D&D General The Tyranny of Rarity

[cbwjm]

Do y'all (on both sides) view choice of character class the same as race? Sub-classes? Alignment? Deities?

Kind of. No class or subclass restrictions in my current game but if I wanted a no arcane magic campaign then wizards, sorcerers, warlocks, arcane trickster, and eldritch knight are likely all out.

I don't really use alignment for my PCs, if my players want to use alignment then I'll typically say no evil alignment, you're heroes not villians. Honestly, I feel like alignment should just be removed at this point since nothing really Interacts with it.

You can select only deities in the campaign, so no Mystra or Bahamut in my homebrew campaign world. Typically you can select deities that would be antithetical to the alignment restrictions above. No heroic acolytes of the corruptor or destroyer for instance as these are not heroic deities.

 

[Stormonu]

Given what you say below, this makes sense in that you're banging out the game world in what must be a very short time.

And that's just it - some of us are one-system one-world DMs. Building a campaign setting (and I've now done three major ones over the years) takes me between about 6 and 18 months, and much of it is the sort of rather dull work I really only ever want to have to do once. And so, once I've done it I'm damn well going to get my money's worth out of it!

Ditto with game systems - I only want to learn one system, once, and then adapt that system for my needs as I go along.

It's like @Umbran noted earlier - you can get locked into a frame of mind if you inavertently overbuild on the front end.

There's nothing wrong with building a grand campaign world up front (or over time), or implementing a published world (I've put together several of my own - Amberos, Crimson Empire, Frost & Fire, to name a few; as well as having run Greyhawk, FR, Eberron and Rokugan among others), but sometimes building less lets you be surprised by what the players bring and allows the DM to be more agile in trying something new. A lot of DMing advice - all the way back to 1E has suggestions not to build everything at once, and maybe start with the local village the PCs begin in and detail outwards as needed.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Given that one constant from then to now is that the GM still does all the work, what new model do you propose?

I've only played a couple games where the dm does all the work, They were, in general, not good games.

What has worked is what we most often do: collaborate. Which involves communication and sharing of desires, along with a willingness to compromise, at least some of the time.

 

[Oofta]

I've run across several modern RPGs (Tales from the Loop, Fate, Fiasco) where the world-building is a lot more player interactive. It can be a session 0 setup where the players contribute world-building attributes (Player 1: "There's a pirate nation to the north", Player 2: "Yeah, it extorts protection fees from shipping lanes so import goods are really expensive"). Or in other cases, it can come up in play (DM: "Okay Dave, you got a 20 on getting past the guard, how do you do it?" Dave: "We used to be schoolmates and in the swordsman's club. He knows I'm on the up-and-up.").

Rather than be full-on stage director, it can change the DM to being an organizer - they take on facts, scenes and information presented by the players, keep it organized for reference and handles the dice rolling for interactions. This can vary from taking off a small workload, to round-robin DMing in a session to near-DMless play; just whatever level the group feels is right for their game.

It's an interesting concept but I know several of my players would kind of hate it. They have a hard time defining their immediate family, much less helping to build a world. I know I prefer exploring a world when someone else DMs: I enjoy the sense of discovery. Part of the fun of playing is building the world as a DM or discovering the world as a player.

I see this as a different style of gaming, neither better nor worse, just a different option for those that want it. I certainly don't think it makes a DM created and curated world "outdated". It's just an alternative method which may or may not work for some groups.

A cool aspect of D&D is that you could implement a collaborative world build and it could work for a lot of groups, it's just not going to work for every group. I also don't think it's inherently better.

 

[Arilyn]

Ditto with game systems - I only want to learn one system, once, and then adapt that system for my needs as I go along.

Really? There's so many good games out there. I couldn't just stick to one. And yes, I have far too many, I guess, but they make me happy.

 

[Stormonu]

It's an interesting concept but I know several of my players would kind of hate it. They have a hard time defining their immediate family, much less helping to build a world. I know I prefer exploring a world when someone else DMs: I enjoy the sense of discovery. Part of the fun of playing is building the world as a DM or discovering the world as a player.

I see this as a different style of gaming, neither better nor worse, just a different option for those that want it. I certainly don't think it makes a DM created and curated world "outdated". It's just an alternative method which may or may not work for some groups.

A cool aspect of D&D is that you could implement a collaborative world build and it could work for a lot of groups, it's just not going to work for every group. I also don't think it's inherently better.

Oh, I'd had some players this just wouldn't absolutely work for at all - they go deer-eyed when they're given the option of two trails on a forest path ("Which way are we supposed to go?"). But after playing a couple games of Fiasco, I'd be down for a DMless campaign where the players make most of the stuff up with either dice to handle the questionable stuff or someone steps up for 5 minutes to run a NPC that needs to be interacted with. I tried starting such a solo game with Forbidden Lands, but ... other projects came up.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Do y'all (on both sides) view choice of character class the same as race? Sub-classes? Alignment? Deities?

I'm curious if there's any correlation to people who feel that class is an in-universe construct instead of a game construct.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Given that one constant from then to now is that the GM still does all the work, what new model do you propose?

That is not and has never been a constant. Even back in Gygax' day it was far from a constant because there was more than one GM in the group and players took the same characters between different DMs. And smart GMs have always taken notes from the players to add depth and factors to their worlds; this was among other things made explicit D&D DMing advice in one of the 4e DMGs. Meanwhile there are literal games that have significant followings that tell the GM not to prepare before session zero.

If you are at the extreme where the GM does all the work rather than just more than most people and you consider this a problem then I suggest you stop claiming that the GM does all the work is a constant and instead look at what other people are doing that takes them less work - and works.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Given that one constant from then to now is that the GM still does all the work, what new model do you propose?

I have been improv GMing since my 1st edition Shadowrun campaign when it first came out in the early 90s. It's the only way I run.

I ran an entire adventure revolving around one small but of premade idea (it would be funny if some NPCs mixed up a banshee-screaming fae with a banshee-tank vehicle and the players went on a wildly misguided shadowrun). That was literally the extent of my preplanning.

I am probably an anthesis GM to you because most of what I have to show for my 4 year long 5e campaign is maybe 7 pages of randomly scribbled notes I had to remember from one session to the next that had been made up on the spot.

 

[Oofta]

I have been improv GMing since my 1st edition Shadowrun campaign when it first came out in the early 90s. It's the only way I run.

I ran an entire adventure revolving around one small but of premade idea (it would be funny if some NPCs mixed up a banshee-screaming fae with a banshee-tank vehicle and the players went on a wildly misguided shadowrun). That was literally the extent of my preplanning.

I am probably an anthesis GM to you because most of what I have to show for my 4 year long 5e campaign is maybe 7 pages of randomly scribbled notes I had to remember from one session to the next that had been made up on the spot.

I'm a bit of a middle of the road person myself. I have a general outline but a lot is improv because the PCs regularly do the opposite of what I expect them to do. But ... I also add anything important to canon. That's how I ended up with a group of non-evil goblins long ago in a campaign far, far away. The group captured a goblin, didn't want to kill him and made some really good rolls to convince it to come over to the side of the light. Thus was the Nug Nug tribe born.

So I start with an outline to go from that I may or may not change on the fly if I think of something better and fact hasn't been revealed yet. I don't have excruciating setting detail ahead of time, but if I pull out a tavern name from my list of random taverns then The Pompous Putty Cat will now forever be the name of the inn in Bridgerton and it's run (or at least was run) by another randomly selected tavernkeeper Glimko the gnome.