ph0rk
Friendship is Magic, and Magic is Heresy.
Again, Hussar and I's tastes on DM restrictions differ, but asking your gaming pals to create characters together during a session 0, where you would likely share that kind of information, is what he is going for here. His players made characters that didn't fit his conception of the game, but his frustration is that they did this BEFORE he got a chance to share his vision.
Sure, but thats, what, three different groups he's walked away from because of character generation "issues"?
You just do have to realize that there are a nontrivial amount of people in this hobby who consider written handouts "homework" to one degree or another, and react to them more than a little hostilely. As such there's a degree of passive avoidance of doing that which is going to be hard to work against.
That's a self-solving problem, though - if they don't like homework, they don't play.
It isn't terribly difficult to have a campaign handout, ask for rough character ideas before session zero, then talk things through and finalize them at session zero (as some players well very likely change their ideas around when they get a sense of what the others are doing).
If someone doesn't want to do any homework at all, then keep them in the pool for oneshots, not the ~2 year campaign.
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