Libertad
Legend
The beauty of tabletop gaming is that there are so many ways one can play them. But every so often, one encounters players who have very unconventional ways of playing the games. I don't mean to imply that such play-styles are disruptive or incorrect, but are dubbed "alien" because of how utterly different they are from what passes as the conventional in ttrpg spaces and/or the particular games that they play. I should note that the subject matter of this thread may very well be subjective, but still figure it could make for an interesting topic of discussion.
I'll start with two examples I encountered in the wild.
The NPC Fundamentalist: one GM I played with long ago had the idea of "players make PCs, GM makes everything else" to an extreme conclusion. They don't want players to come up with details of NPCs in a PC's backstory, like a player deciding the names of their PC's parents or something like "the 4 dots of Allies (City Hall) my Ventrue means that they're on friendly terms with council members/the mayor."
What makes this "alien" to me is that while GMs are responsible for creating and controlling the majority of content, they rarely object to a player coming up with ideas on what kinds of social connections their PC has. Oftentimes the GM would what the player discusses as inspiration for building NPCs who have an attachment to the PC. The NPC Fundamentalist GM would've rather decided everything about the PC's friends, family, mentor, etc.
The Anti-Adventurer: never played with this person, but I saw them once in the comments section of an OSR YouTuber's video. They had a homebrew setting that followed all of the typical D&D tropes...except that adventurer as a profession doesn't really exist. Virtually every settlement would dispatch the militia or local military to deal with monstrous threats. While said setting could have potential, the way they spoke about it was that the PCs were the only people who were adventurers, and they repeatedly came upon settlements that had no need for their help, like any rumors of troubles and rewards were already taken or locked out of because they weren't established within existing political structures.
What makes this "alien" to me is that it feels like a meta deconstruction of Fantasy RPG tropes, but forgets that such RPGs need a plot of some kind for the characters to drive. If the major problems of the world are such that the PCs aren't needed to solve them, it inevitably begs the question of "well, what am I supposed to do?"
I'll start with two examples I encountered in the wild.
The NPC Fundamentalist: one GM I played with long ago had the idea of "players make PCs, GM makes everything else" to an extreme conclusion. They don't want players to come up with details of NPCs in a PC's backstory, like a player deciding the names of their PC's parents or something like "the 4 dots of Allies (City Hall) my Ventrue means that they're on friendly terms with council members/the mayor."
What makes this "alien" to me is that while GMs are responsible for creating and controlling the majority of content, they rarely object to a player coming up with ideas on what kinds of social connections their PC has. Oftentimes the GM would what the player discusses as inspiration for building NPCs who have an attachment to the PC. The NPC Fundamentalist GM would've rather decided everything about the PC's friends, family, mentor, etc.
The Anti-Adventurer: never played with this person, but I saw them once in the comments section of an OSR YouTuber's video. They had a homebrew setting that followed all of the typical D&D tropes...except that adventurer as a profession doesn't really exist. Virtually every settlement would dispatch the militia or local military to deal with monstrous threats. While said setting could have potential, the way they spoke about it was that the PCs were the only people who were adventurers, and they repeatedly came upon settlements that had no need for their help, like any rumors of troubles and rewards were already taken or locked out of because they weren't established within existing political structures.
What makes this "alien" to me is that it feels like a meta deconstruction of Fantasy RPG tropes, but forgets that such RPGs need a plot of some kind for the characters to drive. If the major problems of the world are such that the PCs aren't needed to solve them, it inevitably begs the question of "well, what am I supposed to do?"
Last edited:
