LogFAQs > #905325754

shadowsword87 posted...

Hell, if they choose to be that weird Iron Man Wizard (called School of Invention), with a mech suit and everything, from Unearthed Arcana, then those robots would make perfect sense no big deal.

Well, that's assuming I'd ever let a player use anything from Unearthed Arcana at all (spoiler: I would not).

But to be fair, I don't think you need to be a tech-heavy character to have interesting stories in a world that has ancient magical tech in it. If anything, your hypothetical Druid might have interesting qualms about using such unnatural tools to help defend the natural world, and question whether or not they should be doing so. Conversely, they might consider them no different from the sword or armor they buy in the nearest town to help them fight, and just use them to smash things.

(As an aside, I have literally never used a nuke launcher in any Fallout game, because I am pretty much always RPing my character, and I feel like no human character in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland should ever want to use a weapon that creates MORE nuclear waste. But plenty of players don't give a single shit, and will shoot them off constantly because large explosions are fun. To each their own.)

If anything, it's like if Star Wars had no Han or Chewie but Luke had 3PO and R2 but also a couple of combat droids. The story as a whole can still be about the Force and overcoming evil in one's heart and redemption and so on, but the guy shooting a blaster at the Stormtroopers is now made out of metal instead out of meat.

Just as an example, the old SNES RPG 7th Saga had an ancient lost civilization with tons of robots and magical technology that had collapsed thousands of years before the start of the game, and one of the main characters you could choose to play was a surviving robot from that fallen empire, with no memory of where it came from, seeking answers to why its creators died. While the other players are all radically different (a human knight, a human cleric, an elf wizard/healer, a dwarf warrior, a demon sorcerer, and a literal space alien), and none of them care about that civilization in the slightest, you WILL go there and explore (both in the present as well as the distant past) and learn its secrets.

While those parts of the story may be more interesting for (or at least more directly related to) the robot main character, it's still interesting enough on its own for the other six characters as well, and at no point do you start getting annoyed because the dwarf who wants immortality magic or the evil demon who wants to conquer the world aren't being directly catered to via their backstory.

(and while I forgot 7th Saga in my earlier list of influences, it's almost certainly helping influence at least some of these ideas)

In the same vein, "ancient civilization in the past, mostly destroyed, but now here's some magical robots" doesn't have to become the core theme and narrative of the game, at the expense of whatever else the players might have in mind. The demon-hunting Paladin and the nature-loving Druid and the street-thief Rogue who wants to become a criminal kingpin can all dip into that particular plot point, and if they want to focus on it, great. Conversely, they can act like most PCs in a game of D&D, loot the fuck out of the old ruins for magical items they can use to beat stuff up, and then never think about the implications or historical backstory while going on to fulfill their own selfish desires.

Though if they DO get interested, it's also ripe pickings for narrative. Precisely who WERE the Precursors/Forerunners/etc? Why did they fall? How can the PC access their tech when no one else can? Just what sort of superweapons DO they have hidden away in lost underground fortresses somewhere? And what dark evil might the PC accidentally unleash?


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