D&D General How Weird Do You Like Your D&D

[Incenjucar]

Venture Brothers. Wacky but sincere.

I ran a six year long campaign that started with a scene with vampire mermaids and an angel pirate captain. There was the time the party snuck into a drug den by stealthing through a room where two giff were having a snog. The big bad before the real big bad ended up the Silver Sweeper after being driven mad, coated in ur-metal, given a broom, and taken over with a psychic minion subclass. I could go on.

 

[billd91]

Depends on the campaign. Some campaigns I like the weirdness more than others. It really helps when the players are roughly of the same mind. It's not so good when you want a relatively straight campaign but have one player who always brings the weirdness.

 

[Clint_L]

I currently use a version Exandria as my world, which is a more or less traditional fantasy setting, but I focus on areas that aren't much in the actual play shows, and add an extra dose of Lovecraftian horror.

 

[Clint_L]

Depends on the campaign. Some campaigns I like the weirdness more than others. It really helps when the players are roughly of the same mind. It's not so good when you want a relatively straight campaign but have one player who always brings the weirdness.

Yeah, we could have a whole thread on that one player who you love as a friend and can be very fun, but also is basically doing a whole different campaign.

 

[overgeeked]

On a scale of 1 to 10…How weird do you like your D&D?

Mine goes to 11.

Seriously. I love weird D&D. The weirder the better. That’s one of the many, many things I miss about old-school D&D. It’s the main draw of various OSR games like Old-School Essentials and Dungeon Crawl Classics. Sprinkle in a bit of WFRP chaos and corruption and chef’s kiss. Love me some Appendix N, pulp fantasy, sword & sorcery, science-fantasy, Philip K. Dick new wave sci-fi…mix it up and go wander through the mélange for awhile.

 

[jgsugden]

I want the DM to be interested in the setting and the players to appreciate the game. That can cover a huge spectrum of gaming experiences of widely differing levels of weirdness.

I've played in cartoonish Paranoia games. I've played in D&D where we were bumbling goblins trying to sneak into an opera to steal something we clearly did not understand. I've played in a Supes game where my character's heroic power was being able to do a Groundhog Day of the last 10 seconds (I could repeat my turn if I did not like how it turned out) and I used it to just break the DM's brain.

I've also played in a political conspiracy game where the PCs spent many sessions on intrigue and espionage between combats. I've played in games where everything was moral grey and it was a struggle to choose what we wanted to do with our capabilities because everything was some shade of wrong - including inaction. I've played in games where the decisions we made would change the course of a campaign world that had existed for decades.

All of those were outstanding. I am very adaptable. I just want something that everyone is enthusiastic about playing.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I don't think a scale is how I even think about it.

I like non-standard Fatansty, non-medieval stuff, A gorilla with a pair of punt guns grafted to its shoulders is my kind of weird.

Literally anything from the Far Realms, trying her to use tentacles and slimy to be creepy while just being nonsensical (things exploding into horse-sized ticks) is not.

IMO, nonsensical is often conflated for weirdness, but they're not really the same.

Weirdness may not function according to the principles you're used to, but it should have its own internally consistent principles. They can oftentimes be reasoned out through sufficient observation. Whereas nonsense has no principles (beyond maybe whatever the DM feels like at the moment).

 

[overgeeked]

To paraphrase Syndrome, if everything is weird then nothing is weird. Or at least it feels less weird.

Exactly this. It loses the shine if everything’s always weird. Certain people, places, or things cranking up the weird are great. Lots of disparate weird stuff, great. Everything everywhere all at once? Great movie, but not good for the level of weird in the game.

 

[James Gasik]

I generally try to avoid super weirdness, though I am constantly trying to evoke a sense of wonder in my players. What I tend to do is isolate the weirdness to places where it makes sense to exist, like the time my players ventured into the Feywild to rescue the daughter of a Gnome merchant and an entire town which had been absorbed into that realm.

While there, they encountered rampant wild magic, sunlight that didn't burn vampires, goblin snow ninjas, Father Winter leaving them presents, and a Pheldagrif.

But this wasn't something they'd normally encounter in the game world, obviously.

 

[CleverNickName]

How weird do I like my D&D? Here's a piece of artwork that inspired me to develop a whole new campaign:

Medusa pirates, orc druids riding dinosaurs, tallships with eldritch cannons, swashbuckling sorcerers...hell yes. The artwork is from M:tG's Ixalan set, and I borrowed a lot of elements from Tribality Games's "Seas of Vodari" campaign to flesh it all out.

So yeah. Pretty weird.