Recent content by Remathilis

I agree with the cure, but not the diagnosis. If anything, the "weird" doesn't come out of political correctness, but by a adherence to traditionalism. They want the Tolkien-inspired mentality of humans asecendant, demi-humans (elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings) in decline or a minority...

The trick is that the player needs to know when to be serious and when to be goofy. I'm not against comedy, but too many players think they're in a bad parody movie of D&D rather than an actual D&D game.

I guess genasi fill that role, but I think it would have been neat to see undines, sylphs, gnomes, and salamandars fill the "lesser elemental" PC species niche.

And here is where "D&D's no defined setting" becomes a huge issue. WotC itself currently supports almost a dozen official settings, and with 3pp and homebrew DMs the setting possibilities are infinite. Unless the player is willing to do homework (and few are, some barely do the research...

Most of the joke characters either settle down into something more manageable OR they get bored of the joke and the character disappears somehow. Mind you, when I'm talking joke characters, I'm talking ones that have one gimmick and that's all they do. For example, a lizardfolk chef who could...

Bad players are not a new phenomenon. "I am playing a psionic awakened glass of orange juice and I will scream if you try to stop me" seems much more recent. That's what I'm referring to. I've seen plenty of players who do not grasp the intricacies of the DMs setting or want to play a specific...

You know, it's funny I've never heard about these entitled snowflake players until maybe the last few years and almost always in the context of this board. I'm not disputing anyone's lived experience, but I seriously question if it's as endemic as the Internet would have you believe.

The plural of anecdote is not data. But I will point out a trend that I cannot prove, but tends to be the root of most of these horror stories: Non-dedicated groups tend to run the wackiest, most balls-out stuff possible. Every one of your examples tells me that you were finding the same kind of...

Do you mean Legendary as in "back in Legends" or Planeswalkers?

As with everything, the ideal situation is that the player comes with a set of ideas and the GM comes with setting expectations and the two work out the details. Maybe the evil warlord who attacked my family long ago is the leader of city state that the campaign is supposed revolve around. Of...

Yup. You'll always get that one guy who, when to tell them you can't be a ninja in a wild west campaign, ends up a ninja with a cowboy hat.

I assume that when the DM isn't interested in my character backstory, it's because they have zero interest in incorporating my character into their world and would rather I make the sacrifice to fit their vision than vice versa. Which is fine, I just default to the tropiest possible character...

I was wondering when we would get the remaining preview articles for ForA.

This is going to be some armchair psychoanalysis, but I think this is due to a heavy an element of traditionalism stemming from design of AD&D and BD&D. D&D for years (mostly the TSR era) was built around the idea that the Core Four options were the safest options, and every class and race...

Which comes back to the circus trope I guess. I mean, kobold adventurers are rare (at least in my experience) but if someone really wanted to be one, I wouldn't press demographic considerations on people.