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

[BookTenTiger]

Thinking more about this topic, in a big 5e campaign I played in set in (our version of) the Forgotten Realms, two other players and I played as dwarven cousins. We met together before the first adventure and played out our own improvised session, filling in details about our holds, our patriarch, and the lore of the dwarven clans. We wrote it all up as notes and shared it with our DM, who incorporated it into the campaign. It was a super fun way to generate our own lore!

 

[hawkeyefan]

If you only want positive feedback on alternative approaches you should have made it a (+) thread.

I think it’s more about substantive feedback, Oofta. You’re not saying anything we all don’t know about you.

Do you have any actual examples of play that show either positive or negative aspects of player generated fiction?

It seems like you’ve just shown up in this thread to point out you don’t like the style of play being talked about. Which seems… I don’t know… kind of pointless. Also probably not a good use of your time. Why not post in another thread that’s about something you do enjoy?

If I showed up in a thread about “hexcrawling in D&D” and started going on and on about how “Adventure Paths are where it’s really at and hey don’t say hexcrawls are more fun because that’s insulting to me” I’d expect to be called out, + thread or not.

I guess I don't understand why you would bother posting in a thread that is about a topic that is not relevant to your RPGing.

To claim victimhood because others enjoy different things?

If people stop saying things like "It's like an autocratic ruler of peasants" or "If you're not playing a game based on individual goals and character growth you're playing a board game" or that somehow we aren't really role playing to name a few, sure.

If all you want is positives you should make this a (+) thread.

Or maybe recognize that most such comments were made in reply to some folks who seem pretty extreme. Like the below comments and similar.

If you’re not saying such things, then you can assume that the responses to them were not directed at you.

sitting in the endzone watching the goal post move again

So. If my character's GOAL is catching an escaping assassin. And the wall is an OBSTACLE to my PC catching the assassin. I can't use Streetwise to climb the wall?

I'm not a big fan of having the players add things to the game. I'll tell such a player that it might be better if they just stayed home to write their novel.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Then you've been playing with different people with different goals than I have. I'll take a PC I ran recently. He certainly had a tragic backstory and his personality was affected by it. His wife and child had been killed by (skipping in-game lore) bandits who had been hunted down by authorities. He felt guilt because he hadn't been there to protect them and anger that he had not had his vengeance. So he became a vengeance paladin.

But needs? Wants? Eh. He wanted to hunt down others that would do harm to innocents and see that justice was done. But that to me is pretty thin motivation, it didn't really tie into any specific goals or desires. There was no one to hunt down, they were already dead. He wanted to help where he could to stop anyone else from suffering like he did, but so what?

I also had no need or desire for personal growth. If during the campaign if his attitude changed, great, if it didn't it didn't matter to me one bit. But I had a lot of fun with the PC even though outside of my character background story (verified with my DM) I never contributed once to world building outside of what my PC did or said.

Either we've been playing with different people or we've been playing with them differently. D&D does precisely nothing to encourage individual goals - and pre-authored stories (whether by the DM or by the adventure path) IME inhibit players having individual goals because that clashes with the group activity. Meanwhile if there is a reasonable chance of the goals having a payoff, and if they can do this without dragging everyone on a sidequest only they are interested in, then they love having sidequests. Same players, different approaches to GMing.

 

[hawkeyefan]

To post something more on topic, I used a lot of player generated material in my 5e game. I also used a lot of my own material, as well as a whole bunch of stuff from common D&D lore.

From Tharizdun and the Elder Elemental Eye, to Iggwilv and Graz’zt, to Rajaat and the Sorcerer Kings of Athas,to Orcus and Primus, to Sigil and the Lady of Pain… all of it was in play.

We first played Lost Mines of Phandelver to see if 5e would be a game folks would want to play. After, everyone gave it a thumbs up, I asked them what they wanted to do in play. Invariably, the players said they wanted to wrap up a lingering campaign that we’d begun in the 2e days and which we never properly finished, and which had flavored many later campaigns we ran.

So we treated that original campaign as the backstory, and folded in some others, and the players came up with connections to all that old stuff for their characters. In some cases, we had to fill in some blanks on what had happened to original PCs or NPCs from the old days, and we worked that out together.

So there was a lot of collaboration before we even progressed past Phandever. I used so many ideas from the players to kind of set things up. And then I’d ask them constantly throughout play what they wanted to see as players, and what their characters’ goals were… and then I’d use their answers.

Now this isn’t to say everything was player generated. I still had plenty of ideas of my own. But the collaborative elements were front and center in play.

 

[Oofta]

I'm a little puzzled why you take issue with @pemerton, who hasn't really said anything one way or another about good or bad play styles. I've read a comment or two from other people that MIGHT be interpreted as judgmental if you really wanted to take them that way, but they seemed pretty much in the realm of expressing their own likes and dislikes.

I think it goes without saying we all have somewhat different experiences, but it seems like you feel that other people pointing out those differences is somehow belittling your own, which I don't find to be the case.

So have you not read the posts that state that if the players cannot add to the fiction, it's a power play? That the DM is like a king and the players are peasants? That we aren't really role playing because all we know is D&D. I don't have a problem specifically with pemerton except when he tells me I can't attempt to contribute to the thread by explaining why I don't want to add to the fiction of the world when I'm playing and it's never been an issue when I DM.

As to the 'thinness' you describe in the case of this Paladin... What would NOT be 'thin' to you?!?! I mean, a game in which the focus of the action (at least WRT that character) is on hunting down evil-doers as some sort of compensation for his thwarted sense of justice doesn't seem THIN to me at all! It might be only one aspect of a more complex character, so if that's all there is the PC might be a bit one-dimensional, perhaps, but maybe not. I can think of dozens of ways this can be manifested in play in terms of specific goals etc. However, at least in a Narrativist approach the most interesting kind of play might be testing him on it. Is he really willing to do terrible things to get revenge? Is he entirely sure that he's qualified to be judge, jury, and executioner? How about if his sense of vengeance demands that he go up against people he cares about?

That was one example where I actually had a concrete backstory. But it still didn't really give him goals per se, just an attitude. At the same time I don't really want to play a game with the narrative approach because I've never seen it well done in D&D (other games have other approaches and goals of course). Most of the time "moral dilemmas" are "here are two equally awful choices and you must choose one or the world ends" or similar.

On the other hand I have a character who's whole schtick is that he's a chef that goes adventuring. Other than the fact that he likes to eat and try different foods there's not a lot there. But he has a bad accent, a fun attitude, likes to use food analogies for just about everything. We have a lot of fun.

For a lot of people, their entire concept of a character is limited to race, class and usually a physical description. The character, if any, emerges during play. I don't see an issue with that.

I think there's solid RP potential, at least, there. I would think that if it came out seeming thin that was more due to the way the GM in this example (which you don't discuss, so we don't really know) approached the whole thing. If he just went on ahead and ran some adventure or other without this whole thing playing any role in it, then sure it may have amounted to a hill of nothing. That seems to me to be more a commentary on the GMing techniques in use than anything else (and again, to be clear, if all you wanted was a backstory to be mild color, then your GM was batting 1000).

Except that's pretty much what I want. Go on adventures, maybe save the day now and then, get the kitten out of the tree, tell bad puns, have a few laughs, inhabit a different worldview for a while. I did work with my DM to do a side story on how to get a ghost to move on that turned into a short story (I like to write them now and then), but that was just downtime activity.

But it's also in part because in that particular game we had 7 players and we could only get together once a month for a 4-5 hour session. There simply aren't enough hours of gaming to pursue everyone's personal stories.

 

[mamba]

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.

sure, but what is the likelihood of that? If you are that confused about your chances or what is going on, then you really are confused about it, this is not because the DM is constantly intentionally messing with you

 

[mamba]

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 agree with that, it's just that I am generally more interested in the AP than in discovering my character, that is too much navel gazing for my taste

 

[pemerton]

Thinking more about this topic, in a big 5e campaign I played in set in (our version of) the Forgotten Realms, two other players and I played as dwarven cousins. We met together before the first adventure and played out our own improvised session, filling in details about our holds, our patriarch, and the lore of the dwarven clans. We wrote it all up as notes and shared it with our DM, who incorporated it into the campaign. It was a super fun way to generate our own lore!

In my big 4e campaign, at the start of the campaign I (as GM) asked the players to all tell me two things about their PC: (1) a loyalty, and (2) a reason why they would be ready to fight Goblins.

The player of the Dwarf fighter came up with the following backstory: in the Dwarfhold in the northern mountains, every young Dwarf has to serve in the army, and you are not a full-fledged adult until you've bested your first Goblin in battle. His character had been serving in the army longer than anyone else of his cohort - every time a big fight was on, he had been elsewhere (running a message for a commander, on kitchen duty, whatever). And so he was the oldest "child" in the Dwarfhold. Frustrated with this status, he had left the hold to go and find a way to prove his adulthood.

The colour and humour of this came up throughout the campaign, particularly from one player whose PC would often hassle the fighter about his past lack of accomplishment.

But it also set the framework for how the Dwarfhold fitted into the setting, and even though the backstory itself was meant to have a strong element of humour, it also supported some serious ideas and events as the campaign went along.

 

[pemerton]

that is too much navel gazing for my taste

Can I just check that you intend this in a completely non-judgemental, non-pejorative fashion?

 

[pemerton]

I agree with that, it's just that I am generally more interested in the AP than in discovering my character

On the serious part of your post, discovery/revelation of character is core to the greatest fantasy fiction: LotR (Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, even Gimli and Gandalf); Earthsea (Ged and Tenar and Arren); better versions of Arthurian myth (eg the film Excalibur); some of the best Wuxia films (eg Ashes of Time, Hero, Crouching Tiger, even Tai Chi Master); Star Wars; etc.

Adventure fiction with no character development - for me, James Bond films probably count as a paradigm of this, at least pre-Daniel Craig (and even then it's not the richest of all time!) - can tend to shallowness precisely because of that.