D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

[Remathilis]

i mean i suppose it's like, i don't think that most GMs are flat out not interested in character backstory, but when a player brings a backstory to the table that they've premade, i think there's a tendency to be a little overinvested in a specific manifestation of the pre-prepared ideas, so they want the world to fit around their character concept rather than fitting the character into the world, and at that point it's the character that's the odd one out in the scheme of things.

you may complain that the GM doesn't care about your character's role in the world, but equally, in designing that character preemptively, how much are you showing you care about how they fit into the GMs world?

As with everything, the ideal situation is that the player comes with a set of ideas and the GM comes with setting expectations and the two work out the details. Maybe the evil warlord who attacked my family long ago is the leader of city state that the campaign is supposed revolve around. Of course, both sides can be unreasonable in their expectations, but my experience has been it's DMs more unwilling to interact with a PCs origin than the opposite. (Once you control for the outliers, which the Internet loves to include to prove their point).

 

[Incenjucar]

Generally the DM only needs to actively weave in PC backgrounds a few times per PC over the course of the campaign unless they want to make the campaign heavily about the PCs. If you're just running a module or something you can sprinkle in "Hoy you like a bit like the duke but hawww that's a coinkeedink ahm shore anyways bout that dragon" etc.

 

[Marc17]

Session zero is by definition before play actually begins.

Well, unless they are playing a unix based system, then all discrete numbering begins at 0.*

I prefer for my players to have some sort of backstory. I'll even offer XP for it. However, I have had issues with large backstory packets that the player is way too much into. This pretty much also has me giving a speech about how I may not include their personal plot or even read their backstory and otherwise won't have any affect on the game unless I decide to include it, right after asking them to write one. Still, how much things might be integrated along with how the PCs met is dependent on the game I want to run and part of the elevator pitch I have for it. Typically, I just say everybody knows each other because they grew up together, and they converse and make their characters accordingly at Game 0. That wouldn't work for my magical school game, so they all had very different backstories that I wove into the game at least somewhat as that determined greatly how their characters acted. In that case, they ended up meeting each other on arrival and then as roommates.

*I suppose I have had a game -1. We all got together and played a game of Microscope which created the setting for the game we got together for game 0 to make characters for.

 

[Bae'zel]

...Of course, both sides can be unreasonable in their expectations, but my experience has been it's DMs more unwilling to interact with a PCs origin than the opposite. (Once you control for the outliers, which the Internet loves to include to prove their point).

My good faith interpretation is because DMs have a lot more work to do managing the campaign than a player does (the latter just has to show up and respond to the DM's narrative triggers).

When a player comes to the table with "can you please incorporate my character's backstory, NPCs, locations etc into your pre-existing setting and plans" it can be overwhelming. Cognitive overload.

I know that it's happened to me before. Sometimes it works out and I can manage to make changes. Other times I have had to say no.

Like in my before-mentioned Ancient Greek Argonauts game. I ultimately said no to the player who wanted to be a viking, and the other who wanted to be an Egyptian cat person. We worked things out eventually, but it took some negotiations. I just was NOT willing to adjust everything for them (one pantheon was enough).

But yeah, some DMs are just control freaks, sure. I know that I come across as a bit dick-ish when I get the players to vote on the campaign pitch that they want, everyone agrees on a premise, and I STILL get cyber ninjas for Arthurian Knights Adventures.

 

[Chaltab]

In my experience, worthwhile players are happy to work within my stipulations as a DM and choose ancestries that fit the setting, so if you have a bunch of players who insist on making characters that don't fit the setting... that's not a problem with their being options, it's a problem of the players being a bad fit for your table.

 

[Kurotowa]

In my experience, worthwhile players are happy to work within my stipulations as a DM and choose ancestries that fit the setting, so if you have a bunch of players who insist on making characters that don't fit the setting... that's not a problem with their being options, it's a problem of the players being a bad fit for your table.

Sometimes it's uncooperative players who want to do their own thing with no regard for the campaign pitch. Sometimes the DM just has a lot of unstated assumptions and expectations they didn't make at all clear to their players.

I swear, I do my best to work with the concept and tone of the campaign pitch, but I don't always have a lot to work with. Maybe the DM has a different understanding for the keywords they're dropping. Maybe the DM is just bad at communicating broad campaign themes and intended genre pegs. Maybe they've caught the perenial bad idea of springing a surprise premise twist on the players. But I've absolutely had times where I thought I was tailoring my PC as needed and discovered a few sessions in that they were wildly mismatched for the campaign.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In my experience, worthwhile players are happy to work within my stipulations as a DM and choose ancestries that fit the setting, so if you have a bunch of players who insist on making characters that don't fit the setting... that's not a problem with their being options, it's a problem of the players being a bad fit for your table.

Or, alternatively, a problem with the pitch.

Just sayin'. That's also an option.

 

[Chaltab]

Or, alternatively, a problem with the pitch.

Just sayin'. That's also an option.

True. If you're severely limiting options that should probably be said up front before people join expecting to play their hobgoblin artificer.

 

[DammitVictor]

(Once you control for the outliers, which the Internet loves to include to prove their point).

Oh, sure,  now you're interested in having a coherent baseline...

Seriously, this isn't some statistical anomaly I'm talking about. I'm talking about every single game I've tried to run for anyone but my dedicated home group.

Every time I've tried to run Street Fighter online, with an explicit pitch about the system/setting itself and the campaign itself, the very first application-- on more than one occasion, more than half the applications-- were for characters who couldn't/wouldn't fight. Every. Single. Time.

I make it clear that I rely on collaborative worldbuilding, something I thought most "creative" roleplayers would love-- and I don't just get people with pages of prewritten backstory, I get people with pages of prewritten backstory who resent being asked to help make the world fit their backstory as much as they resent being asked to make their backstory fit the world.

I pitch a game about freelance law enforcement on the frontier worlds of a space fantasy setting, I get  children, literal children... once an eight year old girl in an eighty year old woman's body, with advanced senile dementia, and once a dragonborn warlock using being dragonborn and being a warlock to act out their babyfur BDSM sexual fantasies.

One time I had to repeatedly remind a player that while I allowed her to  base her character on her favorite PC from another game-- complete with godlike backstory that I was willing to work with-- that this was a fantasy setting with no Earth in it and no real-life Earth beings from D&DG, and she got pissed at me every time.

It's really not about players versus umpires. It's not about people with competing and unexpressed aesthetic preferences... either habitually, or for a specific game.

It's about people who want to play a game with other people versus people who want to narratively fulfill themselves with an audience and people who can't tell the difference.

My methods aren't ideal for everyone, but they're generally good enough for the former-- who get to play a complex character with deep ties to the setting, PCs, and NPCs-- and mostly either moderate or weed out the latter.

I was never the "i wanna play my donut steel guy", but I was always the guy who wanted to stretch the bounds of the system and setting. Being honest, when I was younger, I didn't want to color inside the lines at all, stuck playing with the kinds of umpires you're describing. I know they're not just strawmen, either; I've been on the receiving end of the Blazing Saddles treatment many times.

It took a lot of experience, and experiencing games with shared chargen and worldbuilding, to realize I was just as much at fault as the "Fox Only, No Items, Final Destination" guys I was playing with. It took running a lot of bad vale tudo pickup games before I learned that boundaries and guidelines weren't just good for people who wanted "basic" games, they were also good for people--like me-- who wanted "extra" games.

Whether you want to color inside the lines or outside the lines, the lines themselves are a critical part of enjoying the experience and helping everyone else at the table enjoy it. Everyone at the table, from the "PHB Only" to the 'Wikid Dandies", needs everyone else and their conflicting approaches for the best play experience.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

True. If you're severely limiting options that should probably be said up front before people join expecting to play their hobgoblin artificer.

Beyond that, the point of a "pitch" is to sell folks on a concept. If they do not stick to the concept, one possibility is that they're being disingenuous jerks who faked agreement and then immediately reneged on that agreement. Another possibility is that the pitch failed, that is, it did not "sell or win approval" and thus the player didn't engage with it all that much.

I understand that GMs put in work. I'm a GM myself. But something critical is that the GM has to actually put that work in...for desirable things. Stuff the players want to engage with. It's not the players' fault if the GM does a crapload of work on something they genuinely do not feel any motive to embrace. Rant and rave all you like about how hard you work as GM, if you're offering something that just doesn't catch their interest, that's your fault as GM, not their fault as players for failing to fall in line.

Which is a big part of why I just...don't take the whole "I worked so hard and they were just jerks!" argument even remotely seriously. If you pour your heart and soul into a work, into anything, and the audience responds with disapproval...what other medium says "no, the audience are all JERKS for not liking what you made! They should be THANKFUL for all the WORK you did!"? Even in the TTRPG space, if someone pre-orders a book and then decides they think it's garbage, they're gonna return it and expect a refund--and I don't see why they shouldn't expect that.

If you're consistently, without fail, getting players that aren't actually compelled by the pitch you're offering, perhaps it's the hundreds of totally unrelated disparate people, reflecting a horrifically bad community that craps on GMs left and right and has no respect whatsoever....or maybe, just maybe, the issue lies in the pitches themselves.