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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6424286" data-attributes="member: 2067">For now, anyway.It's probably a sign of me getting older.One of the power fantasies that D&D allows for is self-sufficient characters who answer to no one, who improve their own skills by slaying their own monsters and never need anyone else. They come into town from Elsewhere, on some impossible mission, looking for only gold or glory, and leave just as suddenly, attached to no one, without responsibility or background. They are orphans or outcasts or otherwise abandoned souls who needed no one and answer to only themselves. They are Rootless Vagabonds, self-contained engines of freewheeling semi-heroism. YAWN.These days, I tend to find such characters taxing, cliche, and a little annoying. They're bland. They have no arc, no growth, no origin, no fate. no goals. They exist to slot into some excuse to slay monsters and then leave, as indistinct and irrelevant as the rest.As a DM, I see a character like this enter my games, and I kind of sigh and shrug. "Well, I guess we've got another one for the pile of empty ciphers who talk in funny voices, whose goal doesn't go beyond 'kill the bad guys.'"Which isn't to say that those characters are BAD per se. Just that I'm tired of them. Bored of them, even. They join no organizations, help NPC's as only mercenaries do, want only the most materialistic of things. XP and GP, GP and XP, one more fight, one more goblin, one more MacGuffin. They have nothing external that they value, nothing they're committed to beyond their own empowerment. That's all well and good for one character in a party, or an entire party here or there, to explore those angles, but probably 90% of the characters I've seen in D&D fall into this camp: no connections, no alliances, no memberships, no relationships, and no investigation of how or why that might be weird. I don't necessarily just blame the players, here. I feel like most players don't come up with characters like this intentionally, but rather through an odd combination of design accident and system assumptions, they arrive here. 5e's background charts help a bit, but they've got little in the way of lasting effects, and they're easy to ignore. Anyway, I float this thread because it sometimes seems like an oddly controversial idea in D&D, to leverage these connections in play. I've seen players try to create characters with "no strings attached," or who resist things like training NPC's or joining organizations on the idea that they don't want to commit to anything. I've heard players say, when pressed for background, that they don't want to give the DM any "fodder" by having things like living parents or family members, or things they value that aren't their swords and their spellbooks. I've had some success in turning these players around in practice, but the initial resistance always surprises me, and my initial reaction is usually along the lines of "Why do you want to be SO. FREAKIN'. BORING?" But I bet there's plenty of legit reasons why some players are gun-shy about that.So I'm hoping to see why it's controversial, why people might be gun-shy, and what might be some strategies for overcoming that. I've got some tentative and partial ideas, but I'd like to see what the ENWorld zeitgeist says about it. Are you sick of rootless vagabonds? Are you fond of them? Why might they be especially popular? When might they be appropriate? How can we help guide folks to be less mercenary vigilante troubadours and more heroes with investments in elements of the world? Curious about what you folks might say!</blockquote>

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