D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

[tetrasodium]

I was never mislead by WotC, that was my goal from the very beginning, I'm the part of the new audience that pushed for that advice in the 1st place.

It was toxic then it's toxic now. D&d is a game with a division of roles with differing authority over fiction & place in the shared narrative all bound up in the randomness of the dice. There is no telling of a story and none of the individuals involved in play have enough authority over all of that to qualify for the "your" moniker. Were wotc not caught up in an orgy of stormwind and oberoni chasing memes and battling edge cases as if they were the norm that kind of self selected survey brigading demands would have been dismissed with advice to go write a novel rather than treated as a slogan.

I mean, if you want Star Wars stuff that's easy. Grab psionics. Eberron has enough psionics and 5.14 even has a class that's flat out just rules as written intended to fulfill that fantasy. You can tease out what people want from something and provide assistance in making it happen. D&D has plenty of "Yeah this is totally just X". Want to play Elfquest characters? Ghostwise halflings. Want to play a Protoss? Xeph.

No. I said that the hypothetical gm told said player that Luke Skywalker Jedi of The Jedi Council does not fit in Star Trek and gestured at things that do. It does not fall upon the gm to make the rejected disruption work.

Ravenloft is a grab bag anyway. Ironically given how it functions its the setting most applicable to having a Jedi in it due to how that all works

No the gm has the right to reject player backstory race class spells and so on when they want to run a game with a given set of themes and tones those options do not fit into. The two of you are demonstrating how badly wotc failed at supporting GMs in their choice to service posts like 311

Well, then you're a desert tortle. Because desert turtles exist. Or you're from the Last Sea with all of the surfing lizardmen, because we got to be reminded that Dark Sun is the setting with the surfing lizardmen. Rules as written, Yuan Ti and Kenku are completely fine and extant in Dark Sun, and there's nothing saying they're extinct there, so they could exist.

See the earlier quote about players being a disruption by refusing to engage with the setting on a deep enough level to even complete character creation. This is not for the gm to solve for a player who is stuck on a disruptive character concept.

Ravenloft isn't a problem, as designed that setting just grabs people from everywhere so it could easily just grab a tortle from anywhere. Thay isn't a problem, Tortles exist elsewhere in FR, you're just from there and ended up in Thay in your travels. Eberron isn't a problem, everything from D&D exists somewhere in Eberron so, yeah, Tortles are in there by default. There's a wide massive ocean the books don't go too hard into and you're wanting Keith's blog to apply more

See themes and tones of the setting. If a character doesn't fit thegm is totally justified in saying "no it doesn't fit, this is the setting you need to fit". Wotc should have better supported gms rather than breeding a hostile environment where Crawford himself grinned with excitement while saying a class was designed to frustrate GMs

Luke Skywalker may not belong in there but you could easily write a character who starts off the same, a young farmboy from a desert planet with high piloting skills, and use that to play a character in Star Trek RPG of Choice (or that other one with the complicated scenario) easily, and that isn't too hard to fit in. Things go different of course, but the root idea can be played

Why on earth do you seem to think this is a problem for the gm to solve? You are demonstrating how toxically counterproductive wotc's "tell your story" & "designed to frustrate your gm" advice on these kinds of things has been.

 

[SkidAce]

And I will be completely honest as to why I dont have orcs (or halflings) in my campaign.

Playing in the 80s, I didnt want anyone to think my world was a LotR type setting.

So I added in a fallen ancient culture similar to Egypt, made the current empire Asian/Turkish, ditched orcs and halflings (the halflings used to exist but an evil necromancer used a 10th level ritual to genocide them) and have played since then.

No worries, no problems.

Added warforged as ancient golems when they came out, let a player play as a lizardfolk during 1st edition, and adopted Tengu from Guild Wars. Even let a player run a gnome thief based on halfling stats.

But in campaign lore/setting/cultures....NO ORCS, NO HALFINGS.

 

[Marc17]

I mean, if you got buy in from your players, you could limit character options to only Lawful Good human fighters and say you are running Camelot. But realistically I question why you are using D&D at that point.

Really, I've found D&D has always been a fairly good generic fantasy system meant to be modified (or was anyway). Especially when you consider that the rules are only there to fall back on for when the Braunstein game of "What does your character do?" fail. But still, I've always ascribed to that the best GM running the worst system will always be better than the worst GM running the best system, and D&D is the game everybody knows and is most likely to be willing to play.

 

[Remathilis]

Really, I've found D&D has always been a fairly good generic fantasy system meant to be modified (or was anyway). Especially when you consider that the rules are only there to fall back on for when the Braunstein game of "What does your character do?" fail. But still, I've always ascribed to that the best GM running the worst system will always be better than the worst GM running the best system, and D&D is the game everybody knows and is most likely to be willing to play.

My problem is that D&D was never as modular as people thought it was (it's nearly impossible to change the magic system without effectively rewriting the game) and the only reason earlier D&D was modifiable was because it was never well balanced to begin with. I don't feel D&D is any more generic or easier to modify than Genesys or Storyteller, and really only has the advantage of most people knowing the basics of d20 and you can call anything "D&D" even if you are using some retro indie game as long as it uses a d20 and has magic in it.

 

[Alzrius]

Really, I've found D&D has always been a fairly good generic fantasy system meant to be modified (or was anyway). Especially when you consider that the rules are only there to fall back on for when the Braunstein game of "What does your character do?" fail. But still, I've always ascribed to that the best GM running the worst system will always be better than the worst GM running the best system, and D&D is the game everybody knows and is most likely to be willing to play.

Completely agree. The idea that "D&D doesn't do generic fantasy very well" has always struck me as one of those instances where the speaker is saying more about themselves than about D&D. In more than three decades of playing multiple editions of the game, I've found that it, in fact, does do generic fantasy—and a lot of other kinds of fantasy—quite well. You just need to be willing to modify the system, and be adept at doing so. It's not enough to simply recognize that D&D is a toolbox; you have to know what the tools are, what each of them is good for, and which ones you'll need for your current campaign.

Insofar as "but if you change it, it's not really D&D" goes, I think that misses the point, since changing it is central to the D&D experience, whether it's things that you alter for your home campaign or a setting that makes changes right out of the (literal) box.

Likewise, the idea of "just play a bespoke system instead of hacking D&D" similarly seems to miss a lot of relevant points. For one thing, it's usually not realistic to expect your entire group to learn a new system—purchasing new books and sinking hours of time into reading them—just to get an experience that's probably going to end up mostly the same as if they'd just said "let's cap level advancement at 10, and stick to the PHB only, but no warlocks, dragonborn, or tieflings."

And really, that's the issue; that learning a new system quite often costs more than the payoff you get from it. Maybe that bespoke system does facilitate a better play experience; okay, but how much better? Enough to justify going to all of the time, effort, and trouble of learning it? Certainly, for some people that's not really a factor; they have the money to buy the books, the free time to read them, and the energy to retain all of that. But I know a lot of adults for whom the stress of daily life would make that feel like a homework assignment. It's not worth it for them to re-learn character creation, the combat system, character advancement, and a hundred other tweaks scattered throughout the rules. Getting 90% of the play experience you want for zero effort (since you've already learned D&D) is more worthwhile to those people than getting 100% of the play experience after considerable effort.

Which presumes that the bespoke system they invested in even gives them the better play experience that they were promised.

Far better to simply modify the game you already know than to sink your time, money, and energy into what might very well turn out to be a fantasy heartbreaker.

 

[el-remmen]

Which to me is like changing the rules to Axis and Allies because all you have is a Clue board.

But why wouldn’t you change the rules to fit the board you have or prefer, if you want to find a way to play everyone involved enjoys? And why would you care what someone else does with their Clue board or Axis & Allies pieces?

 

[Minigiant]

I always go by the belief

"The DM can make any setting they want with any kind of race, class, or spell restrictions.

But the DM isn't entitled to players.

The Players can only see the game from the outside. So if the PC options are weak or restricted or nerfed for a reason, even a valid one, they have the right to not play."

I think for many, the fantasy popular in the 70s and 80s are aging out. AND the fantasy popular in the 90s are finally getting a shot. So popular settings look different and base assumptions are rapidly moving.

 

[Remathilis]

But why wouldn’t you change the rules to fit the board you have or prefer if you want to find a way to play everyone involved enjoys? And why would you care what someone else does with their Clue board or Axis & Allies pieces?

I would care if someone said "let's play Axis and Allies and then busts out a Clue board, Monopoly tokens and the Pop-O-Matic bubble and said how flexible the rules to A&A are.

 

[Bae'zel]

You ever Play a green book campaign? A campaign where everyone (player and NPC) is essentially a human fighter? You might get a Thief and if you're lucky a crippled mage character who can use 10 noncombat spells total? Ymmv, but my experience was it wasn't very good and the green books (hell 2e in general) was poor at making up for what is lost.

As an explanation: I tried to run Masque of the Red Death and while I love the setting flavor, it's an absolute nightmare to run in AD&D. One race. Four classes, crippled spell casting (spells took multiple full rounds to cast) no armor and Ravenloft rules on top of it (powers checks, etc). And bog standard (or Ravenloft enhanced) monsters. It's punishingly brutal and not a single thing was given to the players to make up for it. The game lasted one module (Red Jack) and when they were tpked at the end by the villain, we all agreed we weren't having enough fun to try again and did a regular AD&D game.

If I ever do Victorian gothic horror, it will be with a bespoke low magic system designed to give characters the tools to play monster hunters. Not a game that takes AD&D, cuts off the PCs arms and legs and tells them to go fight werewolves.

Yes I ran an ancient greek bronze age campaign. All humans. Limited classes. We used 5e, but I relied heavily on Age of Heroes. We had a blast.

I also ran a Witcher campaign, using the classes from Adventures in Middle Earth, which have zero spellcasting. We also had a great time with that.

And we also had a great time with the Call of Cthulhu 3e game from back in the… was it late 90s? Early 2000s? Whatever it was fun.

I know that you disagree, but my experiences with D&D with humans-only, limited classes were great and memorable.

The indignation in this thread that some of us managed to use low-magic D&D in a fulfilling way is starting to get absurd.

 

[Bae'zel]

My problem is that D&D was never as modular as people thought it was (it's nearly impossible to change the magic system without effectively rewriting the game)

Says who?

Anecdotally, my friends and I have done this and had a good time. And it’s not because we were STUBBORNLY worshipping the system, we just enjoyed it.

These “objective truths” you’re throwing around, dismissing others’ experiences is not really fair and kind of rude.