Should some Class-Race combinations be forbidden?

Vaarna_Aarne

Take a look at Pendragon if you ever have the chance to see what I am trying to express here. It does it very well. In fact, a lot of people rage at how similar characters start out. The player characters, by default, start as just knighted nobles from the Saslisbury county. They all have loyalty to their lord, respect hospitality and honor and love their family. They probably also hate Saxons. Not only that, but there are certain skills that make them lose honor, like chirurgery and industry, which aren't "knightly".

Even so, your actions during the game affect a complex system of virtues and create passions, loyalties and other strong emotions that make your character quite unique. You have many ways to affect the gameworld too. Interestingly enough, one of the most important of these is who you marry and how you develop your home.

 

I like where that could go. Traits(burning wheel), templates(because they could allow for a sort of retroactive progression, fulfill certain criteria and then your character 'grows into' a certain 'type' of fighter/wizard/rogue etc), virtues/roads(white wolf, in that progressing along them means something meaningful to the character but it's measured separately from the pure power progression), there's a lot of ways to take that.

You know, I came up with this long cool story about how my sorcerer's apprentice turned into an outcast hedge wizard. As per Luke Crane of Burning Wheel's recommendation, I posted the story on the forums. Surprisingly, they all told me that what I had described sounded like an absolutely perfect idea for a whole game. Since that experience, I'm inclined to agree with you. I went back to the start of the story, talked it over with a friend who wanted to GM, and we took it from there. Things unfolded differently than I had imagined, but that only added to the excitement, and since I had an idea of where I wanted my character to go, the end result was similar, but more organic. So I'm in strong agreement with this, there's no reason that backstory can't be the story, permitted you can balance the needs of everyone at the table at least.

I'd be happy to hear whatever you have to say about it, your input on these conversations is always appreciated by myself at the very least.

Never heard of it but it sounds 100% up my alley.

 

It affects me in pnp.

Also there is a tendency in single-player crpgs to include retarded options for "special" crowd. Not a big deal while it's only an option, but may be a problem when storyline and gameplay count on PC beign a "chosen one". I may exagerrate this though.

 

Uh, a good idea is a good idea. If it's trite and reeks of weirdness, then it isn't special. Likewise, it's entirely possible to make something as 'standard' as a human paladin more interesting by giving him a drinking problem, writing in an unlawful relative, forcing him to deal with temple politics, so on and so forth. Not that any one of those ideas is sufficiently 'good' in and of itself, again, it's about how you handle those ideas in play that matters. If you're playing with unimaginative morons who make derivative mary sues, well they probably aren't going to come up with anything more interesting when you constrain them to base fantasy archetypes. The problem you're mentioning isn't that they are making 'special' characters, it's that they suck at making them truly interesting.

I mean, it really all comes down to good ideas being good and bad ideas being bad. Similarly, there are different qualities of player and game master.

 

Then why are you playing with twats?

 

Did you just refer to me with a racial slur?

 

You really shouldn't refer to people with racial slurs.

 

And why is that proto-homo-australopithecus?

 

*posting drunk on the 'Dex*

What would be the slur for Australopithecus?

 

Same as for everything else:

Sub-Cleve organism.

EDIT: As a particular thing I have, in DnD and Pathfinder the first thing I ask the GM is "can I play a Tiefling Wizard" since I've grown so fond of DnD cosmology and all the stuff you can do with Tieflings.

Another thing is that nowadays my participation in a Star Wars D20 game is about one thing alone: Can I make a Tusken Raider Jedi.

 

Can you name at least one wRPG that was made worse in any way by adding exotic race/class combination?
Also as Draq said, it won't affect you if you'll play with right people.

 

GURPS vs AD&D 1e. Which is better and why?

 

I don't.
But that leaves very few I can play with. Problem that some quite decent otherwise players are going over the top with this silliness.

 

I can't because there were none major wRPGs with a lot of choice on that matter since NWN2 where it was irrelevant to gameplay. And, ss I said, where exotic is an option, it's not a big deal. The problem for me is when crpgs are made with little or no choice on the PC who is treated as special by default. But that's not the race/class combination issue, so you may be right.