D&D General A glimpse at WoTC's current view of Rule 0

[Micah Sweet]

Everyone thinks their character is special. Until they make their next character.

True. I've never been so attached to a character concept that I wouldn't adjust it to fit the setting, or be all that upset when they die. Plenty of PCs in the sea.

Setting should come before character in my view. Just like real life.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So what is the point of players, then? I mean, why does the GM just not write some more setting bible if they have such little interest in the players and their play of their PCs?

How much interest do they have to have for you to believe that game needs players?

 

[Belen]

Then why do you and others respond with the types of arguments above, which depend on players being absolute craptacular human beings?


Okay so...you're doing the thing you said you don't do. You're assuming incredibly crappy player behavior as the ONLY alternative. That is, in this specific paragraph, you have just divided all players into two and only two categories:

1. Those who purely accept what the DM tells them they can pick from, with only extremely rare deviation, or...
2. Those who are buttholes that insist on utterly ridiculous, outlandishly provocative choices and become disruptive if denied

So, when someone tells me those are my options--accept what you're given or you're a butthole--can you see why I would respond negatively?

My take is that you seem to always come down on the side of "the DM is bad, the players are good." That seems to be a default assumption with some folks and a running theme.

Personally, I have a setting. It has restrictions. I am the one doing all or most of the work for running the adventures and campaign. The player is free to speak with me about things outside the listed items. If the player is willing to do the work to fit it into the setting (history, culture, region, etc), then I can work with them. If they just want to pick an option and then it is going to cost me hours of time to build everything, then that is a different story.

It is that simple. When players step up and help and take some of the burden and are willing to do the work, then I am good. If they expect me to accommodate all their wishes and yet leave me the additional work to with no help (and this is the most common player) then I am not as inclined to do it.

I have a job and family too.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Also, speaking of character concepts, to me "elf wizard" is not really a character concept. It is a mechanical expression. Character concepts are things like "A highly learned abrasive genius with thirst for knowledge, who has hard time emotionally connecting with people and may come across as a jerk, but whilst potentially ruthless when facing injustice, actually has a strong moral centre." I think I could get that to work in quite a broad selection of settings.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It of course is perfectly understandable that established IPs the participants are familiar with might be more compelling than whatever harebrained concoction the GM has cooked up. But at least when I play, I am really interested in seeing new worlds people have created, so bespoke words the GM has crafted are a selling point to me, even if their creative vision would differ from mine.

But what I absolutely reject, is the idea that the chosen rule system should dictate the contents of the setting, in a manner that everything that is available in the rule system is available in the setting. Now rules certainly matter, and one should endeavour to choose a system that is suited for representing the setting in question, but the rules still cannot dictate the setting. I am no more required to include elves or centaurs in my fantasy game using 5e D&D rules than I am required to include space ships in my Victorian noir game using GURPS even though the systems in question have rules for these things.

Agreed. It's not a toolbox if I have to use every tool in the box.

 

[TwoSix]

Also, speaking of character concepts, to me "elf wizard" is not really a character concept. It is a mechanical expression. Character concepts are things like "A highly learned abrasive genius with thirst for knowledge, who has hard time emotionally connecting with people and may come across as a jerk, but whilst potentially ruthless when facing injustice, actually has a strong moral centre." I think I could get that to work in quite a broad selection of settings.

"How do you come up with your character concepts?" could definitely be its own thread.

 

[Belen]

It's not. That's the point I'm making. It simply is not the same. You can insist it is all you like. That does not make it so.


I already did. "Things present in the PHB." It would be like complaining that a person couldn't be a Sith (species) Jedi in Star Wars, or a Gorn science officer in Star Trek, or a female dwarf warrior in Middle-Earth, etc.

Gorn exist in Star Trek. Worf and Nog prove that it is perfectly possible for non-member species to join Starfleet and become respected officers at prestigious appointments. (The Enterprise-D is, explicitly, the flagship of Starfleet. To be appointed both Security and Operations Officer on the Enterprise is an extremely prestigious thing.) We have good reason to believe it could happen, and no reason to believe it can't happen, even though historically, as far as we're aware, it hasn't happened.

Sith are a humanoid species in Star Wars. Most of them learned and practiced the Dark Side of the force, but there's nothing preventing them from practicing the light. Especially if they were found as a child and taken in by the Jedi Order. Nothing prevents it, it's just not represented generally.

Female dwarves explicitly exist in Tolkien's work. We get some kinda questionable justifications for why they either don't go out amongst other races or, apparently, aren't distinguishable from male dwarves in the rare cases they do. Nothing prevents it--it's just not represented in the stories.

You are describing settings, not rules.

D&D is not a setting. It is a set of rules to play a fantasy game. The setting is Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Planescape, Mystara, etc. The setting is also homebrew. Many settings have different assumptions, additional rules, new or missing species etc.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I mean, I'm firmly in the second camp; I leave my D&D settings very loose precisely to accommodate a wide amount of aesthetic preferences.

Cool! It's good to hear from other DMs that do this.

But, I do expect at least a little polite deference to my aesthetic values when I indicate them important enough to assert.

Sure. That's part of what a good-faith discussion is and must be: nobody is the king of the convo.

If something would deeply disturb some folks, let's probably leave that out or keep it very soft-touch. Example: I've had an asexual player, so anything particularly sexual for them would be A Problem, but they also played a Bard with some intent of being flirtatious. Figuring out the right balance point required some discussion. I still made some slight errors from time to time, but nothing so severe as to be harmful, just "ehh not feeling this" type stuff.

If something is extremely important to someone, we incorporate it as far as we can, though perhaps with alterations or modifications. Example: I wanted to run an "Arabian Nights"-flavored setting strongly inspired by Al-Andalus, less the slavery. Others wanted to include classic European fantasy things like taverns/bars, which did require me to adjust my expectations, but not in a way that was harmful in the slightest. (Most, albeit not all, Islamic countries have pretty strong rules against alcohol. Although the Tarrakhuna is inspired by Islamic cultures, it is not mimicking them, so ordinary alcohol is consumed, it's just seen as inferior/lower-class compared to the more civilized coffee or extremely expensive imported Jinnistani spirits.)

If something is important to one person and a problem for another, we work it out. Example: in the first attempt at this game, I had someone who wanted to take a necromancy-derived feature. This...would not have flown in the setting as I understand it. As in, "you would be run out of town" wouldn't have flown. But I strongly suspected there was a different reason beyond "I want a ghoul pet", because they were specifically swapping out a different elemental pet feature for this. Digging deep enough, their issue ultimately was that they didn't like how it was worded, and were afraid that the elemental pet would be used against them. I promised I would never do that and offered to playtest one or more rewrites of the feature to give them a pet they'd be happy with; they ultimately decided to replace the pet with a "curse" feature instead.

Notice that at no point did I become some bend-over-backwards doormat. I advocated for my position, and I listened to the player's position. Sometimes, the appropriate thing for me to do was accept that my position wasn't important enough to insist on it. Sometimes, the appropriate thing was to find a middle ground. Sometimes, the appropriate thing was to figure out where the real issue lay beneath the superficial one, and address that. I'm sure there are many other possible situations that could happen, but I'm confident that if both sides of the discussion are participating in good faith, a resolution can be found that will either please both sides or, failing that, at least please one side and do no harm to the other.

Having tables of rotating DMs certainly helps with these authority issues; we generally defer to the DM's vision because we've all had our turns running.

Yeah, I only have one friend who is running a game right now, and neither her gaming group, my current DW group, nor the current 5e group I play in have any intersection. Well, other than me as DM in the second and me as player in the third. I know very, very few people who have even the slightest interest in being DMs and with only one exception (the aforementioned woman and another guy I know) don't know anyone in common except me.

It's a nice idea. It just doesn't apply for a significant number of people.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But that banning PHB species due the setting literally was part of my examples...



I finally think I get what the confusion is. You're mixing up two different things. D&D is not a setting, it is a rule system. It can be used to play in various settings, all of which might not contain everything that exist in the D&D rules. Just like we could play in Star Trek setting using GURPS, but then limit the options to just those that are appropriate for Star Trek.

Yeah, I think @EzekielRaiden is assuming the implied setting hard. I know WotC likes to do that for business and IP reasons, but there's no requirement to do so, and speaking for myself I often don't.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Unless the DM says otherwise. Like people keep saying, not every campaign world will have every race or class in D&D. Some will have other races and maybe another class who knows.

But the responsibility must always be on the DM to get that done, as I said, as part of the pitch. You don't get to get all upset and demanding when I show up to "hey I'd like to run some D&D, you want in?" with the idea of playing a dragonborn sorcerer and only then say "absolutely the hell not, there are no dragonborn in my world and all sorcerers are evil!"

"Let's play D&D" means we use what the core book contains. You have to justify using less.

So is your argument now, that if I choose use D&D system to run a game, I am required to include everything in the PHB?

See above. You are required to justify using less. Now, maybe for some folks that justification is effortless. Maybe you have a preternatural ability to convince a complete stranger that your vision is totally better than anything they could come up with and which you didn't tell them a lick about until after they showed up at the table with character ideas. Color me skeptical, but hey, I've been a skeptic and yet proven wrong before.

For the vast majority of actual groups, though? You have to actually sell your pitch, and that means justifying why it would be interesting, and why basic, core stuff is not available.

In the absence of other information, the PHB is the root of D&D as far as player options go.