From:	John E Pederson <lobo1@****.COM>
Subject:	Characters...
Date:	Sat, 28 Dec 1996 21:05:04 EST

My question is thus: What kind of characters do you allow your players to
use, and based upon what criteria? Personally, I'm more than willing to
let one of my players use a Great Dragon if they could come up with a
really wizzer background and motivations for their character...OTOH, the
chances of them coming up with a background sufficient for that are about
the same as a snowball's in you-know-where:) Currently, the group I'm
playing with consists of 5, maybe 6 or 7 players (counting in myself as
GM).
Current characters include:
A Werewolf Wolf shaman
A female vampire hermetic mage
A free spirit (of as yet undetermined type-hmmm...perhaps I'll
saddle him with a free watcher;)
A negamagical adept (Magic Priority A w/ powers of Negamage in
NAGEE 6 and sorcery adept, currently unaware of his abilities)
And myself, using a former gang member ork (a character w/o cyber
or magic)...
If you're wondering how on earth I could let this happen, please realize
that I'm still in the process of figuring the GMing biz out and that I
worked with most of the players on the characters. I do not yet have
backgrounds on any of them (except the last two), but I think I can come
up with suitable ones when I get the chance to work one-on-one with
players and put the enemies rules in the SR Comp. to good and judicious
use. In any case, what kind of justification would you require of a
player to make use of such powerful and potentially game-unbalancing
characters? Please, no flames/thwaps about Munchkinism/Monty
Haul/Power-gaming or any of the rest of that nonsense. I'd prefer not to
hear it at this point...

Canthros-the-seriously-considering-his-position-shapeshifter-mage