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

[Remathilis]

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.

And here is where "D&D's no defined setting" becomes a huge issue. WotC itself currently supports almost a dozen official settings, and with 3pp and homebrew DMs the setting possibilities are infinite. Unless the player is willing to do homework (and few are, some barely do the research necessary to even play their character) they don't know an Eberron from a Ravnica, couldn't tell you the difference between Oerth and Faerun, and sure as hell isn't going buy and read some 3pp setting book to make one character for a single campaign. And forget about reading your 50 page homebrew packet!

If the PHB gave enough info on the game and world (and most DMs used said world) that people would read the elf page in the PHB knew enough to play an elf in the game, they would probably better integration. At the very least, they would know the difference between a moon elf, a qualensti, and the areneal elf. But the strength of D&D not being fixed to a single world like Golarion or Midgard is also its weakness as players will fill in the lore gaps the same way DMs do; make stuff up that sound cool to them. And unless they are willing to coordinate or do the homework, their is a probable chance they aren't going to use the same gap fillers.

 

[DEFCON 1]

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?

That is definitely a major part, because friends are people you are going to be dealing with again in the future once the game is over, whereas you probably won't see these particular strangers ever again. But I would think that playing with strangers and playing online go hand-in-hand, as the only times you would play with strangers face to face would tend to be at either a convention or in a game store. In the convention's case the DM is usually playing whatever scenario has been given them by the organizers and the players usually using pre-gens so the issue wouldn't pop up. And at game stores (for Adventurer's League or the like)... the DM is more of a facilitator for the players at the store than they are trying to get their special setting up and running (not to mention most stores probably don't have the same numbers of players all rushing to sign up as fast as possible, and thus skipping over reading any setting primer the DM might have.) Online is the one place where a DM can set up their campaign idea and look for players to fill it... and where there's the potential of a mad rush of players all trying to get in.

 

[Umbran]

Sorry, no; I'm not buying this argument at all. If the game they want to play is so much better/more popular than the games they're trying to crash, there should be no shortage of those games for them to join, play, and mutually enjoy.

My understanding is that there's a shortage of games. Period. The number of folks who are willing to run games is small compared to the number of folks who want to play games.

I'm not interested in speculating on their motivations or their moral character. I just want to identify the best practices for identifying the people who want to play the kinds of games I want to run, and deliver those players the best game experience according to that desire.

I don't think there is an identifiable set of "best practices" for this. The people and situations vary too much for "best practices" to develop.

The process of putting together a gaming group is like putting together a group of people to just be friends. If your basic filter is "whoever shows up" then you're going to get a mix of folks who aren't sincere, or are sincere, but are bad fits. Like, if you walk into a bar at 11PM on a Saturday night, and ask, "Hey, who wants to be in a long-term committed relationship?" you are unlikely to get married to anyone who says, "Yes!" in that situation.

 

[Scott Christian]

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.

I have not watched it all, but from what I have seen, that while the players goof - they know how to be incredibly serious too. That is different than what you replied to. The players for Critical Role play serious all the time. They have sincere dramatic moments, mourn lost loved ones, and play intensely during fight scenes. That is not "players playing as a comedy."

 

[Incenjucar]

There is quite a spectrum, which is much of the fun of the game. The goofy moments are often what allow the serious moments to hit - you don't cry harder than for the characters who make you laugh.

 

[Remathilis]

There is quite a spectrum, which is much of the fun of the game. The goofy moments are often what allow the serious moments to hit - you don't cry harder than for the characters who make you laugh.

The trick is that the player needs to know when to be serious and when to be goofy. I'm not against comedy, but too many players think they're in a bad parody movie of D&D rather than an actual D&D game.

 

[bloodtide]

The big problem here is many gamers fall into the trap of wanting to keep everything "just like Earth". Take games/settings like D&D, Star Wars, Star Trek, Boot Hill, 007 or whatever and a "tavern" is basically the same.

And it is bad enough that all settings have become a bland "just like Earth", and worse "just like America/The West", but over the recent past they have even gone as far as to say "all settings must be perfectly politically correct by the Hollywood point of view. WotC obsesses over this.....and they are not the only ones.

The vast majority of DMs do this as it is easy. They can just say "things are mostly like Earth", and then they don't have to create anything special.

I'm one for calling out problem players, but I would only say about half of the players are trying to start a problem with their 'weird character'. The rest just want a unique character.

The "easy" way to break out of the feeling that a group of "weird PCs feel wrong" is to make a Weird World.