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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 8119446" data-attributes="member: 7006">I suspect that part of the issue is that a good number of players just really aren't that creative when it comes to creating character backgrounds.  They aren't authors or storytellers in their own right, and thus won't think up completely original ways for their PCs to stand out or be different.  Instead, all they have is to take what the DM gave them as the campaign premise and then build their character off of that-- oftentimes "playing against type" in order to make their character have a bit of narrative bite in their mind.It's really no different than the fact we get thousands of character concepts from players that are either just carbon-copies of other actual  characters (the Drizzt-clone syndrome), or are the same four or five cliched starting concepts (the orphaned character, the secret heir to the throne that was stolen from the king & queen, etc.)  That's oftentimes the best they can come up with to make something supposedly original or "cool".I wonder in the campaign premise you proposed about the theme being all about religion if the DM almost needs to partially trick their players into playing it by offering up a different big thing as the campaign's "theme" that isn't about religion.  That way they all create characters who riff on being the antithesis of the campaign's premise (like many players are conditioned to do because it's the only way they can think of to make their PC stand out)... and then you just have them fill out the "Deity" line low-key like.  Then as you play the game the Deity line starts gaining more influence and the fake theme you threw out falls by the wayside.Of course, I'm sure there will be responses from some folks here about how it's horrible to set up a game under somewhat false pretenses like that... but hey... if you as a player refuse to buy in to my ideas when I want you to, why should I be the one forced to buy into yours?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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