- In HeroQuest-rules_at_yahoogroups.com, "Roderick Robertson" > This
whole blather about modifying the Chargen rules has (to me) been a long
> series of "But the rules say" and then justifying changes to them -
it feels
> like a person who feels just a *leetle* guilty and needs to talk
themselves
> into it.
I suspect there are a couple of reasons for this that probably go back
to RPG history, and almost certainly don't affect the people currently
debating...
- In the early days (or at least in my early days) we all created
characters "by the rules" and played them in games run by any memeber
of the group who had something to run. When I went to the TSR
run "Games Fairs" in the Eighties, most GM's expected players to bring
their own characters. Obviosly, therefore, it behove players and GM's
to use "the offical rules" in order to make this inter-game transfer
run smoothly. If you are creating a character to run in a specific
campaign run by a single GM (or even in a troupe style campaign run by
various members of your group) then providing all the participants are
happy to use or ignore the same rules it doesn't matter if they are the
ones in the book or not.
- Published scenarios are written assuming that the players who use
them will have been created by, and run according to the rules as
written, so if you change the scale, or allow more or fewer skills,
whatever, there is a chance you will unbalance the scenario if the GM
does not makle the same (or similar) changes there. This is sort of
Jane's argument that if the rules define a Clan Champion as having
skill X, then if you are creating a clan champion he should have skill
of X not 1/2 X or 2X - Of course if you never run any written
scenarios then this is less of a problem...