What does competitive questing have to do with this "chosen one" issue?
Everything. Swen said that the "main" PC gets to have his origin quest, and the rest of the PCs don't. They're just there to support the One Hero. There's no competition, there's no question of who's going to win in the end, there's no tension or genuine interest. The question is now "HOW is the One Hero going to win?" Before, the question was "WILL PC #1 win
at all?" In terms of narrative, these questions are night and day. I was excited for a game with conflict that was meaningful on a level that RPGs have never dared to go to before.
Aren't you just annoyed that the player character might end up being the protagonist?
The fact that you're talking about "THE player character" instead of "the player CHARACTERS" illustrates the entire point in a nutshell.
You're controlling a party, not just a character. The point is that companions are mostly under your control, so it's kind of silly to be actively undermining your player character while controlling your companion.
Sure it is, and it's equally silly for friends to work against each other in a game ... yet people do it all the time and it's fun.
The player character is not "me", and I am not "him". He is
one character I am manipulating in order to make an enjoyable story. If I'm manipulating
more than one character, why should they become mindless slaves serving the motivations of the One True Character? Is my party a "blob", a single person with eight arms and eight legs, but only one mind? Why? Why is that good?
Have you ever played pen & paper role-playing games? Watch the GM. He plays more than one character every session, and they aren't a hive mind that all work together. NPCs fight each other, argue with each other, work at cross purposes, even go to war against each other. Nobody questions why this is good and important. So if it's fun and good storytelling for one person to write the actions of more than one character if he's the GM, why is it bad and wrong for a player to want to do the exact same thing when controlling multiple PCs?
All it would take is for your friend to join your game and you can do all the competing you want.
Oh good, so all I have to do is schedule 40+ hours of concurrent play time with 3 other busy adults. Nothing inconvenient about that.
