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

[Necropolitan]

Not even tieflings would have made Gone with the Wind anything other than a racist snooze-fest.

Nentir Vale Tieflings are descended from the nobility of an empire built on slavery and there's enough of them who want to return to that era that there's an entire conspiracy of Tieflings dedicated to ensuring Bael Turath rises again.

So you will 100% find at least some of them who would think the Confederates were right mainly be surprised that they didn't sign a pact with Asmodeus to gain the powers of Hell.

Which is why a player playing as a Tiefling in the Nentir Vale setting is going to have assumptions made about them by people unless the DM decides otherwise.

 

[Simon The Hunter]

My own personal take, because I really dislike confrontation overall, is that respect of Players choices for their characters and GM reasons for their restrictions be taken seriously during a session zero. And if a session zero is not possible, then a mutual coming together should be found. A reasonable GM can work an odd ancestry into a campaign, and a reasonable player can help this take place by talking with the GM about how to do so. And I'm talking about campaigns where anything can and should go, let's face it, we are here to play out stuff that we think would be fun.

I've got a tonne of Pathfinder 2e stuff, and well, there's a HUUUUUGE number of wild ancestries available. And these funky cool ancestries also have a rarity value of either uncommon or rare to help guide both sides of the table.

If your table of players, at the end of a session zero, all end up with rare ancestries, one of each type, well that's perfectly fine, but as the GM, you can define guidelines beforehand if you want players to limit their choices, however, I do get the "double take" looks that can occur when there's is a high mix of these types of parties because I find them interesting and go "how is this going to work? Will be interesting to find out!"

Also, what's the level of immersion? I have played in some games where I am full RP'ing my rare ancestry, but three sessions later, well, I'm just playing a strangely skinned human. I've also GM'd games where I have a set of guides and then, a few sessions in, a bunch of those guides have been either dropped or massively warped, because the fun of the table at the time meant altering them. And I've been lucky that people I have played with have been cool about it too.

I like to be accommodating, and yeah, maybe it's a bit of the old "peace, love, and mung beans" approach, but there's enough RL conflict out there without bringing that stuff into my table. You want to play an undead skeleton in a campaign set in a holy land with strict deity laws about the undead, then let's work out how your character is going to work...

 

[Scribe]

Its the side effect of D&D having no common lore (and encouraging DMs to endlessly tinker). At a certain point, nobody is on the same page anymore.

I mean...we used to have these things. Pre-Tasha/Pre-MoM.

So its not like its impossible, its just Wizards blew it all up.

 

[Clint_L]

I did have one player who was consistently a pain in the butt with character ideas that went WAY outside the campaign. Like for one he wanted his character to be someone from our world who was constantly hopping between planes of existence, Quantum Leap style, and had temporarily wound up in the campaign setting. Which was a cool concept but made my job so much harder.

 

[Kurotowa]

I did have one player who was consistently a pain in the butt with character ideas that went WAY outside the campaign. Like for one he wanted his character to be someone from our world who was constantly hopping between planes of existence, Quantum Leap style, and had temporarily wound up in the campaign setting. Which was a cool concept but made my job so much harder.

Now see, that's one of my pet peeves. People who obviously have an idea for a character independent of D&D and, instead of writing a novel about them, decide to use a new D&D campaign as the medium to play out their story. Regardless of the fact that the character is completely unsuitable for D&D in genre or power scale or what have you. Very often they'll have drawn up an idea of what their abilities are first, and then when those don't match any of the races or classes actually in the game ask for dubiously balanced homebrew solutions.

I know it's not the worst thing in the world, but it annoys me to no end.

 

[Remathilis]

I mean...we used to have these things. Pre-Tasha/Pre-MoM.

So its not like its impossible, its just Wizards blew it all up.

Not really. Because Elves in Oerth aren't the same as elves in Krynn, Eberron, Athas, or Ravenloft. So if I read in the PHB how elves worship Correllon and then decide make an elf cleric of Corellon, he's not going to be playable in Krynn (which has its own strict pantheon), Eberron (ditto, and elves have very different, non-Tolkien cultures there) etc. And that's just the setting WotC makes; who the hell knows if your campaign has elves, clerics, or Corellon!

That's what I'm getting at. In Pathfinder, you hand me the Core Rulebook and I have enough information to make an elf cleric appropriate to Golarion. In most editions of D&D, the PHB does not give me the necessary info to do that. The only editions that do are 3e (assuming you are using Greyhawk) or 4e (using Nentir Vale). I guess BECMI too.

So no, the problem has existed since 1e. And its not going away until D&D settles on one setting that the game uses to the exclusion of all others.

 

[Scribe]

Not really. Because Elves in Oerth aren't the same as elves in Krynn, Eberron, Athas, or Ravenloft. So if I read in the PHB how elves worship Correllon and then decide make an elf cleric of Corellon, he's not going to be playable in Krynn (which has its own strict pantheon), Eberron (ditto, and elves have very different, non-Tolkien cultures there) etc. And that's just the setting WotC makes; who the hell knows if your campaign has elves, clerics, or Corellon!

That's what I'm getting at. In Pathfinder, you hand me the Core Rulebook and I have enough information to make an elf cleric appropriate to Golarion. In most editions of D&D, the PHB does not give me the necessary info to do that. The only editions that do are 3e (assuming you are using Greyhawk) or 4e (using Nentir Vale). I guess BECMI too.

So no, the problem has existed since 1e. And its not going away until D&D settles on one setting that the game uses to the exclusion of all others.

They could solve this, with actual setting books.

 

[DrJawaPhD]

They could solve this, with actual setting books.

I'd love to see more proper setting books but I don't think it would solve much here since most DMs are going to homebrew their own world regardless of what WotC publishes. Even though I'd love to see more setting books, I wouldn't actually use the settings for anything more than cherrypicking ideas for my own setting (which I won't expect any players to actually care much about)

 

[W'rkncacnter]

The party encountered a village where the cats had become telepathic and were protecting humans that they had bonded to from a dream-monster/memory slime of some sort.

wait that's kind of adorable what

 

[Scribe]

I'd love to see more proper setting books but I don't think it would solve much here since most DMs are going to homebrew their own world regardless of what WotC publishes. Even though I'd love to see more setting books, I wouldn't actually use the settings for anything more than cherrypicking ideas for my own setting (which I won't expect any players to actually care much about)

So its a case of schrodinger's settings?

Either Elves, Dwarves, whatever, are or have been defined, or they are never defined because nobody uses the setting material.