D&D General Player-generated fiction in D&D

[Umbran]

There are haves and have nots when it comes to governing power. I have even seen some people talk about this as a greater democratization of authority over the fiction in games. If you are insulted by this, then maybe consider how your thinly-veiled "church and state" line can also come across as insulting.

Mod Note:
No. You don't get to shift around blame for being insulting. If you were insulted, then you should have said, "That's insulting, I'm done." and left, rather than responded in kind, but tried to dodge it.

That said...

Thing is, I simply disagree. I, and my players, like the separation of church and state DM and player, the designer of the world and the player being solely responsible for the PC.

It is fine that you like the way you play. But this was poorly put to start with - For one, it is referencing politics, in general. For another, you are likening how you play a game to a governing principle of a nation - a thorough mismatch of scale and importance.

You two may need to put each other on ignore, because you are both on edge of being removed from this discussion.

 

[Aldarc]

It's a playstyle preference. Don't like it? Find a different table and DM that agrees with your preference or perhaps a different game. The referee in a football game has a different role than the players, it doesn't take away the agency of the players.

You're right that it's a playstyle preference, and this thread happens to be about a playstyle preference that is different from your own. If you don't like this playstyle preference, you too have the option of not posting in this thread, particularly if you know that your playstyle preferences are not that relevant to the disscussion and/or feel that you would likely not make a positive contribution to the topic because your own idiomatic playstyle preferences may be radically opposed to the OP's. There are certainly other plenty of other discussions in this forum where you would find people who share your preferences. However, here is the question that pemerton asked in his OP:

Who else's D&D has a high volume of player-generated fiction?

The question of "who else" suggests an interest in responses from people who also share @pemerton's preferences. From past and present discussions, we know that you are not such a person whose "D&D has a high volume of player-generated fiction." So what are you hoping to get out of discussion in this thread? If you likely know that you are not such a person, why bother posting (repeatedly) in this thread at all? It just strikes me as odd.

 

[Oofta]

You're right that it's a playstyle preference, and this thread happens to be about a playstyle preference that is different from your own. If you don't like this playstyle preference, you too have the option of not posting in this thread, particularly if you know that your playstyle preferences are not that relevant to the disscussion and/or feel that you would likely not make a positive contribution to the topic because your own idiomatic playstyle preferences may be radically opposed to the OP's. There are certainly other plenty of other discussions in this forum where you would find people who share your preferences. However, here is the question that pemerton asked in his OP:

The question of "who else" suggests an interest in responses from people who also share @pemerton's preferences. From past and present discussions, we know that you are not such a person whose "D&D has a high volume of player-generated fiction." So what are you hoping to get out of discussion in this thread? If you likely know that you are not such a person, why bother posting (repeatedly) in this thread at all? It just strikes me as odd.

This is not a (+) thread, therefore it is a discussion both for and against specific playstyles.

 

[Aldarc]

This is not a (+) thread, therefore it is a discussion both for and against specific playstyles.

 

[AnotherGuy]

How did the player-generated NPCs work out?

Beautifully, as they provided detailed write-ups of each NPC and allowed me to incorporate them as and when suitable for the game. I have listed some of the examples below and provided one of the player's attachments so you can see what I was given to work, typically.

• an absent landlord with a cottage for rental on their estate but with an ever present caretaker and stable boy;
• a dwarvern cleric therapist-of-sorts who offers keen insight for the troubled PC halfing;
• a pair of unsavoury brothers who often find themselves in trouble and require bailing out, a liability more than an asset;
• a peculiar crow who appeared to follow one of the PCs around town, the mystery of the crow was left to the DM. The player enjoys being surprised;
• an elf professor and colleague of a far-away university who communicates with the PC via a transpectus mirror (also player-content) in the Great Library. The PC, an artificer academician with many journals and books published, has arranged for funding (limited) from the university for his research and day to day living expenditure;
• an annoying bard, who gushes over another PC, rather than the PC hero he knows...
• ...Etc

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Do they? Because quite frequently character needs and wants are paper thin and pretty meaningless. I think the group generally needs goals, but for example the goal of the Curse of Strahd campaign was to get out of Ravenloft. Now my PC had their own personality and approach, but they never really mattered given the nature of the campaign.

It's fine if you have people who have strong motivations and goals, but for a lot of people they just want to relax, have fun, roll some dice. Different strokes for different folks.

Maybe the needs and wants are paper thin and pretty meaningless because they're not central to the conflicts that are being expressed in the setting and adventure material that is presented. Or they're just plain so basic and obvious that they don't represent anything unique.

Think about your Strahd example. EVERY SINGLE PC EVER will have this goal, bar none. There's nothing at all in it that speaks to the -albeit imaginary- person that is that PC. Of course it won't produce anything but thin RP if that's all you have.

And expecting that, post initiation, the material presented in the adventure will immediately become central to, and thus engage, the core elements of the character, one that may well not really have a well-defined history or connections to anything, is IMHO asking a lot. In fact you are expecting THE MOST DIFFICULT of all RP tasks from the players in this case, to ab initio produce deep engagement and strong connections and motivations in PCs about which they know little and for whom it is not in any way defined what their relationship with things might be.

This is why, IMHO, something like Stonetop or Doskvol (BitD) is enormously easier to manage and achieve consistent results with in an RPG sense, because there's, by design, a deep set of connections and sense of place built into the premise. But even if you play a game that is more like core Dungeon World or something along those lines with no established myth, at least you have the players pointing to what needs to exist, and having things like bonds that help shape it and give it life. TB/2 interestingly kind of falls in the middle, there's an expected type of milieu, but it is not spelled out in detail. The characters have some circles and an ally and/or nemesis, etc. but it is less constrained than BitD or Stonetop. Plus the harsh environmental aspect creates a fairly clear impetus to center on the 'survival game' to at least some extent.

I think something like 5e is actually RP hard mode. BIFTs were kind of a half-hearted thing. Certainly groups can easily go for it anyway, but most more casual players without the exposure to good RP are in the deep end there.

 

[AnotherGuy]

A bad player alters game reality on a whim and demands the DM agree and always say "yes player". And you really don't want to game with that sort of person.

In the same way your players demand integrity and fairness from you as the DM they trust, you should too demand the same from the player IF you are to incorporate instances of player-generated content.
I have had a poor experience where a player wanted to see how much he could push the envelope (5e plot points), but I feel it is the responsibility of the table (not just the DM) to inform the player that he is falling foul and ruining the game. In my instance, the table decided against that player's generated content (his use of the plot point).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

A good example of how this really does just mostly come down to pure opinion - for me and my players, this helps us get more invested in everything!

More to the point for me, I find it almost impossible to HAVE a thought process as a character if I don't have the experience of projecting my knowledge and understanding of the world, and reasoning about it, onto my thoughts and actions as that character. If I have to run and ask the GM every time I want to think "Oh, the explanation for why the Raven Queen followers are upset is because..." then I am not experiencing being 20 INT Wizard's Apprentice Starn who spent all his time for the last 10+ years buried in books (and probably thinks he knows more than he does, though his knowledge skill bonuses are mostly pretty impressive). And if we were talking about, say, Athletics, I would think that, mostly, I would experience questions and attempts to accomplish things in that vein to be natural to me and where my understanding of the situation would prevail.

And just to note: The GM in such a game is certainly welcome, probably required, to support that by weighing in with their input. Maybe they find something I assert to be implausible or stretching the fiction a bit for gamist reasons, etc. Or perhaps they DO have some prep that answers a certain question, etc. Often I'd expect the GM to come back with something along the lines of 'Yes, and...' or 'Yes, but...'. I try not to propose things that would elicit a 'no', but at least in the context of our 4e game that can happen, and its OK when it doesn't take me out of character too often. But at a certain point, if everything I think I know when I RP being Starn is false, well then something is going sideways! I'm definitely not in character, somehow.

 

[Aldarc]

Maybe the needs and wants are paper thin and pretty meaningless because they're not central to the conflicts that are being expressed in the setting and adventure material that is presented. Or they're just plain so basic and obvious that they don't represent anything unique.

This was a problem that I had when playing APs in Pathfinder 1 (and later in 5e D&D). The plot of the adventure didn't care who my character was. My friends were somewhat disconcerted when I wanted to "retire" my character in the middle of Rise of the Runelords. But I told them that I had lost sight of who my character was through the course of playing the adventure because who they were fundamentally didn't matter no matter how I roleplayed them, with or without integrity. Since then, if I know the GM is running an AP, I never make a PC whose story that I care about or am interested in discovering through play. Otherwise it's just a waste of a character concept IME.

I think something like 5e is actually RP hard mode. BIFTs were kind of a half-hearted thing. Certainly groups can easily go for it anyway, but most more casual players without the exposure to good RP are in the deep end there.

BIFTs were the worst of both worlds where generally people who hated meta-mechanics hated BIFTs because they were meta-mechanics, and people like meta-mechanics hated BIFTs because they were done terribly with little connection to the core gameplay.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

This was a problem that I had when playing APs in Pathfinder 1 (and later in 5e D&D). The plot of the adventure didn't care who my character was. My friends were somewhat disconcerted when I wanted to "retire" my character in the middle of Rise of the Runelords. But I told them that I had lost sight of who my character was through the course of playing the adventure because who they were fundamentally didn't matter no matter how I roleplayed them, with or without integrity. Since then, if I know the GM is running an AP, I never make a PC whose story that I care about or am interested in discovering through play. Otherwise it's just a waste of a character concept IME.

Sure, that is an issue with APs, or other games with similar forced central "metaplot." But you can easily have a game without such and without players having extensive (non character action based) fiction generation authority. It just requires that the players have the freedom to set their characters' goals and act upon them.