D&D 5E Minor rant - y'ever just hate your players' characters?

[Herobizkit]

I asked the Drow player what he wants by way of a setting.

He replied that he wants a Grey and Gray Morality world that features a religious war (rival paladins and clerics) as well as an X-Men style treatment for mages (people who can bend reality are to be feared and controlled by the power-less).

Given I've already introduced slavery, this is starting to look far less wacky and far more grimdark.

But then he also wants the wackiness of a cartoon called "Gravity Falls".

So how, how, how do I make the above silly without being ham-fisted about it and at the same time fun for ME?!

Ugh.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Well...the ways in which arcane masters may be controlled could be ridiculous.

For example: arcanists are rendered powerless by extremely colorful arrays. It affects their psyches like yellow affects Green Lanterns. In such a world, not only might everything be more colorful than a Warner Brothers cartoon, the way you'd control a Mage is too dress them in in bright clothes and cover them in clown paint. Thus the origin of clowns- and the fear they inspire. Rainbow spell failure replaces arcane spell failure.

 

[MarkB]

I asked the Drow player what he wants by way of a setting.

He replied that he wants a Grey and Gray Morality world that features a religious war (rival paladins and clerics) as well as an X-Men style treatment for mages (people who can bend reality are to be feared and controlled by the power-less).

Given I've already introduced slavery, this is starting to look far less wacky and far more grimdark.

But then he also wants the wackiness of a cartoon called "Gravity Falls".

So how, how, how do I make the above silly without being ham-fisted about it and at the same time fun for ME?!

Ugh.

Grim'n'gritty and fun'n'wacky don't have to be separate genres - it's possible for both to exist within the same story or campaign. Look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer - the plotlines were frequently dark and serious, but that didn't stop the show from having plenty of humour and wisecracking.

You could also take the elements he wants, and play them for humour. [MENTION=19675]Dannyalcatraz[/MENTION] has you covered on the mages - I'd suggest going in a similar direction with the religious war. Make it a schism between factions of the same religion, over something really, really petty - think of the schism in the Cats' religion in Red Dwarf, over the colour of the hats the staff were supposed to wear in the fabled fast-food-themed afterlife of Fuschal. Give both sides really similar names, and make it almost impossible for a layperson to tell the factions apart by sight.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Or the Big Endians and Little Endians from Gulliver's Travels.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu

 

[Starfox]

I like the death flag idea, bit i'd not give xp (or anything permanent) as the reward. That might make death-averse players feel they have to raise the death flag to keep up. Alsi, players might raise the death flag and then surrender or run away


I'd make the reward something big but temporary / like advantage for the rest of the scene, or an instant rest and recovery. Somrthing that allows heroics NOW.

 

[pemerton]

I just don't understand why so many DMs won't say "no" to players. Those DMs call other DMs controlling for saying "no" to players, but then they complain about how their players are ruining the fun of the game and they end up burning out. I've been called a controlling DM. Ironically, those that called me controlling couldn't keep a campaign going for more than a few months when they are DMing.

You might be over-generalising here. Most GMs I've played under have, by my standards, been annoyingly controlling (in some cases, to the extent of overt railroading). I'm still GMing 30-odd years later, but I'm not sure that all those others are.

The problem with that point of view, is it isn't appreciated by everyone. It isn't appreciated by a large portion of GMs. The seat-of-your-pants GMing-style that is mostly subservient to a group of open-world PCs with no direct line to their goals except ruining immersion until a goal is reached or death isn't for every GM.

Whose immersion? If players don't care for their own immersion, that's their prerogative. Are you referring to the GM's immersion? (Whatever exactly that might be.)

Nothing in the OP suggests to me that the players in question are setting out to ruin the game.

 

[Herobizkit]

Just a happy update.

It seems the Drow player has taken 'center stage'. This means that the Drow's player will pretty much direct where the story goes.

And so, into the Sunless Citadel they went...

[obvious spoilers ahead, but the module came out in, like, Y2K or so]

And lo, did they agree to rescue the Dragon from the goblins. And verily, did they laid siege to the goblin stronghold and discovered the captured Tiny (3.0's monster stat block) White Dragon wyrmling.

I played her* up to be like an overconfident house cat, hissing and spitting at people as they entered her 'lair', then leaping and flailing with teeth and claws at the Half-Orc who approached her. He swatted it down to 1 hp after the Halfiing Sorcerer and Half-Elf Bard had chipped at it with ranged attacks, where I then had it cower like a kitten and exclaim "I'll be good."

*(The Half-Orc's player asked me if the Dragon was male or female. I remembered that he was playing a priestess of Sif, champion of women and protector of the battered and abused, and decided that she was a female who was being raised to be a mate for Ashardalon... should he return.)

While the Dragon was being tended to, the Drow darted down a side hallway to deal with reinforcements. I had the last goblin in the hallway surrender without a fight and the Drow decided that he needed a valet and a contact to use with the goblin tribe. Butters the Goblin Valet was born.

After some parlay with Meepo the 'Dragonkeeper' (who's terrible at his job), Butters (who's a great source of info about his clan) and Calcryx (who doesn't like either faction), The Half-Orc decides that her divine purpose is to protect the dragon, and the sorcerer jumped in to befriend it and teach it things [he's got the Sage background]. Calcryx opted to join the party over being returned to captivity - which made Meepo even more sad.

Then, off to Goblintown, where Butters shows the group his "home" (a large communal room where they crap, eat, and live) and the throne room of Durnn, Hobgoblin Warchief. The Drow and Durnn have a back-and-forth, trying to assess each other's strength and worth, and I thought an alliance was all but sealed...

Then the Drow revealed that he WAS a Drow and demanded Durnn's surrender.

Then the mass melee began...

I dropped a subtle hint that both Meepo and Durnn had been in the Underdark before, as on the next level of the dungeon, there is a path written on the map that plainly says "To The Underdark" but is deliberately not keyed to the adventure. They may deign to explore it... but with luck, the Drow will opt to collapse it. Don't want any pesky Drow peeking their noses up there...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Sounds like you're off to an auspicious start! Also, liking the goblin names.

 

[Herobizkit]

Yup, seems to be okay.

Aside: had a chat with the guys about general tastes in RP and our Drow player pretty much laid out his tastes, tastes which don't gel with the kind of games I'd enjoy DMing.

It seems that, when it comes to thematic 'formats', past = Fantasy, modern = Wild West/tech/Firefly and future = Space Opera, and there is no mixing for him.

This is a darn shame, because ideally, I'd want to blend all of these together in a Modern setting. He said he didn't mind (for example) "Orcs in space" so long as they were clearly Alien.

Normally, this wouldn't bother me but it does mean that he would sit out any game that did a genre-mix which would bring my players down to two... the two players who don't want center stage type characters.

It's kind of a moot point as I don't really have the energy or the time to run two campaigns as well as play in a third, but it does make me grumble that he doesn't appear open to new things.

Can't argue with taste, though.