thread: 2005-03-23 : Strong Stuff Indeed
On 2005-03-26, Charles wrote:
John,
I think the "Well, what have you not used in a roll recently?" was a poor and confusing answer, but the larger principle is fairly obvious: whatever has not affected the game recently. If your character's eye color has affected play recently, then it matters. If it hasn't, then it is unnecessary to have it written down. Of course, your question is difficult to answer in any detail, since it would require knowing the specifics of a particular game and a particular character.
Personally, though, I'm not sure that "recently" is necessarily relevant. If the game is extremely focused, and doesn't have the possibility of shifting focus over time, then "recently" may equal "ever", but in a game that shifts focus, it may be very important that your character can cause small troops to lose their confidence and flee in terror, even though there has never yet been a need to drive off enemy troops. If, for instance, there are political issues relating to starting a war with a neighboring country going on in the background, what your character knows he could do eventually informs what he does now in the political game.
I think that a more useful way to think about it is not "What is on your character sheet that you don't use?" but instead, "What do you use that isn't on your character sheet?" If your character sheet includes a lot of irrelevant stuff, that probably won't hurt play much. If your character sheet doesn't include a lot of stuff that matters, then the mechanics of character creation (to the extent they are represented by what you end up with on a character sheet) are failing to support the stuff that matters. Even worse is if there is stuff on your character sheet that is wrong, if the game doesn't include mechanics for changing the representation of your character as your character evolves.
I guess the other question is what stuff is there on your character sheet that you use, but that muddies the game by being there. To use someone else's example, if everything your character owns is listed out by weight, then encumberance is likely to come up in play, even if resource allocation issues relating to encumberance aren't actually something the players find particularly interesting to play.
Actually, isn't all of this somewhat of a side-tracking from the central idea (as I took it) that character generation should be strongly tied to change in play: that the character should be created as something changeable rather than something static, and that char gen should fopcus on those things that the game will focus on changing? That play should be viewed as a process of character creation, and character creation as a process of play?
D&D is actually a particularly strong and focused example of this. Except for the core framework of stats, there is very little on a D&D character sheet that is not directly tied to what changes about a character over time. A character at first level and the same character at 10th level will have radically different character sheets. And the core framework of stats is central to what happens in play, which determines what changes.
What it does with a character over time may not be interesting to many of us who don't play D&D anymore, but that is a seperate question.
