D&D 5E As a Player, why do you play in games you haven't bought into?

[doctorbadwolf]

At which point, why are you not offering to DM instead of me then? Or, at that point, when the DM has stated that being religious is important in the campaign, why did you agree to play?

You are communicating very poorly.

Religion being important simply does not mean "everyone is positively religious". I can't fathom why you think it does, but it objectively does not.

So, why am I not offering to DM instead of the DM (I'd never go near your actual table)? Why on Earth would I? No DM I have ever met in my life would be unwilling, or even reluctant, to have any of the characters I proposed in the text you dismissively erased from the post you quoted, in a game where religion is important.

And of course, you haven't addressed your rudeness toward me in the OP of this thread, wherein you put me on blast in a cross-thread snipe without my consent, while misrepresenting what I said in the other thread, nor have you even bothered to address multiple challenges to your spurious notion that FR is a world in which most people expect religious devotion to be an important campaign element. IME, and judging by reading any threads I've ever seen about other folks' FR games, the vast majority of FR campaigns only lightly feature religious devotion, if at all.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

People please learn and play a TTRPG other than D&D before making game design philosophy hot takes challenge

 

[DEFCON 1]

There are hundreds of thousands of character concepts out there. When a DM comes to you and says "play what you want, except please include this ONE thing because it's the point of the campaign "... if you can't even give the DM that then I'm with the others that will say to not to let the door hit you on the way out.

You had one job when it came to making a character for this game. If you are unable or unwilling to follow that one simple rule, I have no desire to make allowances for you and feel no guilt or shame in saying 'No'.

If we had more DMs willing to say 'No'... we'd have many shorter threads here on ENWorld because people wouldn't get so up in arms that WotC was making new rules they didn't like (but were unable to tell their players that they wouldn't be using them.)

 

[werecorpse]

Many people have been taught and believe that a good story is made by subverting expectations. Combine a basic plot with a subversive twist and you have “something interesting” to get things started. So when you have a low magic campaign the “secret wizard” is this subversion. Imo It’s mostly a belief that they are adding a Spicey twist to the game. In fact they are that twist - what could be more fun! The problem of course is that it’s not a twist if it starts out that way, it’s the set up.

In my youth I did some theatre sports (improv theatre/whose line is it anyway) and you would call for inspiration from the audience to start the scene. The scenes would often move in unintended and weird directions but that was part of the fun. If you asked for say a room in a house and an activity you would inevitably get “the toilet” and “building a time machine” or something similar. The advice I was given was that starting the scene at this level of absurdity meant it didn’t develop a weird twist, it was already weird, better to let that happen organically. I think of this with characters in an rpg. The exploration in the game is meant to be of something strange, unfamiliar, like a crazy cult, an inexplicable goblin attack, why the king banned druids etc. Starting off with the weird in party can distract from this but as I say the pull to “subvert expectations“ etc is strong and hard to ignore.

my advice is give the players some other way to be special that doesn’t create this disruption up front - if they are a standard adventurers let some be a noble, know a secret, or have a mystery about their background etc. This may satiate this common desire.

 

[Richards]

Pirate adventures, especially, I have NEVER seen done well. And that's a mystery to me.

I've been reading a "Skull and Shackles" campaign journal in the Story Hour forum (using the Pathfinder 2 rules) where the entire campaign is about pirates. It's a good read, if you want to check it out: Skull and Shackles. It's a solo campaign: the husband, Owlbrarian, is the GM and the wife, Crys, runs a stable of four PCs who are captured by pirates and have to learn to adapt to their new lives.

Johnathan

 

[Seramus]

Why? Friends.

The big thing is not being a jerk. Even in a god oriented game, you can have some amazing role play as a disbeliever. Heck, I let genuinely good roleplayers have huge leeway on their character concepts because I trust them to do it justice.

 

[Zsong]

Bump

 

[MGibster]

Now the entire group has experienced the same event, and that event serves as a relationship bond for the group...win/win..in my DMing book.

So that one character's background gets to define the group as a whole even if it clashes with other characters? This kind of fits into the pattern of players with special snowflake characters making the game about them though.

 

[Guest User]

No the common bond is the NYPD, this is just now a shared event, the group can use to develop bonds between themselves.

I've played in a game that was loosely themed on Henry V, one of the characters was the runaway heir to the Kingdom, (Cormyr..this was 1989..Grey box FR), with the rest of us playing the Falstafian Rogues gallery that were the heir's friends.

In no way did the rest of us feel overshadowed, despite playing "smallfolk"...we still made decisions as a group, whatever the story narrative might say.

In improv, one says "Yes, and..." it ensures everyone has a stake in a scene, and helping someone else achieve their character goals can be very satisfying.

Of course, mine is just a singular opinion.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

People please learn and play a TTRPG other than D&D before making game design philosophy hot takes challenge

Since nobody's biting, I'll say it less sarcastically.

I feel that the argument put forward in the OP is only a problem with games where meta-level narrative control is entirely vested in the position of GM. It creates an adversarial structure between the GM and the players, which exacerbates any creative differences between them that may exist, causing alienation from the creative flow, which spawns all the oft-repeated complaints about control freak GMs and unattentive players.

Games which grant meta-level narrative control tools and mechanics to the players don't seem to have as much of an issue with this, as they generally encourage a more engaged and collaborative mindset and structure within the play group. Buy-in and cooperation is obtained through narrative collaboration, buy letting the players have a hand on the wheel. This is something that D&D's design could stand to learn from, especially as the big streaming push is influencing the general play culture towards a storygame-lite direction.

Or if you prefer a harsher delivery: