Affording a spaceship?

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

If you as a GM gets to decide what kind of things the players' characters own at gamestart, why stop there? Why not also decide who they're going to be, what kinds of characters?

I thought that most GMs do this. Whswhs is unusual in offering a slate of different campaign premises. Most of us announce something like "I'm going to run a spies game, who wants to play?" or "I'm going to run a Mysteries game for PIs working for the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco in the 20s", or "I'm going to run a sort of John Carter sort of thing for Aussie infantry transported to Mars from the battlefields of Pozières". If someone expects to play a starship captain in one of my fantasy campaigns everyone will look at him funny.

Why not create their characters for them? Why not play their characters for them too? Heck, why have players at all? If you want to create a story, sit down and write a novel!

Because they aren't fun.