D&D General Of Consent, Session 0 and Hard Decisions.

[GrimCo]

Somethng like it, probably; along the lines of "advice: know your players before you run a game for them", only put in better words.

Those word are fine. Problem is, it's not really viable for people who do online only games with players from different cities/countries. While online gaming wasn't that big 10 years ago when last DMG was published, it became very popular due to pandemic.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Seafood pizza type players "it's not on the consent form". You can't really catch every corner case scenario on a form.

I really don’t know what you mean by this. Seafood pizza type players is not the dunk you think it is.

You're I'm a group. You order pizza. Seafood pizza player vetoed all the pizza options that aren't a variety of seafood pizza because that's what they like.

Ir if a variety is ordered they get a seafood pizza and eat everyone else's pizza leaving their pizza at the end for themselves.

first... the food part irks me SOOOO much cause yeah I have seen people complain "I want X and Y" then eat 3-4 slices of plain cheese that half the group wanted before they touch theres... I am more likely to kick someone from a group for THAT then consent forms...

BUT>... more on topic
Second... (not D&D but TTRPG) we play Old World of Darkness, and a few (maybe a lot) years ago I tried to run a V20 Vampire game... most of the people I knew for years but 2 of the players where new (one this was there first RPG at all) the OTHER new player was a GF of one of the guys I knew and played with... she was HUGE on consent and all sorts of things but we didn't have a check list per say... she told us she LOVED vampire movies and this seemed fine. She had played D&D once or twice but this was her first WoD game... session 2 she was aghast cause my NPC vampire used mind control to make someone submit, drank some blood then whipped there memory of it... She threw a fit at the table that no one warned her "THAT WAS THE TYPE OF GAME THIS WOULD BE" likened it to SA... and we all agreed, "Yeah, vampires in all media have a lot in common with SA" and then she stormed out... BUT That isn't were this story ends... we played 1 session without her when the next started she came back with my buddy (her BF) and said none of us could continue to play (at my house, my campaign) because it was going to 'corrupt us'
When I told her that in 1996 I was LARPing these things, and any corruption would have long set in, it's just a game.
So long story (slightly) short(er) is that my buddy wasn't allowed to play with us for a couple of months until they broke up... but I also brought up that other 'new to RPGs' player for a reason... she is DEAD set against consent forms and things like it and she runs her own game (although I can't play it do to timing) I understand her Werewolf game rocks, and I used to play in her D&D game and she used to play in my group (again timing didn't work out). but we have players in common. Today she would tell a new player "bad things are going to happen, if you have a real good reason to not like something bring it up to me in private, but assume this is a Rated R game"

 

[GrimCo]

Ahhh. OWoD. First ttrpg i ever played, and straight into Sabbath campaign. It rocked. But unlike that girl from your game, mine was with group of peps who's idea of good Friday evening was chilling in the historical old graveyard (it's nice place in the center of the city, it was used from mid 1600's till 1880s, lots of greenery, but still, old graveyard by night), drinking and blasting old school black/death metal We even had some sessions there.

While d&d is by default PG-13 that can be turned up to R, oWoD's default setting is hard R which can be tuned down to PG-13. Because of themes it covers, i personally, don't accept people i don't know at least decently well in my WoD games.

 

[Lanefan]

Those word are fine. Problem is, it's not really viable for people who do online only games with players from different cities/countries. While online gaming wasn't that big 10 years ago when last DMG was published, it became very popular due to pandemic.

That doesn't mean I'd be catering to it, or to AL-style play, were I the one writing the advice piece in the DMG.

Instead, I'd be laser-focused on home campaigns among friends.

 

[Steampunkette]

That doesn't mean I'd be catering to it, or to AL-style play, were I the one writing the advice piece in the DMG.

Instead, I'd be laser-focused on home campaigns among friends.

And the way WotC is running... You wouldn't be writing the DMG.

They're leaning -hard- into online play and online spaces. Not just Roll20 or Talespire or whatever else. They've repeatedly looked into making their own online TTRPG platform for playing D&D across the world. Why?

Because it breaks down one of the greatest blocks to gaming in any TTRPG space there is:

Splitting the Playerbase.

Just like MMORPGs you want as many people buying and playing your game as possible when you're a TTRPG publisher. You want every possible block out of the way. And learning from MMORPGS is also super important. Look at what World of Warcraft has been doing for two decades, now, as it refines it's process.

It started out with a hard faction break, which resulted in a ton of servers leaning hard Horde or hard Alliance because people wanted to be able to do raids and stuff and if there's not enough Alliance players online when you can raid you rolled up a Horde character to go where the people were. They didn't recognize the problem so they allowed players to faction-change their characters for a fee to make some money off of it and give people a shortcut rather than having to re-level and re-gear the whole way up.

But if you keep that trend going for 6 years and suddenly you've got servers that are so one-sided the PvP community can't even do a Battleground because there's not enough of the other team to play against.

So they started bulking up the capabilities of their servers and then consolidating. Now instead of 10,000 active users the server could handle 20,000 active users and they combined a Horde-Heavy and an Alliance-Heavy server. And it worked great! Kinda.

Because people aged out of WoW. People got snagged by other games. People literally died and entire raid groups would break apart because the raid leader was in a car accident or had cancer or whatever else. And the server would start slanting, again, and keep going because people are gonna people.

So they started making cross-server play functionality. Now you queue for a battleground and you get players from 10 different servers on your team! Which helped a lot, but there were still issues.

So they keep introducing new fixes and mechanical support. Like cross-faction teaming and cross-server guilds and more, so the faction divide doesn't matter as much anymore. They installed this pointless barrier to try and instill brand loyalty to a red or blue banner and it caused SO MANY PROBLEMS over the years. You know what else caused problems?

Doubled Zones. Back in Vanilla through Cataclysm you had tons of options for where to level. You wanna hit Northrend? Cool. Borean Tundra or Howling Fjords as your point of entry? Sure it made spawn-timers easy enough to manage as players hit either side of the map, but the amount of effort and time spent on game design didn't translate into doubled leveling time. You finished Howling Fjord and didn't need to do Borean Tundra because it was lower level.

So now every expansion is a pretty tight path of leveling through selected zones. There's no doubled-up leveling zones, anymore. Everyone goes through every zone so they all play in the same space and populate the same world!

You can map these same sorts of problems to TSR and WotC!

TSR created tons of material! You had Dragonlance, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and more settings out there for a lot of narrative variety. BUT.

If you wanted to play Dark Sun and no one in the area was running a Dark Sun game you were SoL. Lord knows I often was as a teen in the 90s. Oh, sure, there were Dragonlance and Ravenloft games at the FLGSs I could get a ride to, and I played in them, but I had an Athasian Thri-Kreen Psychic Warrior I wanted to play and never could. You know?

WotC discontinued a -bunch- of Campaign Settings when they took over. They spun off Ravenloft to Sword and Sorcery to let them muck around with it. It's not that those books didn't sell at all, it's what they split the playerbase. Spread people out across the Howling Fjord and the Borean Tundra so they were playing the game but not together.

Online Tabletop? That will kill the Faction Divide. We have the technology to make sure a teen in Georgia can find a Dark Sun group out in the great wide world even if there's no one running that setting at their FLGS.

WotC is going to lean so hard on that that the "Playing with your home-table friendgroup" advice won't be in future books. You're already friends with them. You know them and you deal with them on the regular. You don't -need- advice on how to get to know them and work within their boundaries that you likely share because you're already friends.

But when you're playing online with a friend in China and you start sprinkling skeletons and ghosts onto the battlefield you need to know that they're considered especially unlucky and gross. Like far beyond the desensitized Western view of undead as "Generally acceptable levels of creepy".

Again, something we can learn from World of Warcraft who made their undead Forsaken look like the left in the US and the right in China.

Because at the online table you need to take into account the feelings of people you don't know terribly well. And for those kinds of games?

Safety Tools are an outright godsend.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And the way WotC is running... You wouldn't be writing the DMG.

They're leaning -hard- into online play and online spaces. Not just Roll20 or Talespire or whatever else. They've repeatedly looked into making their own online TTRPG platform for playing D&D across the world. Why?

Because it breaks down one of the greatest blocks to gaming in any TTRPG space there is:

Splitting the Playerbase.

Just like MMORPGs you want as many people buying and playing your game as possible when you're a TTRPG publisher. You want every possible block out of the way. And learning from MMORPGS is also super important. Look at what World of Warcraft has been doing for two decades, now, as it refines it's process.

It started out with a hard faction break, which resulted in a ton of servers leaning hard Horde or hard Alliance because people wanted to be able to do raids and stuff and if there's not enough Alliance players online when you can raid you rolled up a Horde character to go where the people were. They didn't recognize the problem so they allowed players to faction-change their characters for a fee to make some money off of it and give people a shortcut rather than having to re-level and re-gear the whole way up.

But if you keep that trend going for 6 years and suddenly you've got servers that are so one-sided the PvP community can't even do a Battleground because there's not enough of the other team to play against.

So they started bulking up the capabilities of their servers and then consolidating. Now instead of 10,000 active users the server could handle 20,000 active users and they combined a Horde-Heavy and an Alliance-Heavy server. And it worked great! Kinda.

Because people aged out of WoW. People got snagged by other games. People literally died and entire raid groups would break apart because the raid leader was in a car accident or had cancer or whatever else. And the server would start slanting, again, and keep going because people are gonna people.

So they started making cross-server play functionality. Now you queue for a battleground and you get players from 10 different servers on your team! Which helped a lot, but there were still issues.

So they keep introducing new fixes and mechanical support. Like cross-faction teaming and cross-server guilds and more, so the faction divide doesn't matter as much anymore. They installed this pointless barrier to try and instill brand loyalty to a red or blue banner and it caused SO MANY PROBLEMS over the years. You know what else caused problems?

Doubled Zones. Back in Vanilla through Cataclysm you had tons of options for where to level. You wanna hit Northrend? Cool. Borean Tundra or Howling Fjords as your point of entry? Sure it made spawn-timers easy enough to manage as players hit either side of the map, but the amount of effort and time spent on game design didn't translate into doubled leveling time. You finished Howling Fjord and didn't need to do Borean Tundra because it was lower level.

So now every expansion is a pretty tight path of leveling through selected zones. There's no doubled-up leveling zones, anymore. Everyone goes through every zone so they all play in the same space and populate the same world!

You can map these same sorts of problems to TSR and WotC!

TSR created tons of material! You had Dragonlance, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and more settings out there for a lot of narrative variety. BUT.

If you wanted to play Dark Sun and no one in the area was running a Dark Sun game you were SoL. Lord knows I often was as a teen in the 90s. Oh, sure, there were Dragonlance and Ravenloft games at the FLGSs I could get a ride to, and I played in them, but I had an Athasian Thri-Kreen Psychic Warrior I wanted to play and never could. You know?

WotC discontinued a -bunch- of Campaign Settings when they took over. They spun off Ravenloft to Sword and Sorcery to let them muck around with it. It's not that those books didn't sell at all, it's what they split the playerbase. Spread people out across the Howling Fjord and the Borean Tundra so they were playing the game but not together.

Online Tabletop? That will kill the Faction Divide. We have the technology to make sure a teen in Georgia can find a Dark Sun group out in the great wide world even if there's no one running that setting at their FLGS.

WotC is going to lean so hard on that that the "Playing with your home-table friendgroup" advice won't be in future books. You're already friends with them. You know them and you deal with them on the regular. You don't -need- advice on how to get to know them and work within their boundaries that you likely share because you're already friends.

But when you're playing online with a friend in China and you start sprinkling skeletons and ghosts onto the battlefield you need to know that they're considered especially unlucky and gross. Like far beyond the desensitized Western view of undead as "Generally acceptable levels of creepy".

Again, something we can learn from World of Warcraft who made their undead Forsaken look like the left in the US and the right in China.

Because at the online table you need to take into account the feelings of people you don't know terribly well. And for those kinds of games?

Safety Tools are an outright godsend.

If you have to account for every cultural concern simultaneously you are going to drastically narrow the field of what you're allowed to show.

 

[Steampunkette]

If you have to account for every cultural concern simultaneously you are going to drastically narrow the field of what you're allowed to show.

Which is why safety tools are a godsend.

If you're not playing with any Chinese people it won't come up on a safety sheet and won't have any impact on the game.

If you are, and it does, -then- you make a few minor changes to accommodate and everyone has a fun time. (And for some Chinese people, it won't appear on the safety sheet, anyway, because they personally don't have a problem with it)

OR you can pretend like every single interaction requires walking on eggshells, throw your hands up, and declare it's not worth your time because you have to worry about every little thing across every culture and every emotional experience or neurodivergence.

One of these things is helpful for everyone. One of them is a thought-terminating statement meant to minimize and ignore problems you, personally, don't face at your table.

 

[GrimCo]

If you have to account for every cultural concern simultaneously you are going to drastically narrow the field of what you're allowed to show.

Yes, but you will expand your customer base. In the end, WoTC is for profit company. D&D is consumer market product. They want to reach as many consumers as they can.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yes, but you will expand your customer base. In the end, WoTC is for profit company. D&D is consumer market product. They want to reach as many consumers as they can.

Unfortunately, profit and creative expression don't intersect nearly as often as I'd like. Kinda my whole issue with WotC's attitude. The profit side gets all the juice.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which is why safety tools are a godsend.

If you're not playing with any Chinese people it won't come up on a safety sheet and won't have any impact on the game.

If you are, and it does, -then- you make a few minor changes to accommodate and everyone has a fun time. (And for some Chinese people, it won't appear on the safety sheet, anyway, because they personally don't have a problem with it)

OR you can pretend like every single interaction requires walking on eggshells, throw your hands up, and declare it's not worth your time because you have to worry about every little thing across every culture and every emotional experience or neurodivergence.

One of these things is helpful for everyone. One of them is a thought-terminating statement meant to minimize and ignore problems you, personally, don't face at your table.

Can you make a VTT that allows for all the individual yes/no toggles you are saying you need to account for hundreds or thousands of different player group compositions? If so, that's great! Ain't technology something! Otherwise, this sort of thing is much easier to adjudicate in person. I'm skeptical WotC is going to make a VTT that does what you want here, although some progress is better than none.