I see a lot of this is game settings. You know what I mean, that poorest of the poor neighborhood, the magic evil forest, even a dark continent.  The fluff text always supports these areas as being 'deadly' even 'unsurvivable', often going so far as to suggest that PC's aren't even immune to the dangers. Sometimes there are even rules to back this up...

What I don't see a lot of is support for characters from such regions. Only a few games seem to suggest players should actually hang their hats in such places on a regular basis.

The thing of it is, of course, is that such characters are a staple of the... well call is 'source documents' for gaming traditions.   Perhaps it is an impossibility, having dark and forbidding places to one type of character be 'home ground' for another. If its home ground to a character, it loses its darkness to other PC's by default.

Sometimes the fault isn't even in the game designer's hands, I think. Perhaps they share the blame in making their fluff text too evocative of the dangers, but in reality GM's often share the blame, 'no you can't be a warrior barbarian from the dark forbidding forest... no one survives there!" (there goes Kyra Knightly from that crappy King Arthur movie, or Strider (with more leeway in description) in Lord of the Rings... classic munchkin bait, he's the grim warrior, lover of the hawt mysterious elf-chick, and a decendent of a line of lost kings with a legendary sword, not to mention oaths of a thousand undead warriors at his fingertips. Yeah, you can play him.... not)

A classic character is the guy who is familiar, even comfortable in the places the rest of us would naturally avoid. Be it the barrens rat in Shadowrun, the blue naked forest chick in Arthur, or (to stretch a lord of the rings bit) some exiled southern warrior who opposes sauron because, well, he's exiled (no, I don't know that Tolkien ever wrote any such character... but he could have, and there is no good reason not to have other than he already had a full cast)

How much of this goes to the idea that many RPGs push that the PC's aren't average people, do not lead average lives, or come from "average" back grounds?

Quote from: Serious PaulHow much of this goes to the idea that many RPGs push that the PC's aren't average people, do not lead average lives, or come from "average" back grounds?

Here's the thing: To someone who comes from tribe of forest dwelling barbarians that IS an average life. Its persepective. Frodo and the gang only think of the Elves as these mysterious exotic people because they aren't elves themselves.

To me its not a question about how average or unaverage a character is, its about opening those sandboxes up, giving me more room to play in.   I think most Game writers expect that anything they mention or detail is meant to be used, not held as some buggaboo used to keep the PC's on the straight and narrow.

Is there any reason you can't just, you know, do this?

I remember I wanted to play one of those guys (I can't recall the name off the top of my head -- Abber Nomads, I think) that lived in the Nightmare Lands in Ravenloft, and I just made him as a Human ranger.  A ranger who was very nonplussed by anything he ran into, having grown up with much much worse.

I guess this gets harder in D&D3, where such people would need special abilities like +4 against fear or whatever. But that could totally just be a feat.

yrs--
--Ben

Ben: As a GM, certainly.  As a player, the answer, quite often, is No.  Therein lies the problem, or part of it.

As a player I've had GMs declare that the Barrens of Seattle were so dangerous that attempting to enter them would result in a fiat death for the character. Sure, one could declare, somehow, that they grew up in the barrens, but the GM would perforce nix that, disallow any practical knowledge of the barrens, and still instant kill your character for having the foolishness to enter this most dangerous of regions.

Which, of course, is silly and stupid, and it happens all the same.

I was actually struck by this thought the other night thinking of noodle shops in 'bad neighborhoods', of all the wierd things. People form communities, and those communities have infrastructures, rules... and most importantly 'People'.  No area of the world is beyond human habitation (not even the arctic circles have been totally devoid of human life even pre-industrial. Not heavily populated, to be sure...).

Someone mentioned 'clockwork worlds' in passing about a GM... that describes me. I'm very much of a 'clockwork mind'. Things have causes and effects, a resource rich region will not lie fallow simply because it has fearsome beasts, and dangerous neighborhoods (barring Kult style shenanigans) will still have people living in them, and thus from them. What is dark and dangerous to one person will be home to another.

Or do you think the ancient Han thought they lived in 'the Mysterious Orient'?

Quote from: SpikeHere's the thing: To someone who comes from tribe of forest dwelling barbarians that IS an average life. Its persepective. Frodo and the gang only think of the Elves as these mysterious exotic people because they aren't elves themselves.

To me its not a question about how average or unaverage a character is, its about opening those sandboxes up, giving me more room to play in.   I think most Game writers expect that anything they mention or detail is meant to be used, not held as some buggaboo used to keep the PC's on the straight and narrow.

Your missing my point entirely. I don't disagree with your sentiments-nothing should be off limits, and the game, like the real world, should be designed with that in mind.

What I am saying is many games encourage people to think of their characters as being above average, or extraordinary. Does that affect how some people perceive the game, and it's setting?

If all PC's in Shadowrun are above the norm, then just what is the norm? If people in the barrens are the norm minus X, then just what are they?

Does that make sense? I feel like I 'm missing something from my explanation here.

Its hard to sort out, so maybe we both are missing something?

I'm perfectly content with a world where PC's are 'ordinary people doing extraordinary things'.... which is to say I don't consider 'ex special forces' be be extra-ordinary.  I rub elbows with rangers and SF guys from time to time, and one thing I've learned is that they put their pants on one leg at a time too.

I'm also content with a world of 'PC Glow' and action points and what have you seperating the PC's from the NPC's.

But I find that looking at the dispossessed (barrens rats) as 'sub normal' tends more often than not to break the clockwork world. It's not that they haven't learned as much, or can do as much as anyone else, its that what they've learned is different, more important in their environment and less useful in the 'normal' environment.   Barbarian dude might not speak Greek or be able to discourse on the Archimedes Screw, but he's also not likely to set up camp in a bear's cave and finds the prospect of a night or two alone in the woods not challenging at all.

Same with Barrens Dwellers and the like.

The other attitude is very colonial european I think. Stereotyped or not.

I guess my perspective on this is going to be sort of odd, then.  My whole game is about the dark and forbidding place.  Everywhere is a dangerous nightmare, and the characters are just beleagered villagers doing their best to survive in a world that should probably have died already.

Quote from: J ArcaneI guess my perspective on this is going to be sort of odd, then.  My whole game is about the dark and forbidding place.  Everywhere is a dangerous nightmare, and the characters are just beleagered villagers doing their best to survive in a world that should probably have died already.

Well, thats not necessarily bad. Its not 'sandbox play' if you will, but senario driven. I've got no beef with saying 'This game is going to be about villagers surviving in a cruel dark world'. I can decide if the idea appeals to me enough to get my ass in a seat every week. On the other hand, if every game you ran consisted of 'okay, you guys are hapless villagers in a cruel dark world...' I'd have to bail.

But I wouldn't want to buy a game that was written as 'action adventure, killstuff takeloot' only to find that the only way to play it was 'villagers et al'.

And I wouldn't particularly like it if someone said 'we're gonna play killstuff takeloot' then shot down ever non-villager character that was presented, and every villager that left the fences for the cruel beyond was butchered mercilessly by the cruel world without nary a die roll in sight.

Well, I'm off to design a game just so I can name it 'killstuff takeloot'.  j/k

Well, there's still plenty of killing things and taking your stuff.  The village just offers a kind of campaign center, and driving motivation for the players to be going out and killing things and looting ruins and things.  Not for the usual mercenary purposes necessarily, but rather for the survival of your family, your friends, and ultimately, the human race.  

It's very mash up.  There's an interpersonal element, an action element, a horror element, the post-apocalypse stuff.  The Village is jsut sort of the glue that binds the whole thing together.

Like I said, J, it sounds more senario driven than sandbox, and there ain't a damn thing wrong with that. I've played both and enjoyed both equally.

But in counterpoint: one of the selling points of Exalted is the 'wide open play', second really to the 'I can toss mountains at cities I'm sooooo 733t.'. I was invited to an Exalted game last year, then inexplicably 'uninvited' when it finally started up.  I was pretty tore up about it (not missing the exalted by the dirty underhanded way I was treated) until I realized that the GM, for all his apparent grasp of the setting and mechanics had, after six months of weekly play, still not actually let his 'perfect circle' of exalts actually leave their little village at the ass end of nowhere.  I'm pretty sure they didn't even properly exalt in the first month or two of play.

In other words, he tossed out 99% of the game.  I would have been bored to tears inside three games.


Not that this is exactly the sort of thing I'm describing in the OP, however. I'm talking about things like the elf home in Secrets of Zir'an, which is sooo uber-cool that no one can go there and even PC elves don't know anything about it... much less the GM. Or the Tir-tairngire from Shadowrun, which was treated by game designers and (many) GM's alike as 'PC free' territory that was impossible to be from, much less Run in. Unless you decided to run an 'all Tir' game or something. *

I could bring up the dark continent from Synnibar, but I can't remember the name for the life of me, only that it was... even according to the book as I recall, instantly lethal unless you had enough levels.  Or how Xen'drik was presented in the Eberron main book... or any continent other than the 'main one'... places where only high level PC's might tred. Sure, the setting has opened up a bit since then, but the 'exiled exotic tribesman' would have been pretty hard to pass.  

In other words, closed minded shrinking of the sandbox that a SETTING should be.

Am I making sense? I don't even know...:raise: