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

[...m...]

Humanoids Handbook is 2E, as are Planescape and Dark Sun. D&D's greatest competition was a system full of vampire and werewolf PCs. This has all been common for longer than most 5E players have been alive.

...ow, did you have to kick me right in the telomeres?!.

 

[Hussar]

I could be wrong about this theory of mine, but at least to me it seems a plausible possibility as to why it happens.

While I don't think it's limited to online play, I do think you have a strong point here. I wonder if the difference isn't online/offline, but rather, playing with friends/playing with strangers?

 

[Hussar]

I don’t think that this phenomenon with players is out of malice, it’s just one of those quirks about the hobby. Like scheduling chaos, tabletop games being literally the lowest priority activity ever in the ladder of human priorities, DMs spending tons of cash, players tending to be overly casual etc

Can’t take it personally, although DM burnout is a recognized thing, while still generally getting demonized as overly controlling and mean to players. I understand why DMs are scarce in the hobby.

Now this I totally agree with. It's 100% not done out of malice. I'm very sure that most of the players that I've dealt with over the years wouldn't dream of doing this out of spite. I think largely what happens is that players often get a concept in their head that they want to play.

The DM announces that a new campaign is going to start up and the players start spitballing different concepts. And, often, they come up with a concept before session 0 has hit the ground. So, they're already coming in with 3/4 of a character already on the go. I know I've tried multiple times to insist that character generation be done as a group activity, only to have players come with fully formed characters pretty much every single time.

But, no, I totally agree with you here. This isn't done because they want to piddle in anyone's cornflakes. They are doing it because they want to play. And the faster you get through chargen, the faster we get to play.

The one thing that always baffles me though when DM's announce that they are going to use X setting, why don't players take that setting under consideration? I've mentioned this before, but, if the DM tells me that the campaign is going to be in X setting, I'm going to try my level best to make a character that is embedded in THAT setting. What's the point of playing a character from another setting? I just don't really get it to be honest. If you're playing in Forgotten Realms, you have literally tens of thousands of pages of material to draw from. Or Eberron or whatever. Make a character that leverages that setting as much as you can.

I don't get the attraction of playing a Vulcan in someone's Star War's campaign.

 

[Remathilis]

Really? This has been a common complaint for years. I remember back many years ago listening to the Fear the Boot podcast and them talking about how players never bother with the DM's setting. Trying to get players to actually pay attention to the setting? That's not new. Heck, you want a good example, watch the Viva La Dirt League actual play Tales of Azerim and you'll see exactly the same thing going on.

I actually had a player take a level in cleric after about 6 or 7 levels into the campaign, when asked what deity his cleric was following, quite honestly ask, "What setting are we playing in?"

This is not new.

Bad players are not a new phenomenon. "I am playing a psionic awakened glass of orange juice and I will scream if you try to stop me" seems much more recent. That's what I'm referring to. I've seen plenty of players who do not grasp the intricacies of the DMs setting or want to play a specific type of character regardless of the genre, but I've never seen this wave of players who come with a character openly ignoring DM to soliloquy seems much more prevalent on DM nightmare threads than I've seen in person.

Maybe I'm just lucky. I've DMed and played for 25 years now, (give or take) and I've seen bad players and good, but I've had more nightmare DMs than nightmare player. (Most bad players I knew either never grasped the rules [ie what dice do I roll again?] or had attendance issues. The truly bad flame out within a session or so).

 

[Remathilis]

My players manage to play those sorts of characters in campaigns that last a couple of years.

Most of the joke characters either settle down into something more manageable OR they get bored of the joke and the character disappears somehow.

Mind you, when I'm talking joke characters, I'm talking ones that have one gimmick and that's all they do. For example, a lizardfolk chef who could not stop talking about eating people. The joke is funny for AC session or two, but either the player tires and the lizardfolk references cannibalism less and less as other facets of the character emerges or the character disappears by being unalived, wandering off, or captured/arrested and left.

I think it might be an interesting (though unrelated) topic to explore how much dissonance is created when the DM plays his game as serious and the players play it as comedy. I suspect that a lot of the mismatch is one of tonal differences.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Most of the joke characters either settle down into something more manageable OR they get bored of the joke and the character disappears somehow

There is a difference between one-note joke characters and characters who are simply anti-trope. But I’ve had a half orc half eladrin (Disney) princess and her undead orc bodyguard, characters lifted directly from Adventure Time and Terry Pratchett, and a brain in a jar, all played in campaigns averaging two years.

I think it might be an interesting (though unrelated) topic to explore how much dissonance is created when the DM plays his game as serious and the players play it as comedy. I suspect that a lot of the mismatch is one of tonal differences.

You can do both in the same adventure. Critical Role does this, and to a degree that has set the modern tone.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

As a GM I dodge the issue through a combination of having racially cosmopolitan nations and strict enforcement of "approved PC races only."

In one game where I specifically wanted mostly-human PCs, I had a rule that to play an non-human PC, the player first had to bribe the GM by creating a human NPC for the GM to use.

 

[Mind of tempest]

My players chose the pitch in that instance. We talked about it beforehand. Or I gave them half a dozen ideas, and they voted on it.

And I still got out-of-the-box concepts that directly clashed with WHAT THEY CHOSE.

It doesn't happen as often as it used to, especially now that I've gotten a lot better at negotiating and finding a compromise, but to kind of imply that I was making bad campaign pitches... well that's kind of unfair.

wait so why do they keep doing that?

 

[Mind of tempest]

It’s also not wrong. Gygax wasn’t into settings, which is why he really struggled when players started asking about the setting for his home game. His first attempt at writing a publishable setting was more suited to a wargame than an rpg.

so what is the phenomino we are dealing with people who care about setting and people who will go with what ever?

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

Re 'joke' characters, I've done a few tongue-in-cheek things as NPCs, so my touchstone for joke or joke-adjacent PCs is "Would this character fit in my game setting if I created it as an NPC?"