Players should play, and not be heard: Campaign Edition

lowkey13 said:

So ... wait for this ... it might blow your mind.

If you, as the DM, are stating that this is the type of campaign that you are going to run, then .... you are, in fact, advocating for a specific type of campaign (a setting, if you will).

You are not polling the players. You aren't saying, "Hey guys, I got nothing. I'm bland like vanilla. So tell ya what- we can run Dark Sun, or do an AP set in FR, or Dawn of Worlds. Whatever, man. It doesn't matter to me. I barely have the energy to keep breathing."

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If "wanting to run a player collaborative setting" is the same as "DM comes to the game with the setting decided" in your estimation, most of the pushback in this thread would have been avoided. That's what most people here were advocating, not apathy.

That being said, there's also a difference between "I've got nothing" and "I'm willing to run a game where I ask the players what setting they want because it makes them more invested in the game". Subordinating your desires for the sake of the group is also not apathy.

*Deleted by user*

I'm probably 70/30% with me being the 70%.

I'm not going to force players to play Darksun if they don't want to but I might give them 2 or 3 options for the next game in terms of a theme.

Most everyone in my regular player pool are DMs or GMs. So I quite like getting their input on what we play next. Sometimes it's put forth as "I'd like to see what you can do with..." suggestions. That's a fun challenge for me to think about how I'd go about preparing and running someone else's ideas. It gives me some constraints to work under which are useful. Ultimately I pick what I'm going to do and the players are always onboard (I haven't given them a reason not to be), but I most definitely solicit their ideas before we move forward.

I'm going to be invested in whatever we do, whether that idea comes from me or one of the players. And there's nobody in my group that's going to say "I definitely won't play X, Y, or Z." None of us have any particularly strong opinions on that score.

I sort of agree.

A DM and players need to be on the same page for the type/tone/etc - but that's communication that can be solved multiple ways.

Usually I don't open-ended poll, I offer ideas I have. I often have multiple ideas and will offer all of them up, so it's polling among several ideas I'm vested in.

A counter-example after I finished one five year campaign and we were taking a break, I did an exit poll from my players. They had a bunch of feedback I thought about, and that helped me plan out my next campaign.

Right now we're at the tale end of a campaign, and in the group we're throwing ideas back and forth. Some people have stepped forward with "I'll run X", but the flip side is we had a bunch of players going "I want to do space opera" and whatever, and int he end we were talking a lot about Blades in the Dark and one person volunteered to run it. So that's akin to polling in that it's player choice, but it involves having a DM who feels strongly about it to step in and run it.

I don't think it's nearly as clear cut as "polling bad" or "polling good".

I know that, with regards to D&D, the setting is important to me as a player. I will not play Eberron, Planescape, Spacejammer, WOTC Forgotten Realms (well, actually, post 1e TSR grey box FR). I will not play in a D&D campaign introducing firearms/modern/futuristic tech, martial arts (as most people understand them to be), wuxia, or shonen anime inspiration despite being willing to play any of these in another system. I will also not play in a campaign utilizing collaborative setting design such as that of Dungeon World or Fate.

As a DM, I will not run the above. I prefer to run homebrew, but I will run Greyhawk (original folio or boxed set setting minus things like Barrier Peaks module), Dark Sun (original boxed set setting), Ravenloft (Realms of Terror boxed set setting) or the Al Qadim setting. For homebrew, I will consider some player inspired changes (e.g. the seafaring pirate elves in my 3e campaign physically resemble drow, because a player wanted to play a drow so I instituted a cosmetic physical change. Mechanically, they were still elves. If she had wanted to be a warforged, dragonborn, or tiefling, my answer would have been no.

Going one step further as a DM, I may just scrap a D&D game and switch to another system depending upon the character concepts my players present. If I had players coming up with a party inspired by comic book characters, I am pulling out one of several superhero systems, because I am not interested in running nightcrawler, psylocke Wolverine, other X-men clones, Batman, etc in a fantasy setting. Similarly, if I see players are inspired by shonen or most other anime, I am pulling out a different system whether BESM, a superhero system (probably M&M (with the Mecha and Manga sourcebook) or Marvel Heroic), Ninja Crusade, or investing in a copy of OVA.
As for scifi/fantasy, fantasy with firearms, martial arts fantasy or wuxia, I am pulling out Savage Worlds, Cartoon Action Hour: Season 3, GURPS, HERO System, or True20 (if the players need a class/level system).

lowkey13 said:

What works for me, may not work for you. And I am not the King of Everyone.

...Yet.

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That is the mission of the Magnificent Six: to stop Loki from becoming King of Everyone. Mages, rogues, and most fighters, have kneeled before Loki; but not the paladins.

Hm, in that case, there should be six pre-gen paladins, and then one who joins the team later, bringing them up to the Magnificent Seven (also the Seven Against Thebes). Possibly a GM-PC.

Might be an opportunity to introduce a home-brew paladin oath: Liberation. An oath-powered warrior against slavery. 20th level class feature: Great Emancipator. As an action, you make a proclamation, and every slave owner in range makes a Saving Throw or loses ownership of all their slaves. (Ye cannot get ye flaske, but Ye can choose to remain a slave.) Which is theoretical, because the story starts at level 7, when each subclass gets its second round of Oath features, for more PC differentiation. (When the slop hits the fan, everyone wants to stand between Devotion and Ancients, because protective auras.)

I was thinking of starting with one each of one each Devotion, Ancients, Vengeance, Redemption, Conquest, and Oathbreaker. On second thought, no one should start as Oathbreaker, but there should be opportunities and reasons for one of the PCs to *become* Oathbreaker during the course of the story. Hm, actually, if the Conqueror becomes Oathbreaker, that might make her MORE aligned with the rest of the party than before.

Does your opinion of paladins extend to both Captain America and Wonder Woman? But I digress.

Anyways, I think there are better ways, to produce light, than as a secondary effect of friction and heat. You may have halogen or diode lights in your home/office, but you're stlll using the rhetorical equivalents of fire or incandescent light. You are free to upgrade, whenever you're emotionally ready. See also: whether the adversarial process of plaintiff and respondent is the quickest and most reliable path to truth.

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lowkey13 said:

Pictured- an all-Paladin party attempting to discern how a trap works.

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Nah, it's just "walk into trap, breeze through the saving throws thanks to Aura of Awesome, fix up the few minor scrapes with some mutual laying-on-hands, wonder what all the fuss was about." Paladins see no need to disarm their opponent before combat, whether living or mechanical.

MarkB said:

Nah, it's just "walk into trap, breeze through the saving throws thanks to Aura of Awesome, fix up the few minor scrapes with some mutual laying-on-hands, wonder what all the fuss was about."

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Rocks fall. Everyone dies.

Everyone, that is, except the Paladins, because Aura of Awesome, and a few rogues who Evaded, a few Druids who were in Wildshape, a few Barbarians who happened to be Raging at the time, Mages with clones, and so forth. We then avenge everyone else, possibly starting by smashing the rocks into sand while the mages and rogues investigate why the rocks fell.