D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

[Maxperson]

I stick by that. If you tell me half orcs are available but not orcs, I'm firstly going to check if I time travelled back in time, and secondly, not join your game because I can tell its not going to go well.

Well, no you can't. All you can do is assume it won't go well, which will be wrong much of the time.

Edit: Sorry for calling you "that guy," but couldn't for the life of me remember who said it.

 

[SableWyvern]

Edit: never mind, not worth it.

 

[Mecheon]

Edit: Sorry for calling you "that guy," but couldn't for the life of me remember who said it.

It fine, it happens

I also accept "the crazy dinosaur guy you do not want to put dinosaurs in the jungle with because he will tear apart the ecological implications of them living there" or "the crazy pterosaur guy who will argue pterosaur biomechanics with you if you dare to have a pteranodon try to grip something with its back feet (pteranodon's feet were far too weak to grab and lift most things, its strength was in its beak. It was basically just a seabird, not an eagle)"

 

[DinoInDisguise]

the crazy dinosaur guy

I take offense to this

 

[Zardnaar]

Yes, but have you ever looked a new monster book and said "damn, that's a cool monster. But I've already said something like that can't exist in my game, so I will never get to use it ever."

In my experience, very few DMs, even those who run "currated" games, so that. Unless it's based on a specific IP (no beholders in Middle Earth) most DMs do not like tying their hands like that.

By the same token, few DMs are actually willing to hard line magic. Because there are so many stories that rely on "DM magic" that limiting that removes those options. You can't have a cult use a spell to blot out the sun because there is no "blot the sun" spell in D&D. Its interesting that a would be willing to limit his own power like that.

I usually leave it open ended. You cant be this because reasons.

Most of the time its because it's a themed game, phantom menace I plan on using or mechanical issue (eg flyers).

Flyers are hard no. The compromise is Aasimar.

Silvery barbs is also a hard no. You cant really compromise on that.

5.5 has also obsoleted done classes eg Shepard Druid. That one's a hard no as well due to mechanics.

 

[Maxperson]

I also accept "the crazy dinosaur guy you do not want to put dinosaurs in the jungle with because he will tear apart the ecological implications of them living there" or "the crazy pterosaur guy who will argue pterosaur biomechanics with you if you dare to have a pteranodon try to grip something with its back feet (pteranodon's feet were far too weak to grab and lift most things, its strength was in its beak. It was basically just a seabird, not an eagle)"

I saw Jurassic World and Hollywood is never wrong about these things. It's their job to be as faithful and accurate to reality as possible.

 

[Belen]

@Scott Christian You asked for quotes. I cannot quote the most virulent voices in the thread, so you'll have to settle for secondhand stuff in some of these. Some quotes are for contrast; not all of these are from the "I as GM get to do whatever I want and players just have to lump it" crowd.

However, I will admit--as noted in previous posts!--that there are messages I missed. Some of which had much more friendly content. It may also be the case that one or more of the people I've quoted in this post are on your ignore list (or vice versa if they have two-way ignore active), and thus your view of the thread would have been...rather more congenial, shall we say. Consider opening this post in an incognito tab so you can check for such things.

To avoid producing an insanely long post, I'm putting spoilers around this.

By and large I have tried to quote whole posts. Where I did not, it is usually because there was a long discussion about something unrelated that I felt would not be helpful to quote. If you suspect anything has been quoted out of context, the links are present. Again, I want to reiterate that some of these are direct demonstrations of the negative attitude I've seen, and others are folks calling out the negative attitude or responding to it.

Edit: And one final note, I stopped looking around page 81? 82? (that is, around post 1620 or so), mostly because I'm tired, I have other things to do, and I can't afford to not sleep properly tonight. So I may have missed out on other things that happened in the past 400 posts or so.

You realize that you quoted me twice for posts where I am talking about working with players or having expanded options after I banned two species.

FYI: I do not run 2024 so the bans on Goliath and Orc are not even PHB standard.

 

[Belen]

I'm not the one claiming anyone's preferences are more important than anyone else's.

There are several people here claiming that one particular participant's preferences are always more important.

As my recent trawl demonstrated, there are a handful of people who have taken a much more nuanced, much more conciliatory take. More than one of them has recognized that I, too, have called for sincerely meeting in the middle.

Whatever is cutting here, I do not see how it cuts the position I've consistently taken, across every single one of these threads: Consensus-building is nearly always possible, so long as everyone is participating in good faith; exceptions are fantastically rare, and generally indicate an incompatibility so fundamental, it probably should've been spotted earlier....again, unless someone wasn't actually participating in good faith.

"You will never get that thing you want, period" is not a position I consider to reflect participating in good faith. "There won't be <tortles/wemics/warforged/flumphs/etc.> in my world" is perfectly compatible with a character having some kind of related anatomy in many, many ways, as already noted:

• Traveller from another world
• Crashed alien
• Magical experiment
• Accidental contamination/mutation
• Awakened animal
• Unusual variant subgroup of something existing (e.g. lizardfolk for tortles, tabaxi for wemics, golems for warforged, etc.)
• Planar being of some kind (planes be weird, mang)
• A reincarnate spell went a little funky
• An inherited curse the character is trying to break (or a blessing they're trying to retain, if they like it)
• A transformation that has to be maintained--or possibly an addiction or the like
• A symptom of some (presumably magical) disease/infection/syndrome
• The product of a vengeful wish, a deity's (dis)favor, or otherwise an external imposition

That's a dozen reasons right there, and that's only if we're talking about someone whose primary goal is the aesthetic. If the primary goal is mechanical, refluffing can allow nearly any mechanic to work, so that's dead easy. Generally I don't pay much attention to this side of things because "refluff mechanic" is kind of a dead-end conversation, and the danger of "OH SO YOU'RE ONLY IN IT FOR POWERGAMING?!" is too great, even though the vast majority of kinda-weirdo races are, generally speaking, weak not strong. (Consider 2014 Dragonborn, which took two further iterations to finally get it right.)

"You simply will not get what you want" is not a matter of preserving setting consistency. At least one of the above things is surely compatible with the world-building in question--surely something among those twelve isn't going to wreck everything. I feel quite confident that this puts the "setting consistency" thing to rest. For the GM who actually wants to support player interest, even if it goes beyond the circles of the world they originally created, there is always a way. Which implies that, if the GM is saying there could not possibly be any way...well...

You must have missed the poster that said DMs could not use the stranger in a strange land scenario because that trope needed to die.

 

[Nightfly]

I have no idea why I was just quoted, two weeks and ~160 pages later. But I'm glad my hatred of tortles has reached a new audience. Tortles! Bah humbug!

 

[Belen]

Not a discussion. You haven’t discussed what they mean by a tortle, what aspects of tortle they think will work well in the campaign, and so on. And of course because “tortle” is a hypothetical, no one who is posting here could give you a true answer.

I have seen a few people give answers to why not a tortle (or whatever)? That come across as “because my world building is more important than making the game fun”, which I suspect the posts you are thinking of where responding to. “Because tortles don’t exist in this world” is not a good answer in a world of magic, because they could be mutant terrapins or from another world. “Because everyone hates tortles” is not a good answer, since being hated by NPCs is something players are willing to deal with (see 2nd edition drow), “it doesn’t fit the theme of my Conan campaign” is a reason - to play with different people, because the player who wants to play a tortle clearly isn’t interested in that theme. No themed game works if they players don’t buy into it.

There were pages and pages where DMs asked those questions and did not get an answer.