Oddly enough, I think there's too *little* modification in RPGs. Many, many players I've spoken to over the years feel not only that they have no business adjusting the rules to fit their play style, but that any new rulebook/supplement that comes out has to be adopted, wholesale, into the existing campaign.
Rather than players over-identifying with their characters, I think it's more of a case of inability to suspend disbelief--particularly as relates to the perceived shortcomings of a given ruleset. For example, if the players can't agree to accept that a 100-foot fall isn't automatically fatal (as the mechanics prove), then the players are likely to work together to "improve" the rules for falling damage.
Of course, it's usually when the players depend on the rules simulating their perceived "reality" that this issue comes to the fore, and the players start tweaking the rules. But it can go either way. If the players push a villain off a cliff, they want him to die when he hits the bottom, no save, no modifiers. HOWEVER, if the villain pushes them off a cliff and they die, then the rules are clearly broken *the other way*, and require serious tweaking to make falling *less* lethal.
I can remember having long, long arguments while playing 1st Ed. Champions, about whether a character should be able to combine a martial punch with a move-by attack ... and how many times we tweaked the rules, tried them, tweaked them again, and so on. In fact, in the 1E D&D campaign I played in, we reworked monks over and over, because playing them was a lot less fun than playing any other class ...
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Date: 2009-01-07 09:41 pm (UTC)Rather than players over-identifying with their characters, I think it's more of a case of inability to suspend disbelief--particularly as relates to the perceived shortcomings of a given ruleset. For example, if the players can't agree to accept that a 100-foot fall isn't automatically fatal (as the mechanics prove), then the players are likely to work together to "improve" the rules for falling damage.
Of course, it's usually when the players depend on the rules simulating their perceived "reality" that this issue comes to the fore, and the players start tweaking the rules. But it can go either way. If the players push a villain off a cliff, they want him to die when he hits the bottom, no save, no modifiers. HOWEVER, if the villain pushes them off a cliff and they die, then the rules are clearly broken *the other way*, and require serious tweaking to make falling *less* lethal.
I can remember having long, long arguments while playing 1st Ed. Champions, about whether a character should be able to combine a martial punch with a move-by attack ... and how many times we tweaked the rules, tried them, tweaked them again, and so on. In fact, in the 1E D&D campaign I played in, we reworked monks over and over, because playing them was a lot less fun than playing any other class ...
JD