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

[Thomas Shey]

Having a premise to your campaign at all in the way you mean is a preference. Now, if you explain said premise before play begins and receive (apparent) player buy-in, then actively playing against it is not a classy move.

In the example I gave, you'd have had to explain it for character generation to even be done in a functional way. And yes, I usually assume people have at least avowed buy-in in a campaign's premise (the exception again tends to be on either my-way-or-the-highway GMs, or people with a bad case of Tigger disease, and both of those are problems in their own right).

And while I realize that "not having a premise" may be a thing sometimes in the D&D sphere, given that virtually all the Pathfinder campaign setups (you know, the thing they've been making most their money off of for years) have one, I can't assume its a not a relatively common one, and that's even just within modern D&D-adjacent games; outside of those and some fantasy games fishing in the same pond, I'd say its pretty much universal.

 

[Thomas Shey]

What do that have to do with literally anything being discussed here?

It has a lot to do with the reasons people will tend to not just shrug and continue when someone starts randomly sowing chaos, which is what the post spun off of.

 

[Thomas Shey]

And yet sometimes they do even when the GM tries to prevent "agency". The agency isn't the problem in this hypothetical. The humans are

If you're waiting for me to agree allowing players agency requires that they be able to steer a campaign off into the hinterlands in a way it was never designed to go including in the upfront campaign description, you're going to be waiting a long time.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In the example I gave, you'd have had to explain it for character generation to even be done in a functional way. And yes, I usually assume people have at least avowed buy-in in a campaign's premise (the exception again tends to be on either my-way-or-the-highway GMs, or people with a bad case of Tigger disease, and both of those are problems in their own right).

And while I realize that "not having a premise" may be a thing sometimes in the D&D sphere, given that virtually all the Pathfinder campaign setups (you know, the thing they've been making most their money off of for years) have one, I can't assume its a not a relatively common one, and that's even just within modern D&D-adjacent games; outside of those and some fantasy games fishing in the same pond, I'd say its pretty much universal.

Adventure paths are not my preference, and I don't see any correlation between popularity and creative value, or indeed any value beyond profit.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I doubt it does. Sometimes an anecdote is just a fun anecdote.

Sure.

 

[Thomas Shey]

As long as the player double checks with me and doesn't conflict with established world lore or causes major issues with unestablished lore that I can't work around, write as much of a backstory as you want. I'll help with name places and whatever details I deem necessary. Just don't come into the game saying that before you got here you slayed two dragons while riding your pet tarrasque and that you're a fabulously rich and incredibly powerful ruler that has armies at their beck and call.

While I get that wouldn't work in a typical D&D game, I just have to note there are games where coming in saying that wouldn't even cause people to blink.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I run a very open game. I'm playing in two games, ones using a modified Candlekeep Mysteries and the other is also an open world. In the latter, we had an intro session where the DM confessed privately that 90% of the session was ad-libbed on the fly. That's something that happens to me on a regular basis as well.

Obviously my experience is not universal but you have no basis for your outlier claim either.

Sure I do. See my note about the Paizo published adventure paths. If free-roaming games were still the default, they'd have been out of business years ago.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure I do. See my note about the Paizo published adventure paths. If free-roaming games were still the default, they'd have been out of business years ago.

You seem very concerned about defaults. What does that have to do with your play?

 

[Velderan]

The books (for 5.0) straight-up explicitly say that humans/elves/etc. are present in effectively all settings, meaning they are instructing DMs they aren't allowed to not use those tools. That's not something a "toolbox" should ever do--period.

Where? Because the 2014 PHB describes some races as being more common while others are uncommon but it doesn't explicitly say they all must be available options. The 2014 DMG flat out says under the creating a campaign section to create a handout for your campaign which contains info such as "any restrictions or new options for character creation, such as new or prohibited races."

 

[Thomas Shey]

In a system where PCs can die, the campaign can end via TPK just due random circumstances. That's a baked in assumption. Sometimes (or even often) the situation that lead to that was due player choices. That is part of having agency and having choices to matter.

In some circumstances, but there are all kinds of systems that buffer that to one degree or another, and I'm perfectly willing to include "knowingly walk into a TPK" as an example of sowing chaos. Heck, at least one of the examples I used earlier would probably end up that way. Like I said, I think a definition of agency that requires everyone to accept a player apparently deliberately wrecking a campaign to engage it is a pretty useless one.

Also, I am not talking about "losing their minds." The player in my game certainly had what they saw as a valid reason for their actions, they were not just being a chaos gremlin.

Which is a different situation than what I'm talking about.

Like if your point is that there is premise everyone agreed to (such as playing Starfleet officers) but the players start to randomly behave in ways not compatible with that premise (such as being chaotic murderhobos) then sure, that is a problem. But the problem here is that not everyone is playing the same game and establishing a common understanding regarding what the game is about has failed.

That is the kind of thing I was talking about.