The Crazy Character RPG Equation: Which Side of the Screen?

[kitsune9]

Has anyone considered implementing a system where players have to "pay" to be something non-human? I'm talking some sort of disadvantage you don't get compensated for to play an unusual race?

Well, if it's for a toolkit game like GURPS and Herosystem, then the racial abilties are built into the point cost, but for D&D or something along those lines, then the DM will come to come up with a system to provide incentive for players to pick one race over another. There's a bajillion ways to create a system from something as simple as level limits (like in 1e) to LA +1 (or more adjustments), limiting point buys for non-standard races, and other kind of restrictions.

I'm not sure what system I'd implement if I was to encourage picking more "standard" races.

 

[Mallus]

I enjoy my friend's campaign, for example, but the actual storyline gets lost a lot, at least in my mind, because we've had two goliaths, a lizardfolk, a half-drow, etc. in the party.

I meant to ask: why does the story get lost because of the PC's race/species?

I can understand the story getting lost if a particular PC has an outsize, scene-stealing personality, or if their race confers game balancing-upsetting abilities (mechanical scene-stealing). But how does race/species alone detract from the game narrative? How does race/species actually impact the campaign?

Does your character spend a lot of time thinking about the racial makeup of the party? "Grod the Goliath is an okay adventuring companion... but what if he married my sister? What if they had kids??!

I was thinking about this last night playing my new addiction: the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2. It has no shortage of weird alien characters with extraordinarily melodramatic --ie special-- background stories, which you have to deal with personally if you want to unlock their best abilities.

But Mass Effect tells a great story. In part because, for all their weird alien melodrama, the characters are also immediately recognizable types, or subversion of types, and their stories are, at their core, good human drama. Which is exactly the way I've seen oddball PCs play out in D&D campaigns. A PC might have a tail, live to be 1,000, or lay eggs, but in the end they're just people, which the same potential for interesting stories to be told involving them.

 

[The Shaman]

I just like the characters to fit the game-world. If the game-world looks like a cantina in Mos Eisley, then go crazy; if it looks like the Prancing Pony, the party should, too.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

If the game-world looks like a cantina in Mos Eisley, then go crazy; if it looks like the Prancing Pony, the party should, too.

I wanted to look like a Prancing Pony, but my DM doesn't like Anthro races.

 

[billd91]

I meant to ask: why does the story get lost because of the PC's race/species?

I can understand the story getting lost if a particular PC has an outsize, scene-stealing personality, or if their race confers game balancing-upsetting abilities (mechanical scene-stealing). But how does race/species alone detract from the game narrative? How does race/species actually impact the campaign?

Does your character spend a lot of time thinking about the racial makeup of the party? "Grod the Goliath is an okay adventuring companion... but what if he married my sister? What if they had kids??!

I was thinking about this last night playing my new addiction: the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2. It has no shortage of weird alien characters with extraordinarily melodramatic --ie special-- background stories, which you have to deal with personally if you want to unlock their best abilities.

But Mass Effect tells a great story. In part because, for all their weird alien melodrama, the characters are also immediately recognizable types, or subversion of types, and their stories are, at their core, good human drama. Which is exactly the way I've seen oddball PCs play out in D&D campaigns. A PC might have a tail, live to be 1,000, or lay eggs, but in the end they're just people, which the same potential for interesting stories to be told involving them.

I think part of it is a question of distraction. Oddball Mos Eisley mixes of characters distracts players (thus the game) from deeper, more involved stories because their outer shallower quirks dominate their attention. Unless you specifically make that, in and of itself, the story of the campaign.

 

[The Shaman]

I wanted to look like a Prancing Pony, but my DM doesn't like Anthro races.

 

[Mallus]

I think part of it is a question of distraction. Oddball Mos Eisley mixes of characters distracts players (thus the game) from deeper, more involved stories because their outer shallower quirks dominate their attention.

But what makes a lizard man with scales and a tail inherently more distracting than an elf with pointed ears and a 1,000 year lifespan, or a dwarf with a big beard and a drinking problem?

I'm not seeing the mechanism at work.

Any character can be distracting, it's fundamentally a player problem, not one whose root cause is race/class/species choice. Besides, PC's with shallow quirks are often the best you can hope for, why they're practically the pinnacle of PC characterization!

 

[Mallus]

I just like the characters to fit the game-world. If the game-world looks like a cantina in Mos Eisley, then go crazy; if it looks like the Prancing Pony, the party should, too.

Absolutely. But after a long, twilit struggle with the various editions of D&D, I've come to conclusion D&D is best suited as a wretched hive of scum, villainy, and more-or-less wide open options.

How does the quote go? "D&D is a game where Conan, Gandalf, and Lancelot team up to fight Dracula".

A lot of the pleasure, and challenge, I've derived from my last two long-running campaigns came from finding ways to place my own idiosyncratic/plagiarized/inherently masturbatory particular aesthetic spin on D&D's strongly-implied kitchen-sick environment. Plus, I like the collaborative nature of letting the players bring whatever mad piece of fiction they choose to play to the table. I see it as something of a challenge.

Put another way, over the years, I've grown less interested in the game settings I can create alone and more interested in the ones I create with my group, so I'm less concerned with PC's that necessarily "fit in". The fun is in making them fit, even if it requires an enormous metaphoric hammer to do so.

 

[billd91]

But what makes a lizard man with scales and a tail inherently more distracting than an elf with pointed ears and a 1,000 year lifespan, or a dwarf with a big beard and a drinking problem?

I'm not seeing the mechanism at work.

Would you find a party of an otyugh, a mongrelman, an awakened turkey, and a club-footed hunchback with the ability to tell what has visited the watering hole by tasting the water and a tendency to dig holes (thank you Spawn of Fachan) to be a bit distracting?

It's all about deviation from the mean. Creatures that are mostly human or highly familiar are less distracting than ones that aren't... unless you've built that mojo into the campaign. Then it may work really well.

Plus, it gets harder to link commonalities between characters the more they are outliers. The more motley the crew, the harder you have to work bring them together and keep them together.

 

[The Shaman]

Absolutely. But after a long, twilit struggle with the various editions of D&D, I've come to conclusion D&D is best suited as a wretched hive of scum, villainy, and more-or-less wide open options.

Given the tremendous diversity of playable settings I've seen created for D&D over many years, I've come to the conclusion that D&D is best suited as a game customised to the tastes of each group playing it.