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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haltherrion" data-source="post: 5252463" data-attributes="member: 18253">A recent thread got me to thinking about starting a campaign with the players in a military order. I’ve considered it a few times for my campaigns but have always shied away from it due to player objections. Most players seem at best lukewarm to the idea and a few are vociferously opposed to it. While I don’t always give my players a say in the setting, I do give them a say when there might be objections under the theory that if they agree to an unusual setting, the buy-in gives me a little more runway to make it work. To date, I haven’t been able to get them to bite. The irony of it is that in all of my intended military situations, the military order does not remain intact for long. Typically the concept is for the order to be defeated and dispersed in the first scenario. This then gives them ties to people who might help them and also starts them with possibly some unusual gear or mounts but leaves the game direction more in the players’ hands. But I have so far deferred from tipping my hand and the setting starts have been rejected. Often at campaign start, the world is set but I will offer the players one of several starting situations. For our most recent campaign, they had the choices of starting in a petty human kingship, starting in elvish lands or starting in an adventuring/mercenary company. It was always my intent that the later suffer an early defeat and loss of their castle and holdings (which has happened now in the game; the players could have involved themselves with that thread and changed the outcome but chose not to and the company is now dispersed). They chose the elvish lands start (there was more to the descriptions for the players but no need to go into that here). Other times, I’ve tried to interest them in being members of an order of griffon or dragon riders, thinking that a flying mount might overcome their objections to being in an order. Again, the intent was that the order would suffer an early catastrophe and the players would be on their own quickly enough but the dislike for orders is strong enough that they avoided those choices as well. Someday I may just put them in such a setting ask them to trust me. I’m not that interested in running the players long term in a military order because I don’t want my NPCs calling too much of the story direction but I’m curious to hear if anyone has tried that as well. Any thoughts or experience with this? This is just a general discussion thread; I'm not starting a new campaign at the moment <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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