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

[AlViking]

Gotta be honest, disliking Eberron and Star Wars, and hating FR to the point of not even playing in it, would be a major red flag to joining a table or inviting someone to a table.

They're just so bland and inoffensive; it's like hating Iowa. I don't have any plans concerning Iowa, but I'm certainly not chuffed at it enough to avoid it.

Having lived in Iowa for a couple of years I certainly have my own thoughts on the subject.

 

[Remathilis]

Gotta be honest, disliking Eberron and Star Wars, and hating FR to the point of not even playing in it, would be a major red flag to joining a table or inviting someone to a table.

They're just so bland and inoffensive; it's like hating Iowa. I don't have any plans concerning Iowa, but I'm certainly not chuffed at it enough to avoid it.

Clearly you've never been to Iowa!

 

[TwoSix]

Clearly you've never been to Iowa!

Did Drizzt and Elminster ambush you in Des Moines?

 

[Remathilis]

Did Drizzt and Elminster ambush you in Des Moines?

Two words: corn golems

 

[TwoSix]

Two words: corn golems

I absolutely have a response to this, but Eric's Grandma is watching.

 

[Maxperson]

But you can pick one off the peg, thus avoiding the proprietorial sense of DM ownership of the world.

Even better if it’s something the players are familiar with from other media.

First, the kind of DM who is going to act to preserve the world in a negative way is going to do it to any setting, purchased or created. It's a person problem, not a setting problem.

Second, it's not better if the players are familiar through other media. There's something to be said for a setting that everyone knows because they've read about it and played in it forever, like the Forgotten Realms. There's also something to be said for a setting that you don't know and are learning about as you explore a homebrew setting.

Both have pros and cons. Neither is in any way objectively better to do than the others. People have preferences, though, and you apparently have a very strong preference for purchased settings over DM created ones, and that's fine. You do you.

 

[AlViking]

Honestly, this thread has seemed pretty sober and fair-minded for the bulk of it.

First of all the werewolf and vampire examples are not hyperbole because they actually happened. While it was the reason I initially created the curated list it's not the reason I've kept it all these years. As @Remathilis pointed out in today's game we have shifters and dhampyr. But while I used to allow everything and anything and finally realized that I liked running the game more when I could have a relatively small list of races that actually made sense to me. I could now do world building where I had a good sense of what it meant to be a dwarf versus an elf and how they tended to view each other for example.

I'm better as a DM and enjoy the game more because I put in some minor limits. Why should my preferences be ignored?

 

[Stormonu]

It does not mean that I do not detest FR. I read all the novels in the 90s and I cannot use that world as a setting for my games. It lacks any compelling narrative for me.

I felt the same way about Star Wars for years. I ended up setting a game 1000 years after ROTJ and that was fine. I would not play or run a SW game set during the films.

At this point, I would not even play in an FR game.

I've had quite a bit of fun in Star Wars games set in the movie eras. Generally the trick is to have the characters off in another part of the galaxy, or if a named character shows up, it's for a cameo. I had one adventure where the group was sent to retrieve an item clandestinely, and turned out they were taking it to a post-clone war Captain Rex. In another, the group had to deliberately activate a beacon to alert Princess Leia and Luke to leave an asteroid field before a waiting-in-ambush Star Destroyer caught them (Graveyard of Alderaan, BTW).

To me (as GM or player), those moments are actually fun and help really feel like the game is set in that universe, not a look-alike.

 

[AlViking]

Two words: corn golems

Corn golems? Bah. Try living downwind of a factory farm for pigs. Stinking cloud has nothing on it.

 

[Maxperson]

You don’t need to “get it right”. Every table’s version of a setting is unique to that table. The point is to avoid the sense of exclusive ownership, and wasting time creating stuff that the players aren’t interested in.

I think you mean wasting time creating stuff you aren't interested in. A lot of players have some level of interest in the setting lore. In my experience it's most of them.