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

[Paul Farquhar]

You play a different game than I do. The PCs are powerful but there are also powerful NPCs and everyone has to sleep sometime.

Powerful racist NPCs are called villains. PCs have plenty of practice fighting them.

I could also say that if the player insists on playing something not on my curated list and is not willing to discuss actual compromise that supports the "Entitled Player Syndrome" argument.

Sure, but what I just suggested is a compromise. The player has agreed that rather than play a tabaxi, which does exist in the setting, they will play a depowered rakshasa, which you have established does. Furthermore, the player has agreed that they will always be in disguise (easy to do in 5e rules) rather than walking openly.

 

[Umbran]

Any attempt at lynching a PC is likely to result in a massacre of the village, so it's not like it poses any real threat.

Which should result in the PCs being reported to the local Baron. If the Baron's forces aren't up to it, they get referred up to the Earl, then the Duke, then the King.

Do none of these have forces that are a real threat to the PCs?

 

[TwoSix]

So someone that doesn't share your preferences is always doing it wrong?

"Wrong" is a spectrum.

My argument is twofold.

1) If you're playing D&D and you aren't embracing cosmopolitan diversity, a central point of the game for the past 25 years, you're doing something wrong. If you think a setting should only have a few races, then the OSR is probably a better for you. This is a specific corollary to a more general principle: *Play the game that's in front of you, don't break the game to fit your preferences."

2) If you're putting months of solo setting building as a higher priority than the needs of your group of players, you're not embracing the heart of TTRPGs, which is "colloboration".

 

[Remathilis]

So having appropriate responses to character actions is a bad thing? You want to be able to run around burning villages and people don't react? How is that a living world when character actions are meaningless?

Your premise begins with the notion that somehow everyone knows the PCs are guilty. Apparently the PCs were dumb enough to do it in plain sight, leave witnesses, and announced their names as they did it. And everyone around saw the burned wreckage and knew it wasn't orc raiders or the cow kicking over a lamp but those adventurers who just a week ago helped us by saving the local mine from a kobold infestation. They are a menace! Let's shun them and provoke their ire! Have the Lord send his army after them, the same army who, you know, couldn't kick some kobold squatters out of a mine!

Consequences make sense when the circumstances permit, not when the DM has a video game like justice system and every NPC develops hive mind.

 

[TwoSix]

But sometimes there is story in constraint too. Having a tiefling actually be looked at as a demon, and therefore the cause of the town's draught-stricken crops or high percentage of deaths can get tiresome, especially when all the other players want to do is go slay a dragon. So if the DM literally says, there are no tieflings because they are devils and demons and not one person would ever trust one, let alone invite them into their kingdom, castle, inn, business, or house. You as a player, have a choice to make. Play a different character or don't play. To insist you still get to play it, and ruin other people's fun is selfish. To insist you play it, regardless of the lore dump given to you by the DM is again, selfish. You come off the selfish person in that scenario, not the DM who already has ten pages of lore around demons and devils, and a hundred pages of lore around the cultures and races and kingdoms that exist.

Or the DM could just not, you know, make that terrible decision and stamp it into their world-building.

 

[AlViking]

"Wrong" is a spectrum.

My argument is twofold.

1) If you're playing D&D and you aren't embracing cosmopolitan diversity, a central point of the game for the past 25 years, you're doing something wrong. If you think a setting should only have a few races, then the OSR is probably a better for you. This is a specific corollary to a more general principle: *Play the game that's in front of you, don't break the game to fit your preferences."

2) If you're putting months of solo setting building as a higher priority than the needs of your group of players, you're not embracing the heart of TTRPGs, which is "colloboration".

So ... if I don't run my game according to your preferences I'm doing it wrong.

I don't do collaborative world building. I do collaborative world development as the world is affected by the actions of the PCs.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Do none of these have forces that are a real threat to the PCs?

About the same threat as any other opponents the PCs face.

 

[TiQuinn]

The more I read from this thread, the more it becomes apparent why Keith Ammann is discouraged. Yes, the game has changed and it’s moving farther away from a place in his mind where he has chosen to anchor himself. If he keeps writing for what he thinks the game should be, rather than what the game actually is (or what the audience wants), I can’t see that working well for him.

Personally, I think he should write for the OSR space where his game philosophy still applies.

 

[Umbran]

It always starts with "I have a carefully considered vision of my world" and it ends with "and I'm not going to let anyone change it unless I say so."

Really? Or is this a snarky reply that has gone to the point where we cannot tell if you are serious?

Or... do you figure that if the PCs "massacre" an entire village, that should have no repercussions in the narrative?

 

[Umbran]

About the same threat as any other opponents the PCs face.

Except, of course, that it is a threat that will hunt them down, and attack at their weak moments, rather than wait in its lair for them to kill it.