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SnowFire
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New York City, NY
Jan 1970 time: 00:34
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It's an amazingly laudable yet astonishingly foolish idea at the same time.
On the bright side, the idea behind "living X" campaigns is a campaign that stretches across the world, where everybody impacts the same world, and if I move from New Jersey to England, I can keep the same character, who is simply making a similar trip from the part of the world given to NJ to the part of the world given to England.
On the down side, in order to accomplish this, they decided to completely remove the importance of individual characters, their eccentricities, or give any freedom to the GM. To prevent characters from cheating on rolls, characters are made point-buy, insuring you never see any exceptional characters. In order to prevent GMs from levelling up favorite friends of theirs, the GMs can only run pre-made adventures, which only give out a set amount of XP, which must be signed off on. Since these are all pre-made adventures that can be run, no character ever has a particular reason of his (or her) own to do something; all characters are wandering do-gooders with nothing particularly better to do with their time than solve these pre-made adventures. Since the GM has no freedom, he also must strictly enforce the letter of the rules, subject to appeal by his players!
Now, it would certainly be no fun if another player came to your game, and he had conspired with his previous GM to make a level 20 character with 18's in all his stats. But I say just not let him play in that case. The cure is worse than the disease when you remove all flavor from the game.
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