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

[Micah Sweet]

I think this puts word to a central concept I have been circling around myself.

To what extent is the character the game?

I now realise this might indeed just be a facet of a much more profound observation about the distribiton of creative input.

If we take the hard core old school as a baseline. Before play the GM is expected to prepare a setting with at least one interesting location to explore mapped and keyed to a certain level of detail. This is a big creative input to the game. The players on the other hand is rolling up a mostly random character. There are hardly any creative input from them at all in this process.

However once actually playing, the GM is expected to take on the role of a pure referee. Ideally given the prepared setting material there should be no creative input needed from the GM at all. The players however are encuraged to be creative with how they interact with the various setting elements. Noone are concerned with creating anything new for the setting during play.

Also while playing, characters can die at any time, to be rapidly replaced. This isn't meant to be much more anoying than "skip a turn" in a children boardgame. The setting is the game. The characters are just an abstraction for how players can interact with the setting.


Now compare this with the following style of game:
The GM does hardly anything before the game. Meanwhile each of the players create a character. This is a highly creative process. During play, the GM is having a special creative responsibility in figuring out interesting situations to put the characters in. Meanwhile the player's main role lies in interpreting these situations in terms of their understanding of the characters, to determine how they should react.

Notice how the roles has more or less reversed? Here the setting is an after thought to be discarded and changed as is needed to support the situations. The characters is the game.

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When a GM is creating a setting in the first instance, they are essentially creating the game. And then it make sense if they want the creative freedom to create a game they think they would like themselves, and that hopefully the other players would like. This is a heavy responsibility with such an centralised process.

However in the second instance, the characters is the game! And these are being created by the players. So of course the players would want the creative freedom to create a game they would like to play! I think this is the sentiment I see expressed in what you write here.


What I am seeing is that a lot of trad games today appear to be a mix of these two extremes. And I start wondering if this might be a problem. Are we essentially trying to play two kinds of games at once that doesn't really harmonise? How can a GM both work well as a unpartial referee and a situation creator at the same time? How can players both seek out cool creative things to do with their characters at the same time as they try to live up to and sharpen the vision of their character? And who is responsible for bringing the game?

That's very insightful. For my part, I see the setting as possessing a far larger portion of "game" than any PC, or even all PCs put together. I have no problem with players putting a lot if effort into making their PC; indeed, I appreciate that ability when I'm a player. But that doesn't change the proportions of game to my mind. The setting is still the main component. As the GM, I want to be the worldbuilder and referee, not the guy making situations during active play to entertain the players.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think variation brought by subclasses helps a bit here. I also like classes and subclasses that let you choose stuff, like the Totem Barbarian, whereas there is an unifying theme of animal totems (so they come from cultures where animal spirits are revered) but still allows variation between individuals.

And your #1 just is a no go for me. I just do not want to play a game like that. If mechanics do not represent anything concrete, if not fully diegetic then at least a thematic archetype, I just do not want to touch it.

I think the strength of classes is that they are strong recognisable archetypes that come with lore that attack them for setting, and if they are not used like that, then I just do not want to use classes at all. There are plenty of classless systems I can use, but if I choose to use classes then they must mean something.

This is one of the reasons I love Level Up. So many choices every level, which translates to more combinations and more potential for the setting to depict these things (and especially more mechanical ways to depict fictional constructs).

 

[FrogReaver]

@Enrahim relating to the two modes you outline, when running a game I effectively have two different modes as a GM. Between the games I plan stuff, and at that point I consider how to create interesting situations that speak to the characters. But when we actually play, I try to refrain adding or altering new elements; the board is set, and we play to see what happens.

Yea, I think this is fairly common. I would note that depending on what the GM takes into account to create those interesting situations between sessions that might part might either be GM driven or player driven. Say the GM makes interesting situations based on player provided backstories. The game starts to revolve around the players contributions, even though it was the GM that decided this.

Unless Player Driven is just another term for the player has the final authority on what the game should revolve around. In which case okay, but if that's the meaning why not just say that?

 

[FrogReaver]

This is one of the reasons I love Level Up. So many choices every level, which translates to more combinations and more potential for the setting to depict these things (and especially more mechanical ways to depict fictional constructs).

For what it's worth, you are striking the right balance of bringing up level up sometimes and not overly criticizing games I like. It makes me a bit more interested in it, not less.

On a side note, how does it compare in power levels to 2024 d&d PCs? I always felt it had more powerful PC's than 2014 d&d.

 

[Lanefan]

Then you would be running 5e in a way specifically not intended, which contradicts the explicit text given to players. 5e made very extra explicit what had been a strong implication of 4e and a quiet whisper of 3e: sapient races that aren't monsters can't be 100% guaranteed Always Chaotic Evil (or whatever), and specifically with Drow, they're now explicitly understood to encompass a spectrum of cultures--some of which are devotees of Lolth (or other evil Drow deities), some of which are not (possibly devotees of good Drow deities, like Eilistraee, but possibly not having any special religious affiliation). More or less, it's saying that for established settings (such as FR, the implied setting of 5e), the Drow everyone is familiar with come from only a handful of cities in a particular region--with other regions having different cultures.

The way I've always had it, Llolth killed off any other deity the Drow ever tried to raise against her, thus ensuring she's the only in-culture one they've got. Ditto with Gruumsh and Orcs.

A Drow could, of course, go out-of-culture to find a deity, but that would pretty much amount to self-exile.

Now, of course, you aren't beholden to what WotC decided to do with the game.

Oh, I most certainly am not.

But the fact is, Drow are explicitly an entirely playable race/species in both the 2014 PHB and 2014 PHB. Even if they weren't, the mechanical package doesn't change other than which "you can cast this once a day" extra spells (and otherwise-ordinary cantrip) you get, so for almost all rules purposes, a drow is just an elf with dark skin and slightly different bonus spells. Telling the player they can't play an Elf in general, Drow or not, would almost surely get some pushback.

Same as Dwarves are PC-playable but Duergar are not, or Gnomes are PC-playable while Svirfneblin are not, Elves are PC-playable while Drow are not. Each of the non-PC species are the "underdark mirror" of their surface equivalents.

That said, if the game was set full-time in the underdark I'd be tempted to reverse all that.

Side question - and this came up at our last session - what's the underdark mirror for Hobbits?

And yes, part of it is Drizzt Do'Urden--but part of it is also just that genuinely sapient species/races are being treated as "it's more complex than that" now. Some of them, from particular factions, may be "show no mercy". But you can't just instantly see the color of an elf's skin and know "oh this is 100% an un-person I need to kill right away." For, I should hope, probably obvious reasons. (Social implications from demonizing a dark-skinned, matriarchal society that lives in a dangerous faraway place? Perish the thought!)

I get that for Drow in particular, which is part of the reason they're pretty much gone from my current setting. But other monsters IMO should be just that: monsters, until and unless an individual proves itself otherwise.

Orcs, for example, are usually kill-on-sight in my game, but tell that to the party who ended up taking surrender from some Orcs then taking those surrenderees in as paid party henches. Those Orcs turned out to be loyal to a fault - all they needed was someone to treat 'em right - to the point where the party Ranger (who mechanically gets combat bonuses against Orcs) ended up leaving the party to join the Orcs and become their liaison with the neighbouring Humans.

 

[Lanefan]

I mean, we can assume every game (outside of some sci-fi and extraplanar settings) has weather happening as a background assumption.

Exactly. And narrating that weather, even when the PCs are only looking out a window at it, is a quick and easy way of setting a tone for the day's activities.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't know about that, though. In this thread I've learned that everything can be explained by pixies. All the way down, it's all pixies.

Raining? Pixies pis ... crying. Wind? Pixies flapping their wings. Snow ... pixie dust, in all probability. So no bakgrund assumptions, just pixies!

So many pixies!

But are those pixies healthy, or are they diagetic and on medication for it? Inquiring min...pixies want to know!

 

[Lanefan]

It's interesting in how we see the same problem but chose different ways to address it.

To me, the idea that the exact same ability progression would be seen across tens of thousands of individuals is extremely damaging to verisimilitude. And I can't see a logical reason that a simple cultural or educational set of practices could produce that level of conformity.

Quick solution is to require training to level up. That goes a long way to making similar progressions within each class more believable: people teach others what they've been taught themselves.

 

[hawkeyefan]

So after a few dozen pages of people talking about the primacy of the setting and the role of the GM as the near-sole contributor of the setting... is anyone really surprised that for many of us, what's being described is a GM-focused and/or GM-led game?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So after a few dozen pages of people talking about the primacy of the setting and the role of the GM as the near-sole contributor of the setting... is anyone really surprised that for many of us, what's being described is a GM-focused and/or GM-led game?

To see it that way would require the players somehow being unable to affect the direction of the game via the actions of their characters.

Like my sessions usually end with the players deciding what they want to do next, and then I prep stuff appropriate for that for the next session. It seems pretty player directed to me even though I'm the one who makes the setting.