"Oddities" in fantasy settings - the case against "consistency"

[Bedrockgames]

Well, for one thing Gollum ain't exactly player-character material. He's a plot-device NPC who gets drafted into a party somewhat against his will and then does nothing but cause conflict there.

I think this gets at a whole different topic than setting consistency but of character creation parameters and monster-NPC design parameters. You can definitely have games that allow a character like Golem as a class. But a lot of games a choice like Gollum might present balance issues or party conflict issues so it wouldn't necessarily be on the table for character creation. But a setting where Golum is simply an NPC isn't a violation of setting consistency. NPCs and Monsters don't have to follow the same rules as making player characters (i.e. the GM can introduce a unique monster who is the product of a divine curse and was once human, it is only inconsistent with the setting if Divine Curses make no sense in it).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think most instances of this are the player outrightly trying to be a jerk. I think that they're just more focused on themselves than they are on the group as a whole, with no way to manage a happy medium between doing what they want to do and doing what's fun for everyone. It's an instance of them not being able to have fun unless they can make things all about them all (or at least most) of the time.

Now, that's far from the only way that someone can be disruptive at the table. But in my experience it's a problem that very often dovetails with the "let's overturn a convention" idea, as it very often seems to be another way of saying "my character is the most special of all."

I'm honestly not sure why anyone would think that "not being allowed to overturn convention" can at all be equated to "not being allowed to contribute." The "contribution" comes not through defining how the setting works, but through what your character does in the course of play. Do you really have to be the last mage in the entire world to have a fun time? To leave your mark on the game world? To be a hero of the ages? If you already have a vast world with myriad adventures waiting, secrets to be uncovered, enemies to fight, and treasures to be won, why is the only way you can "contribute" to be to rewrite the underlying truths that the world is based on?

I disagree with your suspicion, as it conflicts with what I've personally experienced and heard from others. If someone wants to overturn convention by having their character be some sort of "chosen one," that's a big red flag for me.

Which is fine. Seriously, that's a perfectly cromulent method of play. But to me, the conventions of the settings (and their expressions under the game rules) are like a big bucket of legos: the more I have, the more things I can make, and it helps that the legos all interact in a uniform manner. Overturning convention is like disassembling pieces of the game world that's been built with those legos, though, which can range from being aesthetically unpleasant to possibly causing the entire thing to topple over.

To be super honest, I think the whole thing kind of reeks of GM privilege thinking.

In my own experience, the greatest gold is the player who thinks beyond what is just laid out. This 'Last Mage' example is perfect. Sure, the player wants a character that has a purpose and who's existence and actions can have meaning in the world. That's the highest acknowledgement and engagement with that world and gift of meaning to it that any player is capable of.

Now, some player might be pushy or selfish enough to only want to be the center of attention, and sure that's bad, but I think that kind of player is A) exceedingly rare, and B) deserves to be reasoned with, and C) could potentially still be exploited as a resource if the GM knows how to handle them correctly. I've had many sorts of players, some (always young ones) who fit that bill. I've also had some GREAT players who were a little more assertive and needed the GM to make sure they didn't push anyone around. I recall one in particular, very nice guy, who was in 2 of my 4e campaigns. He was a great asset, even if he was always inventing things and hamming it up or kind of stage managing the whole party at times. I just made sure the other players were getting equal say in things. Frankly nobody in that group was a shrinking violet anyway, but the one quiet player got focused on enough and it was all good.

Obviously nobody can say there's no such thing as a problem with a player, but why does it always boil down to certain people having an issue with players? Could it be there are other issues? I think it's well worth considering, but gosh, dare to imply players might get their way once in a while and you're committing heresy.

 

[Alzrius]

To be super honest, I think the whole thing kind of reeks of GM privilege thinking.

In my own experience, the greatest gold is the player who thinks beyond what is just laid out. This 'Last Mage' example is perfect. Sure, the player wants a character that has a purpose and who's existence and actions can have meaning in the world. That's the highest acknowledgement and engagement with that world and gift of meaning to it that any player is capable of.

Now, some player might be pushy or selfish enough to only want to be the center of attention, and sure that's bad, but I think that kind of player is A) exceedingly rare, and B) deserves to be reasoned with, and C) could potentially still be exploited as a resource if the GM knows how to handle them correctly. I've had many sorts of players, some (always young ones) who fit that bill. I've also had some GREAT players who were a little more assertive and needed the GM to make sure they didn't push anyone around. I recall one in particular, very nice guy, who was in 2 of my 4e campaigns. He was a great asset, even if he was always inventing things and hamming it up or kind of stage managing the whole party at times. I just made sure the other players were getting equal say in things. Frankly nobody in that group was a shrinking violet anyway, but the one quiet player got focused on enough and it was all good.

Obviously nobody can say there's no such thing as a problem with a player, but why does it always boil down to certain people having an issue with players? Could it be there are other issues? I think it's well worth considering, but gosh, dare to imply players might get their way once in a while and you're committing heresy.

I see it as exactly the opposite: PC exceptionalism run amok.

Leaving aside the issue of how rare it is to run into a player who does this (other than to say that I wouldn't categorize it as being "exceedingly" so), I agree that players thinking beyond what's laid out is a good thing, but when it's done in the context of the course of play. Characters who are established before the game even begins to be "special" in a way that no one else is seem to overlook the idea of exceptionalism as being – not an initial state that they begin playing with – but as a status that they earn over the course of the game. If a character wants to bring back magic to a world that's lost it, that should be a campaign goal that they're working toward (ideally with the input and contributions from the rest of the group), not something that they've already accomplished in their backstory.

It's the same reason why I agree with the idea that a character's backstory should be their first three levels. If you can't come up with a way of making your character interesting besides saying that they start out being able to do the impossible, then to my mind, that's not much different from wanting to start the game at level 20 when everyone else is at level 1. You're already doing things no one else can do, and are likely expecting to have a major impact on the setting and its people, simply by being who you are, before session number one has even started. "I'm the one who changed the world" should be how you finish the campaign, not how you start it.

And in all honesty, characters who are defined by being special right from the get-go seem to work against the group's fun anyway, at least in my experience. My friends still talk about the time one of them (hitting a series of exceptional rolls) killed a lizardman priest who was levitating inside the top of a hollow tower where they were fighting (on the staircase that hugged the inner walls of the structure), and then jumped onto his floating corpse and used his own weight to ride it down to ground level, delivering a healing spell to the barbarian who had fallen a few rounds previously, saving his life when said barbarian was one round away from dying. No one talks about the character who's backstory was that he was the son of Mystra, goddess of magic.

 

[MGibster]

This is such a weird thread. I am not even sure what is the point, besides deriding people who care about world building. Consistent doesn't mean homogenous. It means that things make certain amount of sense both logically and thematically. And of course it is all made up, it is fiction. Doesn't mean you can make up anything and remain consistent.

Admittedly I'm a bit confused by this as well. Consistency doesn't mean there aren't exceptions or extraordinary individuals. In the vast majority of games, player characters are somewhat exceptional. Even in a game like Call of Cthulhu where the characters are "normal" people, just encountering and surviving against mythos threats makes them somewhat extraordinary.

In my own experience, the greatest gold is the player who thinks beyond what is just laid out. This 'Last Mage' example is perfect. Sure, the player wants a character that has a purpose and who's existence and actions can have meaning in the world. That's the highest acknowledgement and engagement with that world and gift of meaning to it that any player is capable of.

And in my own experience, the last mage player is telling me he doesn't want to engage in the campaign that the GM or the other players want to enage in. The message he's sending is, "The hell with what everyone else wants. We're going to to this my way."

To be super honest, I think the whole thing kind of reeks of GM privilege thinking.

The GM does the lion's share of the work in running a campaign. Not all privilege is unearned.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I'm amused at how most of the negative experiences in this thread seem to mostly be "we started a game where nobody had any kind of conversation about what characters they would play and then continued to not have a conversation after we felt like it had negative consequences". Truly, talking with your friends like a person solves 99% of table issues. Quit attributing malice to your friends.

I kinda wanna push back on this, talking doesn't really accomplish anything, when you talk positions are stated-- the give and take of negotiation, the system of values each person has about what's fair for them to give up and why, those things are all much more relevant than talking, and that doesn't automatically happen just because you communicate, though communication is a prerequisite, it's much more about small-group social power dynamics than it is about anything, and the just talk approach crashes on the rocks these threads do-- "What is each person obligated to give way on?" it also gets kinda problematic, because everyone kind of takes for granted that their preferred value set is the natural conclusion of talking. But like, talking is all we do here, and we never resolve anything.

 

[bloodtide]

Consistency?

This is about Toxic Players. There is a huge group of players just waiting to be triggered and try to ruin a game. As soon as the DM says "no something" the player gets enraged and triggered as that "one thing" is "suddenly" the one and only thing that player must do.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Internal consistency. Middle Earth, despite the oddities pointed out in the OP, has a strong underlying internal consistency which goes a logn way toward making it believable enough that we can immerse ourselves in it

Ok, but what character, say from a fairly typical list of D&D type fantasy tropes is going to undermine that? I can think of none!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Ok, but what character, say from a fairly typical list of D&D type fantasy tropes is going to undermine that? I can think of none!

Certainly that depends on what sort of world we are trying to portray?

 

[Lanefan]

It’s not. He would not have come up with the concept without the proposed setting.

What’s the point of the world without magic? Is it to prompt conflict for the players to bring to the game and to discover what happens? Or is it to limit what’s available?

I would assume it's to limit what's available, both to the PCs and to the GM.

It doesn’t blow the premise away. The premise implies that there must have been a last mage. All it does is say “suppose that is one or more of the PCs”.

"Must have been" implies the past, "one or more of the PCs" implies the present; and there's a big difference between the two in how the concept is likely to play out. There's a big difference between "magic is dead" and "magic is dying"; the player here is trying to take the former and turn it into the latter, forcing the GM to sort out all the ramifications of magic otherwise not quite being dead.

Well, I think there’s plenty about Tolkien’s world that defies immersion and consistency… and I think many of the explanations that help maintain consistency have been applied after the fact. Again… it’s all made up.

Well, as we no longer have JRRT around to ask directly, all we have is conjecture. That said, given his approach I'm quite willing to accept that everything he put in those books had a reason for being there, and that it all sat on a very solid and consistent chassis.

Why is it player vs. GM? Again, this carries the expectation that the GM has some kind of agenda for the setting beyond prompting interesting ideas from the players.

The GM obviously has some sort of agenda or idea or conecpt in mind, otherwise the no-magic restriction wouldn't be there. Maybe she doesn't want to bother with magic in the campaign because of all the extra rulings and work it entails. Maybe she just wants to see how a no-magic game plays out and-or functions. Maybe she's got a loose plot in mind where the PCs are the ones to return magic to the world. Who knows?

Yeah, gladly.

By this I take it you're not cool with characters moving from one campaign/world to another?

 

[Lanefan]

The the last mage dies and magic is now truly gone.

If that's the case, all is good.

IME it very likely wouldn't be the case, however, as at least one player - be it the one who just lost the first "last mage" or another seeking to switch characters to fill the gap - would try to bring in another mage.

Not if all the other player characters have similar unique things and burning drives. The group will work that out, and there's totally room for other players to be supporting cast if they want to anyhow.

If they want to be the supporting cast, all is good; and some players are cool with this. Others, though, aren't.

It is not the stated premise of the game, it is the proposed, and therefore suggested and tentative, premise of the game, which is open to twists and even outright rejection.

If a GM comes to me and says "Here's the idea I've got, it'll be a no-magic game, you in?", to me that's a binary yes-no question: I'm either in under that premise or I'm out. Why? Because clearly that premise is what the GM wants to run with this time, otherwise she wouldn't have suggested it; and with a strong implication of that's what the GM thinks (at the moment) she's most likely to enjoy. And the GM's enjoyment is rather vital, as the game don't run without its GM and if the GM isn't enjoying running the game it tends to drag the whole thing down.

No, there will be discussion to come to mutual agreement about what everyone will find enjoyable. It's not like the GM has already written (or purchased) hundreds of pages of adventure material. Burning Wheel is not that kind of game.

The GM may, however, have already put a fair amount of thought into the setting and how a lack of magic would affect said setting (and system as well).

Again, it sounds to me like people have been taking "GM's proposed ideas" as "firm autocratic decisions to be accepted meekly" rather than as "laying out a beginning for a conversation".

If the GM doesn't want to run the game then there's no game. Here, she's proposing a no-magic game and the first thing she gets in response is "I want to play a mage". How is that not throwing her concept back in her face? How is that not asking her to run something she's just said she doesn't want to run?

Gollum would be amazing player-character material. He has his own drives, huge challenges to overcome, and in-game conflict is, well, the point of that game!

So BW leans into PvP? That's refreshing, at least.

Any other time I bring up PvP as being a sometimes-fun way to play people brandish holy symbols at me like I'm some sort of undead.

It was supposed to be a no-magic setting, for whom?

The GM, who's the one designing said setting as far as needs be done.

Clearly the table's interests have wandered from the initial suggested, tentative, open-to-discussion proposal.

To the point where they're likely to be seeking a new GM soon, I'd think; unless the GM is really flexible in what she's ready-willing-able to run.