The Campaign: When Making New Things To Excel At Isn't Good Enough

(Contiuning from yesterday's post.)

Other Forms Of Creating Competitive Advantage

How many times have you been reading lore wiki pages, or playing in a campaign, when you cross swords with someone that used to be like your man but decided to become some monster in pursuit of whatever it is that monster wanted?

In a proper RPG campaign, such encounters are not the result of a Referee rolling on random encounter tables or using a module. They are the result of players seeking that edge over their opposition.

Becoming Something Else

Remember that yesterday I said that one way to do this was to make add-ons to what a character may be. "Becoming something else" means to change your character's race from what it was to something that grants it a decisive advantage over his rivals in the campaign. This is the route that we see when Magic-Users resort to undeath and become Liches, usually due to (a) being unable to acquire perpetual life any other way and (b) creeping up on the limits of their mortal lifespan.

Apotheosis is another route, but this involves either a high Charisma score and a lot of leverage with a cosmic power capable of transforming mortals into gods (or a functional equivalent) or it involves a high-risk gambit of swindling or stealing the means to induce it from such a cosmic power-wielder.

A more specific variation is "someone else", which is what Magic Jar is all about and variations of Polymorph. Drifting away from typical Pink Slime Fantasy, we also get cyborgs and similar whole-body replacements such as the Dreadnaughts of SpaceMace 39K.

Note that each such becoming is not cost-free.

The cyborgs are machines, and thus must be repaired and maintained to retain full functionality. The undead have issues with sustainance and interaction. Apotheosis usually means either entering conflicts with other cosmic powers directly, or due to affilation with the patron power that made that happen, and those are not the only costs. (AD&D1e rules for Clerics, Druids, etc. involve contact with immortal minions to gain spells of given levels- no reason why your man would not have such duties.)

What matters to those making these moves is that the benefits gained are worth the costs paid and sustained thereafter.

Developing New Subordinates

This is a catch-all for when a player decides that his man, rather than changing himself to get an edge, developes his subordinates to do so. This also falls into the Research & Development process, and it is how we get our tales of Necromancers raising undead hordes above and beyond what the rules ordinarily allow for him to wield as self-perpetuating drone swarms or summoners trafficking with potent supernatural entities to the same end (i.e. summoning demons).

This is also where we get tales of people trying to create ideal automata to deploy, making minion races or beasts to do what typical ones will not or cannot, and so on that is typically NPC-only territory in Pink Slime Fantasy. There is nothing that says that players' characters cannot do this themselves.

Or, it could involve wholesale rewriting of the henchmen and hirelings into far hardier soldiers- turning them into living weapons. More villainous characters may decide to do this to their enemies instead.

Hitting The Table

Regardless of what is chosen, the procedure remains the same: the player informs the Referee of what that character will do, the two confer on what that will entail in terms of time and material costs to be paid as well as how it will play in terms of the rules, and when development is complete the player is free to deploy his new addition to the game at his convenience.

And, for all you folks in the back looking aghast at this, I remind you that all that treasure in those dungeons had to be created by someone at some time in the past. The same goes for all those monsters and widgets and wondrous places of power. Letting players make new such things, or revive lost formulae for those past creations, is nothing more than contemporary people figuring out how to make Roman concrete. Part of the fun is in figuring out and deploying things that others do not have access to in order to win- and that is a mindset that transfers readily to real life, something that is lacking more often than not.

If they come up with something that leads to them winning, let them. They earned it.