Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 8402292" data-attributes="member: 6677017">As a player I always like to make character choices in consultation with the other players so we end up with a more or less balanced party and everyone has their own area of spotlight. With a group of 4-5 PCs, even doing that means you will still probably have some situations you aren’t ideally suited for, and that’s okay. It makes each party have strengths and weaknesses as well as each character. I‘m even fine with theme adventures where an entire party plays the same class, or at least similar classes, if that is appropriate for the scenario being played (I wouldn‘t do that for a more general campaign).As a DM, the only time I take the slightest notice of party composition is if there happens to be something they are likely to come up against which they will likely get destroyed by. In that case I’ll attempt to create some sort of forewarning so they can either get what they need to have a chance, or avoid the situation. Other than that, I feel it cheapens the experience if the DM adapts to party capabilities. If this were 3e or earlier, I would make sure to let the players know if they were thinking of a character that would have real problems (like a rogue in a campaign where undead and other foes immune to sneak attack prominently featured), or if no one in the party had a class feature they might want to have (like Turn Undead in that same example), but those aren’t really issues in 5e. If the challenge goes up because I made my character (or our party) well suited for it, then my character/party has become simply averagely suited for it. If challenges are nerfed because my character/party is poorly suited for them, then, again, we have just been made averagely suited for them rather than getting to experience having to struggle through our weakness. For me, the freedom to explore a world that does not adapt to my character or party (other than through natural in-setting results of our actions) is a huge part of what I want out of D&D. I want the DM to present a world with adventures, challenges, and interesting places before we even think up our characters. And then once we make characters and start playing I want the DM to play the setting as if it was his character and not change things in ways that invalidate the experience of our exploration of that setting.I think a lot of people have never even had that experience, and so have no reference point for how satisfying it can be. Some of that probably has to do with the prevalence of shorter campaigns. If you’re only playing for a couple of months it makes little difference whether the world is independent, consistent, and impartial to your party, or whether the DM is making everything up on the spot and customizing it to them (unless they arent any good at it) because a short scenario like that would play similarly either way. But in campaign that either goes on for years, or is part of consistent setting hosting multiple campaigns, it won’t take long before the lack of that true freedom of choice starts to be felt.</blockquote>

Verification