D&D General How has D&D changed over the decades?

[JiffyPopTart]

A couple would be rare but not unheard of; my concern is there being 4 or 5 in a party of 6 where that 4 or 5 Gnomes might be the biggest gathering of them within a few hundred miles.

Classes the same: I want Paladins, for example, to be playable but rare. And so they're gated behind rolls, though in my own case I've little to worry about as my players aren't generally all that keen on playing them anyway.

Dialling them back (and therefore also dialling back their associated drawbacks) ends up making them all very much the same in play; this seems to be the route 5e has gone/is going and is something I intentionally want to avoid.

So you aren't even talking about PHB gnomes, you are talking about some other species with the gnome name? It's an unfair conversation if so as most people equate gnomes with the depiction in the PHB, not some houseruled odd different thing.

How do gnomes procreate when they never meet each other and pair up?

Nevermind....some things man was not meant to know.

 

[payn]

A couple would be rare but not unheard of; my concern is there being 4 or 5 in a party of 6 where that 4 or 5 Gnomes might be the biggest gathering of them within a few hundred miles.

So? Im still not following how gnomes just roll solo in the world, despite there being tens of thousands of them. Or is this a party thing and not a world thing? Story vs setting?

Classes the same: I want Paladins, for example, to be playable but rare. And so they're gated behind rolls, though in my own case I've little to worry about as my players aren't generally all that keen on playing them anyway.

Cant you just say one pally in the party allowed?

Dialling them back (and therefore also dialling back their associated drawbacks) ends up making them all very much the same in play; this seems to be the route 5e has gone/is going and is something I intentionally want to avoid.

I guess different strokes. I differentiate character in role play and dont expect the rules to do it for me.

 

[Lanefan]

Why not ask the players to not have more than one (or any) in the party?

If I ask them not to have any I might as well take them off the PC-playable list. Which I've been tempted to do...

Asking them to self-limit is, IME, a breeding ground for arguments; but that's an in-house issue.

The best way to enfore rarity in a campaign is doing so on the DM's side, by not having a lot of gnome npcs.

Already done. Most of the NPC commoners etc. they meet are Human, as are most of the adventuring NPCs they take in from time to time.

What I'm after is that the PC population at least vaguely reflect the overall setting population in the large-ish part of the world they run in - half-ish Human, the rest roughly split between PartElf, PartOrc, Hobbit, Dwarf and Elf, with a very few Gnomes and other things. I could achieve this by making them hard-roll for species every time, but IMO that's overkill. What I do instead is, based on where they are in the world at the time and what lives there, have it that you can choose from a short list of local species OR you can hard-roll on a longer list with more variety but no guarantee of getting anything specific.

 

[overgeeked]

Asking them to self-limit is, IME, a breeding ground for arguments; but that's an in-house issue.

I've found the same. If you say something is banned, you'll inevitably get push back and arguments. If you have things gated behind rolls, the problem self-corrects. The compromise I've found is for players to pitch a few concepts and I pick what comes into play. The player gets to play something they want and I can simply not pick the stuff I don't want in the game. Everyone wins and no hurt feelings or arguments.

 

[Lanefan]

So if you were the GM and had 4 PCs, one of which was a gnome, gnomes would feel rare to you? If then at any point the party met another gnome and it teamed up with the party it would tumble the house of cards and ruin the suspension of disbelief?

If I'm the GM they're probably going to go through many more than 4 PCs and if only one of them all is/was a Gnome, we're cool.

But if 8 of the first 15 are Gnomes, something's come adrift unless the PCs have been running in a Gnome-heavy part of the world (which, for almost the entirety of my campaign, they haven't).

 

[Lanefan]

So you aren't even talking about PHB gnomes,

1e PHB Gnomes are still pretty close to ours. I'm sure as hell not talking about 5e, if that's what you thought.

How do gnomes procreate when they never meet each other and pair up?

And you've just tripped neatly on to one of the reasons their species is in decline in the setting: their population is too scattered and the few communities that do exist are slowly developing issues around in-breeding.

Well done!

(and maybe if I someday re-use the setting for a different campaign I might use the recovery of Gnome-dom as an overarching story hook, who knows?)

 

[Lanefan]

I guess different strokes. I differentiate character in role play and dont expect the rules to do it for me.

I also like to differentiate characters by role play - it's an argument I have to trot out every time someone raises the "all characters of class-x are the same because their mechanics are the same" bugaboo - but having them also forced different by species allows that if one wants one can role-play non-Humans in a more bland-and-boring manner (handy for those whose role-playing sometimes, well, isn't) and let the system take care of the differentiating.

 

[Thomas Shey]

OK, how else do you enforce rarity?

I either don't, or I just ask people to not get carried away with it. if people are that determined to play something uncommon, its not worth my time to make a big deal out of it.

How does one "get good" at luck without cheating?

And if you actually mean get good at cheating, the door is that way...

Yes, I actually did mean "get good at cheating." The attitude of people who got sick of being forced to deal with random die rolls who dropped into cheating often was "If you think its your right to enforce that sort of crap on me, then you can just try and catch me addressing it." After all, the worst they're going to have to deal with is their preferred alternative to dealing with that nonsense anyway, and they're unlikely to have any respect for your insistence on forcing it on them so the fact you're going to be soggy about it when you boot them out is unlikely to bother them much.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I either don't, or I just ask people to not get carried away with it. if people are that determined to play something uncommon, its not worth my time to make a big deal out of it.



Yes, I actually did mean "get good at cheating." The attitude of people who got sick of being forced to deal with random die rolls who dropped into cheating often was "If you think its your right to enforce that sort of crap on me, then you can just try and catch me addressing it." After all, the worst they're going to have to deal with is their preferred alternative to dealing with that nonsense anyway, and they're unlikely to have any respect for your insistence on forcing it on them so the fact you're going to be soggy about it when you boot them out is unlikely to bother them much.

Again, if you don't like the way the game is run, and no concensus can be reached, you walk away. I really don't understand why this is a question.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Who cares if two or three of them are in a party? I mean, tens of thousands can be rare, but are you really saying they never ever travel together? Family of gnomes never appear? Gnome friends never travel together? The idea that they are so rare you never see more than one at a time seems more strange than to encounter a couple in an adventuring party.

I'm going to take a little the other side of this.

When you have a group that demonstrates a really low-occurrance composition, if that sort of thing matters to you at all, you have two choices: make the campaign in part about that, or ignore it best as you can while knowing that fact is not really how it should be playing out.

I can understand the issue people have with that. I just don't think at the end of the day that issue justifies most of the solutions to it.

Dial back races/species/ancestries/ethnicities in RPGs so they all are playable choices that dont require janky random rolls and other oberoni balance solutions.

Well, mechanical imbalances are a whole different kettle of fish. And honestly, random rolls don't do a damn thing to protect against that; they're still going to happen sometime, and its just as big a problem when they do.