D&D 5E feeling dissatisfied - need some advice

[pukunui]

[MENTION=22953]SteelDragon[/MENTION]:Ouch. For the record, I am thoroughly enjoying the other game I'm DMing. Admittedly, that's a Tyranny of Dragons game set in the Forgotten Realms, so I've just been running it more or less as is, with just a few tweaks.

This campaign is a homebrew. I had a specific vision of what I wanted it to be like, but through no one's fault but my own, it has not turned out to be that way. No, it's not that players' fault. It's my fault.

Why shouldn't I be allowed to enjoy myself, though? It's not like I'm getting paid to DM.

 

[Psikerlord#]

With regard to the deities and religion aspect, that's a bit harder. In the ubiquity of magic thread I recall posting that it's hard to make magic seem rare when you allow magic users as character choices. If you want the deities to be distant and their influence to be rare, clerics and paladins should probably not be allowed as PC choices. However, you have allowed that. So, unless you want to ask them to write up new characters that ship has sailed.

Yeah I agree and think the best way to implement a non-divine world is to do a reboot/restart, with no clerics or paladins as options. I would add someof the cure spells to the sorcerer/wizard/warlock lists, hmm perhaps even making them some kind of limited ritual?

edit: sorry forgot about druids and bards and curing. So you can probably just simply remove cleric and paladin.

 

[pukunui]

edit: sorry forgot about druids and bards and curing. So you can probably just simply remove cleric and paladin.

Yeah, I'm happy with bards and druids being able to heal. Rangers, too, I guess, although I'm thinking of implementing the spell-less variant, which still has the healing poultice option. Plus there's the Healer feat.

I'd mostly just be taking away things like bless, divination, raise dead, and spiritual weapon. Plus the turning of undead and such.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Anyone got any suggestions?

For the deities thing: Strength of Faith to innate magic (Sorcerer-like) may not be that big a leap. It could become a plot-arc focus. What if a rival/villain prophet or messiah figure emerges whose dogma contradicts some of what your Cleric and/or Paladin believe in or stand for. They must set out to prove that he's a false prophet, that his powers don't really come from the god. That might involve all sorts of quests to sacred places, searches for relics, crises of faith, etc... so there's your travelogue and episodic structure.

And, in the end they discovery that, yes, the prophet does get his power from some innate heritage - but so do the other divine characters, so, perhaps, do all such characters. But, saving grace, they identify the prophets heritage as something unpleasant - diabolic perhaps - while their own heritage may trace back to a more legitimate figure, a demi-god or avatar or race of angelic beings or whatever fits, or, maybe to another, more neutral source, but their power is /shaped/ by their faith.

What do you do when you aren't entirely happy with how a campaign has worked out over a period of time and you feel you want to make changes?

Make the players the focus and driving force of those changes - and be open to them /not/ being precisely what you were going for.

 

[steeldragons]

@SteelDragon:Ouch. For the record, I am thoroughly enjoying the other game I'm DMing. Admittedly, that's a Tyranny of Dragons game set in the Forgotten Realms, so I've just been running it more or less as is, with just a few tweaks.

This campaign is a homebrew. I had a specific vision of what I wanted it to be like, but through no one's fault but my own, it has not turned out to be that way. No, it's not that players' fault. It's my fault.

Why shouldn't I be allowed to enjoy myself, though? It's not like I'm getting paid to DM.

*sigh* Is this what they call a strawman?

No one said you aren't "allowed to enjoy [your]self." I said the fact you are not "entirely enjoying", your original words, yourself is not a valid excuse, in my none too humble opinion, to cancel a campaign the players have no problem with nor, in my continuing not so humble opinion, for a DM to bring up as a reason for anything.

I love to DM but there are plenty of times things don't go as planned. There are plenty of times I'm not "entirely enjoying" myself. Players arguing about gods know what rules' minutia, wasting game time on non-game related tangents, waiting -constantly-on the same player to declare actions...the fraggin' pizza getting cold or soda getting warm! There are a million ways/times I am not "entirely enjoying" myself, as the DM.

The answer, again, is suck it up and deal with it. If you don't like the way the game is going now...change it. Make it something you will enjoy. No question. A "no- divine-classes-this-time-do-over-cuz-I-didn't-think-things-in-a-distant-gods-world- through- at- the- beginning- of- the- campaign" is an unacceptable option, to me, as a DM.

You wanted to be creative [creating a homebrew]. That's awesome! Get creative. Make it work!

 

[pukunui]

Strength of Faith to innate magic (Sorcerer-like) may not be that big a leap.

One option I have considered is changing clerics and paladins to known spells rather than prepared spells. That could make them more like sorcerers. But I'd still have to deal with the obviously divine magic that they can cast.

It could become a plot-arc focus.

Yes, it could, but to be perfectly honest, I'm not that interested in doing something like that.

*sigh* Is this what they call a strawman?

I don't know. Is it? I think perhaps you are getting too semantic here. Let's leave the word "entirely" out of it. Let's just say that I'm not enjoying myself anymore - that is, it was fun before, but the prospect of continuing with the status quo is not appealing.

I love to DM but there are plenty of times things don't go as planned.

I'm well aware of that. There are plenty of things that I do just suck up (many of them along the same lines as your own examples). I'm just not sure that this is one that I can suck up.

 

[steeldragons]

Not really, no.

You asked what to do, I've given my advice.

Better luck next time. I'm out.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Second, I had originally envisioned the campaign world as having distant gods who may or may not exist. I wanted to have religions be more like the real world - or other fantasy settings like Eberron and Game of Thrones. But now that I've got both a cleric and a paladin in the party, I'm struggling to really emphasize that idea. It's hard to say that the gods may not exist when you've got people walking around performing miracles in their names.

What if they run into a corrupt NPC cleric of a lawful good deity who is subverting the church to his own ends without actually even believing in the religion? Sort of a Cardinal Richlieu sort of figure. That ought to raise some questions in their minds as to whether the "miracles" really are miracles or just another kind of magic, once they figure out just how cynical this powerful cleric's faith is.

The fact that the "miracles" can be be dispelled in the exact same way as arcane magic ought to raise some questions too. And if it were actually a god intervening on your behalf in combat, why would hitting Father Brian with a stick hard enough make the miracle go away? It looks like a spell, smells like a spell, quacks like a spell... maybe it really is a spell and Father Brian is deluded about the nature of what it is that he is "worshipping."

 

[Viking Bastard]

I don't know what to do with the distant gods bit, other than make it clear that a lot of NPCs just don't buy it. Just as much as Tony Stark scoffs at "magic" as merely being science beyond our knowledge, I find it perfectly understandable that many would see "divine" magic as mere arcane tricks and not as proof of any godly intervention. I mean, in any case, the presence of divine casters doesn't make a campaign revolve about gods. I've run campaigns revolving around "The Gods" and their machinations, and games where the background religions clearly contradict each others, but with all sides employing by-the-book Clerics without any explanation. You can go heavy handed and undermine the PCs beliefs, or you can just make the world at large not care about the PCs' religious convictions.

As for the PCs being stuck in place, I recommend blowing the place up, and preferably, make it their own damn fault.

 

[77IM]

pukunui:

1) The travel thing seems easy to solve. Nuke the town. Now the party HAS to move on. Have them bring their favorite NPCs with them as refugees!

2) The cleric thing is tricky. If your players are making cleric and paladin characters it's probably because the WANT to play those characters. Denying them requires a lot of up-front buy in, so it's worth exploring compromise options first.

There are plenty of ways to make the gods seem distant while still allowing divine magic. Have the gods in your world done anything BUT grant spells? If not, consider calling into question the "reality" of these divine gifts. Who's to say gods are granting those gifts, and not some other force? If the PCs are high enough level to start travelling the planes, they may uncover evidence that clerical powers are not divine at all. Maybe they travel to a foreign land where the clerics are blatant atheists, even anti-theists. Or maybe they come face-to-face with the "gods" and they are horrible tentacled abominations from beyond time and space.

Church politics is also a great way to tarnish divine power: If the selling of indulgences was enough to start a reformation, imagine what charging for raise dead will do!

If it were me, I'd make divine distance an official part of the world's history and mythology. E.g., the Age of Legends ended nearly 3,000 years ago. Since then, the divine domains have been sealed off by the Adamantine Gate and no-one has heard so much as a peep out of the gods. (Create several competing myths explaining why.) You can summon Solars and Planetars who live in the astral plane, and or commune with them or whatever, but they're clearly not gods and their knowledge and authority is limited. Clerics can still channel divine power, just as the sun god keeps the sun lit and earth goddess keeps the world spinning, but anyone claiming prophecy or miracles is probably a quack. (I'd remove the cleric's "pray for a miracle" class option; they get the spells, but it's up to them to use that power wisely.)