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

[tetrasodium]

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The group has to agree.
You can be interested or like whatever you want. But if the group doesn't agree to it, you can't do it with that group.

"Hey I'm running a $setting game" is all the GM needs to do in order to establish the limits of character and story options. If the player is not familiar with that setting and agrees to join, the responsibility is on that player to adapt to the limitations the gm helps them work out rather than complaining how the gm didn't say no tortles or that elves are different in $setting while continuing to push for and outright play the original rejected concept.

An issue is many people don't make these formal agreements openly in their groups. Sometimes they agree to sit down, default to defaults, then arguments and hurt feelings occur because someone does not follow a default assumption.

Who are these people? Why are you not quoting them instead of shifting the goalposts around like this and inserting and endless chain of scenarios nobody is suggesting in order to keep talking about how the gm is responsible for doing this and that?

Aint no lost city.

Bob is asking for too much.

The DM can't force a PC on a player nor a Player force a setting on the DM.

Obviously but that's not what you were saying AND you are still unwilling to openly admit that the problem is Bob is asking "too much" because he refuses to share the burden for making his character story personality and so on fit the setting he agreed to play in beyond writing something other than dwarf in the race/species box.

This wouldn't be a discussion if they didn't exist. IF you narrow the game well down from the base options AND don't sell it, you are going to run into people who don't wanna play in it. And many people can't take rejection.
I've ran into a couple like that.

Hitchens's razor - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Why are you not responding to those people instead of introducing and responding to things nobody is suggesting as if you are responding to those totally real posters?

On the flipside, there are players who come with a similarly small list of PCs they are willing to run. Again rejection.

Yes there are and we don't need to invoke hitchens razor because some of them who have literally been posting to this discussion where you keep talking about steps the GM needs to take in making a PC concept work. Here is one with a long history in the thread

Setting coherence is something the DM cares, I myself am fine just being 'there' as a lizardman in the arctic.

Perhaps you should take responsibility for your own preference and tell the gm of that hypothetical Arctic based campaign you yourself introduced that you aren't willing to play an Arctic based campaign rather than agree to play and proceed to show no willingness in making your character fit the setting?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Indeed. The 2014 iteration of the D&D 5E PHB has less than ten races and twelve classes (i.e. only nine races), yet I doubt that anyone would consider that cause to reexamine if they should be playing some other game altogether.

Oh, but some did! There were folks on this forum and others, that I personally spoke with, who swore up and down that because Dragonborn were going to be printed in the 5e PHB, they'd swear off the entire edition, back in "D&D Next". And, if you recall, back just a little ways before that, we had the absolute MELTDOWN of the community over the fact that gnomes were not present in 4e's PHB1--even though almost nobody ever plays gnomes! Like we legit actually have the data now from over a decade of 5e, which shows that gnomes are--at best!--maybe 2% of all characters.

So yes. The inclusion or exclusion of any particular option in a book quite literally does lead some, and I emphasize some, folks to reexamine if they should be playing some other game altogether. To slightly paraphrase Spock: It is not logical--but it is sometimes true.

 

[GobHag]

Perhaps you should take responsibility for your own preference and tell the gm of that hypothetical Arctic based campaign you yourself introduced that you aren't willing to play an Arctic based campaign rather than agree to play and proceed to show no willingness in making your character fit the setting?

I'm willing to play an arctic based campaign, I just don't care to make my character fit in an arctic setting.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If you knew ahead of time, would you have played in my all human campaign, where the goal was to highlight the class and things you learned in character, as opposed to what you "were"?

It was planed for a year and lasted about 14 months, up to 10th level.

If I knew ahead of such a game? Yes, I would politely decline. It's a mildly interesting question--when everyone is the same except for X, what does that do?--but it's not interesting enough to play something other than what interests me.

And to be clear, I would do exactly the same thing if it had instead been:

• Every character in this game must play a Primal class, no other classes exist; I want to see what a world where Nature is THE source of power looks like.
• Every character must have a Thief background and come from the same city; I want to see how characters of the same background evolve over time.
• Pre-gens, because I find it extremely difficult to roleplay pre-gen characters in most cases, outside of one-shots.
• (inspired by GobHag above) Every character must come from the same environment, because this is a world stuck in eternal winter and I want to see how that affects things.

It can be the most thought-out, prepared, adaptive, well-structured campaign. There's still a good chance that I'm not going to enjoy it nearly as much as I would if I got to play things I actually like, so I'm not going to do it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

He summarized my exact feelings. Like I read 2024 and i want to like it but it’s a LOT like reading 4e to me. Like this is a great game but it is wildly different. Let’s say more like 3.0-3.5 really and how the game under 3.5 got really quirky and weird.

As someone who is a huge fan of 4e...

What on earth makes 5.5e look even remotely like 4e?

I would absolutely, hands-down, no-questions give you 3.x, because 5e (either version) is literally 3.x retooled. But 4e? 5.5e didn't add diddly-squat from 4e that wasn't already there, and I've already gone through (in painstaking detail) how 5.0 mostly doesn't look like 4e, and even in some the places where it does, either it's completely superficial, OR the culture-of-play actively fights it for reasons that are beyond me.

 

[MichaelSomething]

So I shouldn't force the PCs to play an all mouse campaign by forcing them to eat magical cheese???

A Matter Of Scale - Penny Arcade

Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.

www.penny-arcade.com

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Unfortunately the opposite has become true, going off of one of the previous comments in this thread. Players bludgeon DMs into submission. “It’s MY character, not YOUR world.” And this is supposed to be a collaborative game. That just reeks of the player entitlement that’s become an issue in the culture.

I think it’s more an issue of Tetra and a few others who feel overtly hostile to players. I am a DM, I like giving my players cool stuff once in a while.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think it’s more an issue of Tetra and a few others who feel overtly hostile to players. I am a DM, I like giving my players cool stuff once in a while.

Who's Tetra?

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Who's Tetra?

The most vocal of the people on the thread that views D&D as being hostile to DMs. You might have them on ignore or vice versa?

 

[MonsterEnvy]

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"Hey I'm running a $setting game" is all the GM needs to do in order to establish the limits of character and story options.

So let’s say you are running Eberron what classes and Wizards released species would you say me as a metaphorical player would not be allowed to play? Could I play Dragonborn, Goliath or Tortle?