How Accommodating to Player Preferences Should the GM Be?

[grankless]

Some of us GMs, due to career, health or whatever don't have the luxury of gaming with established friends. I've started groups in multiple cities via MeetUp and Facebook ads. Additionally, I run for online groups. These are always strangers, but my fellow gamers still, and most of them appreciate a GM who steps outside their tiny relationship box to game with people they don't know.

This still does not answer why you would rather insult anyone who isn't fitting your preconceived notions rather than having a mature conversation with them and perhaps coming to a compromise that makes you both happy, or perhaps understand them better. This seems like a pretty basic step of the process of making new friends.

 

[Blue]

I'm not spending tens of hours on a map or on world history or on NPC write-ups if there's a risk that I'll have to chuck it and do it all again after that discussion.

Once the campaign starts you are already doing this for any player agency. They might never encounter a particular NPC, might get into an argument with the Duke when he was awarding them medals and never get invited to the masquerade ball you had planned.

Unless you are full-on-railroad, you already are redoing work., And since you can easily veto changes that will have you redo that map, it's not a factor.

First non-negotiable premise: worldbuilding is NOT collaborative.

FOR YOU. That is absolutely not a universal rule.

 

[Lanefan]

I cannot disagree with you in stronger terms.

Back in 3.5 days, I was creating a character and my young daughter wanted to make one as well. What they wanted wasn't channeled into the narrow constrictions of what D&D offers. They weren't trained to think along the lines of how classes grouped things together, they weren't trained to think abotu how ability scores collate with classes, so putting your lowest ability score into Wisdom to be impulsive wasn't the best for a druid. We've been playing D&D, we think along the lines it gives us. Someone new to the hobby does not yet.

All fair; but keep in mind that someone who's that new to the hobby also has no idea around concepts of intra-character balance and-or what might be overpowered or underpowered in relation to the rest of the game. Which means, someone else - usually the DM - might have to step in and sort it out, or even just say no.

The player here isn't trying to be dysfunctional in the least; but unfortunately the end result might unintentionally end up that way regardless, unless someone says no.

 

[Gimby]

After having a game fail fairly recently due to DM burnout, I've got a slightly different perspective on this. It was set in Ravnica, so a fairly open setting regarding character options, but even so everyone worked closely with the DM regarding their characters and ensured they were well integrated with the setting. The problem was that the entire party had designed for toughness and control with poor damage output (I'd chosen to play an abjuration wizard with pure control effects and no damage, for example) so combats ended up dragging out while the DM struggled to challenge the group. As we progressed to the mid levels the problem got increasingly worse as enemy HP pools ballooned.

The overall point is that this needs to be an ongoing conversation - it's important that the DM is enjoying what they are doing.

 

[Blue]

All fair; but keep in mind that someone who's that new to the hobby also has no idea around concepts of intra-character balance and-or what might be overpowered or underpowered in relation to the rest of the game. Which means, someone else - usually the DM - might have to step in and sort it out, or even just say no.

The player here isn't trying to be dysfunctional in the least; but unfortunately the end result might unintentionally end up that way regardless, unless someone says no.

Agree to a point - new players may need experience to understand how to play as part of a party. Dysfunctional is a stronger term than just that to me.

But I don't think that them wanting to try something they have seen elsewhere that doesn't happen to be a base D&D choice, like playing a fairy or a centaur until those options came out, makes 9 out of 10 of them dysfunctional. Which is what I was arguing against.

 

[Theory of Games]

This still does not answer why you would rather insult anyone who isn't fitting your preconceived notions rather than having a mature conversation with them and perhaps coming to a compromise that makes you both happy, or perhaps understand them better. This seems like a pretty basic step of the process of making new friends.

I love how you assume all players are open-minded enough to have "mature conversations" regarding campaign settings and rules systems
How about, you do what's best for your group of friends, and I'll do the same for my groups of strangers?

 

[Lanefan]

Since I do this every campaign, I am proof this isn't true.

I have certain ideas at start of campaign of where I want to go. I am maybe lightly into "Act II", and not married to any of it -- more it's so I can foreshadow but I can change things as long as it doesn't retcon anything that has ever hit the table.

That's story-building, not worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding, the way I see it, is the process of mapping the setting, coming up with its history and backstory, designing its pantheon-cosmology-calendar-cultures-languages-climate-weather, populating it (in vague terms at least, as in "Elves here, Dwarves here, etc.), writing up some key NPCs, and then figuring out the system and-or house rules that you're gonna use to run all this*.

Only after doing all that can one consider what adventures and-or stories might suit; and as by this point you've got something concrete to present to the players in order to assess their interest, this is where you start inviting players in.

* - one can, of course, skip many of these steps by using a canned setting and playing by RAW; but I don't do that.

I had a bunch of worldbuilding and campaign themes that I shared with the players so that they could create characters that fit. Last completed campaign the players had a bunch of large world-based changes they asked. Any of them I could have veto'd or opened for more discussion/compromise. They made some huge changes to the world, and I worked those into the worldbuilding in the two weeks before the first session. Completely? No. Just like I don't have complete ideas for character arcs from receiving their backstories during those two weeks, but I can put them in a city one mentioned or work something into a starting adventure.

Again, I'm not saying allow things that break your worldbuilding. But there's so much that's orthogonal to what you have built. Does your worldbuilding prohibit that there's an Artful Dodger orphen-master in a particular city that one player wants? Then allow it. Does it have spelljammers and inter-crystal sphere trade? Well, that will probably impact too many things so I'd probably go no.

The sense I got earlier was that if a player wanted to drop a spelljammer into such a world I'd be expected to do all the required redesigning; and indeed: no.

So you see your worldbuilding only needs to deal with the changes that are already compatible with what you have, and don't need to complete integrating everything by first session, just what's going to impact that session.

I learned the hard way a long time ago that the better I've got things nailed down before the first session the easier it is to run the game thereafter. At the very least the starting town and realm, the first adventure or two, and the overarching stuff (pantheons, calendar, etc.) has to be hard-coded before the puck drops.

I can (and do) always add things in or expand on things later as the players/PCs discover new areas.

 

[Lanefan]

Once the campaign starts you are already doing this for any player agency. They might never encounter a particular NPC, might get into an argument with the Duke when he was awarding them medals and never get invited to the masquerade ball you had planned.

Unless you are full-on-railroad, you already are redoing work.,

Prepping something I ultimately don't use is still work I only have to do once; and if I don't use it now I've still got it available for later.

And since you can easily veto changes that will have you redo that map, it's not a factor.

Ah - that I still have right of veto wasn't made clear in the prior posts I was responding to. On the contrary, the impression I got was that the players would in effect have veto over me; and be able to send me back to the drawing board after I'd already done what I thought would be most of the work.

 

[Reynard]

There is a class of GM that seems to really disdain players and think of them as, at best, a necessary evil in order to run the campaign they want to.

I sincerely hope those GMs never find players and end up writing the novels they truly wish to.

 

[grankless]

I love how you assume all players are open-minded enough to have "mature conversations" regarding campaign settings and rules systems
How about, you do what's best for your group of friends, and I'll do the same for my groups of strangers?

Yeah, most people are in fact able to able to have normal conversations with other people. I hope you can learn to do the same one day.