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

[SableWyvern]

I've probably missed some of the back and forth over the past dozen or so pages, but . . .

If you invite me over to your D&D game and describe the world and campaign as standard D&D,

Is anyone in this thread who is curating races also "describing their world and campaign as standard D&D"?

Edit: Never mind, I should have finished reading before rushing to post, you weren't making the point I thought you were making.

 

[Dire Bare]

This is the internet after all, and extremes and hyperbole are rampant.

Yes, obviously if I was running a kitchen-sink fantasy game of D&D, in an established setting like Toril, I'd let anything go. Within reason. For example, I'm about to run an city-centric campaign of Baldur's Gate meets Lankhmar very soon and advised players NOT to make outdoorsy ranger or druid types unless they were "urban" reskins because they'd work better. Mind you, this was the campaign pitch that the PLAYERS gave me... and STILL I had someone want to make a Druid and a Barbarian (we worked it out, found out what they wanted and collaborated on an urban-focused alternative that scratches that itch).

But the back and forth was mostly about how utterly unfair and narrowminded it is when DMs ask players to stick within a particular campaign theme. It seems like published games get a free pass from this critique, but Homebrewed ones don't. Hence the "Witcher campaign in 5e banning Dragonborn and Tortles" idea creating indignation and accusations of creating "unfun". And arguing whether D&D can actually be a toolkit at all (ie, it is "meant" to be inclusive of all published options no matter what). What about the historical green books? Those don't cound apparently. And so on and so on.

Edit: I'd wager that most of us are far more open minded that this debate insinuates; that we'd all actually get along really well at a game table. But this is the internet and bad faith interpretation is the default.

Again, I'm sure I've missed a lot of the back-and-forth . . . there are a lot of posters responding to ghosts from my perspective (mutual ignore lists), but . . .

The "debate" started with banning character concepts from standard games . . . world-building by subtraction. My world is different because it doesn't have silly stuff like tortles or tabaxi!

The goal posts then shifted. Well, what about my all elven campaign? Or my all assassin campaign? The extreme examples and hyperbole grew on both sides in an arms race to show how unreasonable the "other side" was being . . .

Part of the ongoing debate is . . . communication is hard and the complexities in our brains often come out as simplistic hyperbole on the screen. But it's also a lot of . . . someone is WRONG on the internet . . . (I'm certainly guilty of falling prey to that one . . .)

How I'm seeing this all shake out is two different styles of play that aren't really all that incompatible, and can be seen as extremes on a continuum, but . . .

• Traditional Style - DM Control and Authority: It's the DM's game, they set the tone, theme, and world-building. You are a guest in their campaign and should follow their rules. An old-school DM using this style might be varying levels of open and collaborative, but ultimately are the final arbiters of what fits. This style can be hampered by poor communication, doesn't mesh as well with the direction the hobby is going, but a strong and charismatic DM probably has a lot of players having a lot of fun . . . and they likely get a lot of personal enjoyment out of world-building. DM's who take this to the extreme can be adversarial and worry about "entitled players".
• Collaborative Style - The DM is simply one of the players and is more a facilitator, the players can have just as much control, and almost every aspect of the game is open to emergent play and player collaboration. Somebody wants to play a tortle, but it doesn't match the theme everybody decided on? The DM doesn't "ban" the concept, but might open it up to the group for discussion. Without a strong DM and/or cohesive player group, this style can lose focus and maybe even get out of control! In the extreme, players and DM build the world together, it doesn't exist until play at the table! Players not used to this level of collaboration and contribution can feel lost and overwhelmed, but it also offers a lot of freedom and takes the workload off the DM's back.

I suspect we're all somewhere in between these extremes, but the "debate" is sliding towards the extremes with lots of disingenuous arguments. Oh well.

I also suspect that the home games of some of the folks arguing in this thread are probably a lot of fun . . . but the closed mindedness and aggressiveness against "entitled players" just leaves me cold.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That is not true in how we run games. I am sure everyone does it differently, but at our session zero we decided what kind of game we want to play (setting, theme, etc.) and its broad parameters. Then the players go make characters based on that discussion and the DM works on the campaign world.

Which is how I would run things. It's just not the way "GM vision" and all these other things are presented. There, the GM builds an incredibly tight world, where every city (and in some cases even every faction and most NPCs!) is pre-generated, there is no room for a previously-unknown land, a culture that has been isolated up to present, etc., despite that being....actually a real thing that happened IRL. Who remembers the journey of Marco Polo? Or myths and legends like Journey to the West?

More or less, I just find it really suspect when the GM brings what seem, to me, like extensive and even draconian limitations on what the players can do or be, but the player bringing even the gentlest of limitations ("I'd like to play a <species X> <class Y>") is portrayed as ruining the GM's fun, hogging the spotlight, subverting the game, etc., etc.

Just looks a lot like giving nothing but deference, indeed almost reverence, to anything and everything the GM does, while treating the player, as noted, as an expendable, replaceable nothing. It just looks...well, frankly, deeply disrespectful from the GM. I see the GM as I see...well, basically any authority figure. In order for them to justly receive the obedience and support of their subordinates, they need to prove themselves worthy of it. That requires, yes, some degree of putting the good of the group ahead of their own interests--that's why we trust them with authority. It will, occasionally, require that the GM accept that what would be absolute maximum fun for them is not an acceptable course of action, because it would cause more harm to the group's collective fun than it would net for the GM's personal fun.

That is one of the burdens of leadership, accepting that you have some burdens to bear--and some of them will be tedious, frustrating, boring, or displeasing. A leader who isn't willing to do that is a "leader" in name only. If someone wants to take up that mantle of table leadership, I expect them to take up the responsibility to put the group's fun first--but note, first. That doesn't mean they're a doormat to be used by others. It means that when the chips are down and they have to decide between "100% GM fun no matter what" and "95% GM fun so everyone else can have 100% fun", they pick the latter. There are, of course, always going to be bridge-too-far things. It's not a simple "always do X no matter what", because if there were a formula for GMing, we wouldn't have so few GMs. I just don't think anyone who says "my fun is more important than your fun if we have to choose who gets to have the most fun" merits the degree of deference being demanded in this thread.

Because that's sort of the concealed assumption, isn't it? That's why it becomes a binary, people act like the GM loses ALL of their fun for ANY concession no matter what, so therefore the GM cannot ever concede. But that's obviously ludicrous. A tiny imposition on one side for a massive gain on the other should never be dismissed out of hand. I don't care if that means some adjustment or patience or whatever is required--that's what (generic) you signed up for when you asked for GM authority over others.

You want the power, you take the responsibility--which means putting others first, even when that's inconvenient or slightly less fun for you than what you were originally intending to do.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I also suspect that the home games of some of the folks arguing in this thread are probably a lot of fun . . . but the closed mindedness and aggressiveness against "entitled players" just leaves me cold.

This.

The instant I see anyone complain about "entitled players", as some kind of global phenomenon rather than specific people in a specific campaign/group, I immediately become skeptical of whatever they're arguing. Doesn't matter if I agree with it or not! I find that entire premise to be disingenuous from the outset, so...yeah it's an extremely tough sell.

There's a reason I so frequently talk about how "beleaguered" GMs are allegedly being abused by players in an edition that has bent over backwards to enshrine that GM as having tremendous authority. The rules of 5e are merely suggestions which the GM is explicitly empowered to negate, reinstate, negate, reinstate, etc. as often as she wishes, whenever she wishes, for as long as she wishes, for no reason other than that she wishes it. The rules explicitly support capricious GMing, and give the players no defense whatsoever against it except the nuclear option.

 

[AlViking]

This.

The instant I see anyone complain about "entitled players", as some kind of global phenomenon rather than specific people in a specific campaign/group, I immediately become skeptical of whatever they're arguing. Doesn't matter if I agree with it or not! I find that entire premise to be disingenuous from the outset, so...yeah it's an extremely tough sell.

There's a reason I so frequently talk about how "beleaguered" GMs are allegedly being abused by players in an edition that has bent over backwards to enshrine that GM as having tremendous authority. The rules of 5e are merely suggestions which the GM is explicitly empowered to negate, reinstate, negate, reinstate, etc. as often as she wishes, whenever she wishes, for as long as she wishes, for no reason other than that she wishes it. The rules explicitly support capricious GMing, and give the players no defense whatsoever against it except the nuclear option.

Yes, my poor beleaguered players who are laughing, getting excited about rolling crits, happily chatting away. Having tense moments when the rogue goes down and is about to be eaten by the black pudding. Then the monk does enough damage for it to split and the wizard takes them out with a thunderwave and they all cheer. AKA Sunday's game.

Poor pathetic souls.

 

[Dire Bare]

Is anyone in this thread who is curating races also "describing their world and campaign as standard D&D"?

Edit: Never mind, I should have finished reading before rushing to post, you weren't making the point I thought you were making.

To respond to your struck text . . . yes.

That's where we started.

Nobody explicitly stated, "My world is pretty standard, it's just like the Realms, but different . . ." But they failed to communicate that their world is more narrow, more specific, more different . . . a Brancalonia or Household or homebrew that truly is non-standard. They came out swinging against "entitled players" ruining the fun of the DM. Again, later, the goal posts shifted in the ridiculous need to prove others unreasonable.

Now, of course, some of these folks likely DO or at least HAVE run very specific, narrow campaigns . . . but unless you communicate that clearly in discussion, and more importantly your players, it's reasonable to assume you are playing standard, default, PHB D&D.

And even up until this page on the thread (at least from posts I can see) . . . some folks still haven't really convinced me their homebrew campaigns are really all that far from standard D&D, other than a list of restrictions. And many of the examples used in argument are purposefully hyperbolic examples rather than common examples of play.

If you are running a pretty standard D&D campaign and you're ready to shoot down all sorts of "weird" player options . . . I'm going to pass on your game. I hope you and your players have fun, but I had too much of that in the 80s and 90s.

If you are trying for something very specific and you sell me on how much fun we'll have . . . I hope you'll still be open-minded towards player character concepts, but having a restricted list makes more sense. But if we start playing and I realize your world or campaign really only differs in that there are no tortles (for example) . . . sigh, I'll probably bail. Not because I need tortles, but because I am so tired of that style of running games.

 

[dave2008]

...There, the GM builds an incredibly tight world, where every city (and in some cases even every faction and most NPCs!) is pre-generated, there is no room for a previously-unknown land, a culture that has been isolated up to present, etc., despite that being....actually a real thing that happened IRL.

IDK, I have never experienced anything like that nor have I seen many DMs talk about their game worlds like that. I would guess you are taking a few extreme cases and extrapolating them to the majority of even many DMs. I just think the DM you generally present is a fantasy. I can only think of one DM on these forums (and none that I have ever met) that is complete against any type of world-building with the players and one other that is fairly hostile to it. Everyone else falls somewhere closer to the middle.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

As one of the main advocates for the "D&D is intrinsically kitchen-sink" position, I will say I think games like Dolmenwood and Brancalonia, or any other 3pp games that's essentially a well-curated D&D-type fantasy, are great.

But I believe there's a world of difference between presenting a player a published campaign setting and saying "We're going to be running this", and a GM typing up a bunch of notes and saying "You can't play drow because they're evil, and you can't play these particular races because I didn't include them in my campaign documents."

The core tension with worldbuilding is that worldbuilding is great fun for the GM. But outside of games where the worldbuilding is the point of play, like Microscope and Worldwizard, players (in general, not every player, I'm giving the legal caveats some people want) aren't interested in downloading a bunch of setting specific info to make characters. You can also notice how some more modern OSR games (like Dolmenwood and Mork Borg) also give a bunch of handy random tables so that players don't have to absrob as much setting info to make characters.

I can compress all the relevant campaign guide information into a single wiki page, including allowed species etc.

I've probably missed some of the back and forth over the past dozen or so pages, but . . .

If you invite me over to your D&D game and describe the world and campaign as standard D&D, perhaps in the Realms, Exandria, or a similar homebrew . . . yeah, I'm going to be irritated if you start banning character concepts seemingly arbitrarily, which is how this whole thread-drift argument started out. No tortles on Toril? Exandria? Even Krynn? Pass.

You mean like orcs and drow, which are specifically non-existent in Krynn? Demanding to play one in a Dragonlance campaign is pretty much the sign of a problem player who is not going to engage in the setting at all. If you are going to chuck a tanty at being denied something that the setting explicitly sets out as "not a part of it" then I'm not going to want you in my game.

I mean if I specify"no X" on the players guide, and a prospective player tells me "here's my x. I have to play him and will accept nothing else", they're not likely to endear themselves to me.

But if you communicate clearly you are going for a specific, more narrow setting/campaign, like Household or Brancalonia . . . I'd still encourage you to be open to player concepts, but yeah, maybe not a tortle, dragonborn, or tiefling. Or maybe so!

I'm running a LotR 5E setting right now, and I'd be leery if one of my players wanted to play a tortle or other species not in Tolkein's legendarium. But I'd be open to the pitch and we'd talk it out. The answer wouldn't be "no" but "maybe" until we've discussed it. I did let one of my players play a "wizard", an Istari. That's in the lore, of course, but not in the game. The player is using the standard druid class to model a nature-oriented Istari, similar to Radagast. It is messing with the power level of the game . . . but we're making it work and we're having fun. I could've just said "NO!", but I'm glad I was open to the concept.

In the context of this discussion, I don't think the rules system matters. D&D, Pathfinder, Blades, OSE, whatever . . . it's the setting, tone, and theme of the game that should dictate character options. But it's important, IMO, for the DM to be open-minded, focused on group fun rather than being precious about world-building, and most importantly, remember that it's all just a game!

There are no tortles in Middle-Earth . . . but there are talking otters and other strangeness. Maybe a talking turtle person wouldn't be all that disruptive to a LotR game after all . . .

Yes, settings matter, and despite the demented policies of the Crawford era of D&D, plenty of D&D settings explicitly exclude "core" elements to have their own identity. The dilution of that has not been an improvement. Likewise with plenty of homebrews.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Which is how I would run things. It's just not the way "GM vision" and all these other things are presented. There, the GM builds an incredibly tight world, where every city (and in some cases even every faction and most NPCs!) is pre-generated, there is no room for a previously-unknown land, a culture that has been isolated up to present, etc., despite that being....actually a real thing that happened IRL. Who remembers the journey of Marco Polo? Or myths and legends like Journey to the West?

Does every character in this world come with a pre-loaded knowledge chip about the whole world? Having a fully realised setting doesn't invalidate a "exploration into the unknown" adventure, since its still unknown to players and PCs. It often works better for the DM to know where the players are going and what's it like.

(Not to mention "Journey to the West" is about travelling from China to India, both places that existed outside the context of that story. It wasn't like India appeared out of nowhere once Tripitaka started walking there.

More or less, I just find it really suspect when the GM brings what seem, to me, like extensive and even draconian limitations on what the players can do or be, but the player bringing even the gentlest of limitations ("I'd like to play a <species X> <class Y>") is portrayed as ruining the GM's fun, hogging the spotlight, subverting the game, etc., etc.

Just looks a lot like giving nothing but deference, indeed almost reverence, to anything and everything the GM does, while treating the player, as noted, as an expendable, replaceable nothing. It just looks...well, frankly, deeply disrespectful from the GM. I see the GM as I see...well, basically any authority figure. In order for them to justly receive the obedience and support of their subordinates, they need to prove themselves worthy of it. That requires, yes, some degree of putting the good of the group ahead of their own interests--that's why we trust them with authority. It will, occasionally, require that the GM accept that what would be absolute maximum fun for them is not an acceptable course of action, because it would cause more harm to the group's collective fun than it would net for the GM's personal fun.

That is one of the burdens of leadership, accepting that you have some burdens to bear--and some of them will be tedious, frustrating, boring, or displeasing. A leader who isn't willing to do that is a "leader" in name only. If someone wants to take up that mantle of table leadership, I expect them to take up the responsibility to put the group's fun first--but note, first. That doesn't mean they're a doormat to be used by others. It means that when the chips are down and they have to decide between "100% GM fun no matter what" and "95% GM fun so everyone else can have 100% fun", they pick the latter. There are, of course, always going to be bridge-too-far things. It's not a simple "always do X no matter what", because if there were a formula for GMing, we wouldn't have so few GMs. I just don't think anyone who says "my fun is more important than your fun if we have to choose who gets to have the most fun" merits the degree of deference being demanded in this thread.

Because that's sort of the concealed assumption, isn't it? That's why it becomes a binary, people act like the GM loses ALL of their fun for ANY concession no matter what, so therefore the GM cannot ever concede. But that's obviously ludicrous. A tiny imposition on one side for a massive gain on the other should never be dismissed out of hand. I don't care if that means some adjustment or patience or whatever is required--that's what (generic) you signed up for when you asked for GM authority over others.

You want the power, you take the responsibility--which means putting others first, even when that's inconvenient or slightly less fun for you than what you were originally intending to do.

This is a lot of text to just say that you don't understand that a DM can produce a realised world and the players can still have fun? The DM puts in 90% of the work, so yeah, they should have most of the power.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

This.

The instant I see anyone complain about "entitled players", as some kind of global phenomenon rather than specific people in a specific campaign/group, I immediately become skeptical of whatever they're arguing. Doesn't matter if I agree with it or not! I find that entire premise to be disingenuous from the outset, so...yeah it's an extremely tough sell.

There's a reason I so frequently talk about how "beleaguered" GMs are allegedly being abused by players in an edition that has bent over backwards to enshrine that GM as having tremendous authority. The rules of 5e are merely suggestions which the GM is explicitly empowered to negate, reinstate, negate, reinstate, etc. as often as she wishes, whenever she wishes, for as long as she wishes, for no reason other than that she wishes it. The rules explicitly support capricious GMing, and give the players no defense whatsoever against it except the nuclear option.

Yes, the person running the game and the setting is given a lot of power, because if they don't have it, the game falls apart.