Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
Yes, but not everybody has the same concept of fun. I run games that are fun for me, and apparently for my players, as when I lived in San Diego I had accumulated a pool of around fifteen players who kept coming back. But my sense of fun calls for a strong world concept and constraints on what characters can do based on that concept, which requires players to be ingenious in finding ways to work within those constraints.
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Oh, absolutely, and I would never claim that someone else's game is no fun if they're enjoying it!
I have found, with my players, that they don't enjoy constraints on how they can spend their earned CP unless those constraints help them imagine their character or how it fits into the world. It makes total sense to everyone if I say "you can't buy psionic powers because psionics don't exist in this world," but if I say "you can't buy psionic powers because only people born with them can have those powers and you weren't born with them," the player will likely just say "couldn't I have been born with them and I just didn't know it until now?" or "couldn't the gods somehow grant my character powers?" etc. And sometimes that means they're willing to do things in-game to get the powers, like travel to the sacred mana pool or whatever, and that makes for a fun adventure. To me, it's a
game, and in order to have fun my players need to feel that it's a fair game and not a rigged one. If I say "well, you should have thought of that when we started this campaign 28 sessions and 150 CP ago, it's too late now to become a psion," the player will feel like they're being hamstrung by my rules and vision, rather than those rules and vision being there to support their fun.
This may partially have more to do with the kinds of games I run, which tend to be cinematic, influenced more by DnD and video games than literature and such, internally consistent to the degree that it helps us imagine what's going on but not taking great pains to explain all the details of things that happen "off-screen" unless they seem relevant to the PCs' actions. I realize your games might be more focused on literary themes and realistic character development as ends in themselves, in which case your priorities will naturally be quite different...