D&D as a smorgasbord

[Desdichado]

One of the nice things about robust, mature games that have had lots of splatbooks and stuff issued over time is that there are a lot of options. D&D qualifies in many editions; certainly 2e, 3.5 and probably even 4e by this point.

I've heard a lot of people preach the virtues of "core books only" and I've heard people preach the virtues of "anything goes", but I've never really heard many people preach the virtues of cherry-picking; loading up your plate with hand-selected options, smorgasbord style, and creating a game milieu that way.

Anyone ever done this? If so, which edition did you use and what elements specifically did you pick to put on your plate, and which elements did you specifically exclude that perhaps most players would expect?

 

[Crothian]

I did this once in 2e for a campaign I planned that was city based I did go through all the Complete books and say what kits would and would not be alloud. I liked the feel of it for the game since it was going to be different and more restrictive becasue of the action always being in the city. It was a bit of a pain in the ass though to go through all those books and Dragon magazines to find out what all the options were and then to make a master index of what was alloud and where one could find it.

 

[Nifft]

I've never really heard many people preach the virtues of cherry-picking; loading up your plate with hand-selected options, smorgasbord style, and creating a game milieu that way.

Huh, that's pretty much exactly what I meant when discussing my "monster palette", and that's certainly what I mean when discussing what kind of races I'd want in my ideal setting.

Here's what I did for my last 3.x (3.0 -> 3.5) game:

Races:
- Standard, plus Kobolds (house-ruled to not suck quite as much), plus Tieflings (as a template that could be applied to any race), plus Warforged.
- Racial Paragon classes (at first cobbled together from Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed / Evolved, then we changed to the "official" options in WotC's Unearthed Arcana).

Classes:
- Standard (that's all we had when we started), then house-ruled Sorcerer (as fixes were discussed on these boards), then a bunch of prestige classes & class variants as they came.

Monsters:
- Started with a sub-set of the MM: goblinoids were the main threat, ancient dragons each acted like a multinational bank ("You give me your gold, I lie on it, and I give you this easy-to-carry paper!"), demons & devils were the "meta" threat, and the undead were wicked tools of destruction used by all sides... until they came to be their own side. Oozes, Fey, Magical Beasts... were mostly just random encounters. Most of the stranger magical beasts (e.g. displacer beast & yrrthaks) lived on a nearby world called by some "Barsoom".

So yeah. It works, and it works great, but it's been such a default mode for me that I don't think of it as something needing discussion as a thing in of itself. I'd be much more likely to discuss each element individually ("so, how about them Warforged?") than to discuss exactly how I plan to use them all together.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Barastrondo]

I always run themed games if I can get away with it. Thing is, I like a fully stocked pantry, like you see on the Iron Chef, even if not all the ingredients are going to get used in a particular campaign. Nordic-style axes at the roof of the world campaign? No genies, pegasi or beholders are likely to show up. But even if dryads aren't particularly Nordic in feel, if I get a neat idea for an ice dryad in a frozen forest, it can go in.

The main thing about thematic games is that I find there's relatively little reason to ban things that players might want to do ahead of time. Just call for them to rationalize it within the context of the theme. I won't ban warforged from a Viking-style game ahead of time, but I'll let the players know that they have to figure out some way to make a warforged look and feel like something that a Nordic witch would create, and that it should have a personality and motivation fitting the campaign.

I consider it the Dark Sun principle: if people had banned halflings when creating Dark Sun instead of letting someone make a pitch for how to include them, there would not have been cannibal halflings in Dark Sun. So maybe I don't plan to have halflings in my blasted post-apocalyptic desert world campaign, but I like to leave room for a player to talk me into it.

 

[Shemeska]

Well I've always run planar campaigns with my home group, and generally speaking I've always had a policy of "You can use it if you can justify its inclusion in-game to fit the character concept. So please, sell me on the idea."

I've also never really distinguished between potential sources be they first party or third party or somewhere in-between like Dragon and Dungeon when they were in print. One of my players was a rather prolific pdf "collector" and so generally speaking the group pulled from virtually any WotC book in print (with the notable exception of the BoED which never got outright banned, but it didn't get a good reception from the group).

My group also rather fell in love with the 3e Relics and Rituals I & II from S&SS, and both players and myself have always been pretty rampant about snagging stuff from 2e and converting it to 3.x versions on our own. Currently I've been pilfering some ideas and crunchy bits from some Pathfinder books for a 1/2 faerie dragon PC I'll be playing in a campaign that one of my players is going to be starting now that my campaign just finished this past weekend.

We cherry pick. We cherry pick like crazy. As long as it fits the flavor of the campaign and the flavor of the character, go for it. Unless it's a poison that's not evil like all poisons are evil because it only hurts evil things and it only hurts the evil inside of them, or something like that... hehehe ravages. Never going to sell that one with my group.

 

[Desdichado]

I guess I've done a much more radical overhaul of some of my games, then, than it sounds like anyone who's posted so far has done.

My last campaign I said that nobody could pick any class with a spellcasting progression of any kind. There was no magic. Period.

Psionics were OK, though. Also: no elves, no dwarves, no gnomes, no halflings. No half-elves, obviously, too.

I ended up with a human swashbuckler, a hobgoblin rogue/fighter, a hobgoblin soulknife, a shifter scout, a human rogue, and a half-orc barbarian.

It had a funny Weird tale vibe to it; the characters were smuggling Greek fire to an army of gorillas in a flying ship, stopping at places with Lovecraftian names like Mnar, Kadath, Carcosa, and The Lost City of Naked Amazon Hotties Who Ride Dinosaurs Into Battle.

I thought, all things considered, that the group was surprisingly low-key considering some of the options they could have taken.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

My D&D campaigns are either anything goes (after DM approval, of course) or cherry-picked.

All of my RIFTS campaigns were cherry-picked. I actually went so far as to type up a list of approved O.C.C.s and R.C.C.s- complete with a quick blurb as to what each each one was, organized by sourcebook with page numbers. It greatly helped people design their PCs. Instead of poring over three dozen books or so worth of material, they could scan over a 7 page list. Most of what I excised was either redundant or was "out there" even for RIFTS.

 

[Nifft]

I guess I've done a much more radical overhaul of some of my games, then, than it sounds like anyone who's posted so far has done.

There have been several times that I wanted to start over -- to throw out all the Tolkien races but humans, for example -- but it would have cost too much baby per unit bathwater.

Back when we started, there just weren't all that many cherry trees from which to pick.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Back when we started, there just weren't all that many cherry trees from which to pick.

Cheers, -- N

Especially since that pesky George Washington kid chopped one down, right?

 

[Nifft]

Especially since that pesky George Washington kid chopped one down, right?

Actually it's because cherry trees hadn't evolved yet. There was just this scruffy grassy stuff on land when we crawled out of the sea to chip ourselves some flint dice.

Cheers, -- N