One of the perennial criticisms of zero-to-hero tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons is that they stifle creativity by sharply limiting your initial character building options and reserving all the really outlandish stuff for high-level play. Like, what if I don’t want to be an elf wizard? What if I want to be a vampire werewolf angel from outer space? What about that?
Certainly, there’s something to be said for games that let you go as weird as you want right from the start, and there are any number of games that will absolutely do that for you. Heck, most tabletop games will do that for you; the popularity of D&D and its various imitators notwithstanding, zero-to-hero RPGs are the exception rather than the rule! (If only because getting character advancement mechanics right is a stone bastard even for every experienced designers – but I digress.)
There’s a trick, though: reserving the weird stuff for high levels obliges you to work your way up to it, and while this can sometimes feel like the rules are saying you have to “earn” the right to play the character you want, introducing that weirdness over a span of time – and here I mean real time, not just narrative time – in response to the events of a story with multiple storytellers will send it in directions that never would have occurred to you on your own.
The result isn’t no weirdness: it’s organically grown weirdness. You start out with something basic like “elf wizard”, and by gradual degrees, over the course of many sessions, that character develops into something that takes several paragraphs to explain.
Now, I’m not saying one approach is better than the other – going full gonzo right from square one can be fun, too. I am saying that it’s not a simple matter of weird now versus weird later; when you build up to it gradually, in response – and as a response — to a collaborative story, you don’t just get deferred weird. You get different weird, in a way that simply could not have been accomplished by leaping straight to the end result.
(This is why high-level characters contrived for the sake of examples and illustrations never ring quite true, incidentally; when somebody’s trying to fake organically grown weirdness, you can tell!)
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