September 14, 2003
Playing with a license
When playing a licensed roleplaying game like Lord of the Rings, do you like to play characters from the setting, or original creations? Why or why not?
The short answer would be original creations all the way. More precisely, I would say not playing characters created by other people.
I've always shied away from using other people's characters, and from participating in campaigns where other players don't use original creations because up until recently (where recently starts about a year ago) I've mainly participated in games with people who aren't fantastic roleplayers. When a character is an original creation, every detail of the personality is (usually) left up to the player. In the case of a third party creation its up to that player to try to recreate a personality created by someone else. If they don't do this well, it can irritate or lead to arguments... "Luke would never have done that!".
Sitting somewhere near the top of my TODO list of infinity I have an entry reminding me to type up a scenario I ran a few months ago (its also getting a severe polish as I spotted a few improvements while I was running it). It takes place in the Babylon 5 setting, and some of the action takes place abord the station itself. In the original version I went to great (OK, not that great) lengths to avoid having the characters run in to any of the major characters.
So they get hired by the Narn? The obvious candidate was G'Kar, but I wasn't confident I could do him justice. In walks a generic (he's only in two scenes and the players will probably never meet him again - and if they do he can get some background then) Narn diplomatic aide (its 2257, none of the ones that appeared on screen have arrived yet).
There are better GMs then me out there, and there are people who care less about continuity then me out there too. I can respect that (the revised version of the scenario will include G'Kar - if the GM wants to use him), I'm just not ready to him myself.
Posted by at 10:57 PM. You can comment on this entry.
