Players creating setting elements

[S'mon]

Stop playing with people whose playstyles vary radically from your own?

No - pretty well _every_ 3e player who gets Leadership creates the cardboard Cleric cohort given the chance, because the in-game advantages are so great. That is independent of the players' basic play style, it's a product of the system. This includes good players, bad players, players whose play style is similar to mine, players whose play style is radically different from mine. One solution is to lower the risk of PC death to such a low level that players see no need for the Cleric cohort, but 3e isn't designed for a low-threat sort of game.

Anyway, that was just a throwaway example. Now that I run C&C, and give PCs the followers I decide come follow them, the problem has vanished.

Something that worked well recently in my Moldvay B/X D&D pbem (loosely based on Keep on the Borderlands) - a female player's Magic-User PC wants to start a brothel at the border castle where she is the acting Magist. She gave me a few very basic ideas for staff - male and female, prostitutes, guards, etc - name, picture, maybe 1-line description. Instead of handing them over to her to play, I introduced them as potential recruits and we did a scene where she met them, negotiations etc, with me playing them. She got to create the setting elements she wanted, but I kept editorial control.

 

[Corsair]

Our DM has a general idea of what his world is like, but many countries are just "names on a map" at this point, with only a few sentences at most of description. He encourages players to volunteer to help flesh out the world, especially if it is to work in a character they want to play. For instance, I wanted to play a psion, but psionics were not present in our current area of his world, so I wrote up the next continent over, a land of gothic architecture, gypsies, and feudal lords, where psionics overshadowed arcane magic.

I got a nice background homeland for my character, the GM got to save himself some time, and the players got a richer, deeper world.

 

[Hussar]

No - pretty well _every_ 3e player who gets Leadership creates the cardboard Cleric cohort given the chance, because the in-game advantages are so great. That is independent of the players' basic play style, it's a product of the system. This includes good players, bad players, players whose play style is similar to mine, players whose play style is radically different from mine. One solution is to lower the risk of PC death to such a low level that players see no need for the Cleric cohort, but 3e isn't designed for a low-threat sort of game

In your experience of course. IME, cohorts have been bards more often than not. Obviously YMMV.

 

[S'mon]

In your experience of course. IME, cohorts have been bards more often than not. Obviously YMMV.

You must have very Lawful players. I guess Bards are good for boosting the whole party, but of the maybe eight free-choice-player-created Cohorts I've seen, 100% were Clerics whose role was to stand beside the PC healing & buffing.