The RPG Paradox -

from - EN World: D&D / RPG News & Reviews
by Mouseferatu 5th November 2010

-It'd be absolutely ludicrous for me--or anyone--to talk about "what people want" from RPGs as if there was any universal answer. Heck, click on any random thread in the forums, and you'll see pretty quick that the differences of opinion are legion.

What you can find, if you're engaged in the hobby, are certain patterns. Things that a lot of people would love to see in their own games. It may not even be a majority, but it's a sufficiently significant subset that the major games would do well to at least try to satisfy that particular desire.

The problem is that RPGs, by their very nature, often prove ill-suited to, or even completely incapable of, providing the desired experience.

(Most of what follows probably isn't news to many of you, but I'm hoping that by laying it out as a specific phenomenon, it might spur some discussion. Or at least provide an interesting read.)

What got me thinking of this recently is Rhukma, my character in the Savage Worlds of Solomon Kane campaign I'm currently involved in. He's one of two spellcasters in the group. He's also a foreign, exotic, mysterious type. (The campaign is set in Eastern Europe. Most of the PCs are European. Rhukma is Indian.)

In a fantasy novel, such as the Robert Howard pulps on which the whole game is based, Rhukma's magics would be creepy, enigmatic, and (above all) ill-defined. When he calls on the names of the various Hindu gods, raises his elephant-head talisman high, and commands the roots to lash out and grab his enemies or the beasts to obey his commands, it would be a bizarre, frightening thing.

And we do our best to play it that way, at least so far as it doesn't derail the game, or offer my character more than my share of the spotlight. But let's be honest. It doesn't actually feel that way. We all know that Rhukma has access to four specific spells from the book, and exactly how they work, and what their limits are.

In almost any ongoing discussion of magic in D&D, you'll eventually come across someone lamenting the fact that magic in the game feels so mundane, so commonplace. The spells have no mystery to them. They're so specifically defined that there's little creativity in their use. People being able to buy or create magic items takes the wonder out of them. The fact that a specific quantity of magic item bonuses is built into the system renders them nothing but modifiers. There's no magic in the magic.

I don't necessarily disagree. Obviously, not everyone shares that feeling, but for those that do, it can be a real downer when it comes to playing certain types of campaigns or characters.

It's also almost entire unavoidable, as the first of the RPG paradoxes. Boil it down to the core, and it's very basic: Something's only mysterious and exotic so long as it's unknown.

continued -
LINK - - -
http://www.enworld.org/forum/columns/296507-rpg-paradox.html

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