How Weird Should D&D Be?

[Henry]

It's more accurate to say the typically D&D setting has a thin veneer of romanticized Medieval Europe covering a chunky, gooey core of Gelatinous Cubes (self-explanatory), talking giant lynxes (AD&D Monster Manual), ancient machines (see Lum the Mad, Apparatus, Kwalish), laser-shooting floating eyes (Beholder), brain-eating psychic aliens (Mind Flayer), giant insect monsters (numerous), a cornucopia of deadly molds/fungi (more numerous), dinosaurs (even more numerous -- wow Gygax must have really liked dinosaurs!), man-eating treasure chests (mimic), flaming swords, freezing swords, weird magic item stolen from Road Runner cartoons (Portable Hole), and so on.

True, though I hope as a default players can't play beholders or giant lynxes, or buy portable holes.

Besides that, most of that is peripheral to the majority of the game. A character could adventure their whole life and never encounter most of those, compared to a magic sword, or an elemental, or an orc, or a goblin. I'd keep these kinds of things on the fringes, as they were for most of D&D's history.

 

[Oni]

I'd say while weirdness is part of it, there's a difference between "weirdness in the setting" and "weirdness in the game." In the rulebooks, even from OD&D, it's always been traditional sword and sorcery available to the players, but then in the settings (like Blackmoor and Greyhawk") the weirdness was things the characters encountered, more to set as a contrast to the world they knew than anything else. Characters in settings encountered robots, but weren't encouraged to play robot characters. It's true that Gary did say in the )D&D books that the DM and players could work out anything together from playing dragons on down, but he did pointedly stay away from any advice about how it was done, and backpedaled from even that in AD&D.

As I mentioned in the guslinger thread, for default D&D? let's have the full gamut of traditional and "near-traditional" sword and sorcery (fighters, monks, barbarians, fighters, the works!) but I'd rather see anything outside of "sword and sorcery" as supplemental, so that the majority of players will build up their D&D like Legoes, rather than the equivalent of having to strip out factory standard elements from an already-built car.

Honestly what I would really like to see isn't so much built in weirdness so much as have the book flat out say that if you want a game with robots and lasers and people from the real world and horseless carriages and whatever other silliness you can imagine then you can do it, you should do it, and it's still D&D. I feel like a lot of people can't step outside the genre box if they're not given permission.

 

[Anselyn]

How weird should the default presentation of D&D be? Should it entice players to traditional fantasy or beyond it? It seems like something the game originally embraced at its inception with OD&D's robots, Temple of the Frog, and the suggestion that players could play pretty much anything.

I think OD&D-style, at least in the way weplayed it, had quite a few "weird" through-the-looking-glass type things where up would become down, you'd arbitrarily be shrunk or your characteristics would be temporarily jumbled.

Fun like this _was_ fun - but can't really be grounded in a semsible gameworld physics. Er, hence the weirdness!

If you view this as magic-as-magic rather than magic-as-technology; it may have a place in D&D.

 

[Incenjucar]

Why remove the silly? Perfectly brilliant engineers and scientists have done silly things. Why shouldn't the Int 18 wis 6 Wizards do the same?

Maybe he was trying to woo a Druid? Or just wanted a portable herb garden to take with him while adventureing.

Ideally the PCs could be laughing their armoured butts off, right up until the moment it pulps one of them, and then seasons his corpse with chevril and thyme.

I'm all for a Silly Monsters book. But, unlike the usual April Fools nonsense, they need to actually make the rules balanced.

I cannot stand it when they do April Fools monsters or spells and they aren't actually usable in the game as-is.

 

[the Jester]

Heh!

I had "elves" who were crash landed Greys- their tech allowed them to alter their appearance to being more human-like, and their "stasis fields" that made interstellar travel practical also accounted for their long lives and the time distortion effects of being overnight in "Underhill".

[MENTION=19675]Dannyalcatraz[/MENTION], have you ever read Elfquest? It's very cool and umm, SPOILER ALERT, your idea sort of relates to it.

All the comics are online (for free!) here.

 

[Savage Wombat]

You know, the presence of weird sci-fi-like elements goes a long way towards pleasing the Exploration-style gamers out there. If it's just another owlbear ("A mad wizard made it") it's just another fight. But if there's a reason the flumph is in your campaign world, and the heroes can find this out, they'll really feel like they discovered something.

 

[Aeolius]

But if there's a reason the flumph is in your campaign world, and the heroes can find this out, they'll really feel like they discovered something.

I remember in my first online game when the PCs not only discovered that flumphs, called uphlum by the locals, were related to both mind flayers and aboleth but also there were five subspecies of flumphs and a massive flumph goddess known as the Great Illuminator.

 

[The Human Target]

Weeeeeeeeeeird.

 

[Ratskinner]

Weirdness has a long and storied place within D&D. However, I think it shows up in the monster manuals and the adventures more than the core or basic rules. Weirdness or Sci Fi-ishness is one of the dials that individual groups and DMs should be able to tune. (Usually just by including or excluding certain monsters, races, and the like, IME.) The game should definitely leave room for wild and wooly weirdness.

I don't, however, feel that Pistol-Wielding Warforged Half-flumphs should be part of that basic presentation. They belong more to either setting or adventure supplements or modules. I'd be okay with a "Renaissance" modules that added firearms, though.

 

[rogueattorney]

I like having a fairly mundane "center" of the campaign and then have things become progressively weirder the farther the pcs wander from the center. This works both vertically (levels of the dungeon) and horizontally (hexcrawls into the wilderness).

I prefer starting pcs to be relatively mundane, too. I think the weirdness feels best when it's discovered by people who are relatively normal. Later pcs in the campaign can be sourced from whatever population exists where the campaign is currently set. (In other words, if a new pc joins the party when the party is in a Burroughs/Verne style lost world, that new pc might be a caveman or a dino-man.)

Lucky for me, my current DM runs a campaign that fits my style completely. It's set in 11th C. Cornwall, but as we go down into the dungeon, we find all sorts of crazy things... a giant with a chainsaw, purple aliens with laser pistols, a cancer cult, and etc.