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

[Lanefan]

See, that's why I mentioned the alternative.

Me? I'd play 6 months of something like Ironsworn (maybe modify it a bit to make it more D&D fantasty, say). Which means my setting is ready for play in about 20 minutes. I then spend the next six months collaboratively building a detailed, intricate setting with my players, in play, that will result in a compete, living setting that everyone at the table is directly linked into.

Which I can then use to build other campaigns if I so choose.

If D&D (or any RPG for that matter) requires SIX MONTHS of work before it's playable, then RPG'S are dead.

Depends. If six months work gets you ten-fifteen years of play, it seems a decent tradeoff.

Ignoring things like vacation trips, I've been DMing pretty much weekly or twice-weekly since 1984, with three gaps:

1994-95 10 months between finishing one campaign and (somewhat unexpectedly, I got talked into it) starting another
1997-98 1.5 years during which I ran maybe 4 sessions (only had 2 players and they didn't want to run without a third; the game I was playing in at the time also nearly died, same reason)
2007-08 9 months between campaigns, during which I ran a 3-session one-off as a playtest while designing what's now my homebrew setting

During all three of those gaps I was active as a player. But some downtime from DMing can be a nice break, too.

That, and keep in mind the prep for the new campaign or setting can happen while the old one is still winding down, if one has that degree of foresight.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't see much of a particular difference between those use cases, no.

My question is more of "Did you, as a DM, spend a lot of time detailing that setting, such that you wouldn't be amenable to changing it or from moving on from the concept if you don't have player buy-in?"

If I don't get any player buy-in then clearly I've got it wrong somehow and have to start over.

If, however, I get keen buy-in from four or five people but there's that one other person whose buy-in is conditional on my making fairly big changes to the setting and-or system I've just designed, then that one other person can take a hike.

A DM who spends tons of time detailing a setting is a DM who is implicitly stating that their setting details are important, and not just being used as backdrop for play. And I think that desire can have pernicious effects on a game, even in trad play where setting is more of a consideration. I simply find it to be a very rare group where most of the players have legitimate interest in exploring all the details the GM wrote up in the past year that have nothing to do with their characters.

Most players IME just want a game to play. That there's a deep setting there for them to explore if they so desire is a pleasant optional extra from their side but makes running the game week-to-week a whole lot easier from the DM side as so much of the legwork has already been done.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't think the difference is nearly as hard as you claim.

Given you don't care about appearance, I'll be focused purely on mechanics. In 5e, being a tiefling gives you three things, the middle of which comes as package deals associated with the three heritages, Abyssal, Cthonic, or Infernal). The first is 60' darkvision. Given this is something many species have, I doubt you care about that. The third thing is the thaumaturgy cantrip, which again, I presume you have no problem with. So the whole focus is on the three-part packages.

I assume, for example, that you would not raise such objections with drow/dark elves as characters?

Drow would have the same problem in play as would something like a Tiefling: they'd be kill-on-sight for most surface species and nearly all decent adventurers.

As DM, I've had some less-than-horrible Drow show up in my games as NPCs over the years and the end result has every time been an argument between those who would defend them and those who would kill on sight (it's been about a 50-50 split as to who wins the arguments). In an old campaign of mine a player once got (un)lucky enough to roll up a Drow as his PC via a long trip through the "Other" species table; once in play it lasted slightly longer than a fruit fly, half the other PCs were quietly lining up to kill it but an enemy got there first.

Or just elves in general, really. Because guess what? Other than elves getting even more features, they're functionally equivalent to tieflings! Elves get: 60' darkvision, the three-spells package deal selection (drow/wood/high), advantage on saves to avoid Charmed, one free skill proficiency from Insight/Perception/Survival, and Trance.

Tieflings get 60' darkvision, the three-spells package deal selection, and Thaumaturgy. That's it.

Elves - the surface kind - don't come with that whole half-demon baggage attached.

Is it really so hard to have--for example--a wildly divergent subspecies of elf, that was experimented upon to test the boundaries of magic, which resulted in them manifesting slightly different magical powers and losing some of the benefits that come with being an elf? I could see such a group being ostracized and hated for their differences from regular elves (especially if they have the classical "bright red/purple/blue skin" appearance of tieflings!) despite not having any connection whatsoever to anything fiendish since, as you have said, fiends don't exist. It'll be a different spin--racism inflicted upon a people, rather than being an ancient "legacy of evil" or whatever--but when you don't care about the appearance...AND you accept the "the same but objectively better" elf stuff...I just don't understand what the problem is.

Well, in my game fiends - a.k.a. demons and devils - very much do exist and that ain't about to change. And reflavouring Tleflings so they're not demon-related still leaves me with the headache of having to rewrite the rules to accommodate their existence as playable PCs, now with the added bonus work of having to dream up from scratch the species' culture, history, genetics (as in, what else can they interbreed with if anything), and initial creation.

 

[hawkeyefan]

So what? It is still not suitable for every setting. My current setting has no elves or dwarves, someone might want a run world without humans.

I personally would default to nothing but humans. I don’t find the other heritages or races to be all that interesting, really. They seem more like archetypes than anything. Nothing that can’t really be accomplished with cultural differences.

But other people feel differently. So I don’t restrict them.

My take on it is that building a setting for play is something different than building a setting to tell stories in a more traditional authorial sense. I think many DMs mistake the second for the first, or don’t really make the distinction to begin with.

That is very much not my assumption. D&D is what you make if it.

Well, it’s also what’s in the books. There’s certainly things that are implicit in a game of D&D until shown otherwise.

Like, until someone says “this game will take place on Athas” or similar, things like gnomes and monks and the like would be expected, whereas Jedi and Klingons and Autobots would not.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Drow would have the same problem in play as would something like a Tiefling: they'd be kill-on-sight for most surface species and nearly all decent adventurers.

But that could all be changed very simply if you wanted. You could just say “on this world, Drow are not all evil… they are like any other racial group and run the gamut alignment-wise”. Easy.

Well, in my game fiends - a.k.a. demons and devils - very much do exist and that ain't about to change. And reflavouring Tleflings so they're not demon-related still leaves me with the headache of having to rewrite the rules to accommodate their existence as playable PCs, now with the added bonus work of having to dream up from scratch the species' culture, history, genetics (as in, what else can they interbreed with if anything), and initial creation.

That sounds like about 10 minutes worth of work.

 

[Lanefan]

sorry for picking at this, but i just need to point out that there's no h in tiefling.

Indeed, but "Thiefling" as an alternate name for "Hobbit" works quite well.

 

[Lanefan]

Because when your first resort is to "pull rank" on what I see as an incredibly mild request, it looks like you literally could not care less what your players like, think, or feel. That's a HUGE red flag.

Thing is, you might see including a new PC-playable species as an incredibly mild request, but I - the one who has to do all the behind-the-scenes work to include that new species in the rules - do not.

(I should note I'm coming at this from the non-Wotc-era perspective of Tieflings not already being part of the core game rules as written. 5e has already made almost everything under the sun PC-playable, meaning that to include or drop a single species is relatively trivial there)

 

[Micah Sweet]

I personally would default to nothing but humans. I don’t find the other heritages or races to be all that interesting, really. They seem more like archetypes than anything. Nothing that can’t really be accomplished with cultural differences.

But other people feel differently. So I don’t restrict them.

My take on it is that building a setting for play is something different than building a setting to tell stories in a more traditional authorial sense. I think many DMs mistake the second for the first, or don’t really make the distinction to begin with.



Well, it’s also what’s in the books. There’s certainly things that are implicit in a game of D&D until shown otherwise.

Like, until someone says “this game will take place on Athas” or similar, things like gnomes and monks and the like would be expected, whereas Jedi and Klingons and Autobots would not.

I show otherwise every time I sit at the table, and have for many years. The books (any books) are packages of convenient options, and I don't ever treat anything in them as gospel.

 

[Lanefan]

I guess I don't understand why "3:200" is desirable here, but given you specifically set them up to be stronger, I guess that's fair. D&D overall aims for much more common but not nearly so dramatic crits.

I used 3 : 200 as that's the odds in my rules. On a natural 20 you roll d10 to confirm and on 8-9-0 you've done 2x-3x-4x respectively.

And yes, I grant that this change does away with the rare but extra impressive crits. That's the necessary trade-off. Can't win 'em all. I personally think that simplicity, efficacy (crits always feel strong) being at least kinda-sorta tradition-like,

You could, of course, then tack on another rule if you want to still have some impressive crits. That's the final piece of 4e's crit rules (which I would not have expected 5e to copy). Specifically, you get some bonus d6s equal to the enhancement bonus of the weapon you're using, at least in 4e. So if you have a +3 weapon, when you crit with it, you maximize that attack's damage dice, and then roll 3d6. (This also makes up for the missing (Y+1) part from the equation above, incidentally.) That could result in an extremely impressive crit....or merely a really solid one if you roll poorly on those d6's.

For your stuff, perhaps indefinitely exploding d6s would be better (or "very high cap", e.g. like max of 10d6 bonus). That is, roll a 6, you get to roll another die, keep doing that until you roll something that isn't 6. You can theoretically do a bazillion damage, so there's still that roulette-like element I know you prioritize, but even if you roll a 1 on that first (and thus only) d6, you still got a solid baseline. Every crit matters, but some will matter A LOT.

That could work, though is less efficient rolling-wise than a simple d20-d10 sequence.

Naturally, I imagine such rules would also apply to creatures attacking PCs.

Naturally.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I show otherwise every time I sit at the table, and have for many years. The books (any books) are packages of convenient options, and I don't ever treat anything in them as gospel.

Well, gospel is hyperbole. I’m just saying that, until told otherwise, when someone talks about D&D, I’m gonna assume the races and classes that appear in the PHB. And plenty of others do, too.