Too many ingredients make the soup flavorless?

Lots of threads last weeks were about character options and flexibility; the discussions showed that this is a very appreciated feature of 3rd edition, and in fact the books with character material are still selling very well.

On the other hand, in the past year and a half I have personally felt less and less interested in those kind of books, and I thought it was because as a player I don't have much chance on using all that stuff. Even as we always play 2-3 campaigns at the same time, plus a couple of PbP, there is still more than 90-95% of unused material in my (not so many) books.

Anyway... thinking about it from another perspective, I've now been considering another problem, which could be more interesting. There are so many character options around, which players obviously want to try since they want to use their books, that it has watered down some of ours campaigns too much.

It feels to me that the problem is more in the playable races, but also something else. The game has the advantages of letting players write up very original characters, against the cliches', and that should make the game more interesting.

But after 4 years of gaming... what has quite become the cliche' for us is itself the making of non-cliche' PC :\ If we look at e.g. Elves in our games, there are no more Elven mages than there are clerics, monks, bards... they have become just variant humans, they have much nothing left about "being an elf". Yes they have +2 Dex, but that is just a number and it makes a small difference IYKWIM.

In a way, the "options, not restrictions" great idea of 3ed has helped making individual characters more interesting, but the whole settings are less interesting, at least those which basically allow everything with little restriction, like FR.

Talking about restrictions, we always thought the multiclassing penalties were silly, and it's been years since we forgot about them. Now for the first time I almost miss them, because they helped giving a (small) identity to different races. [This is just an example of restriction however, don't take this specific one too seriously...]

So what am I saying after all this babble? That from a setting point of view, I really want some restrictions back. In a way they really make sense, and if you later feel like they have become a burden, you can make a new campaign with different restrictions (effectively it's like another setting).

A few months ago I bought OA and Rokugan CS, and started playing in a couple of adventures. Rokugan is quite a restriction-heavy campaign compared to others, but it doesn't feel like we are held captive by those boundaries, instead they give distinctive features to the setting's fantasy world as a whole.

I'd like to know what others think about it, in case I'm just going totally nuts

I agree, and I'm quite glad that in both the campaign I run and the one I play in there are fairly strict restrictions on classes, races, etc. I find that proliferation of options reduces my desire to play, maybe because I come from an OD&D(1974) background where we only had 3 classes, level and class restrictions for races, etc or maybe because I don't play that often so I find that I object to having lots of things that I'll never use.

Most of my fun comes from trying to role-play my characters, which is not really down to a set of numbers on a page (at least IME) or killing things and taking their stuff.

On the whole I think that creativity is stimulated by boundaries rather than stifled by them.

You could do as we do in one campaign and enforce multiclassing not only as normal, but also for picking up prestige classes. That way, the races' favored class plays a much higher role and this in turn helps to make the races more stereotypical.

Also using mostly standard races, with maybe one character of a "weird" race thrown in, certainly helps to create a more game-world-realistic (where the PHB races are usually predominant in civilized areas) adventuring party.

Bye
Thanee

The problem is also to retain a distinct flavor for a campaign. Say that the DM wants an Arthurian-like setting. A human paladin and half-elf mage are okay, but then if three other players come with characters such as a Xeph (race) Favored-soul (class) who plans to take the Sulurian-Mage prestige class (never heard of that one*), you quickly obtain a ridiculous world cuisine (try to find that old thread back) that sounds stupid rather than Arthurian.

As such, I think there must indeed be limits and restrictions to what is available in the DM's campaign setting. It should be up to the DM to decide what's available, then let the players choose from that; otherwise it's anarchy.



(*: Yet, among the thousands of prestige classes published at one time or another, I wouldn't be surprised it already exists... )

I agree with the above posters that it's important to have race & class restrictions to fit the flavour of the campaign, and a game without _any_ restrictions is likely to have a "grey goop" flavour - everything is in there, nothing is distinctive. In my own game PCs are almost always human, with the occasional elf, half-elf or dwarf. There's plenty of variety within the human races & cultures. Likewise I use almost entirely core classes, plus a few very specific ones that fit the setting. OTOH I'm happy to work with a player to tweak their PC's abilities (just like it suggests in the PHB) so they fit the player's concept as well as my game.

I don't think it's the job of the rules to place restrictions on an individual campaign. That's what we have DMs for - to prune back the morass of possibilities until the shape of the individual gameworld emerges, like shaping topiary.

mhacdebhandia said:

I don't think it's the job of the rules to place restrictions on an individual campaign. That's what we have DMs for - to prune back the morass of possibilities until the shape of the individual gameworld emerges, like shaping topiary.

Click to expand...

That's why as a DM I have a list of allowed races/classes and combinations. There are plenty of human subtypes in the world, with the core races and the main limitation is on classes, as for the moment I still haven't got a ranger that I really like - getting close now and it should pop up on the houserules threads soon.

But it does mean players have to accept if they're playing in an Arthurian campaign (to use Turanil's example) they can't have a Drow two weapon fighter with the Angst feat as it is not appropriate for the setting.

When I saw the title of this thread I thought for sure it must be about Eberon...

In Terra Viejo race or home region can affect--or "restrict"--sarting class, equipment, religion...its all in the big red sig.

I can see it from several directions. Yes, there is often a tendency, particularly after playing for a while, to want to be the iconoclast character. The only good member of an evil race; a charismatic member of a non-charismatic group (or vice versa); basically, a character that goes against type and keys off of what they aren't, as opposed to what they are. That can be fun, but this approach rapidly becomes the new black, as it were. Eventually, you get burned out on the oddballs, just like you did on the originals. It's a cycle.

Boundaries don't necessarily have to be totally restricting, and OA is a good example of that (although it's worth noting that some OA has different boundaries, not always more/less). For those boundaries to work, however, they have to fit the feel and framework of the campaign. Arbitrary class restrictions are no fun....class restrictions that are reinforced by the campaign setting can be.

Remember, Dr. Seuss' "The Cat in the Hat" was written with only 220 words; "Green Eggs and Ham" with only 53! It is said that people can thrive in creativity when restrictions are placed on them - don't be afraid to use a subset of the rules to get the feel you want for a campaign. Just make sure your PLAYERS know what you're going for, too.