D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[JConstantine]

And maybe modern situation advice takes inspiration from that sort of thing and I just haven’t read it in detail, but I tend to see or think of it as “stuff for the players to do/explore” vs “stuff to actively impose upon what they care about” if that makes any sense?

So, "prep situations, not plots" is basically born from the same desire as sandbox play: namely, wanting to avoid railroading and ensuring player decisions mattered by having the GM unconstrained by a rigid plot. Both of what you mention can fall within it depending on GM/group style.

 

[hawkeyefan]

That's fair. My actual preference is for the player to stick to their PC specifically once the campaign begins, but in practice people throw out little details about their backstories all the time and it's not something I'm losing sleep over. My daughter's PC in a recent game brought the party to stay at her family's home for a couple of days, and we basically made them up together.

See this is the kind of thing I have come to expect (in my own games) to come up quite a bit during play. The idea that a player would know all this about the character before play even started is surprising to me. This has been how my group has handled it since we moved on from more murder-hoboey, pawn-stance type play. Once we started treating the characters as actual people that existed in the setting, rather than unattached wanderers that were little more than a token for play with a character trait or two attached.

I'm often surprised by the level of resistance to this kind of thing, especially since it's easy to collaborate to make sure whatever ideas align with what's already been established and what would fit with the game.

 

[Faolyn]

@Faolyn is it right that you mean that for all RPGs "only the GM can legitimately author parts of the world outside the players' characters" or do you mean that for some modes of play that you are defending, that must be the case?

That would depend entirely on the game in question, of course. There are numerous games where the players get to make the world, or at least major chunks of it. There are numerous groups that build the world together for the GM to run in.

But I would say that putting something down to be "fun and interesting" is hugely different from putting something down to be "potentially anything the players want, provided they roll well enough." I've said many times that the players shouldn't be playing on godmode and should respect the tone, genre, and fiction of the game, but pemerton's example was basically directly handing the PCs the cheat codes.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's fair. My actual preference is for the player to stick to their PC specifically once the campaign begins, but in practice people throw out little details about their backstories all the time and it's not something I'm losing sleep over. My daughter's PC in a recent game brought the party to stay at her family's home for a couple of days, and we basically made them up together.

I was thinking of a case where the group goes through their old village in the course of the game, and suddenly who and what their family is actually has some bearing, something it wouldn't have generically had. But your situation with your daughter sounds similar.

I've seen GMs would absolutely insist on doing said filling in themselves, which seems weirdly overprotective of their authority over setting for something relatively minor (again, assuming you don't have a player who's trying to get some sort of serious advantage out of how they do that, but that's usually going to be pretty obvious).

 

[Thomas Shey]

See this is the kind of thing I have come to expect (in my own games) to come up quite a bit during play. The idea that a player would know all this about the character before play even started is surprising to me. This has been how my group has handled it since we moved on from more murder-hoboey, pawn-stance type play. Once we started treating the characters as actual people that existed in the setting, rather than unattached wanderers that were little more than a token for play with a character trait or two attached.

I'm often surprised by the level of resistance to this kind of thing, especially since it's easy to collaborate to make sure whatever ideas align with what's already been established and what would fit with the game.

There's always been a divide about this; years ago we even had a set of terms for it (Design at Start (DAS) compared to Develop in Play (DIP). A lot of modern games kind of mandate a bit more of the former, but a lot of in-between cases occur, too.

 

[hawkeyefan]

There's always been a divide about this; years ago we even had a set of terms for it (Design at Start (DAS) compared to Develop in Play (DIP). A lot of modern games kind of mandate a bit more of the former, but a lot of in-between cases occur, too.

Sure. I just expect that there's no game that has it all done before play. The players don't have every detail about their characters and their history worked out before the first session, and the GM hasn't fully detailed the entire world and all its NPCs. It seems that Develop in Play as you call it is always going to be a component of play.

And although I can get the idea of maybe wanting to minimize it, the fact that any method or idea that actively uses it should be rejected entirely seems a bit extreme.

It just seems like folks just denying themselves of interesting tools.

To lean on @Micah Sweet 's example... I would guess that his daughter will probably be a bit more invested in the character's family since she had a hand in defining them than if the GM just made them up without her input.

 

[JConstantine]

The idea that a player would know all this about the character before play even started is surprising to me.

Is it really all that surprising? The player who creates an elaborate 50-page backstory with everything nailed down is as real as the murderhobo with nothing beyond a name. Extreme outliers they may be, but they're out there.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

See this is the kind of thing I have come to expect (in my own games) to come up quite a bit during play. The idea that a player would know all this about the character before play even started is surprising to me. This has been how my group has handled it since we moved on from more murder-hoboey, pawn-stance type play. Once we started treating the characters as actual people that existed in the setting, rather than unattached wanderers that were little more than a token for play with a character trait or two attached.

I'm often surprised by the level of resistance to this kind of thing, especially since it's easy to collaborate to make sure whatever ideas align with what's already been established and what would fit with the game.

I'm actually happy with players creating backstory and whatnot dynamically during play in order to relate to stuff that is happening. That's awesome. Maybe it even helps them out sometimes in a fairly simple way. But given we're playing to make the game interesting and the PCs lives exciting it's not going to create problems, quite the opposite.

Again, I see all these worries people have about players 'abusing' things like this is just hold over from some basically obsolete Gygaxian skill-test play perspective.

 

[AlViking]

I was thinking of a case where the group goes through their old village in the course of the game, and suddenly who and what their family is actually has some bearing, something it wouldn't have generically had. But your situation with your daughter sounds similar.

I've seen GMs would absolutely insist on doing said filling in themselves, which seems weirdly overprotective of their authority over setting for something relatively minor (again, assuming you don't have a player who's trying to get some sort of serious advantage out of how they do that, but that's usually going to be pretty obvious).

Since I'm more familiar with my world than my players are, we typically have a discussion about their background. It's not that I don't want them to fill in the blanks, it's that I don't want them contradicting established lore that they may not be aware of and I can frequently give them information to build on. If we were using a new world every campaign I wouldn't care as much. For the most part I only veto ideas if they throw in something really bizarre that didn't fit with the rest of the group, gave themselves something like a million GP inheritance or their parents are the most powerful rulers in the land.

 

[AlViking]

I'm actually happy with players creating backstory and whatnot dynamically during play in order to relate to stuff that is happening. That's awesome. Maybe it even helps them out sometimes in a fairly simple way. But given we're playing to make the game interesting and the PCs lives exciting it's not going to create problems, quite the opposite.

Again, I see all these worries people have about players 'abusing' things like this is just hold over from some basically obsolete Gygaxian skill-test play perspective.

Sadly I've seen some players claim "Don't worry if we get arrested, Daddy can bail us out" type of thinking. Fortunately rare, but it does happen. That's the only thing I'm particularly concerned about.