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

[TwoSix]

So if no player in any group I've ever DMed a home group for adamantly insists on playing a tortle, I'm okay? What if they want to play a werewolf or vampire with all the benefits but none of the penalties?

Players who are playing in bad faith don't need to be deferred to in any colloborative sense, obviously.

Players asking for raw power grabs with little sense of story connection are almost certainly acting in bad faith.

 

[TwoSix]

Like there isn't a lot of uninteresting stuff in FR or any other published setting? I pay attention to my players whether it's homebrew or I'm running an AL game as to what level of detail and description they want. It's just easier with homebrew material because I don't want someone piping up and telling me that the bartender of The Petite Troll is Eight Fingers Malone, not a female half-orc.

As far as "wasting time", it's my time so why do you care?

No one is particularly interested in what you do in your game, outside your players.

This is primarily a discussion of technique and advice.

You've simply offered up details of your campaign; these have become a useful test case for hypothetical discussions on these techniques.

 

[AlViking]

To be honest, I wonder if some of these folks exhibiting deep distrust for DMs have had really negative experiences and/or have tasted the forbidden fruit of RPGs that don't have DMs at all.

It would explain this to me a little.

I've had mediocre DMs that homebrewed and mediocre DMs that ran using published settings. What made them mediocre was not the homebrew. The truly bad ones (incredibly rare, fortunately) were just truly bad DMs.

 

[Dire Bare]

People seem to expect subservience from the DM and anything else is an autocratic dictatorship.

Careful, you might stray into hyperbole . . .

So if no player in any group I've ever DMed a home group for adamantly insists on playing a tortle, I'm okay? What if they want to play a werewolf or vampire with all the benefits but none of the penalties?

Oops, too late.

Player A wants to play a tortle, an option presented in the official books. Player B wants to play a werewolf "with all the benefits and none of the penalties". Sure, these two hypotheticals are equal in all aspects.

Sigh.

 

[AlViking]

No one is particularly interested in what you do in your game, outside your players.

This is primarily a discussion of technique and advice.

I wasn't responding to a post on advice. I was responding to a post that DMs have a sense of exclusive ownership which I assume is related to the many, many posts about how DMs who prefer homebrew are just treating players like visitors to a museum, don't want players doing anything to change the world and similar.

Actual advice? Do what you enjoy. For me homebrew is less work than running established worlds and campaigns. Everybody's different.

You've simply offered up details of your campaign; these have become a useful test case for hypothetical discussions on these techniques.

I didn't give any detail of my campaign in this particular instance, I was describing one of the issues I have with published campaigns like FR. I will never be an FR grognard but they are out there and I've run into it. They know details about every important tavern in Waterdeep that has ever been discussed along with far more details and lore than I even knew existed. It makes it more difficult as a DM to improvise and tailor the story to the characters.

 

[Dire Bare]

I detest published settings like FR. There are so many powerful NPCs around, why would a D&D party ever feel special?

I cannot run in a setting with Elminster or Drizzt.

We play in the Realms all the time. Drizzt and Elminster have yet to show up, and no one has remarked on it yet. Strange.

 

[AlViking]

Careful, you might stray into hyperbole . . .


Oops, too late.

Player A wants to play a tortle, an option presented in the official books. Player B wants to play a werewolf "with all the benefits and none of the penalties". Sure, these two hypotheticals are equal in all aspects.

Sigh.

Those were examples of requests from games before I came up with a curated list. You've expressed repeatedly that you reject the my preferences. I want a small number of intelligent humanoid species in my world is because I don't want a kitchen sink campaign. It has nothing to do with power grabs.

 

[AlViking]

-nm-

 

[Maxperson]

For my spelljammer campaign, I knew the PCs will start in an asteroid field and fly along the first levels with an asteroid hopper (a non spelljamming ship that with the help of hooks and ropes basically swing from asteroid to asteroid, the field is a fantasy asteroid field where the asteroids are quite close together). For that asteroid field I created (not in detail) several small settlments and the starter town - Plank City, which is a settlment of asteroids coppled and hold togethter by robes and planks, run by a church or chauntea. I had NPCs and locations for that town ready.

Like, 99% of all GM game prep is setting prep. Every location, encounter, NPC, monster, adventure hook is setting. I prefer my GM is preparing at least some of that so that it stays consistent.

In this case the adventure hook was literally the setting!

That sounds like a really fun campaign. I totally would have made a miniature giant space tortle for my PC.

 

[Maxperson]

Except that that is, in fact, literally what "realism" means.

Look it up. Or, if you don't feel like it: link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4.

In every case, when "realism" is used to refer to literary or artistic things, it is always referring to depictions attempting, as much as possible, to display things like they actually are in real life. That's very literally the whole point of the word.

And "fantasy realism" is not a thing. The closest you'll get is either (1) the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, where the "realism" there refers to....depicting scenes as closely as possible to what they would be in real life, if they did in fact exist in real life, they just coincidentally don't happen to. Or (2) "magical realism", a primarily literary space where realistic environments are presented...but they also happen to contain supernatural or unphysical events, which are not treated as unusual or even all that worthy of comment by the author/artist.

In literally every case, however, "realism" as a particular branch of expressive endeavor, is about making things as similar as possible to what is actually real. Hence, I said what I said. The depiction of religion--not deities, religion, the practice and complexity and day-to-day living within that practice--in Eberron is worlds more realistic than that of nearly all other official D&D settings. The pseudo-Christian henotheism of nearly all D&D worlds is an extremely unrealistic portrayal of religion, even when taking into account that gods are demonstrably very real and quite powerful in these settings. The religions do not function as social entities; they function as gameplay components, to a degree that even I find troublesome. Not so with Eberron. Its religions actually have the shape and behavior that one would expect--and include problems, complications, contradictions, and foibles, so, so many foibles.

I don't need bad definitions. In RPGs that's not what people mean when use realism in RPGs. You basically have 2 choices. 1) you can use it the way people in RPGs use the term. 2) you can be confused by the term and misuse it by applying it only to real world examples.

In RPGs Fantasy Realism is a thing.