Do highly unique characters still get a bad rep; and: how to give them room to exist?

[Thomas Shey]

I play 13th Age, where player characters are literally required to have One Unique Thing about them. Miraculously, the world does not collapse.

Well, to be fair, at least part of that is that the OUTs very explicitly don't provide much mechanical benefit. But it also works in part because the Dragon Empire is a pretty weird place even by fantasy standards.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Expectations can be managed, though. That's the purpose of having a Session Zero: to square the DMs expectations for their campaign with the players' expectations for their character. You want to play a dragonborn, your DM doesn't want to include dragonborn in the campaign...so who is "wrong"?

Nobody. There is no "wrong" here, just a need for compromise. The player and the DM need to talk about why the dragonborn is so important to the player, and why dragonborn aren't included in the campaign, and find a way for both to get what they need. The DM needs to be ready to present viable alternatives, and the player needs to be ready to accept substitutions.

In my experience, nobody likes to play D&D with anyone who takes the "my way or the highway!" approach to compromise, on either side of the DM screen.

I just have to note that sometimes no meaningful compromise is possible. The two pieces of rope don't have to meet in the middle.

 

[TiQuinn]

Expectations can be managed, though. That's the purpose of having a Session Zero: to square the DMs expectations for their campaign with the players' expectations for their character. You want to play a dragonborn, your DM doesn't want to include dragonborn in the campaign...so who is "wrong"?

Nobody. There is no "wrong" here, just a need for compromise.

Exactly this. I've played all human games before because of the setting that the game was in. I've restricted abilities and classes and feats, and the like at various times, and been a player in those types of games as well. The key is being above board at the start of the game about what you want to do, and sell your group on the idea, and work with them.

But keep in mind, the post that I was responding to was one of those "KEEP THOSE PLAYERS IN LINE OR THEY'LL RUN ALL OVER YOU" imaginations, and frankly, the only time I've seen that was when the DM was trying to play a gotcha campaign and NOT being transparent about expectations.

 

[Lord Shark]

Well, to be fair, at least part of that is that the OUTs very explicitly don't provide much mechanical benefit. But it also works in part because the Dragon Empire is a pretty weird place even by fantasy standards.

No weirder than the Forgotten Realms -- and a hell of a lot less weirder than places like Tekumel or Jorune, I'd say.

 

[Lanefan]

My worries are well in the rear view on the topic. All the perceived "snowflake" issues I had were due to power seeking. For example, 3E had no dragonborn so folks wanted to be dragonkin or half dragons that came with powerful templates that threw them out of balance. Another example was drow had a write up, but they also had "noble" template which meant regular drow was never good enough for the power seeker. This has largely died away as power levels have lower gaps and/or strong design points to keep them in check.

Yep, pretty much this.

As for being unusual, I dont care if a player wants to explore that. As a GM, I try to cater to the interest of my players and provide them with opportunities. Though, if somebody goes through painstaking effort to make sure that everyone knows that their unusual character is unusual in every possible moment of every session, im going to be greatly annoyed. Your Pc is one of the main characters in a group about a story of happenings related to all of them. YMMV.

My only issue if-when a player intentionally sets out to play something bizarre is that others will want to do likewise, leading to a party of even-greater-scale misfits in the setting than would already be the case while at the same time rather defeating the point of playing something unique.

And so, I gate the bizarre stuff behind dice rolls; meaning that when something odd does come up it really will stand out.

One character in my current game, for example, ended up through said rolls as a bizarre cross between a Hobbit and an Ent (or just a Hobbit that really went nuts on the Entdraught!); nearly 7' tall, built roughly like Shaq, with always-on barkskin and real problems fitting in to any society. And, being part-Hobbit, of course it's also an always-on eating machine.

 

[Tonguez]

Like a dragonborn, or a genasi, or a tiefling? How dare a player come to a table expecting to play a PC race that they've heard others are playing!

I dislike the addition of these races because it takes away their specialness, it becomes just another human with a forehead prosthetic. Afterall a PC Spawn of Asmodeus is kinda cool, but Tieflings become decidedly less cool when John the janitor is one, and theres a whole family of them living next door. Equally I'd much rather a player come up with a concept of being a Elf magically infused with elemental fire, than have an entire race of Genasi and I'm happy to have an experienced player be a juvenile half-dragon.

I also like unique Monsters (like Birthrights Awnshegh) and have even gone so far as replacing Half-Orcs and Half-elfs with Fey-tainted Humans

 

[MGibster]

I was running a Legend of the Five Rings game many years ago. For those of you who are not familiar with L5R, it is basically a fantasy version of (mostly) Japan where player characters are samurai (bushi, shugenja, or courtiers) or sometimes monks. One of the players wanted her character to be an extremely honorable bushi who used to be a geisha in the past.

There are some problems with that in L5R. There is a caste system in place and for a samurai to have worked as a geisha would bring a lot of embarrassment to her and her family. The player was a bit confused, "But geisha aren't prostitutes." She's right, they're not, but with a rigid caste system in place if you step out of bounds it's generally not a good thing. But I worked with the player. None of the geisha skills (other than seduction) were dishonorable. It would be perfectly fine for a samurai to possess many of the skills geisha had such as playing the biwa, telling stories, dancing, or singing. If she really wanted to have been a geisha then a Dark Secret disadvantage could work but the reputation of her and her family would be negatively affected if this was ever discovered.

This was a (mild) example of a character that didn't really fit the paradigm of the campaign in some ways. But the player and I were happy to work out a solution. She was making a good faith effort to make a character that fit into the campaign. Had she shown up and said, "Hey, I want to play a Dutch merchant who is stranded here" that might have been a pain in my butt.

 

[Thomas Shey]

No weirder than the Forgotten Realms -- and a hell of a lot less weirder than places like Tekumel or Jorune, I'd say.

Can't agree, but in this case its weird as in "varied in ways you wouldn't guess because of all the stuff that's accumulated over 13 ages". I'd actually argue that neither Tekumel or Jorune is weird in that sense; they're just off the beaten path. But once you understand their basic history, everything kind of is what you'd expect. But--living dungeons? War banners? Magic weapons that all talk to you? None of that is particularly things you'd extrapolate from other parts of the setting. I'd say that even exceeds the kitchen-sink elements of the Realms.

 

[Distracted DM]

To some degree, every PC is special. At least in most games. In most fantasy settings, your average person is a farmer, tradesman, or merchant rather than an adventurer no matter if they're an elf, halfling, or tortle. Even in a game like Call of Cthulhu, most people just don't investigate eldritch horrors, in Star Trek most people aren't in the Federation having adventures, and in Shadowrun most people aren't running with the shadows of the night.

Every PC is special, but not everyone that's special is a PC. There are a few games out there where the PCs are truly Unique for what they do (Dungeon World and 13th Age come to mind), but otherwise the PCs still fall into an existing mold that would be there whether those particular character existed or not.

 

[GuardianLurker]

As people have pointed out, there is a big difference between "unique" and "disruptive". There's a middle ground too - "Unique with active drawbacks", where the character's uniqueness isn't itself disruptive, but may have issues with integrating into the campaign or party. Here, it's the player conduct when the problems arise that determine whether the character/player is disruptive or not.

As a completely fictional example: My campaign may have centaurs, but adventuring centaurs are unique. 'Tis fine. I warn the player that this is a biped-centric world, and the adventures are going to be a lot of dungeon-crawling and ruin-exploring, and that centaurs (and similar) are going to have real problems interacting with the world. Still want to play a centaur. OK.

Now at this point, there's basically two paths that happen - one of which is (unfortunately) common and disruptive. If the player then comes complaining to me that they can't fit in the bipeds' structures, nor dungeon-crawl into the depths with the rest of party, and throwing a tantrum? Disruptive - and also not my problem, as warnings were given. On the other branch, if the player comes to me and says, "OK, I see what you meant, my bad. I'd still like to play my centaur, how can we make this work?" I'll work with that, and the character will probably become more unique.

Now, some may call the first "spotlight-hogging". To me, that's a function of how much the player demands the campaign focuses on their character's needs. Which isn't necessarily a component of the behavior here, but often would be.

Fortunately, I haven't encountered that problem in real life. My disruptive players have been few (thankfully), and for other reasons.