I'm merely curious as to where the more accommodating DMs are willing to draw the line, if at all. How is "no humans from Ohio in my fantasy world" meaningfully different from "no tabaxi in my fantasy world"?
I know I already said it, but my philosophy really does boil down to, "Anything that opposes legitimate (non-abusive, non-coercive) player enthusiasm should be avoided." It sounds like you primarily look for player enthusiasm at two levels, the "elevator pitch" and (for lack of a better phrase) the "grown attachment" phase. Nothing wrong with that, of course; it's very much in the classic style of play. I take a very expansive view of player enthusiasm; pretty much
anything that gets a strong emotional reaction within or about the world is good. (Obviously not
absolutely everything; if something makes the player personally upset, that's not good, but if it's "I'm upset about this because I know things can be made BETTER and that drives me to MAKE it better" then that's great.) So if there's something I haven't got a settled answer for--and that's often the case, because this is a big world and I have followed Dungeon World's advice to "draw maps, leave blanks"--I may turn to a player and ask
how their character knows something, or
where they learned it, or who their friend is that got them inside news, or whatever.
Such connections reinforce that this world, this campaign, belongs to everyone involved. Yes, it's "my" game, in the sense that I brought most of the pieces and run the world and know the Ultimate Secrets etc. But it's also "our" game, in the sense that I have worked to encourage every player to feel that they (as players proper, not just through their characters) have a stake in what this world is and how it works. This then provides a natural, intrinsic motive for them to care about what happens: in whatever small ways, they've helped make this world what it is, and it couldn't be quite what it is without them. My ideal situation is where every player is jazzed to play, not just because their characters have stories to explore and future unknowns to discover, but because we all feed into one another and make a story that could not happen without
everyone, not just me.
And that is a rather alien approach to me. Even assuming good faith on the part of everyone involved (e.g. the player isn't trying to insist on a special portal fantasy character because they want to disrupt a preindustrial magical setting by developing gunpowder, they really do just want to play a fish out of water, maybe inspired by Dorothy Gale or one of the Pevensie siblings or Commander John Crichton), I… just don't see the need to build that kind of consensus most of the time. If I'm running at a game-shop, I likely don't know any players who sit down at the table well enough to care in the first place about their pet character ideas; and if I'm running at home with friends and family, "Hey, let's all play D&D!" is always enough to spark enthusiasm—and we all trust whoever's DMing enough to set the boundaries of their own game-world, knowing full well that next time around, someone different may DM and set their own boundaries for their world.
As noted above, my goal is sort of to continually build new enthusiasm, if that makes any sense. Perhaps it may matter that this is only my second campaign I've ever run, and both campaigns were set in the same world (since the previous campaign only lasted like, six sessions with a completely different group, and I had really wanted to see where else this world might go). Further, half the players that have participated (we've had a total of six players, though never more than five at once, and the group is currently down to three + me) were essentially
complete newbies, and the other three were very long-lapsed gamers who hadn't been in a game for a decade or more. Thus, a lot of this is, in part, driven by my desire to show the newbies as much as possible what vast wonders lie in store, and to give the lapsed players a chance to stretch out and enjoy a level of freedom and participation they (sadly) haven't always been given.
I'd like to zero in on the bit about "we all trust whoever's DMing enough to set the boundaries," as I think that gets to the heart of our different perspectives here. I see TTRPGs in general as an incredibly open space, pregnant with possibility. Setting boundaries on that space is something to do very sparingly, with clear and measured purpose. This isn't because limitations are inherently bad in some abstract or universal sense though! Limitations really can breed creativity. Rather, I think of it like an authority placing limitations on the freedom of the press, rather than an author placing limitations on her freedom to write a novel. We value limitation at the author-novel level because such limits encourage better work, e.g. how Isaac Asimov set out to prove that you could write a science-fiction mystery novel that was still a
good mystery, you just had to scrupulously avoid
deus ex machina and other technological "Ass Pull" scenarios (as TVTropes would put it). Yet conversely we tend to value a lack of limitations placed by authorities on what can be expressed, for exactly the same reason: by having as few such limitations as possible, it encourages many different stories and perspectives, creating a richer and fuller public forum and marketplace of ideas.
Obviously, D&D falls somewhere in the middle. The DM
is an authority figure, after all, and D&D is a community activity rather than an individual creative effort, so we really can't say that nothing like "freedom-of-expression" concerns applies. Yet the DM very much takes an author stance with regard to the goings-on of a world (likewise, the players WRT their characters, albeit less so), and they really should abide by limitations in order to produce quality work. This makes for a balancing act, which will (as is the case with most
interesting questions of right action) balance differently in one context vs. another. I find that continually generating new enthusiasm by keeping my limits minimal apart from my few bright lines (no Evil games/PCs, permadeath only happens with player-DM consensus, I won't play the game
for the players) and a desire for internal consistency.
Perhaps as a useful example of a place where I
did "put my foot down," but still worked to find a consensus: for the first group that played in
Jewel of the Desert, there was a player who wanted to have a zombie minion (a move taken from a different class than their normal one). That...didn't sit well with the world, or rather, would absolutely have caused this character SIGNIFICANT hardship because necromancy is HIGHLY blasphemous to a large majority of the population. The character would have either had to keep the creature a secret and only use it sparingly, or accept that they'd never be part of civilized society. Since I really didn't want either of those unfortunate directions to befall the character, I worked really hard (like, easily half an hour of discussion on just this point) to find out
why the player wanted this benefit. Ultimately, it turned out that they liked the idea of a pet/creature/friend, but worried that the default mechanics for the class they
were playing would result in DM fuckery that they just didn't want to deal with. I persuaded them that they wouldn't have to worry--I very VERY much take to heart another of Dungeon World's DM Principles, "Be a fan of the characters." We instead settled on them taking a different necromancer move, the ability to place a nasty curse on others, and the player walked away reasonably happy with their choices, while I was able to avoid a serious conflict between the world as established and the PC group.
Notably? While "trust" was a concern here, it wasn't so much trust in my ability to offer an interesting world. Instead, it was a question of trust in whether the rules would screw them just for wanting a fun thing. And they
did accept that I would use the rules provided fairly, neither taking a hardline position nor letting them get away with whatever they wanted, striking a (player-intent-favorable) balance.
I'll be replying to Maxperson (and others) in a later post. I need some more sleep first.
