard). Or maybe you're just telling that character to retire. Whatever.

If you're saying we can't choose details about our characters that limit future stories, we can't actually make characters and you don't have a game. Now we can have a reasonable discussion about the extents of things you can declare about your character ("I'm the son of the king!" or "I'm a katana samurai in this mostly realistic modern game!" are things you really need to discuss with the group). And these extents will vary based on a lot of factors, including game mechanics, setting, and what the rest of the party wants to do. Which means you probably veto the katana samurai in the realistic modern game, because that's dumb. And you probably veto the son of the king unless the group wants to handle the ramifications of that.

But "declaring static details about your character = bad" is not an argument, because that applies so broadly as to make character generation impossible. It is not a sufficient argument unless you're prepared to tell me why I should coin flip for my character's gender (and then everything else, but let's start there).