D&D General Do you like LOTS of races/ancestries/whatever? If so, why?

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Ridiculous. You seem to think a GM is the employee of the players. That's absolutely not the case. It is a group activity but it is one that is assymetric in regards to work input. A group is absolutely entitled to play what they want to play but they don't get to force a GM to run a game they want to run just because the vote is 5 to 1. Instead, that's a group that should be a GM and 4 players.

I think that the DM needs to compromise if all of the players disagree with them. Good DMs aren't tyrants that force their view of the game over the views of all of the other players. Compromising and taking feedback from your friends isn't "being a servant to the players".

 

[Xamnam]

Then they would be welcome to leave and do that, or have one of them run that game. I would not even want to play in it. I would find it silly and ridiculous, and I take my RPG time more seriously than that. I want adventure and fun, certainly, but not things I would consider worthless.

To me, this sounds like an r/rpghorrorstories in the making.

How is a prospective DM/player recognizing that what a table is looking for is fundamentally a terrible match for their sensibilities and walking away a horror story?

 

[Reynard]

I think that the DM needs to compromise if all of the players disagree with them. Good DMs aren't tyrants that force their view of the game over the views of all of the other players. Compromising and taking feedback from your friends isn't "being a servant to the players".

Why? Isn't the GM entitled to "no thank you"? Why can't the players say "no thank you" and start their own game. With blackguards and hoophaks? If players demand a kind of game, they're welcome to it, but one of them needs to step up and get behind the screen.

 

[Azzy]

I would and do use the terms Mos Eisley or Kitchen Sink as positive descriptors, but in their most frequent use, they are overwhelmingly surrounded by text that colors its intention as dismissive, usually in the sense that it's thoughtless, lazy, or indiscriminate and therefore boring. Barring an explicitly positive note, or even just lacking other context, it's a fair guess to take that it is not being meant as praise.

All of this.

 

[Tonguez]

I think that the DM needs to compromise if all of the players disagree with them. Good DMs aren't tyrants that force their view of the game over the views of all of the other players. Compromising and taking feedback from your friends isn't "being a servant to the players".

You do realise that a DM is just another player, a person there to interact and have fun. If they dont find something fun then they have every right to say “nah, I dont wanna DM this time, why dont you take over?”

Good players need to accept that noone is obliged to DM for you.

 

[Incenjucar]

The different table preferences are all valid. This is only really an issue when players are stuck between choosing a DM they don't enjoy or not being able to play. If there was an endless supply of non-horrible DMs it wouldn't be a concern if some of them were more restrictive than others.

It can be pretty rough for people stuck with limited options, though, and I think that the struggle to find a DM who is interested in providing something a given set of players find to be fun may be behind a lot of the negativity here. DMs being a scarce resource, they have an outsized impact on the experience of others.

 

[Azzy]

I disagree with this pretty strongly. SW doesn’t narrow down at all. Each new installment features new species, and every iteration of the roleplaying game features more and more species the longer it is in publication. The video games narrow down, but like the SW rpg core book, that’s a matter of format limitations, not worldbuilding.

Hell, Star Wars Saga Edition eventually got rules for making new species.

Going farther back (to further your point), the old WEG D6 SW RPG (which still has a large fanbase) had stats for most of the species that existed in the movies and novels that existed at the time (and several original ones).

 

[Hussar]

Who said that?

No, no, he's entirely right there. I do not care one whit about world building. That's totally fair.

To me, a game world doesn't exist until the PC's interact with it and ceases to exist the second they leave.

Frankly, any DM who thinks it's more important to not have race X than to play with that player is a DM I want nothing to do with.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

But sharks vs crabs vs karkens?

I’m cool with that,

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I think that the DM needs to compromise if all of the players disagree with them. Good DMs aren't tyrants that force their view of the game over the views of all of the other players. Compromising and taking feedback from your friends isn't "being a servant to the players".

Why? Isn't the GM entitled to "no thank you"? Why can't the players say "no thank you" and start their own game. With blackguards and hoophaks? If players demand a kind of game, they're welcome to it, but one of them needs to step up and get behind the screen.

Over the past few decades in the hobby, I have usually taken feedback & suggestions from players. But there is always a point beyond which I will not compromise. What that point may be depends on what I‘m trying to run.

If there’s a strong campaign reason for there not to be a particular race, it may not be possible for a player to convince me to allow an an exception. I know from experience a blood-hungry madman PC wouldn’t fit well in a “4-color heroic” type game, so I wouldn’t permit one. If my choice of system for a particular game isn’t popular, I probably will not change it, and will simply not run that campaign.*

But before the point of “No.” is reached, there’s always discussion. If I think the idea is good, but there’s stil reasons why I’d have to refuse it, I’d work with the player to try coming up with a viable alternative.







* I’ve compromised on that once, and it didn’t work out well.