D&D 5E As a Player, why do you play in games you haven't bought into?

[Chaosmancer]

Van Halen put a clause in venue contracts.

They wanted a bowl of M&Ms provided with the brown ones removed.

People thought it was prima Donna rock stars.

The reason they did it was to see if the organizers had read the contract. If they hadn't there's a good chance they didn't read other parts like health and safety stuff.

Wire up electric guitars wrong you can electrocute people.

So basically if you write a players guide and with a brown M&M clause it's a way to weed out players who aren't that invested in your game to begin with.

Eg "no Drow" in writing. If they ask to play Drow.....

If you have multiple interested players you can prioritize the ones who paid the most attention.

Oh, that is really fascinating.

And it would explain so many "prima donna" things

 

[Thomas Shey]

I can accept that. That is why in addition to a handout, the Session Zero is a walkthrough of issues that might be important (or interesting) to the players, as well as a hype session. Of course, to bring this back to Hussar’s point, this sometimes means that players don’t have time to finalize their characters, or they need time to digest the information before they make characters.

Ideally, yeah. And absolutely, and that's even if you don't have one or more players who will dither up to the last moment.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's a self-solving problem, though - if they don't like homework, they don't play.

Depending on the available pool of players, it can turn into a self-solving problem where you don't have any players. As I said, resistance to reading things is not uncommon.

(Honestly, the assumption that there's large player pools available everywhere does not seem well supported, and you see it a lot, I suspect from GMs and players who happen to have been fortunate in this regard).

 

[Thomas Shey]

My players won't even read professionally published source material. They're sure as hell not going to read more than 3-5 sentences from me about the setting.

And here's an example.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's interesting that almost this entire thread is looking at the issue from the GM's perspective.

But nothing from the perspective of the other players.

I've seen this a few times. A GM pitches a game, and I make a character to fit that pitch as do most of the other players. One particular player wheedles the GM until they're allowed to play something that really doesn't fit the concept. After a while the game starts becoming about that player's character.

There's a reason people want to play exceptions. Exceptional characters by their nature get spotlight time.

While sometimes its spotlight hogging, there are other reasons. Most of them can end up being problematic, though.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My take as well, it's a thread.

Cavegirl's right on both grounds, though; having all that be in one person's hands is well ensconced in the hobby (partly, of course, because they tend to be mostly things you don't want someone who is otherwise playing normally to do because they have disproportionate power, and most groups can't functionally afford four separate non-play roles, even if they could find someone to do them all).

 

[Chaosmancer]

Fanfic as in writing something homebrew for a pre-established franchise e.g. the Harry Potter setting? That always seemed pretty niche to me.

I'm planning on running a class on Fanfiction writing soon online, and one of the things I want to point out in that class is that "Fan Fiction" is old and popular

Just for a few rapid-fire examples

Dante's Divine Comedy is a Fan Fiction. Dante puts himself into the shoes of the protagonist, and a large part of the work is exploring an established canon and living out fantasies (like putting all the Pope's in Hell except the ones he liked)

The Book of Enoch is an ancient, non-canonical set of biblical stories, focused on a minor biblical character (Enoch) and his adventurers.

Wicked I was just reminded of recently, and it is also basically a fan fic, writing in the setting of Oz, but changing the script.

And, if you really start digging into it, you start wondering, what is the difference between the person who writes a new adventure for the Harry Potter Universe and someone who reboots and re-imagines a popular TV show? Why isn't Fantastic Beasts, which is about the author of a book mentioned in the HP series, basically Fan Fiction. I do believe it was written by fans, not by Rowling.

At the end of the day, the art form is huge, it is just that some people do it as amateurs and others professionally with licensing deals (or not if they are working with a public domain property)

I think you're defining 'fanfic' much differently than I am. I see it as, for example, writing a short story about Lucius Malfoy's upbringing in the Harry Potter setting - the author is using the pre-established and well-known setting wholesale and just adding some more fiction on top of what already exists...and often inserting a version of self in there as well. And it's single-author written work, and almost always amateur (I don't count the extended-universe Star Wars novels e.g. works by Timothy Zahn as fanfic). A narrow definition.

You seem to be suggesting fanfic covers almost every type of post-original storymaking, a much wider (and thus perhaps less useful) definition.

Put another way, just because Ed Greenwood invented Forgotten Realms doesn't define every game played in that setting as FR fanfic.

I also don't connect being invested in one's character during gameplay as having anything to do with fanfic. But if you're then going home and writing stories about that character, now you're into a form of fanfic I suppose, except there's no well-known franchise or setting to pin it to.

I get your objection to the wider definition. And I agree it ends up so broad it makes me wonder if it is worth defining.

But, your definition is also far too small.

There is a series I've followed called "The Golden Empire" which takes place in a universe based wholesale on an anime, the lore, the magic, everything. But, the characters are new. And, more importantly I think for your definition, it is big.

It is 8 "chapters" but that covers checks the website 919,225 words.

At nearly a million words this would be about 10 novels worth of length.

So... it is clearly based heavily off of a property the author does not own. It isn't being commercialized, and it does not take away from the original work. It is both entirely new and rooted in the original work. And while it is "amateur" in that it is not being professionally published, it is also far larger than is traditionally conceived.



A tangent, yes, but like I said, I'm gearing up to teach a class in a week, so I've been boning up

 

[Thomas Shey]

People have been trying to break down the GM role for years to little impact on the hobby as a whole and little benefit that I can see to gaming.

3 of those four issues pretty much have to go together, or it's not a role-playing game in the traditional meaning of the word, but something else (which I can say sounds completely unintereesting).

I don't see any intrinsic reason why the person operating the setting and NPCs needs to also be the mechanical judge. Its just that few people are going to want to be there for no reason but the latter, since it isn't an interesting role in and of itself.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It seems that in this specific instance (as usually with these sort of things) it is about failure to communicate.

Like about 90% of all gaming problems, honestly (and before someone comes along and says "Is that that hard?" have you looked at a lot of other parts of life? The answer is "Yes.")

 

[Thomas Shey]

Maybe they won't, doesn't mean they can't.

IME, these days, most groups have multiple people who can DM.

But as you note, that doesn't mean they're willing to, for any number of reasons.