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

[AlViking]

7.5 million is a pretty strong number, certainly doing laps around halflings

And no, I don't think its surprising. But with people insisting "Oh, gotta stick with the stock ones", having tieflings and dragonborn so thoroughly demolishing halflings is showing, yeah, no, new races absolutely attract attention and are popular enough to stand by themselves. This has well and simply proven it because if you showed someone that chart and then said "Yeah we're going to cut the 4th and 6th most popular option (also probably the 5th one as well given how people are about drow) and instead promote the dead last option like its actually important", you'd be laughed at. Long live Dragonborn and Tieflings, death to the "Gotta just have humans, various half humans, halflings, gnomes, elves and dwarves" paradigm.

People getting their expectations from there means they're expecting Tieflings and Dragonborn, and I know for a fact there's a lot of people who have problems with both of them. Behold, player expectation


As that list shows, aesthetics is hell of important factor into why people will pick something. Everyone agrees Dragonborn don't have great stats as a player race, so there sure aren't at least 7.5 million BG3 Dragonborn running around due to stats..

Could I play Dragonborn or Tieflings, the 4th and 6th most popular options per the Baldurs Gate 3 options there? Or would you decide instead that, no, the popular choices should be ignored and instead the least popular choice of halflings should be factored instead?

I have no problem attracting or retaining players. If you feel entitled to play something not on my list find a different game. I won't miss you.

 

[AlViking]

These questions seem to imply that @AlViking should be curating his game to appeal to the widest possible fraction of the BG3 playerbase, rather than the handful of people he actually has at his table.

This feels like another large part of the disconnect. A number of people seem to be arguing for mass appeal, to people who have a stable group with a set of expectations everyone is already happy with. I don't and never have drawn my players from the wider pool of TTRPG gamers, so what the "community" wants or likes or is popular has never had any impact on what we do.

I would also add that I've started new groups over the years and have never had any issue gaining players. The only problem I seem to have is too many people want to join the game at times, which is a good problem to have.

 

[Belen]

I ran a game a while ago with the following PC races:

• Humans
• Hobgoblins
• Bogarts (roughly equivalent to a small D&D orc or large D&D goblin)
• Goblins (gremlin-like)
• Weird, solitary, alien-like elves.

There were basically no humanoid monsters in the region of the world where the game took place. This turned out to be quite a challenge for me, as there were wide expanses of wilderness, and I came to appreciate how easy it would have been to fill those areas with orcs or troglodytes or ogres or whatever. But, yeah, I will curate monster races for much the same reasons I curate PC races.

I have been struggling for a while with the traditional intelligent monster species as wilderness encounter fodder.

 

[AlViking]

But they aren't insisting on 100% in some of the cases I saw. Its just that the 1% you're fussy about is also the 1% they are. Your red lines have a gap between them.

What case? The "compromise" has always been "Let me play a tortle and this is how you can include them in your world". It's not compromise, it's demanding capitulation with ideas on how to capitulate.

 

[Mecheon]

This feels like another large part of the disconnect. A number of people seem to be arguing for mass appeal, to people who have a stable group with a set of expectations everyone is already happy with. I don't and never have drawn my players from the wider pool of TTRPG gamers, so what the "community" wants or likes or is popular has never had any impact on what we do.

I would wonder if it also comes to the systems being used. Because I've never had an in person game, I've always been dependant on computer based tabletops. So, yeah, given my history isn't running into people (I don't even have a local game store) but instead scouring through promoted campaign ideas where folks are looking for more players

"Here's this discord server with a bunch of people who want to play" is how I come across people so turnover is a lot more expected, along with scouring for new folks

 

[DinoInDisguise]

It has not seemed to me that folks calling for compromise are actually saying "my way must win".

They are instead saying "you can't piss on my trouser and tell me it's raining."

Imagine a robber-baron "compromising" with someone he's stealing land from by saying he'll hire her, at a wage well above entry. From his position, he probably thinks that's a generous offer, he is after all agreeing to an employment contract. But from her perspective, this is a man trying to get her to be okay with him stealing her land, and buying her off with an above-minimum-wage job. That's not a compromise, even if one side thinks it is. If the robber baron has the power to unilaterally just make this happen, that doesn't suddenly make his proposal a compromise when it isn't.

An actual compromise would be the man agreeing to pay a fair price for the land, and her accepting that genuine offer, then they go their separate ways.

In a similar way, being told "well you can't play a dragonborn, but you can come from the Dragon Clan of barbarians and call yourself a 'dragonborn', but you'll be human" is not a compromise. And yes, that is a real example actually floated in a previous thread like this, from the pro-GM side. A "compromise" sincerely proposed, but clearly with the awareness that it would be rejected....something that was characterized as unreasonable, petulant demands from a player.

So yeah. There's a great deal of talk of compromise. I find most people on the "GM empowerment" side are very prone to proposing false compromise that barely even pays lip service to what the other side wants.

I disagree. I see the same false compromises on both sides.

In your example of the dragonborn. We have three options, "No, play something else," "I must play a dragonborn" or some compromise. This is really a straight forward starting position.

First we start with "play something else." That isn't a compromise as is. Neither is "I must be allowed to play a dragonborn." Both require complete capitulation. Same with "Let me play a tortle and this is how you can include them in your world," and "Play an approved race and Ill make the game fun." It's false compromises all the way down. All of these require copitulation.

Your example, "you can come from the Dragon Clan of barbarians and call yourself a 'dragonborn'" is a compromise. It is giving something, the word Dragonborn. It is a DM favored compromise, sure. But it is a compromise under the definition of the word. It's a compromise many players would take, in my experience.

Another compromise might be "you can have scales on your skin, but you'll be called human or elf." A third might be a lizard-man with dragonborn mechanics. Each of these are somewhere on the spectrum of compromises. Each has both sides giving something and getting something.

Looking back on this thread, I see none of these compromises, nothing close. Everything is either A or B. It's either "tortle" or "no tortle." No discussion as to how to give someone what they want from the tortle, while keeping the worldbuilding intact. Nope. No discussion that we should have the discussion at all, that talking is required. Nope. Nothing.

If people wanted to compromise, the answer to the question "Why do you want to play that?" wouldn't be "I just do, or I walk." And the answer to "Can I play a Tortle? Wouldnt be "No, its not on the approved race list, take a walk!" Both are simply demands of copitulation.

So no. All I see is a binary. A binary presented while screaming the word "compromise." A binary each side has now told me isn't a binary.

I think the better way to approach the situation is to ask the other side "Whats important to you," and start from there. The answer will tell you if a true compromise is even possible. If the answers are back at the starting position, I guess walking it a good idea for both.

 

[GobHag]

I was trying to find something that gave the player almost everything they wanted without giving them something I don't want. That's what makes it a compromise even if people aren't willing to accept 99% and will only accept 100%.

No it's the 1% that's important to them.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Personally, I still find it so bizarre how GMs seem to want to nail down every square inch of their world, leaving no place with anything the GM doesn't already know to the smallest stitch. That doesn't sound like a setting to me; it sounds like a prewritten play that I get to watch unfold, I just happened to be allowed to name and voice one of the characters in it. I find it hard to see the difference between such incredibly restrictive "curation" and simply running down the rails of the GM's unpublished novel. It gives me the feeling that the GM isn't even remotely interested in anything I care about, and if there's ever a gap between what I want and what the GM wants, I will always be dismissed, shame on me for having wanted anything the GM wasn't offering. Etc.

Honestly that seems like a bizarre take. Is that an issue when you play in something like Call of Cthulu set on 1920s earth. Is it "restrictive" to you that you know all the countries that exist in that world?

I have a decades old homebrew that I use for my campaign so naturally it has a lot of pre-existing lore. None of this makes it anything like a "prewritten play" and players have plenty of agency. I expect them to interact with the lore when bringing their character concept, but I will generally work with good faith attempts to create a appropriate character. What you're proposing sounds like some sort of mini-emotional tantrum directed at a DM who has the temerity to expect to be able to curate any aspect of the world they've created.

 

[GobHag]

Another compromise might be "you can have scales on your skin, but you'll be called human or elf." A third might be a lizard-man with dragonborn mechanics. Each of these are somewhere on the spectrum of compromises. Each has both sides giving something and getting something.

Looking back on this thread, I see none of these compromises, nothing close. Everything is either A or B. It's either "tortle" or "no tortle." No discussion as to how to give someone what they want from the tortle, while keeping the worldbuilding intact. Nope. No discussion that we should have the discussion at all, that talking is required. Nope. Nothing.

@Remathilis posted this, and since @AlViking rejected it and considered this not compromise then it really is uncompromisable.

So here is the funny thing. IF you okayed my (lets say) Hermit Tortle Druid, I'll give you all that info. I'll work around in your setting to make that character fit. Maybe he was awakened by a druid ritual and the spell mutated him to a more humanoid shape? Maybe I'm one of the last of a weird offshoot of lizardfolk. Maybe a mad alchemist dropped a cannister of mutagen on me. I'm usually cool with making him fit because you worked we me on letting me play the character I wanted.

 

[soviet]

I disagree. I see the same false compromises on both sides.

In your example of the dragonborn. We have three options, "No, play something else," "I must play a dragonborn" or some compromise. This is really a straight forward starting position.

First we start with "play something else." That isn't a compromise as is. Neither is "I must be allowed to play a dragonborn." Both require complete capitulation. Same with "Let me play a tortle and this is how you can include them in your world," and "Play an approved race and Ill make the game fun." It's false compromises all the way down. All of these require copitulation.

Your example, "you can come from the Dragon Clan of barbarians and call yourself a 'dragonborn'" is a compromise. It is giving something, the word Dragonborn. It is a DM favored compromise, sure. But it is a compromise under the definition of the word. It's a compromise many players would take, in my experience.

Another compromise might be "you can have scales on your skin, but you'll be called human or elf." A third might be a lizard-man with dragonborn mechanics. Each of these are somewhere on the spectrum of compromises. Each has both sides giving something and getting something.

Looking back on this thread, I see none of these compromises, nothing close. Everything is either A or B. It's either "tortle" or "no tortle." No discussion as to how to give someone what they want from the tortle, while keeping the worldbuilding intact. Nope. No discussion that we should have the discussion at all, that talking is required. Nope. Nothing.

If people wanted to compromise, the answer to the question "Why do you want to play that?" wouldn't be "I just do, or I walk." And the answer to "Can I play a Tortle? Wouldnt be "No, its not on the approved race list, take a walk!" Both are simply demands of copitulation.

So no. All I see is a binary. A binary presented while screaming the word "compromise." A binary each side has now told me isn't a binary.

I think the better way to approach the situation is to ask the other side "Whats important to you," and start from there. The answer will tell you if a true compromise is even possible. If the answers are back at the starting position, I guess walking it a good idea for both.

I don't think 'play a human but call yourself a dragonborn if you want' is a compromise that would satisfy many people, presumably the player could already have created a character like that without any concession from the GM. But I do agree that your lizardman example or possibly the human with scales example would probably work.

It may be that in some of these situations a compromise is not so much in the outcome as the process. If turtlemen are not a stock part of the GM's world but I want to play one, I would expect to be able to have a discussion and make my case, and for that GM to honestly reflect and consider whether it could work. If the answer is still no then at least I was given a fair shake. If the approach instead was to give a flat instant no with zero consideration and 'if you don't like it there's the door', I would think this is not a game or a GM I will enjoy.