(09-03-2013, 01:28 PM)LilMomoshi Wrote: YAY! Discussion happened!
While I'm thinking of it, another thought, in relation to RP and game mechanics.
I've always taken the approach, in terms of power of my character and the skills they have, of directly relating this to the game. If they can't cast it in game, they can't cast it in RP. If it's a spell outside of their class (which, granted, will require some self-restrictions in this game) then they can't use it. Level isn't related to power, but it certainly is to skill and study, then.
How do you wonderful people approach this?
I tend to take a looser approach myself, as in not intimately tying game mechanics to character ability. To me, telling a good story is more important than how many hours I've spent leveling my character to get such-and-such ability.
That said, I try not to ignore the framework of the game either. To (again) use my character S'janna as an example, she has some magical talent that (until recently) was extremely untutored. Class-wise, she is/was an arcanist, and in RP demonstrated a pretty pathetic ability to heal, and a sort of unfocused offensive magic. She had no ability to summon (as she'd not been formally trained). These abilities make sense in the scope of the arcanist class- we get a heal and an 'untyped' attack pretty much right off.
In that regard, too, I played up the fact that she was doing this without any sort of focus, which is why those abilities were so meager in her hands. I guess that's ultimately how I'm sort-of representing the different classes/abilities as they relate to S'janna using them- different foci are required to perform different effects, or at least to perform them to any meaningful degree. It's my explanation for why S'janna was flinging around heals and ruins in battle one day, but when she left her tome at home and was carrying a bow, her magic was conspicuously absent- a bow is not a good focus for combat magic, right? It's not like she suddenly forgot her magic, it was simply that it was pretty much useless without a focus.
I hope that makes some sense, and wasn't too rambling.
