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

[Hussar]

But I don't think having objectively evil sapient beings in D&D is inherently bad. It is a fantasy world.

But, generally, that's not the issue. No one has a problem with having objectively evil sapient beings in D&D. The dev's certainly don't and neither do any of the critics. The problem is when you have objectively evil sapient NATURAL beings. As in stuff that is an actual species that reproduces, eats, and all the other stuff that goes with being a living, breathing species. In addition, the problem is that in the history of the game, the description of objectively evil sapient beings was word for word identical to the description of real life people who have suffered a rather large amount of discrimination because of those descriptions.

Nuance is important.

 

[CreamCloud0]

The last player wanted to play a hobbit. I said those are kender in Dragonlance. He didn't read the summary. After a few sessions of me correcting him, he stopped calling his character a hobbit.

Look, i can respect wanting to stick to a setting’s lore, but for all the horror stories I’ve heard online about kender players being, well, kender players, I’m just a little surprised i still hear GMs choosing to enforce using kender over halflings in DL when a player wants to play a halfling.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I have always felt it a little jarring when I am in a party that has characters ranging from a talking bird to a centaur with nary a traditional humanoid or human in between. It really feels like a circus troupe rather than a party of adventurers. I find that to be especially the case when none (or hardly any) of the Player Characters are native to the region or are even completely unique beings. I can't specifically say that it's because I prefer a human-centric approach because I would have no problem with a majority Dwarf party, Elf party, or Gnoll party.

Does anyone else have this problem or is it just me? How can I move past it? Are there ways I can frame things in my mind to make it easier to get on with?

EDIT: What I really meant by this is how I find it jarring when almost an entire group has no ties demographically or by any other means to the region or setting in which the campaign is held. I have found a large rise in players who come to a game with the intention to play one of the characters from their "stable" as opposed to creating a character specifically for the game they are joining.

I'm seriously considering running a humans-only campaign.

Of course, that doesn't solve everything. I would fully expect to end up with one guy with a rapier talking like Inigo Montoya, another in a white 3 piece suit talking like WC fields, a third doing the Arthurian knight thing, and a stoner in a tie-dyed t-shirt going "Oh, man, it's a double rainbow!"

 

[Simon The Hunter]

Of course, that doesn't solve everything. I would fully expect to end up with one guy with a rapier talking like Inigo Montoya, another in a white 3 piece suit talking like WC fields, a third doing the Arthurian knight thing, and a stoner in a tie-dyed t-shirt going "Oh, man, it's a double rainbow!"

I'm still laughing at how this situation WILL definitely occur no matter what the guidelines are...

 

[CreamCloud0]

I'm seriously considering running a humans-only campaign.

Of course, that doesn't solve everything. I would fully expect to end up with one guy with a rapier talking like Inigo Montoya, another in a white 3 piece suit talking like WC fields, a third doing the Arthurian knight thing, and a stoner in a tie-dyed t-shirt going "Oh, man, it's a double rainbow!"

I wonder how well you’d get the same results with a ‘human-passing’ world? Trim the aesthetic differences and if needs be some of the more egregious traits too, so even if you’ve got a handful of species running around it’s not something that’s acknowledged because everyone’s just human, yeah so sure jenny just has a natural resistance to sleep and charm magics and taylor’s a little large and can carry twice as much as the next guy, but that’s just how they’re born, some people are tall, some are smart and some can produce flames from their hands, you aint gonna call em a different species over little quirks like that.

 

[Remathilis]

I'm seriously considering running a humans-only campaign.

Of course, that doesn't solve everything. I would fully expect to end up with one guy with a rapier talking like Inigo Montoya, another in a white 3 piece suit talking like WC fields, a third doing the Arthurian knight thing, and a stoner in a tie-dyed t-shirt going "Oh, man, it's a double rainbow!"

That's the rub; a good player can make a Dragonborn warlock fit like a glove and and a bad player can make a human fighter stick out like a sore thumb.

 

[humble minion]

Look, i can respect wanting to stick to a setting’s lore, but for all the horror stories I’ve heard online about kender players being, well, kender players, I’m just a little surprised i still hear GMs choosing to enforce using kender over halflings in DL when a player wants to play a halfling.

I wonder how many of those stories have happened in the past 20 years, or are they hoary old tales from the 80s?

I'm running Dragonlance now, and I allowed kender characters, and one player rolled one up (a druid/cleric of Habbakuk). It's a group of mostly younger people who'd had nothing much to do with Dragonlance before this campaign (one guy had played part of the original DL modules back as a 12yo) and ... none of them had ever really even heard of kender. The kender PC is being played as incurably curious, enthusiastic and talkative, and there's been no problems at all.

I think long marination in and enthusiasm for the old Tasslehof novel lore is probably a poor indicator as to how a kender PC will work out, but I think the problems with them are overstated these days. Dragonlance has been a backwater for decades. The cultural memory among most modern gamers of 'kenders as annoying kleptomaniac jerks who want plot immunity for being jerks' is just not there, at least if you're under 45.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, I agree, but there are limits too. I don't want to have to read a couple hundred pages of lore and anceint history in order to play game either. It's always a balancing act IMO, and setting that do a great job of showing rather telling are often more accessible, IMO.

And you need to recognize that there are players--quite a lot of them IME--who don't want to seriously deal with any setting's lore. And no, not playing with such players is not a functional option for everyone.

 

[Marc17]

This is a real thing. How much do you expect you players to read? Answers from varuious games are all over the place.

I run home-brews and do lots of history and backstory, but tend to give everything the PCs really need to remember in an elevator speech. Everything else gets presented in NPC interaction or emails I send out with the long version which I do not expect them to read. I don't expect most of the NPCs living in the world to know that stuff either. If they breech anything to significant, I just explain it and tell them their character would know that, and let them do as they will.

Honestly, I've never had an issue with players not knowing the setting they're in, home-brew or not. The only issues I've ever had were those who were fanatically followers of published settings and not only couldn't remember I set the game in a time before all the stuff they knew happened (nothing past grey box and gazetteers) but made assumptions and acted on them based on such knowledge ( Made up example: "Well, I ignored what the NPC said because they city they said we should go to was destroyed by The Red Wizards." or would be in so many hundreds of years in the future after a couple of world changing cataclysms that have not happened either.)

 

[DrJawaPhD]

And you need to recognize that there are players--quite a lot of them IME--who don't want to seriously deal with any setting's lore. And no, not playing with such players is not a functional option for everyone.

Completely agree. Players will care about setting lore as their character starts to experience it in the game, and not before. If they cared about worldbuilding lore, they'd be the DM not the players