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

[Not a Decepticon]

I've already said it's too late. The smoke isn't going back in the bottle. But I'm just reiterating the issue with players creating characters that don't fit with the DMs setting is almost exclusively a D&D problem and there is a reason you don't see it often in other RPGs.

I think you are the only one who see the smoke...wait isn't it a genie who is in the bottle? Also, that is very much NOT just a D&D problem. And I am speaking here from experience.

 

[Hussar]

So yeah, Bob the new D&D player might know what an "elf" is, but his version of elf is probably not going to align with what the version of elf your campaign is running. And that mis-match of expectation is where these "Bob created a huge backstory that doesn't take into consideration my world" problems come from. Well no kidding, D&D barely gives him anything to base it on and then proceeds to produce a half-dozen exceptions to the scant lore there is!

I smacked into this in a recent campaign.

Two of the PC's had backgrounds that they were from the Feywild. One was an owlkin, the other was dragonborn. Both fantastic players that I love to pieces. We were running the Candlekeep Mysteries campaign.

So, in one of the adventures, the party travels to a town that has been destroyed by Meazels. The evil fey had driven everyone into murderous rages that resulted in the entire town murdering each other. So, the party comes in, tracks down the evil fey who flee into the feywild through a portal to the feywild.

Now, this is where the total breakdown in expectations came in. And, I will freely admit, this was 100% my own fault for not talking to the players beforehand. See, to me, I see the Feywild as a horrific place where fey torture and murder and/or destroy the minds of anyone unfortunate enough to enter. It's a place that makes Ravenloft look like a picnic. The fey see any mortal as a pet, at best, to be treated like a pet and at worst, a toy in the same sense that your pet cat has a toy.

So, the adventure that I had laid out after they entered the feywild completely blindsided the two players. One player kept insisting that this wasn't the feywild at all and it was actually some sort of hell and refused (out of character mind you) to accept that this was the Feywild. The other player imagined the Feywild to be something like Grimm Fairy tales - sure, it's a bit dark and dangerous, but, overall, not a totally horrific place to live. My interpretation of the Feywild is a Kafka-esque hellscape of gaslighting and mental torture. Alice in Wonderland without the PG rating and Disney ending. Far more Pratchett.

The adventure totally broke down with the players being totally baffled by the scenario because it ran so counter to their expectations.

Again, I take total responsibility for this. It had honestly never really occured to me to think of the Feywild as any sort of nice place. Total mismatch in ideas.

But, this does rather dovetail with your example. The descriptions of the Feywild, such as they are (note, this was years before the Witchlight adventure came out) meant that all three of us were totally correct and totally wrong at the same time. I guess, at the end of the day, that does rather nicely encapsulate the Feywild, but, it doesn't really lend itself well to making a good game.

 

[DrJawaPhD]

Then again, D&Ds Greatest Strength is apparently bringing a cleric of Corellon to a Dragonlance campaign...

I already responded once to this quote but it got me thinking of some of the far more goofy characters that our table has seen show up in the past couple years without causing any issue in the campaign. We've had a group playing Mario/Luigi/Peach, a group playing various Pokemons (I forget which), Minecraft Steve, Arthas, a group playing Nixie/Antrius/Evandra, Strongbad*, Mandalorian*, a group playing Elite Tauren Chieftain singer/guitarist/bassist*, and who knows what else I forgot. As a DM you just roll with it and let everyone have fun

*These ones were me I've been guilty too

 

[Hussar]

Those games all have a tiny fraction of the player base that DnD 5e has. I bet they would all love it if DnD abandoned one of it's biggest strengths by consolidating everything down to one setting*

*Not that WotC could even do this if they wanted to, they tried to stop third parties from publishing but failed, and certainly have no control over DMs homebrewing

Isn't this precisely what WotC did for the first half or so of 5e? Every adventure was specifically set in Forgotten Realms and not even the whole Realms, but, specifically the Sword Coast? Sure, we got Ravenloft, but, it would really be 2019 with Ghosts of Saltmarsh that we actually got anything that wasn't Forgotten Realms. Even then, the large majority of 5e AP's and guide books have been specifically tied to Forgotten Realms. It's not like WotC has been supporting a bunch of settings for over a decade. 2024 releases and what's the first thing we get? Another Forgotten Realms book.

In what way have they not consolidated down to one setting?

 

[Not a Decepticon]

I already responded once to this quote but it got me thinking of some of the far more goofy characters that our table has seen show up in the past couple years without causing any issue in the campaign. We've had a group playing Mario/Luigi/Peach, a group playing various Pokemons (I forget which), Minecraft Steve, Arthas, a group playing Nixie/Antrius/Evandra, Strongbad*, Mandalorian*, a group playing Elite Tauren Chieftain singer/guitarist/bassist*, and who knows what else I forgot. As a DM you just roll with it and let everyone have fun

*These ones were me I've been guilty too

I mean, one of most famous list of player hinjinks ever written starts with "I am not allowed to play a character based on the Who drummer Keith Moon".

 

[Hussar]

Yes they are all fictional creations that draw on the same (real-world) mythology, so certain similar elements show up in them. No reason for the lazy "actually they are the same deities as the ones from Toril" slop that we've been subjected to.

Heh. Thank you so much Planescape.

And people get annoyed with me for complaining that Planescape has forced so much onto other settings.

 

[Neonchameleon]

You know, Tales of the Valiant and Pathfinder are both open gaming. How many other settings but Midguard and Golarion are there for either of them? They are certainly no harder to design for then D&D, and probably are a great deal easier. Then again, how much effort does KP or Paizo put in supporting any other settings?

Paizo just puts all its settings into Golarion and calls it a day.

I already responded once to this quote but it got me thinking of some of the far more goofy characters that our table has seen show up in the past couple years without causing any issue in the campaign. We've had a group playing Mario/Luigi/Peach, a group playing various Pokemons (I forget which), Minecraft Steve, Arthas, a group playing Nixie/Antrius/Evandra, Strongbad*, Mandalorian*, a group playing Elite Tauren Chieftain singer/guitarist/bassist*, and who knows what else I forgot. As a DM you just roll with it and let everyone have fun

*These ones were me I've been guilty too

Goofy comic relief characters can be entirely integrated into a setting as my current Daggerheart campaign is demonstrating. It does however take a willingness for the GM to not be precious about their setting - which is at odds with detailed settings.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

You know, Tales of the Valiant and Pathfinder are both open gaming. How many other settings but Midguard and Golarion are there for either of them? They are certainly no harder to design for then D&D, and probably are a great deal easier. Then again, how much effort does KP or Paizo put in supporting any other settings?

Labirynth and Starfinder entered the chat.

 

[DrJawaPhD]

It does however take a willingness for the GM to not be precious about their setting - which is at odds with detailed settings.

It's not really "at odds" though, you can easily have a highly detailed setting and just not be a stickler for making sure that every PC concept fits perfectly into the DM's perfectly curated vision. Most of those characters I listed were not "comic relief", they were serious characters played seriously and were eventually seamlessly integrated into the DMs campaign setting, in some cases for 2+ years. A few were just stupid one-shot concepts though that got old fast

 

[plecostomus]

Not sure why you'd feel that way. That's how several real-world polytheistic religions worked.

Ishtar (Mesopotamian) begat Astarte (Phoenician). Astarte begat Aphrodite (Greek). And then Aphrodite was syncretized with Venus (Roman). Likewise, Hermes is probably an offshoot from Pan (as in, formerly an epithet of Pan, Pan Hermes, "Pan of the piled stones"), and Pan was an offshot of an un-spellable Proto-Indo-European deity who also spawned a Vedic pastoral deity, Pushan. Hell, even within a single religion it's quite possible to have highly divergent takes. Poseidon was originally the head of the pantheon, back in the Mycenaean days, when chthonic gods were much more prominent--which made all the myths about Zeus's ridiculous antics a lot easier to explain. Further, certain gods could be worshipped differently in different places or at different times. Zeus was Zeus Panhellenos, "Zeus of All Greeks", but he was also Zeus Xenia, "Zeus of Strangers", as he was the god of hospitality.

A relatively clean solution to the problem of having literally hundreds of gods is to instead have a relatively constrained pantheon--say, forty-ish, counting deities of all alignments--and then different cultures perceive and worship some deity or set of deities differently.

I wonder which gods would immediately inform their clerics they are Doing It Wrong if the clerics' culture starts calling the god by a different name or interpreting the god's profile in some off-brand way? The god might even have unexpected reasons for doing so (being prideful, as opposed to being interested in truth or an honest relationship with their worshipers). Interesting to think about compared to IRL. Depending on how the gods for a DM's world are constructed, they might be sensitive to or shaped by how they are worshiped, which might make them cautious about allowing divergent faiths.

Ahh, more worldbuilding the players won't read.