Quote from: deadDMwalking;723451Honestly, most people play a fairly small range of archetypes.  If options are limited and they've been playing a long time, you can start to see them repeat.  It's hard to make every wizard different when you use the same spells.  It's hard to make every Fighter different when you use the same tactics.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;723515

Quote from: robiswrong;723471So, the following are all the same:

* The guy adventuring so he can save up money and marry the girl back home
* The guy trying to be the best warrior in the world, single-minded in his pursuit of perfection
* The guy who sees battle as his fast-path to money and glory
* The guy who's seeking revenge on the man who killed his father
* The ex-mercenary trying to redeem his checkered past
* The sword for hire who'll go to any extreme - but only against 'unjust' foes
* The bitter cynic out to make the world pay for what it's done to him

Because they're all fighters with the same abilities?

You realize that they could literally be the same character with virtually no modification.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;723451While you might think some of my characters are 'samey' (human Ranger for instance), I do try to make the personalities different

...

Quote from: deadDMwalking;723451I strongly disagree.

Yeah, well I disagree that you disagree.

I think we may be talking at cross purposes.

Quote from: jhkim;723172I don't think that wanting stuff not on the menu is inherently being a dick.

No, it's not. One player in my D&D group was always playing something exotic, so another fellow said that when he was DM, that player would at last have to play a human.

So it is, and no complaint from the player!

Moral: Don't be a dick, and don't play with dicks. (We leave that to the priest character.)

Quote from: deadDMwalking;723515You realize that they could literally be the same character with virtually no modification.  

Ardenne left home to pursue the path of a warrior.  After ten years and seeing more blood shed than any man should, he returned home to his village and prepared to retire as a blacksmith.  But in his time in the mercenary company, he made enemies, including the Infamous Black Prince - a renowned swordsman.  He came in the night with a band of his men and murdered Ardenne's father.  Ardenne must acquire money to hire mercenaries of his own to force the Black Prince to battle - and he must train with his blade to ensure he can best the Black Prince.  And once he has his revenge, he will return to his betrothed - the one he can't marry, or even acknowledge lest the Black Prince realize the pain it would cause him to hurt her.  

But even if they're not literally the same character, most people can handle just a few personalities - the gruff one, the nice one, the quiet one and maybe that's it.  So you do the 'gruff thief', then the 'gruff warrior' then the 'gruff wizard', and so on, until you've done all you can do.  Now it's time to be the 'gruff half-demon' so it at least looks different.

I guess that truly uncreative people probably do go through life assuming everyone else is equally uncreative.

But over here, I'm running an LotFP Dark Albion game.   Probably one of the least set of options you can have in terms of mechanical in-rule ways to make two characters of the same classes different from one another; elves, wizards, and clerics may have different spells from one another, a thief might have a different choice of which set thief-skills he chooses to put his points into, and that's IT. And there's only 7 classes.

And yet over two campaigns, and what must be at this point something like 30 different characters (each player gets to play 2 characters at a time, and of course there's plenty of deaths), there's almost never been any two characters of the same class that were the same. Each one, within the mold of the fantasy-england low-magic setting, was very much his own thing.

RPGPundit

Quote from: James Gillen;723002This relates to my main axiom of GMing: "Give your players a choice between A and B and they will inevitably pick Q."

JG

Case in point: The friend who was running a game on Wednesdays is burned out and asks me if I can go back to GMing.  I say, "OK, well I had the Shadowrun game I was running last year, give me a couple weeks to prep for that."  He says "Actually I didn't like the new Shadowrun system very much, can we do Champions?"  Which would kind of require coming up with some history for why the PCs are the first superheroes in the world OR coming up with a whole backstory for who the heroes were between the 1930s and today.  But I had a whole bunch of work done for another gaming group doing Pulp Hero so I decided I could just skip ahead a couple years and do a Golden Age of Champions game- that way I wouldn't have to answer the question of who the first superheroes were because the PCs would be them.
My first friend and Player B are making characters that work with this concept (a Superman-type and a tycoon with gasoline-powered armor).  Player C however wants to make something similar to the character on the Canadian/SyFy series Continuum - a female law enforcement officer in 2077 who got caught in some condemned anarchists' escape plan via time travel, showing up in the first decade of the 21st Century and trying to stop the anarchist cell from destroying her family's future.  In this case the PC would be an intelligence agent following somebody who used time travel to go to the '30s to stop World War II and "make history better."
Which is a great concept in and of itself, it just throws a monkey wrench in the whole concept of my game, since even if I establish that the PC and her archenemy are from an alternate timeline, I still have to come UP with that timeline background...

JG

I disagree, in which X + time travel is a great concept by itself. No good has come from time travel games except too many more questions and everyone ending up a subsidiary to their precious story/timeline. Your group needs a greater taste of the lash and less of the mirror.

If you can't explain your character in a succinct phrase without sending up red flags, you can't have it in my games. See: time traveler saving the future, street urchin with magic lamp of wishes, schizophrenic godling, bundle o' point buy disadvantages, etc.

Quote from: RPGPundit;725179I guess that truly uncreative people probably do go through life assuming everyone else is equally uncreative.

But over here, I'm running an LotFP Dark Albion game.   Probably one of the least set of options you can have in terms of mechanical in-rule ways to make two characters of the same classes different from one another; elves, wizards, and clerics may have different spells from one another, a thief might have a different choice of which set thief-skills he chooses to put his points into, and that's IT. And there's only 7 classes.

And yet over two campaigns, and what must be at this point something like 30 different characters (each player gets to play 2 characters at a time, and of course there's plenty of deaths), there's almost never been any two characters of the same class that were the same. Each one, within the mold of the fantasy-england low-magic setting, was very much his own thing.

RPGPundit

That is awesome and speaks a lot about how some people focus on mechanics  while others focus on character.

I have a friend who was recently telling me about the dnd group he started gming for, and he said "They don't role play at all"

Its hard for me to relate to dnd without role play, but its definitely out there and being enjoyed by some players.

Well, kind of enjoyed; his players apparently argue about rules all the time

Disclaimer: I am not saying everyone that loves mechanics is unable to also focus on character.

Yes, there are people who do both (enjoy diddling with mechanics while also being serious roleplayers).

RPGPundit

Quote from: robiswrong;723267Right?

I find that 'race/class' is the *least* interesting part of a character.

I've had people tell me that "humans are boring".  Really?  So 99% of characters *ever* in fiction are dull?  REALLY?

Tell me about it. The attitude just baffles the Hell out of me. For some reason that type of player that feels like the longer the character description is the more interesting the character will be. so a Warrior losses out to the Half Dragon/Half Kender Time Traveling Psychic Warrior even though 9 out 10 times, IME, they'll have exactly the same personalities as the rest of their characters. There was a thread on this that blew a few weeks ago.

The weirdest example of it I've seen is in Exalted where you'll get people that refuse to play Solar Exalted because they're too "vanilla human" when almost all the other types are humans with endowed powers too.

There's a reason for my Katamari Damacy signature. Strongly in the "personality shows through play" school of thought. Everything before is just a sketch.