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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 4662723" data-attributes="member: 3887">Oryan, I'm pretty sure I know where you're coming from since I DM'ed in a similar style for many years. I'm not trying to paint you as a bad DM, I'm sharing my experiences. My campaigns have only gotten better the more open I've been to to player input/concepts, even when they're not exactly to my tastes. Great!I think most of us did. But that understanding is neither right nor wrong, and I can tell you from personal experience I've had great results in recent campaigns by making the players 'partners in the creation'; giving them narrative authority beyond control of their PC's actions. No. The DM controls most aspects of the campaign setting, all a player has is their actions and their background (and whatever additional narrative control the DM doles out --which is a good idea, BTW<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />). That's silly. In a traditional D&D campaign, the players don't 'control' enough to be controlling. Why not share yours? You did invite other people to play in it. So players are free to name their PC's something you like. Doesn't the DM get to name enough? All the people, places, and things that aren't the PC's (and their pets). Practically speaking, doesn't the DM have enough tools at his disposal to maintain campaign tone without needing to control PC naming? You were!It's not lenient, it's being respectful and accommodating to people w/different interests. Those are good things.  It is a hard question, but one a DM should keep asking themselves. "How can I balance my likes with those of my players?" All I can say is that I've come to see player input that I don't immediately like --be it a character concept, name, potential story arc--as a DM'ing challenge, simply acting as arbiter of campaign taste/tone/flavor seems boring to me. Besides, like I keep saying, the DM has control of the most of the 'engines of tone production', I have trouble seeing how some incongruous tonal elements attached to the PC's can seriously challenge that. And I've found the best way to respond is to simply 'say yes' to players --unless they're only after gross mechanical advantages-- and then spin things from there. Acknowledge their concept, then create challenges from it. No one likes being edited, especially during their leisure time.</blockquote>

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