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

[Faolyn]

Maybe following a plot isn't the point of the game.

Are your players wandering around aimlessly just occasionally poking at things but otherwise doing nothing?

Because I'm assuming that the players have goals. Maybe it's a goal they got because they bit a GM-provided hook. Maybe it's a goal they made for their group. Maybe it's a goal they wrote up in their character's background. In any of those cases, if they're ignoring those goals because they suddenly want to know why there's a really good waiter working at this one inn, they're not working on those goals, so it won't disrupt anything any further to say "I don't know."

 

[Campbell]

My personal concern in these sorts of situations would be are players acting on their character's curiosity or their own? Do their actions make sense for someone who has lived in this world their entire life or are they acting like a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? For any game I care to run that sort of Isekai vibe where players are prodding at things that should not be unusual to their characters is a bit of a nonstarter.

 

[Faolyn]

Isn't the bigger issue with FTL settings that even if you have something like an Alcubierre drive that is powered by some kind of negative energy unobtainium it's then also a time machine with significant implications for causality?

"The math says we should be traveling to last week, but for some reason it just doesn't do that. Nobody's been able to figure out why."

Of course, if your players really, really want to do time traveling, and it's not just a whim, and you don't mind having to deal with the problems that creates and maybe having to do soft reboots of your setting, then go ahead!

Which touches on something of the nature of rpgs - that in a work of fiction you can make things function through a selective process of overlooking and avoidance, but in a rpg this is more difficult unless the players are on board with that also.

I mean, in a space opera, you're probably safe - FTL is such a genre cliche that you probably don't have to worry about players trying to fly their space ship to last week, but there are other situations in which this kind of thing can be an issue.

(Eg you give your players a decanter of endless water which is supposed to be a useful and wondrous magic item and the players realise that it's an infinite source of energy.)

Well, with nowhere for the water to drain to, unless you have a mess of people doing little but casting destroy water all day, you'll quickly get flooding, so the benefits will quickly be outweighed by the negatives.

That being said, I--and I doubt I'm the only one--had ideas back in the day for a Spelljammer sphere that was nothing but water because of a decanter. Not a water planet, but a water sphere.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My personal concern in these sorts of situations would be are players acting on their character's curiosity or their own? Do their actions make sense for someone who has lived in this world their entire life or are they acting like a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? For any game I care to run that sort of Isekai vibe where players are prodding at things that should not be unusual to their characters is a bit of a nonstarter.

While I get your point here, for some players this sort of thing is just a bit too much of the enjoyment they get out of a game, poking at the corners. You can, of course, say you'd really rather they did that somewhere else.

 

[Campbell]

While I get your point here, for some players this sort of thing is just a bit too much of the enjoyment they get out of a game, poking at the corners. You can, of course, say you'd really rather they did that somewhere else.

Sure. They're welcome to find their bliss elsewhere. Given my personal disinterest in world building for its own sake (though I generally end up doing a fair amount in support of other stuff) I am likely not the right GM for them.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I would prefer for the DM to determine the species and cultures and major political organizations prior to play. I don't think those should be added by the players.

Okay.

Now imagine you ask, "Can I play a tiefling?" and the GM says, "No, I'm sorry, there are no tieflings on this world anywhere"...because they know ABSOLUTELY EVERY race and culture on EVERY part of the planet.

It's not just "oh, make sure there's a pretty good idea of what's going on in advance".

This is a world completely determined, down to local economics, EVERYWHERE. Nothing can be modified. Period.

 

[Maggan]

Now imagine you ask, "Can I play a tiefling?" and the GM says, "No, I'm sorry, there are no tieflings on this world anywhere"...because they know ABSOLUTELY EVERY race and culture on EVERY part of the planet.

Why put everything to such extremes?

The DM doesn't have to know everything, she just has to know if tieflings are part of her campaign or not. And if she is willing to add them or not, if asked.

It's a difficult enough task to be a DM that I don't see the benefit of placing an unneccessary burden of total preparation on them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Okay.

Now imagine you ask, "Can I play a tiefling?" and the GM says, "No, I'm sorry, there are no tieflings on this world anywhere"...because they know ABSOLUTELY EVERY race and culture on EVERY part of the planet.

It's not just "oh, make sure there's a pretty good idea of what's going on in advance".

This is a world completely determined, down to local economics, EVERYWHERE. Nothing can be modified. Period.

Is your argument that if the GM doesn't want a particular species represented in the game and/or the setting and the player does, too bad for the GM?

 

[Lanefan]

"You find the owner's manual. It's somewhere north of 600 pages long, written in an 8-point font with basically no margins. Are you going to start reading it?"

Our D&D party stole an electrically-powered zeppelin from a tech-advanced steampunk-like society we're largely at war with and this is exactly what happened: we figured out how to fly it soon enough but everything else about it we had to learn from the very thick and fine-printed operators' manual we found on board, written in a language none of us could read.

It took us a couple of months to fly the airship halfway around the world to our home base; during that time a couple of PC mages - after casting Comprehend Language more times than they care to think about - were able to both understand the manual and translate it into Common and (Elvish? I forget) so that more of us could read it.

So hell, yeah, I'm going to start reading it!

 

[The Firebird]

Now imagine you ask, "Can I play a tiefling?" and the GM says, "No, I'm sorry, there are no tieflings on this world anywhere"...because they know ABSOLUTELY EVERY race and culture on EVERY part of the planet.

This is what I look for in a game. I'd much prefer this to the DM changing their setting to accommodate me.

This is a world completely determined, down to local economics, EVERYWHERE. Nothing can be modified. Period.

This sounds delightful and like it would lead to a game with high player agency.