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

[AlViking]

Personally I cannot imagine going into someone else's game with a concrete character concept that I absolutely must play. I want to discuss the campaign world, what fits with the world and the rest of the group is interested in, what the pitch is for the campaign or what we as a group decide we want. I may have had some vague ideas that may have been fun but they just didn't fit with the group or what the group wanted to do. I'll just file away that idea in the "nice to play someday" file and pick something that will fit. If that means I wanted to play an elf and there are none in the world I'll figure out something else.

If someone does join a game with character sheet in hand for a session 0, not just a concept or something they'd like to run but something they absolutely must run, to me it's a potential red flag. We're going to have to have a discussion about what that player wants out of the game because it sounds like someone that's making demands not just of the DM but the rest of the players at the table.

 

[AlViking]

Well, you work with the players. Presuamble, you have a finite amounts in your campaign, so you might even have to allow shardminds, just one, for the one player that likes the idea, and no yuan-ti at all, because no one asked for them.

Of course, maybe it doesn't actually have to be a shardmind, either. Maybe there is a game feature or a story feature or visual that they like about it and can be accomplished in a different way.

The beauty of D&Ds long history and many supplements is that you basically any character idea probably has had one class or race has precedent somewhere. I could easily see that in an AD&D campaign a player would like to play a Golem (either a free spirited one or even one build by the party's mage and serving them. I played a character's Butler once in a short-lived Space 1889 game, that was fun).
In 3E and later editions, the obvious choice would be Warforged. But with or without the Warforged as an easy-to-use race template for the idea of "i want to play a golem", you wouldn't need to write in an entire new species with an elaborate back-story. You don't even need Wizards creating Golems as a regular occurence. It could be just a one-time thing, one Wizard (or devil, or fey, or engineer, god or alien from outer space) making an experiment / dropping some gear.

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Also remember, one of the original things that started this discussion wasn't even tortles. It was taking away stuff from the PHB of the edition for your campaign. So something like "no Orcs" or "no Rangers". Which is something that happened during the AD&D era settings, where simply options were removed and billed as a campaign feature.

I liked Remalithis stance of asking: Okay, you want to take something away - but what do you add as options? If your setting is so much more focused that it can't be distracted by Warforged or Tortles or Elves or Sorcerors, how does this narrow focus manifest on the player side?

I read this as the typical - let the player decide all of the options for the game and the DM must make it work.

I'd give my logic and reasoning behind I do what I do but it never matters. If there's a disagreement on what is allowed and there is no compromise no one at the table can force the issue. For a player it means there's no game to join, for the DM it means that seat at the table is still open.

 

[tetrasodium]

Really that is a conversation just a bad one..

Either the DM or the player is supposed to ask why the playo wants to be a tortle.

And onus typically is more on a DM because typically the DM has more a setting control then the player.

On the player side, the responsibility of the player is to be completely honest. On why they want this specific choice. So that the DM can find out what fits for their setting..

That bolded bit is just hyper technical hair splitting by misusing a dictionary.

When you pull back from that sophistry there is still the huge problem you've been defending while claiming otherwise. What you keep blatantly ignoring in your zeal to shift the entire burden of making characters fit onto the gm and absolve players as a whole of bearing even the slightest speck of responsibility to work with their GM is that what you are pointlessly calling "conversation" is still an example of players showing a complete refusal to engage in collaboration with their gm or a refusal accept that their gm is a human not gifted with mind reading capability rather than some flavor of an ai training robot.

Despite your claims to the contrary in 1297, this is not a problem rooted in the mere format of it being a forum discussion between two sides with no willingness to compromise and the discussion itself has demonstrated that repeatedly. Time and time again there have been efforts to talk about what the process of players working with the gm, and each time those efforts are crushed by either you reminding everyone of a point nobody is arguing about how players aren't required to join or keep playing a game they don't want to play --OR-- that effort to discuss a process of collaborative working with is blatantly dismissed and some suggestion is made for how deliberately absurd examples like Luke Skywalker Klingons and so on could totally fit settings they are violently in conflict with if only the gm was more flexible and changed the setting to make a deliberately absurd example if only the GM would ignore the absurd result.

Even beyond that there is the problem that this is on some levels a problem that wotc's choices in design marketing and community interaction§ 5e. All of those combined have shifted this from a past minor issue where the gm could reasonably expect a player with a poor approach to collaboration to engage with them on some level other than indignation and outrage after explaining things like how d&d works as a game between one DM and an average 3-5 players to an endemic problem where even trying to explain that gets the gm immediately labeled some kind of toxic control freak as we've seen many times through the thread.


§ ie tell your story, we designed this subclass to frustrate dms, the crushing video game mentality design focus.

 

[Minigiant]

That bolded bit is just hyper technical hair splitting by misusing a dictionary.

When you pull back from that sophistry there is still the huge problem you've been defending while claiming otherwise. What you keep blatantly ignoring in your zeal to shift the entire burden of making characters fit onto the gm and absolve players as a whole of bearing even the slightest speck of responsibility to work with their GM is that what you are pointlessly calling "conversation" is still an example of players showing a complete refusal to engage in collaboration with their gm or a refusal accept that their gm is a human not gifted with mind reading capability rather than some flavor of an ai training robot

The player has to say what type of character they want to play and why.

The DM have to say whether or not this type of character or a substitute exists in their world.

Because the DM typically is the one who knows most of the world.

 

[Belen]

We're talking a legacy Dungeons and Dragons race that's been around since before I was born, we're not talking Blades in the Dark. If I knew obscure Blades in the Dark sources of playable races since before I was born, sure, whatever

I never heard of Tortles until they popped as a short supplement for purchase on DDB and I have been running D&D since 1993.

Calling them a legacy playable race is a stretch no matter when they were first referenced.

 

[Belen]

I am just glad I do not have these issues in my games or among the larger group of people that I know.

I have seen both toxic players and DMs and I avoid both. They tend just to be toxic.

 

[Bae'zel]

DM Always Wins.

Because they’re doing all the work. They bought all of the books (usually). They do all the planning, improvisation, setting book keeping and running hundreds of NPCs. They design the dungeons, make rulings, come up with DCs, balance encounters, do most of the math.

Players just have to show up with their characters sheets. Even then, guaranteed, several don’t even do that.

So yeah, the DM gets some authority. In D&D they have to. If you don’t like that, play something else: there are tons of RPGs where the DM shares narrative and mechanical control with the players. Or even DM less systems.

 

[Remathilis]

In order for there to be a compromise there has to be a conversation. I tried to have a conversation to discuss alternatives and all I get is "I want to play a tortle, just say it's a one-off or they come from some hidden valley". I suggested one reason someone might want to play a tortle is because the natural AC and of course that's not why they want to play a tortle and only a tortle will do.

But that's not why I would want to be a Tortle. You are assigning me a motivation I don't have. If you think it's just about the AC, you have absolutely missed the point. I want the aesthetics of the species. The mechanics is second. To say "play a dwarf in plate" is to basically say "be a human and pretend your a Dragonborn".

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I read this as the typical - let the player decide all of the options for the game and the DM must make it work.

I'd give my logic and reasoning behind I do what I do but it never matters. If there's a disagreement on what is allowed and there is no compromise no one at the table can force the issue. For a player it means there's no game to join, for the DM it means that seat at the table is still open.

No, player and DM work together to find a good solution for the idea they had. I think that's inevitable, because you do this every time. Sometimes it's easier, sometimes it's harder. Before the player created his Knight character that lost the love of his life to an assassin's guild in a capital city, the guild, the knighthood and the love of his life didn't exist in your campaign. The player decides these are options that must exist your campaign, but you never included "assassin's guild active in capital city" or "knighthood in capital city". Maybe it fits right in, but maybe it does not.

 

[Scott Christian]

Personally I cannot imagine going into someone else's game with a concrete character concept that I absolutely must play.

This.