You might not have been, but Saxony was.
Saxony wrote:Yes, this means Alladin gets his fucking Scimitar somehow, no questions asked. If the player wants to jump through hoops and obey verisimilitude, sure, go ahead. But if he wants a scimitar, he gets the scimitar.
I
hope that Saxony has some vaguely-defined line in his head where certain player demands are unreasonable. I really hope I can't replace "a scimitar" with "the chance to fuck Fluttershy" and get a statement Saxony still agrees with. I'd be interested in probing where people think that border is.
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I'm trying to think my way through a couple different cases. The case of the ax preferrer is quite different from the case of the katana fetishist.
Let's assume that this is a game that provides a high-volume torrent of loot. Maybe not Diablo/Borderlands/MMO levels, but a steady supply of new items. You are not expected to use all or even most of the items you get. For coolness' sake, we don't want you to melt them down into scrap and turn them into items off a wishlist, because that's lame and trophies are cool. But you get a moderately diverse flow of items. Lots of magic swords, magic axes, magic bows, magic lances, magic brass knuckles, and so forth.
Let's also assume that in this system, there is not an extremely rigid upgrade schedule to your weapons. This means absolutely no wishlist shit, because if the game assumes wishlisting then the game assumes that the MC is acting as Santa Claus and fuck that. But it also means that if you decide to stick with a +2 weapon while everyone around you is running around with +4s, you are a bit worse but you still contribute meaningfully to the team. You take hits, you deal damage, you solve problems. You can refuse to replace your weapon for a while and still be valuable. Some classes in 3.x already have this feature.
In this paradigm, a character who prefers axes is completely viable and doesn't require any toxic bullshit. Out of the diverse flow of new weapons, there will probably be moderately useful axes. Since there is no wishlist bullshit, ANY moderately useful axe is better than nothing (whereas in a wishlist system, any moderately useful axe except the one you want is worse than nothing) so he can take it. The player doesn't need to demand that his MC stuff an ax into the next adventure, since if he doesn't see anything he likes in the next pile of loot he just shrugs, operates at a suboptimal but still functional level for a while, and moves on. The MC doesn't have to transmute shit, or allow magic marts, or let PCs extract midichlorians from their weapons and inject them into other weapons. The MC sets up the world, the player decides how his character reacts to it, and if the player chooses to only use axes it's probably mostly viable.*
The katana fetishist, on the other hand, is someone who wants to use an exotic weapon. A katana, a scimitar, a laser gun, whatever. It's NOT part of the expected treasure distribution system. If the MC does not begin tweaking the world to suit
his player's desire to look cool, the player becomes unhappy. And so now we get people who say things like "Just FORCE the katanas into the setting if the player wants them". This is toxic and obnoxious and a bad model for MCing. It brutally shatters WSOD by calling attention to the fact that the world the PCs are RPing in is not real, and has no sense of reality, but exists ONLY as a theme park ride explicitly to allow players to do what they want. And "what they want" is to be a fucking katana wielder.
*There are still some issues with this. Lago points out that if you allow people to give a shit about the difference between a sword and ax cosmetically, you start to give a shit about it mechanically. You start to write CLASSES that are swordmaster or axwielder, and that kind of distinction really does not play nicely. Two classes that are supposed to be entirely separate on the basis of what KIND of bladed weapon they use do not sit at the same table with a Wizard or a Druid or a Cleric. They can't even sit at the same table as a Fire Mage, Beguiler, or Barbarian. There is an extremely low level of power where allowing people to give a shit about the differences in weapons doesn't start to lead to this sort of issue. It really is bad when you try to cram a VAH and a 3.x Wizard into the same game.
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There is an odd double-standard about how important weapon shape is. There seem to be people saying "Well, it doesn't really matter what category the weapon is, so the MC should just change it." But doesn't it cut both ways: "It doesn't really matter what category the weapon is, so the PC should just lump it." Why does the PC's desire to look cool trump the MC's desire to have a world that makes sense? At some point, even if weapon category is irrelevant, this is storytelling and concreteness and details will come up so SOMEONE has to say if the goblins are wielding axes, swords, or boards with nails in them.
Since, in general, the MC gets to write the world and the PCs decide what their character does, I'm inclined to say "The PC should just lump it."
