D&D 5E We Would Hate A BG3 Campaign

[Maggan]

I'm just commenting on the apparent implications of your posts.

So you think that if a unique monster person showed up and people reacted like I described then the same reaction has to be applied to the humans who make up 95 percent of the inhabitants of the known world?

I really don’t think it’s a stretch to believe that a talking, walking, never before seen dragon-person would ellicit a different response than a common as dirt human.

A plot device similar to that can be found in James Claville’s novel Shogun, btw. No dragonborn unfortunately but the setup is similar.

 

[Mecheon]

So you think that if a unique monster person showed up and people reacted like I described then the same reaction has to be applied to the humans who make up 95 percent of the inhabitants of the known world?

I mean it'd attract attention but like.... Its D&D. There's far weirder. Dragons can already talk and given the existence of stories, folks absolutely have probably heard some equivilent of "Down on her luck person is friendly to random person coming by, turns out he's a respledent gold dragon, she becomes fabulously wealthy". To say nothing of "Here's Bahamut, the dragon god of dragons, who's a good good who likes to hang around with a bunch of other good gods you may worship" also existing. A dragon person in D&D is basically just, about the same as a tall kobold, or a half dragon, or a lizardman, or some guy who's come by the local church of Bahamut. The archetype's exised for decades and there are some form of 'yeah that's a dragon-y person' predating dragonborn in most settings

In our world it'd be weird, sure, but our world isn't the D&D world.

 

[Maggan]

I mean it'd attract attention but like.... Its D&D..

If you play standard D&D which I don’t.

And again at its heart this discussion is not about dragonborn. It’s about whether a GM has the right to set the rules of their game and thereby exclude options for players. Dragonborn is the example used.

I say a GM has that right.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Because many games are gamist idealized worlds, nobody should even attempt to make something more realistic is not a particularly strong argument.

I'm not passing judgment on what people should or should not do. I will state that if your practical goal is to actually run games in a setting and have it appeal to anything except a carefully selected group of participants then I would avoid incorporating the sorts of realism which would including racism, slavery, what we would consider extremely constrained roles for women (or men for that matter, it is fantasy after all), etc.

 

[Mecheon]

If you play standard D&D which I don’t.

And again at its heart this discussion is not about dragonborn. It’s about whether a GM has the right to set the rules of their game and thereby exclude options for players. Dragonborn is the example used.

I say a GM has that right.

While they do, the thing is, D&D's a social game and that goes the other way as well. A GM who excludes everything the player wants on shakey grounds is going to be a GM who finds themselves without players. There is a push and pull of requirements because, in the end, the story isn't the GM's: Its the player's story, the GM's just helping to make it a reality.

Frankly, given Dragonborn are one of the least powerful races in the game and absolutely going to be picked for flavour reasons, I remain not seeing them as much of an issue and have questions about settings apparently too rigid to have "Hey, y'know how dragons made kobolds that one time? Dragonborn came from a similar process but they're more independant" as a setting thing. Even Dark Sun had its proto-Dray as a first run

 

[Warpiglet-7]

If you play standard D&D which I don’t.

And again at its heart this discussion is not about dragonborn. It’s about whether a GM has the right to set the rules of their game and thereby exclude options for players. Dragonborn is the example used.

I say a GM has that right.

That is the historical standard assumption.

I really don’t care if some groups have a voting process for those decisions. But it’s not wrong for a dm to design! What the heck?!

 

[Oofta]

Would that really be telling to most people though? I don't think most associate Tabaxi with their 5E storyline specifics or being created by gods, I think its 'I want to be cat person/Hrothgar/Khajiit", that sheer archetype. Like, not just in fantasy, in sci-fi the archetype goes back absolute decades as well, plus D&D's had them for yonks with Rakasta alone

People cool for the setting specific changes, they just want to play a cat person. So it could come from the cat lord, be a bunch of people from a war-torn land who ended up travelling once their homeland was destroyed, or a really complicated bunch of desert dwellers with questionable links to elves, maybe? (and frankly, I don't think tabaxi are hard to slot into settings given how wide the animal person archetype already is)

Or ... they could find another campaign to join if they want to play something not on my list. I have plenty of players without running a game I don't want.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is one area that we disagree on quite a bit. Realism isn't all or nothing, it's a spectrum. And not only is it a spectrum, but it's modular, so you can plug it in over here, but not over there where the game is more gamist.

I can have realism level 2.3(spells and wizards), realism level 8.1(humanoids have to breathe) realism level 3.6(dragons ahoy!), realism level 7.3(gravity that works, but isn't exactly like real life), and realism level 3.14159(the setting is flat and circular) all in the same game.

The existence of a low realism module does not preclude or invalidate a higher realism module, so cries of, "How can you like realism when there are dragons and spells in the game!?" is a counterargument that fails on its face.

We all draw the realism lines in different areas for different modules. Maybe a Discworld has too little realism for you and you need a setting with a spherical one. Maybe you don't care if a fighter can split a mountain in half with a purely martial ability and don't need those things to be realistic in the least. One thing realism isn't, though, is moot in D&D. It's all over the place to some degree or another, depending on the particular module.

I was only touching on settings and social/political/ethical sorts of factors, nothing else. Obviously your game could, in theory at least, perfectly present an entirely consistent and potentially fully realistic set of physical laws and the concomitant weather, geology, etc. which would have to consistently follow. AND YET it could still be entirely unrealistic in the social dimension! I was merely pointing out that gamist considerations virtually compel that lack of realism at a practical level. I would say that is also true of physics and such, though that has more to do with the amount of detail vs the fidelity to reality, so its a bit different discussion. Ultimately my point is that discussions of realism in terms of societies in RPG settings just doesn't make sense, they serve other masters besides realism.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

but all the time they would be exactly like the DM played them to be.

If this causes disruption in a campaign based on NPC reactions it is because the DM wants it to cause such and plays those NPCs like that.

This is essentially a "DM agency" issue. The DM can choose to make all of his NPCs nonpulsed about it just like a player can use his agency to make his PC who never saw a dragonborn non-pulsed. If the DM chooses to have his NPCs get excited about it, that is because he excersized his agency over those NPCs and chose to do that.

I think the whole "that is not how it would be IRL" is a bit overblown. If we are accepting things like Fireballs and Dragons (or walking skeletons if you don't have dragons) then we can accept that these NPCs would act in a certain "unrealistic" way as well .... because if we are comparing this to real life, having an NPC not freak out on seeing "a devil" is actually less of a stretch than the devil, his pal the Elf, a wizard that can cast spells being there in the first place. In that respect it is actually possible in real life for the NPCs not to freak out. It isn't even possible to do many of the things the players are doing.



No. The DM can make the tavern keeper do whatever he wants in game and he doesn't have to explain it.

This is no different than a brand new PC showing up inside the pocket plane where the last player died with no explanation of how he got there, or at best a flimsy explanation. Then that character you walked into joins and starts helping the other PCs. Whether it is how it would be IRL, it is entirely possible for the DM and other PCs to do/allow in game and won't break the game at all.

See, I agree with you, but then you cannot have it both ways! Either things are explained by an appeal to realism or they are explained by how they provide a workable basis for play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You have a certain view of what constitutes internal consistency of a game world. That view is different from what others consider consistent. Both are okay. Yours does not trump theirs though; it's just different.

Forgive me if the argument form "I have invalidated your reasoning simply by redefining all the terms" is not particularly impressive!