D&D 5E We Would Hate A BG3 Campaign

[Voranzovin]

That's not true at all. You're being defensive. You have the power in this situation; you can choose to feel sorry for yourself, or you can take a few simple actions to make your life better. Ball's in your court.

I'm sorry, no.

People suffering from mental health problems, including social anxiety, can't just decide to turn them off. If they could, believe me, they would. Then there wouldn't be any need for therapy or psychiatric medication and no one would ever be depressed. How much do you think that resembles the world we actually live in?

That doesn't mean that people who suffer from social anxiety and other mental health problems have no agency in the matter--those problems can be treated. But fighting any kind of ingrained behavior or pattern of thought is difficult and time consuming. It's the kind of thing people may work on, in some cases, for their entire lives. Suggestions that they just shrug and get over it, however well-meant, aren't helpful. At best they're useless, at worst insulting and infantilizing.

 

[Mecheon]

Then an alien you've never seen that looks and awful lot like a xenomorph shows up. Do you really think people would accept them with open arms?

Oh, people would go worse

for the sake of yourself do not look up people's reactions to the Xenomorph Queen in Dead by Daylight

I don't know, I guess a roving mauler could exist in my world because I haven't specifically X'ed it out. But the odds are pretty small. What's a roving mauler? One of the dumbest critters ever published ...

Oh, that's just Buer, great president of Hell, fifty legions of demons, capable of healing all injuries and knows a lot about plants

Except with lion legs rather than goat ones.

 

[Oofta]

So I went through the Monster Manual and asked "Does this exist?" you could answer yes or no for each and every monster? Because you can do so for the PC options I wager.

See, I don't believe many DMs actually care much about the internal consistency of their world. That's a front. If they did, they'd know what monsters (and spells and the like) exist in their worlds. Dragonlance, for example, is EXTREMELY specific about what doesn't exist (orcs, lycanthropes, etc) and I don't wager most DMs bother with that. Because they don't need to spell it out since it would be a list for one: the DM and if the DM decides xvarts are stupid, they don't need to say that they just don't use them ever. Instead, they spell out the PC options since that list is for more than just the DM and they must be careful in case someone actually says "Can I be a X?"

Why does it matter? I can tell you for example that Bullywugs don't exist. I can tell you that orcs exist in one region and where they originate (they're not a naturally occurring species in my campaign world). I can tell you that gnolls are rare and how they were created but they're mostly limited to one region, although a related species has spread to another. Goblins (and more rarely goblinoids) exist most places because they're like rats and quite adaptable. But what's the difference between an evil spirit that manifests as a ghost or a specter other than how the spirit of a dead person manifests?

But I'm still the one deciding what fits my world, it's just a question of timing. I'd rather have a curated list up front that I let people know when I invite them than have someone join my campaign all excited to play a tabaxi only to tell them "no" because there is no cat lord and gods (much less "celestial beings") don't directly impact the prime material in that way.

In short, I don't think artistic vision has much to do with it, I think it has a lot more to do with "rules for thee, not for me."

I'm the one doing the world building, so ultimately I decide what belongs or doesn't. I see no reason to look through hundreds of monsters just to see where they fit. So?

Gotcha.

Nah.

 

[Maggan]

So I went through the Monster Manual and asked "Does this exist?" you could answer yes or no for each and every monster? Because you can do so for the PC options I wager.

Are you really positing that either a GM has to have everything decided in advance, else the GM must have nothing decided in advance?

Seems a bit reductionist to me, but if that’s how you run your games, you go you.

I’ll be somewhere in between those two extremes.

 

[mamba]

In short, I don't think artistic vision has much to do with it, I think it has a lot more to do with "rules for thee, not for me."

you literally just explained why these lists do not exist (outside of published settings)...

Dragonlance, for example, is EXTREMELY specific about what doesn't exist (orcs, lycanthropes, etc) and I don't wager most DMs bother with that. Because they don't need to spell it out since it would be a list for one: the DM

 

[pemerton]

It doesn't reduce internal consistency to you. It may to others, and their feelings on the matter are no less valid than yours.

How is internal consistency relative? Relative to what?

To me it seems to be a property that supervenes, in some fashion, on propositions that are true within the fiction. Those propositions, and their truth within the fiction, doesn't seem to be relative in any interesting fashion.

 

[pemerton]

I don't see how this is the implication of what I wrote.

A dragonborn. A walking dragon. A talking lizard. In my mind it will attract a lot more attention than a human in my human-centric campaign.

Also, you are inferring quite a lot about how I run my games without much information to go by. I'd prefer it if you didn't pass judgement on me as a GM, if for nothing else than for the sake of keeping this discussion civil.

I'm not drawing any inferences about your RPGing! I'm just commenting on the apparent implications of your posts.

 

[pemerton]

Is this the only type of world that would be considered acceptable?

I don't even know what work the word "acceptable" is doing here.

I'm just saying that, to me, a world in which polymorphing wizards and wild-shaping druids raise no eyebrows, it doesn't seem obvious that Dragonborn would do so.

 

[Mecheon]

I'd rather have a curated list up front that I let people know when I invite them than have someone join my campaign all excited to play a tabaxi only to tell them "no" because there is no cat lord and gods (much less "celestial beings") don't directly impact the prime material in that way.

Would that really be telling to most people though? I don't think most associate Tabaxi with their 5E storyline specifics or being created by gods, I think its 'I want to be cat person/Hrothgar/Khajiit", that sheer archetype. Like, not just in fantasy, in sci-fi the archetype goes back absolute decades as well, plus D&D's had them for yonks with Rakasta alone

People cool for the setting specific changes, they just want to play a cat person. So it could come from the cat lord, be a bunch of people from a war-torn land who ended up travelling once their homeland was destroyed, or a really complicated bunch of desert dwellers with questionable links to elves, maybe? (and frankly, I don't think tabaxi are hard to slot into settings given how wide the animal person archetype already is)

 

[pemerton]

You have a certain view of what constitutes internal consistency of a game world. That view is different from what others consider consistent. Both are okay. Yours does not trump theirs though; it's just different.

As I posted to @Micah Sweet, I don't know what this notion of "consistency relative to <insert something here>" is.

Just because a setting isn't to one's taste - eg one finds killer kangaroos silly - doesn't make it inconsistent.