The General and the Specific

I've been doing quite a lot of thinking about the various peoples of Terafa recently, but also considering one of those big questions that doesn't really come up anywhere except in RPGs: what if the player doesn't agree. That is, what if I say in my campaign guide that "an elf is this", but the person playing an elf character wants something different from their character? And what if, despite our negotiations, we just find that the two notions don't work - that the player wants something from the character that is just impossible in the context of the lore of the setting?

I've gone back and forward on this issue several times over the years. Eventually, what I have settled on is this: the character belongs to the player, and what they say goes... for that character. Obviously, their character is a one-in-a-million exception, for whom the normal lore just doesn't work. And, for the duration of that character's existence the normal lore will be suspended.

It is, of course, entirely possible that at some point I may come back and write the "official history" of the setting. And in the event that that character plays a notable part in that OH, at that point the character's story will be moulded to fit the ongoing lore of the setting. But that would only happen after that character was no longer in use - once the character is indeed a matter of history.

So, for example... I hae established that elven Lord and Ladies are infertile amongst themselves - only the elven Queen can have elven children. Suppose, however, that the player wants his character to be married and have children, and wants those children to be elven (as opposed to half-elven).

Well, fair enough. As indicated, that will indeed be the case for that character for the duration of his career as a PC. But later, in the official history, if the character features at all, it will be massaged - perhaps he and his consort found themselves the adoptive parents of some young elven children, or perhaps he married a human and had half-elven children, or something else.

Ultimately, the point is this: the lore of the setting will not be used to constrain player characters any more than is absolutely necessary; but once they are no longer player characters, those characters will most likely be made consistent with the setting lore.