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

[Minigiant]

What you miss is that agreeing to join and refusing to adapt your character to an "Arctic campaign" was said by the same poster who introduced the Arctic campaign while admitting they had no willingness to fit their character to it. On top of missing that critical detail you are shielding players who behave in such a way by insisting on littering your comment with a string of butbutbut finger wagging of warning at people trying to say that level of disrespectful behavior towards a gm running it and players who actually did build characters for it is totally unreasonable.

I'm not shielding anyone.

If you play in a game that is themed your character has to be compatible with the.

A person who's saying that they are refusing to make a character that is incompatible with the theme is wrong and should not play at that table.

A person who is saying that they are refusing to make a character that is compatible with an Arctic theme campaign is not offering information that complete the entire judgment because they are a large amount of character options and character archetypes which are compatible with an Arctic campaign. So therefore either the player desires to play a specific type of character which has elements that are incompatible with an Arctic theme and those elements are completely tied to their ability to have fun with the game or the DM is including aspects in restrictions for their art theme campaign that is beyond the pale which would not allow many characters like the character that the player wants to play be compatible with it.

Like for example if somebody wants to play a blue dragon sorcerer well a blue dragon sorcerer is not completely incompatible with arctic campaign. However if the DM says you have to play a silver or white dragon sorcerer the player can say "well the point is that I want to do high damage and you're choosing to make me play a character class that would be resistant heavily in your campaign".

And that's my point. Something is missing.

The player might be asking for something that is incompatible with the setting.

The DM might be forcing restrictions that is incompatible with the players fun.

Something is missing.

 

[M_Natas]

There is honestly no suggestion that a Level 1 Warlock shouldn't have their Level 3 choice planned out fluff-wise, and both the PHB and DMG explicitly suggest in multiple places that anyone familiar with D&D should just start their Campaigns ar Level 3 or 4...Level 1-3 is essentially the training wheels stage the rules assume players will skip.

Which I find a ... bad suggestion.
Levels 1 to 3 feel quite different from the later levels and skipping the first levels make the game feel to samey and removes a lot of the feeling of progress from the game, because the advancements in the first levels feel the strongest.
It's like skipping the fellowship of the rings so you just can go right to the battle of helms deep.

 

[Parmandur]

Which I find a ... bad suggestion.
Levels 1 to 3 feel quite different from the later levels and skipping the first levels make the game feel to samey and removes a lot of the feeling of progress from the game, because the advancements in the first levels feel the strongest.
It's like skipping the fellowship of the rings so you just can go right to the battle of helms deep.

Sure, I get that. Nevertheless, the books do suggest that, which implies a lot about how much the designers care about flavor not being fully online until Level 3.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

If I were running it? You could play any of those things. Dragonborn are officially included in Eberron as of 4e (they are native to the then-largely-unexplored dragon-ruled continent of Argonessen.) Goliath have at least two different origin stories I can think of if they aren't official. I have nothing against tortles, so go ahead; I'm sure we can find a place Tortles might come from. For anything much further afield, there's some options.

I don't think Eberron has any reason why classes would be limited, but certain backgrounds might. Eberron is kind of in its own exclusionary cosmology, as in other universes either aren't accessible to Eberron, or genuinely don't exist. So you probably couldn't be a Dragonborn from Arkhosia, as much as I might wish you could. That doesn't mean "dragonborn from a fallen empire" isn't possible though, so we can very likely find something that reasonably matches, just with some gentle modification.

As a general rule, I go out of my way to embrace player character development and input. My most important resource as a GM is genuine player enthusiasm. Player enthusiasm is hard to earn. It should only be spent sparingly, and only for truly worthy ends.

I agree with all of that, was asking a question of Tetrasodium who said

"Hey I'm running a $setting game" is all the GM needs to do in order to establish the limits of character and story options. If the player is not familiar with that setting and agrees to join, the responsibility is on that player to adapt to the limitations the gm helps them work out rather than complaining how the gm didn't say no tortles or that elves are different in $setting while continuing to push for and outright play the original rejected concept.

And I was curious what they consider the limitations to the Eberron setting as I know they are fond of it.

 

[M_Natas]

Tier 2 is arguably the sweet spot, where PCs are pretty pitent but not insanely so, but I would say Tier 1 is fun, as well. But starting at Level 4, everyone has their Class abd Subclass fully online, plus both Background and General Feats. So starting at Level 4 offers more distinct build opportunities.

For me personally that is ... problematic. When you come to the table, your character concept completely planned out, down to the feats and ASIs you will take up to level 20.
In the good old days a character developed during , which makes them inflexible during play and makes roleplay worse, because they have thise perfect character in mind that they can't change out off, which makes them inflexible during play.

 

[Remathilis]

Which I find a ... bad suggestion.
Levels 1 to 3 feel quite different from the later levels and skipping the first levels make the game feel to samey and removes a lot of the feeling of progress from the game, because the advancements in the first levels feel the strongest.
It's like skipping the fellowship of the rings so you just can go right to the battle of helms deep.

I don't find that true anymore. Maybe back in the old Red Box when you had to earn thousands of xp to make 2nd level that was true, but 5e is structured that levels 1 and 2 take one session each to achieve and are basically tutorials. It's more like skipping Weathertop to get to Rivendell.

 

[dave2008]

See post above. If your vision is too limited to allow 10 species and 12 classes (even if they aren't the exact ones in the PHB) then your vision is too limited for me.

OK, I find that overly simplistic and not really a reaction to what I said, but again...ok.

I mentioned that I think settings should be a place to introduce new stuff (rules, ideas, etc.). I also said restrictions could be minimal or non-existent. The thrust of a "narrow" setting should be to show off new ways of doing things.

And just an FYI, when we started our last campaign I gave the players the MM and said pick any sentient creature you want and that can be your species!

 

[Minigiant]

For me personally that is ... problematic. When you come to the table, your character concept completely planned out, down to the feats and ASIs you will take up to level 20.
In the good old days a character developed during , which makes them inflexible during play and makes roleplay worse, because they have thise perfect character in mind that they can't change out off, which makes them inflexible during play.

That is kinda Stormwind.

Your optimization rank and roleplay rank are not linked.

The thing is that in back in the old days you didn't have anything to choose in order to design your PC past level one. The DM gave you 90% of the widgets and tools to customize your character past level 1 outside of multi-classing.

But it knew where more modern versions of RPGs the burden of optimization, customization, and differentiation is placed on the player not the DM.

 

[Remathilis]

And I was curious what they consider the limitations to the Eberron setting as I know they are fond of it.

"If it exists in D&D, it exists in Eberron."

Seriously, Eberron is probably one of the worst examples of limitations in D&D and that's intended. There are things unique to Eberron (warforged, Dragonmarks) and things that are altered (cultures of elves and halflings) but nothing (and I mean nothing) is banned. So if an Eberron DM bans anything, that's his preferences overriding the settings.

 

[Parmandur]

For me personally that is ... problematic. When you come to the table, your character concept completely planned out, down to the feats and ASIs you will take up to level 20.
In the good old days a character developed during , which makes them inflexible during play and makes roleplay worse, because they have thise perfect character in mind that they can't change out off, which makes them inflexible during play.

Who said anything about Level 20...? Getting to Level 3 takes two whole sessions if you are counting XP. Planning two sessions ahead isn't all that weird, and frankly it seems a strange idea that a Wizard or Druid would discover what tradition they belong to before Session 3 just as much as Warlocks or Clerics. Planning for Level 3 is the default assumption of the game, that's why flavor does not all come online until then. I have never seen anyone play any Class in 2014 without having preplanned their Subclass choice and baking it into RP at Level 1 & 2.