As a Dungeon Master (DM) I have been perplexed about something for a while. Back in my proto role-playing days, if you played a game system you read the whole book from cover to cover. It wasn't just an excuse to understand all the rules, but to also understand the world you might be playing in. Reading Shadowrun vs AD&D player's handbook you get two totally distinct feels for their setting. Player handbooks give a taste of the kind of adventures you might be in. Furthermore how your player character (PC) might interact with the setting, what their needs, wants and goals might be.
Character Generation is a Game
Today, I was reading Chris McDowall's blog. He is the creator of Into the Odd, and Bastionland. His blog post, Running a Minimalist Game exposed a self-imposed blind spot of mine. Specifically this paragraph:
"No, don't worry about reading any rules before we play. Yeah we'll do character creation right there on the night, nothing needed ahead of time. The setting? Aaah it's this big city called Bastion and it's weird but we'll discover that as we go".
If you have played D&D 5e, Pathfinder or pretty much most non OSR inspired role-playing games you need to realize something. For a new player, being able to create a character the night of a game is a rather hard task, even with the help of a patient DM or player, it takes a long time. To make things worse a lot of knowledge, understanding and experience is needed to make a competent character.
This is problematic for multiple reasons. I don't believe all characters must be hyper-optimized, however the optimization level needs to match the rest of the party. Otherwise it imbalances the party, which in turn imbalances encounters. As a DM, if that imbalance is not considered and mitigated two possible outcomes will occur.
Either the non optimized player will feel useless or not very good about their character not carrying their weight. Or, the PC might die because they can't handle the purpose of the encounter itself. This problem doesn't just occur in combat encounters, but it also bleeds through social interactions. Social interaction optimization is a thing, and if done well, it can break not just party balance but the entire feel of the game.
Of course, all of this is dependent on the DM, the severity of optimization or lack thereof, and ultimately on the players themselves. I am not a big believer in defining what "fun" is for role-playing games. However, in my experience, severe imbalances almost always make the game less enjoyable.
The point is, character creation in current games is not easy. It's a lengthy process that requires intimate knowledge. To acquire knowledge you must read all the materials provided to you. Usually that material is ever increasing, as new books get published, either giving extra features, subclasses, feats and spells. For people like yours truly, that's part of the fun, reading new books, understanding new possibilities and evaluating the overall effectiveness of each change. The changes they produce to the existing character creation landscape.
The truth is, complex character generation is a detraction from the game. It's ironic that there is a separate game within the game of D&D. Making a character is a game in itself. If that game is played wrongly you might not have as much fun in the actual game. Which is a pretty huge problem. Once again the DM can help mitigate this, however this means the DM is working against the game rules to make it work. Not with them.
No comments:
Post a Comment