K wrote:No bad characters. Ok, you what if you want to make an "sea wizard" who is a swashbucker that carries a cutlass and swings from ropes and can bail water with the best of them. You choose a high Str. Then some guy comes up to you and says "Oh, the only high Str magic attacks are Necromancy...so I guess you are a necromancer, eh?"
Hell no. You want people to actually not able to make mistakes in character creation AS WELL AS be able to make the character they want.
Some people might say, "but hey, you can just make abilities that favor some stat for every kind of thing that people want." In an ideal world, that might work. Since we don't live in an ideal world and are not going to write a thousand abilities and we want the "sea wizard" from the above example to be able to cast Wind Blast and Lightning Bolt and Mists of Deception, we can't limit people's active attacks by their stats.
This is an important enough concept that I think it deserves its own thread. Quite simply, the game should not support all character concepts. I know, blasphemy. But bear with me for a bit.
When you see a monster, or a character, or a building, or whatever, you have expectations about it. Within the context of the story there is a certain amount of continuity. You can name something and have people know what it is, what it can do, and what it can't do. If the Lava Men start shooting Lavalectricity at me, I'm done. That story has ust gotten stupid and I don't want to tell it.
You can't just mix and match powers willy nilly and still have the setting make any god damn sense. If you've established that the technology level is late bronze age you can't have some player pop in as a wild-west gunman. Sure, he could be balanced with an Ice Crafter magician fairly easily. But that's not the point. The point is that the setting doesn't have any fucking pistols in it, not that pistols are inherently better than magical hail stones.
If the setting doesn't tell you what you can't do, then it doesn't tell you what you can do. Or more importantlly, it doesn't tell you what can happen. It's like playing Magical Teaparty with a bunch of five year olds. Every one of them ranting about Spiderman or Dinosaurs or something.
If the setting has Strong magicians as Necromancers, or Necromancers and Flame Wardens, or whatever and someone says "Yeah, but I want to play a cowboy!" you'd tell them to fuck off. And if someone wants to be a strength based weather mage in a setting that doesn't have those, then you should tell them to fuck off to. Just because something is mechanically balanced and possible to fit into a fantasy setting doesn't mean that it should be in your fantasy setting.
You don't have to cover every single thing that every single different person might want to do. You have to cover enough that there is variety in the setting sufficient for everyone to do something unique, without making so much variety that people lack the ability to anticipate what is going to happen or remember what sapient races in the world do.
-Username17