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

[Belen]

Wait, when did I pick up "Legend?"

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think there's also the overlooked solution of not designing a setting with a bunch of stuff players might object to.

Remember, for the most part I'm staying away from the setting control discussion; I'm only talking about rules decisions.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Every reference to it from @Lanefan has seemed quite brief and perfunctory to me. To the tune of spending maybe a sentence or two on it, and then three paragraphs about something completely unrelated.

He specifically agreed that one of the reasons sometimes you need to hash out things in-game is because you don't want the same situation to be resolved differently the next time. As you've noted yourself, that's a pretty important departure from a lot of people, including several in this thread.

If anything, he prioritizes consistency (in the precedent sense) too much, to my POV of view, and I put a pretty high value on that.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Note that I am not saying you should or shouldn't post anywhere. Just that, based on what you have said in this post, I'm not sure the very premise of the thread is one you find interesting or worthwhile to discuss.

True enough. I only posted in because I saw you comment once again on your inability to find worthwhile games and tables to sit at (and what appears to be a still-lingering anger towards the situation) that made me think you were looking for something more than just clarifying your current situation. But if you're good, then that's cool.

 

[Dire Bare]

Why couldn't there be Wookies in Star Trek? After all there are unexplored regions of space, wormholes, different dimensions. Why are you so limited in your imagination that you can't imagine an alternate universe where Wookies exist?

Is it because Wookies don't fit the theme and style of the game you want to play when you're playing a Star Trek game?

Like @Emerikol, when I have an opening in my games I include a page or two of restrictions, expectations and an intro to give them a general idea of the type of campaigns I run. But one thing I'm clear on is that I've always been clear on is what species I allow. Which, honestly? If you can't compromise and use one of the half dozen or so races I allow then perhaps you won't be willing to compromise in other ways with the other players.

In an FR game a while back I thought it would be fun to play Puss In Boots style PC complete with bad accent named Antonio. Of course playing a Tabaxi made the most sense so that's what I did. But if the campaign didn't have anthropomorphic cat people? I would have just chosen a different species or come up with a different concept. My vision of an individual character is not more important than the vision of the DM has for their world or the style the DM and other players have decided to play. For me, the PC is the character idea du jour, for the DM? The DM has likely spent hour upon hour building a campaign world. If they're like me, they've spent thousands of hours over years running games in that world. Compared to that? My PC doesn't have to be furry.

The original post, "You are the kind of player who wants to play a wookie in a Star Trek game" was a very deliberate and ridiculous strawman in this overly emotional and very silly argument folks are having.

But . . . I'd totally allow a player to play a wookie in a Star Trek game. After having a good conversation with my player, there is no reason to assume including a wookie character would break the theme and style of my Star Trek game. It's be pretty easy . . . Kashyyyk is now a planet within my version of the Star Trek universe, perhaps within Federation space, perhaps a Federation world. Wookies wouldn't have been enslaved by the "Empire", but perhaps they were by the Cardassians or Klingons. The PC wookie could be a Federation member just as Nog (Ferengi) or Worf (Klingon) were in classic Trek. Maybe only a few folks understand the wookie language (like Han), or perhaps the universal translator works just fine for wookies.

Y'all need to relax in this thread and stop taking things so personally. Overly restrictive and controlling DMs are not my style, as a player or as a DM myself. But if that's your style, and you've got players who are having fun in your games, more power to you. If you lean towards the more collaborative approach to DMing, we are of the same tribe . . . but don't let the grognards get you down, you aren't going to win any internet arguments with them, nor they with you.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The main argument is what level of responsibility should a DM have and it is ill-defined. The new rule 0 does not really help. It does not really clarify.

I was springboarding off this discussion, and mostly suggesting I think Rule Zero in general is a pernicious holdover; the specifics of the new version were not something I'm interested in.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No. I don't ever say the question is wrong. Maybe it something the DM won't find that challenging to integrate. It just depends. I would not suggest it if I got a session 0 preplay packet that said the races allowed are A,B,C,D. I would pick one of those without question.

Sure. If the premise doesn't sound fun to me, I won't bite. I've passed over applying to numerous games over the years because the pitch, premise, or limitations just weren't my speed. (As an example, I genuinely don't understand the point of trying to play low-power PF1e unless it's E6, and E6 doesn't appeal to me, so any PF1e game that is predicated on either idea I just won't even look at.)

There are a lot of reasons a DM might not want a race. Some are flavor and some are mechanics. If it is mechanics you could just say "Hey i want to look like a dragonborn but I'll operate mechanically like a human." If it is flavor it is harder but you could ask him if he had some other flavor that would enable you to use the same mechanics. It also depends on what you wanted to play.

Sure. That's precisely the process of having a sincere conversation should do. It is possible, though I think it should be quite rare, that genuinely no resolution can come out of it. Hence why I heavily raise an eyebrow when people declare, without any discussion in advance, that no it absolutely couldn't be possible and you'd better get used to it.

I do think draconian (forgive the pun) changes to the standard PHB options should be telegraphed ahead of time.

This is probably why I don't like 5e though because there are so many races, classes, and subclasses that it seems bad to me but that is my preference.

Personally, I think having a diverse range of options is all to the good. Not only does that mean you have significantly more valid subsets to work with, but it's also a lot more likely that even if options A, B, and C are out, your players will be content with something from options D-J instead. There are certainly limits; as I've said before, I think there's somewhere between 18 and 25 class fantasies that D&D more or less supports (specific things, mind; it's not a ranked list, but it is one particular list). Having that many classes to draw on enables an enormous variety of specifically-themed worlds by selecting subsets.

Of course, I would also prefer that instead of the game making ridiculous and false blanket statements (like the idea that every fantasy world always has humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings, which the 5.0 PHB either outright says, for humans, or strongly implies, for the other three), the books instead go over both advice and examples for how class and race selections produce a particular campaign feel.

A setting where the only explicitly supernatural classes are Psion, Assassin, Artificer, and Monk, and the other classes are "Machinist" (not my favorite name but it's my current placeholder), Warlord, Rogue, Fighter, and Barbarian? That's a fascinating world concept, one where obscure magic and occult phenomena are much more prevalent and involved than the usual spells we think of, which implies perhaps a more Lovecraftian bent, or maybe a Westeros-style thing where magic limitedly exists but is resurging, etc. Likewise, a setting where (say) humans were only recently introduced, and the dominant species are satyrs, wemics, kobolds, and changelings? That's bound to look quite, quite different from the bog-standard everyone's-seen-it-a-million-times superficially-Tolkienesque knockoff.

I absolutely agree that curation of a setting can produce extremely interesting results. I just find that a lot of DMs-arguing-on-the-internet have a "vision" that is little more than that: a superficial Tolkien knockoff.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Wait, when did I pick up "Legend?"

Its a breakpoint on number of posts I believe.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The original post, "You are the kind of player who wants to play a wookie in a Star Trek game" was a very deliberate and ridiculous strawman in this overly emotional and very silly argument folks are having.

But . . . I'd totally allow a player to play a wookie in a Star Trek game. After having a good conversation with my player, there is no reason to assume including a wookie character would break the theme and style of my Star Trek game. It's be pretty easy . . . Kashyyyk is now a planet within my version of the Star Trek universe, perhaps within Federation space, perhaps a Federation world. Wookies wouldn't have been enslaved by the "Empire", but perhaps they were by the Cardassians or Klingons. The PC wookie could be a Federation member just as Nog (Ferengi) or Worf (Klingon) were in classic Trek. Maybe only a few folks understand the wookie language (like Han), or perhaps the universal translator works just fine for wookies.

Y'all need to relax in this thread and stop taking things so personally. Overly restrictive and controlling DMs are not my style, as a player or as a DM myself. But if that's your style, and you've got players who are having fun in your games, more power to you. If you lean towards the more collaborative approach to DMing, we are of the same tribe . . . but don't let the grognards get you down, you aren't going to win any internet arguments with them, nor they with you.

Don't forget--it wasn't just a wookiee. It was a wookiee Jedi in a Star Trek game, @Oofta. That's what I was being compared to for thinking that, because dragonborn are in the PHB, it's reasonable to think you can play one if the DM didn't say in advance that you couldn't.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Its a breakpoint on number of posts I believe.

Or number of 'Likes' you have received. One of the two I think?