D&D General The Tyranny of Rarity

[Crimson Longinus]

But...that's just the GM's side. What about the players? The more complete question is more like, "What's better, a setting the DM believes in, but players who bear up with restrictions, or a setting the DM feels is fundamentally goofy, but the players get to revel in their cool ideas?"

Neither is a game worth playing. If all the people are not interested playing the same game, then it is better for them to not play together.

 

[hawkeyefan]

What's better, a setting the DM believes in and is enthusiastic about or a setting the DM feels is fundamentally goofy? Why is it that players can be prima donnas that demand every race under the sun but the DM who builds the world has no say in the matter? Why does "compromise" always seem to mean "let the players decide what can be a very important part of setting feel and continuity"?

I didn’t say that the GM must compromise. I said that folks should collectively compromise. Sometimes, players should give in. Sometimes, GMs should.

But if the sole reason to not allow thibgs that people want is to keep one person happy….then I don’t know if that’s enough to matter, regardless if that person is a player or a GM.

I don’t place any more privlege or importance on the GM.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I speak from the perspective of someone who is perennially the GM for my group.

At this point I'd add that ENWorld consistently in polls seems to have 80+% of people who regularly GM and 90% of people who GM at some point (the most recent poll I found). This isn't some sort of players vs GMs thread; we're all GMs here. It's a matter of what we think helps GMing the most.

 

[Oofta]

"I'm sorry, but I can't DM well if you take too many races," does not seem like a great selling point.

I'm sorry, but I've built this campaign world over decades and put a lot of thought into it over the years. I limit races based on what I think makes sense for this world. If you have a character concept let's talk about it and see what we can do but no, you can't play a kenku. They don't exist in my world. What were you hoping to get out of it? Is there some concept that fits that will work?

The point is, ultimately, that the campaign world is not the meaningful unit of game to the players. The players are not sitting down saying, "Oh, great! Another chance to make the GM's world a reality!"

Without a campaign world there is no game. The players have a huge impact on my world's reality through their actions and decisions. Things that happen in a campaign become part of the world's lore. You have no idea what my campaign is like but equating a handful of limitations with a dictatorial railroading DM is pretty insulting.

With restrictions on player choices, the GM is asking the players to take the burden of supporting the campaign world, rather than the campaign world supporting their play. In this, the players are giving something to the GM. They ought to get something back. Basic fairness, there.

They get a fully realized campaign world. They get to make PCs that are pretty much free to do what they want within limits that I set for group cohesion and fun for the entire group. So no evil PCs, no loners that go out of their way to antagonize other PCs. I'm quite up front about what style I provide. What they get back is a fun campaign with lots of laughter and hopefully some interesting drama along the way.

Note: this comes from the perspective that the GM is not ultimately "superior" to other players. "The GM does all the work, so the players should generally bow to the GM's desires," is an old, and I think largely outdated, model. If, in order to run a game, you need the players to give up a lot of stuff, that's not their fault, so they don't owe you the solution.

So I'm outdated because I have a preference? Really? Why not just straight out tell me I'm an old-timer grognard who is playing the game wrong? The players are not giving up much because if they absolutely must play a tabaxi it just means they have to find a different game. I gave up long ago trying to be a DM for every possible player.

So, your "What harm does it do?" comes from the position of a person who doesn't actually have any problems. Players, are not, in fact, taking a bunch of characters that don't work for you. I suspected as much - this is a hypothetical situation, for you.

In addition to a player asking to play a half dragon half vampire I also had player ask to play a drow. I said no and we moved on. In another case (and another edition) someone wanted to play a deva. Because they could pass as human and I had an idea of how to integrate it into the campaign I allowed it and had a fun reveal at the end of the game.

It doesn't come up often because before we sit down they know what's allowed.

The answers to the question you have asked clearly then do not apply to you. What harm does it do? Well, in your case, nothing. Your status quo is fine for you. Go, have fun.


But realize then that your personal perspective does not apply to the answers, either. You don't really have much to say on why GMs might want to roll back on restrictions, or why it might be a positive for a GM to do so.

I've repeatedly stated what I think it buys for DMs through examples. I create and populate a campaign world. If it doesn't make sense to the DM that there are dozens of intelligent humanoid races running around then they shouldn't feel pressured or bullied into doing something that doesn't make sense to them. I get tired of being called a tyrant simply because kitchen sink campaigns without serious justification (Planescape or SpellJammer for example) is one I have a hard time taking seriously. I play AL where everything is allowed, but I can't take the Forgotten Realms seriously as a campaign setting. It always feels a bit cartoony to me.

People have preferences, likes and dislikes. I have no problem if someone doesn't want to play in my sandbox and have never had an issue getting players. If a handful of limitations means you don't want to play in my game it's not my problem. If you tell me I'm wrong for having limitations, that's your problem.

 

[Thomas Shey]

True, but real world analogies fail imo when you add a bipedal lizard to the mix. No way are most people going to shrug and move on if such a being is unique.

I'm not sold on that in a world as magic-heavy as most D&D worlds are. People will have seen weirder things, even if not regularly.

 

[Cadence]

I don’t place any more privlege or importance on the GM.

In groups where most of the would-be-players can also DM it feels symmetric. If there are five players and one DM, the game can go on without one of the players but not without the DM. So it feels like there is some imbalance.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I was never a fan of that. If you aren't gaming with folks who can talk through such things like reasonable adults, that is the root problem, not the races in the game, or how the game books are written.

Yeah. The phrase a long-time friend put it is "Making something unlikely is no substitute for making it impossible". If you don't want something to happen, make it not happen; if you're willing to let it happen at all don't assume low probability will do the lifting for you.

 

[Thomas Shey]

People often use this as a disparagement. I don't understand why. Adventurers are already weird, likely to be subject to strange curses (or blessings...or both), consorting with dangerous or capricious powers, delving into knowledge and locations Man Was Not Meant To Know, wearing bits of bling stolen from dead people or recovered from seven different ancient cultures without a care in the world about fashion, etc.

I'm going to take a bit of the other side of this here.

The question is how much you want the PCs to always stand out like a sore thumb. Assuming your setting is not super-conservative, a typical old-school PC group wouldn't necessarily attract a lot of attention in a cosmopolitan setting, and honestly, aren't necessarily all that distinct from people around them at least at lower levels.

As soon as you have a lot of exotics (and that's the important thing here--how uncommon they are. The Star Wars cantina is a bad example, because you find random aliens scattered all over the setting, and there's enough different kinds that any given one no one has seen before in a place that gets a lot of transit will only attract so much attention; a fantasy equivalent can potentially be the same) every place they go, even from the start, their distinctiveness becomes something of an issue in the way everyone is reacting to them. You can ignore it, of course, but that can feel very forced. And this becomes all the more pronounced when the whole group is like that.

Among other things it can just distract from the kind of situations you want to present and things you want to do, because it distorts all kinds of things.

 

[Umbran]

Do you ever have any restrictions on race or class in the games.you run?

Broadly, if I own the book it is in, it is fair game. If I don't own it, we can discuss - if you have a cool idea that isn't just about mechanical power, and I have the funds, I will often buy the book. I have, on occasion, limited a particular race or class for balance reasons. It has been many, many years since I put in a restriction for worldbuilding reasons.

As noted upthread - I generally build the game around the player choices, not restrict the player choices to fit into my world - if the player wants to play a tortle paladin, it will be a world with tortles and paladins in it - I'll talk/negotiate with the player about how tortles and paladins fit into the world.

If I, personally, want to build my own cool stuff into the world, I do that around the player's choices - you can think of it as "Yes, and..." cooperative worldbuilding. My passion for running a game does not come from realizing my game world, but comes from the player's experiences playing - if the players are getting a good experience, I'm a happy GM.

If so, what's an example and what do the players get for it?

So, as above, what the players get is... basically what they want. Maybe with some negotiation.

I am not a "one game, one game world" kind of person, and I haven't been since 1986, and the release of the old FASERIP Marvel Superheroes game. D&D is great, I love it. But there's a lot of other game experiences to be had. So, broadly, it is safe to say that, each RPG campaign I run is not just a new game world, but is a different ruleset - one in Deadlands, the next Ashen Stars, then D&D, then Spirit of the Century.

Luckily for me, the players I typically work with are similar - they don't want to play several campaigns in the same system and same world. So, I don't run that. Once I have dispensed with the idea that my campaign world is a persistent, long-lived thing from which I gain pride and passion, the rest comes naturally. I don't feel a need to own the thing.

 

[Oofta]

I didn’t say that the GM must compromise. I said that folks should collectively compromise. Sometimes, players should give in. Sometimes, GMs should.

But if the sole reason to not allow thibgs that people want is to keep one person happy….then I don’t know if that’s enough to matter, regardless if that person is a player or a GM.

I don’t place any more privlege or importance on the GM.

The DM builds the world, which includes populating it with specific races. The player gets to create any character that fits in that world. In my campaign I also have some simple guidelines designed to make the game work for all the other players at the table.

We regularly provide lunch for our players because we host games at our house and my wife likes to cook. We let people know what we're thinking of making, take into consideration preferences but ultimately my wife is the chef and she gets to decide what gets made. Is she "privileged"? Yes. She's the one cooking the meal and putting far more work into it than anyone else at the table. Same with the DM.