Thought of the day Thursday

Since I don’t have a gaming group and my son isn’t old enough yet to grasp the full nuances of RPGs (although we are progressing by using Dungeon!); most of my time must be spent in collection, reflection, speculation, and creating my own material (which I hope to at least use with my son when he is old enough to play). So having said all that, it is speculation time. Anyway, I was thinking about the rule sets for the various incarnations of D&D and how they relate to the various stories listed as inspiration in Appendix N of the 1e DMG. In particular, I’m reading the Elric Saga and thinking about how these guys would be worked out in the OD&D or Basic D&D frameworks (yes, I’m well aware of the 1e Deities and Demigods). Now over the years, I’ve heard people toss out nuggets like: “well, folks like Elric don’t fit into the rules framework.” I find myself asking, “Well, why the hell not?” I mean, if the inspiration for the game is heroes in the vein of Elric, Conan, Aragorn, etc, then why can’t my guy eventually become one of those? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing the system – I find that I grow to appreciate it more and more as I get older. It does allow for the flexibility for the DM to pretty much add house rules or disregard rules in the system without dramatically breaking the system or needing to rework other in game systems by doing so. So, now to the speculation part, what kind of benefits/drawbacks systems to folks use to capture the truly unique and epic characters in the vein of Elric? Do people use mechanical systems to represent this or do most groups reflect the uniqueness via story elements and not use subsystems to capture unique attributes? I’d be interested in hearing what others think on this.

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