Yeah.
A good DM doesn't volunteer, <snip>
That is what the players sign up for: we agree to play according to your game. <snip>
Good DMs don't volunteer? Citation needed. People are so quick to demand evidence in this thread. Show yours. I doubt you actually will, because you've decided I'm persona non grata, and overall I've tried to respect that even if I think it isn't particularly courteous, but this one merits a response.
I dunno about you, but when I join a game, I agree to play that SYSTEM, and in particular, a bare minimum of the baseline components thereof. Also: how can the DM be
asked to run, and yet it is the players "agreeing" to play? The latter requires that it be the DM
offering something that the players accept. The former requires that the DM be
responding to a request made by the players, at which point surely it is the DM agreeing to do something the players wanted? You are undercutting your own argument not two paragraphs later!
It is a two way street, but it starts with the DM.
Max, I know that you love idiosyncratic definitions, but that is literally saying "it is a two way street, but it isn't."
Either the need to respect one another's preferences does, in fact, actually apply mutually, or it does not. Either the street goes both ways, of it only goes one way. You have just explicitly described a street that actually goes only one way: the DM must be respected flat out always, and the players get only what the DM deigns to give them, nothing more. That is, by any reasonable definition, NOT a two way street.
Seriously, though, it isn't a "chore", it is just a lot of work. I do it because my players ENJOY playing in my adventures when I DM.
Then why keep bringing it up as this incredible burden you must bear?
I just keep going back to why the player wants to play want they want.
To me, 95% of players can have fun with other ideas. Players tend to have muliple things they like. They typically can and are willing to switch race, subrace, class, subclass, stats, or theme. 95% of player can do this.
If your setting lore is such that a player can't or is unwilling to switch race, class, style, them, or their "subs", there is a good chance your lore is bad, in not interesting to a non-superfan of the theme, or has nor be well explained. Sometimes it will happen.
The 4e PHB had a "play an X if you want" after every race. So a player who wanted to be a banned race, the DM could look at these and find other ways to play that way.
Players not having enough PC opinions should be a relatively rare thing.
From my experience, when a player can't find a PC idea to play within a world, the player is either being an extreme hardliner on one idea or the DM's setting lore and lore derived mechanics don't match the base assumption of the D&D. And it's usually the latter.
I am...kind of confused as to where you stand here. Things like "95% of players can have fun with other ideas" seems to be a "screw what you hoped to play, play what I allow or GTFO" position. But your later statements seem to indicate a pretty thoroughly critical stance against inviolable restrictions. Is that correct?
My groups usually have four or five people, so for me it's more of a five-way street.
Edit to add: I don't want to break out the "deciding what toppings to order on our pizza on game day" analogy, but I will if I must.
It's still only two ways. Are player preferences worthy of respect? If the player is earnestly enthusiastic about something and would he crestfallen to lose it, is that enough to
sometimes make you reconsider? If you have a an adult conversation, is it genuinely at least
possible that you could change your mind, or accept some form of genuine compromise, rather than unilateral declarations and absolute dominance?
Because every one of these arguments are always massively aggrieved.
The poor DM, lashed tot he wheel, forced to do all the work for those wicked players. And the only glimmer of hope and joy they are allowed is just one simple, tiny little thing-- being the only person whose preferences matter and whose word is unarguable law, set above those sad plebs who are damn lucky they deign to do a fun creative activity that is such an awful burden apparently.
I wish the books would do more to to foster an entertainer mentality rather than a small god complex.
Absolutely. And for those who mocked me (and others) for using hyperbole,
it was the pro-restriction folks who did it first.
Yep. Elementary school through college.
Once in college, I also joined some games where all the
others were friends and I was the new guy, but I also had games with friends in college (before the game).
After college, it has been a mix, about half "friends-first" and half "friends-after".
Then I hope you understand that not only is this unusual, it is in fact extremely special.
I have
never played in a game where I was friends with every player to start with. I have never played in a game where I was friends with even
half of the players to start with. The only games I have ever even
participated in that was 100% friends-only are the DW games I've run (well, one abortive campaign that fell through and another that is ongoing.)
I'm not experiencing it, I'm reading it here. Constantly. On this thread.
Because D&D's approach to the storyteller position is seriously and dangerously cracked.
In fairness, it's not just D&D. White Wolf, at the very least, also has issues of this kind.
In what way?
I mean, I've been DMing this way since the beginning, and frankly every other DM I have ever played with DM's this way as well. I really don't see why you feel this is a problem?
You cannot possibly expect me to believe you've never heard of "viking hat" DMing.
The level of hyperbole about how terrible DMs are if they don't allow everything a player wants always hits such ridiculous heights.
Yes I think the DM makes the final decisions about a lot of things. The DM should listen to their players, no DM can run games that their players hate. Every game I have ever played (outside of one failed experiment) has been that way. We discuss some opportunities, the DM makes their pitch and we all have fun.
If you run a cooperative game, cool. Do what makes sense. But please stop the exaggerated "The DM is on a power trip" because they make some decisions about the campaign that someone somewhere could might not like.
The hyperbole was, as far as I can tell, exclusively in response to pro-restriction folks making their own hyperbole first. "[F]irst take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye." You even engage in some of it yourself, talking of how the DM must "allow everything the player wants." Accusations of ridiculous hyperbole are not very effective if you engage in hyperbole of your own.
So. You have a discussion. Does this mean you are actually discussing in good faith? That you are open to compromise, to the possibility of changing your mind or reversing a past decision, despite "precedent" not necessarily supporting it (to appropriate Lanefan's term, quoted below)? Because your repeated insistence on "the setting is mine," "99%" of the world being under your control, etc., do not reflect that level of cooperation and diplomacy. Such statements very much come across as my-way-or-the-highway, never-darken-my-door-again DMing, where there is no discussion or conversation, there is the law handed down by the DM and that's it.
Here's another.
Even when I do I have gotten people demanding I do 250 words so it fit into reason 1. And still demand they have player agency and I must change. Because the DM is their play thing.
And my next quote, which I am also directly responding to, likewise includes an insult, "button pushers."
It would be funny if it weren’t so earnest. And the whole creativity tangent, yikes. I’ve introduced 5E button pushers to OSE and after a few hiccups they suddenly got it. It was like a literal light went on over their head. Limitations and restrictions breed creativity.
I responded to hyperbole about literally being the players' plaything (as quoted just previously.) This mocking criticism of "so earnest" hyperbole should really consider who's engaging in what and whether the pot is calling the kettle black here. More importantly, limitations CAN breed creativity, but I don't think anyone wants the Comics Code Authority to come back so that we can get more creative comic stories, do they? That "CAN" is incredibly important and when you leave it out, you turn a nuanced true statement into an objectively false one.
Context matters. I wouldn't have used that term, but the whole sentence?
If the campaign has been set ahead of time and the player shows up to the game to create a conflict, he's being a douche.
So yes, someone that goes out of their way to be disruptive, that person is the problem.
And Max explicitly treats it as all, or effectively all, players who fail to instantly bend to any DM restrictions as being ones with obvious malicious intent, exclusively pursuing something forbidden to be a disruptive little naughty word, with zero mention of not allowance for genuine, heartfelt enthusiasm that might lead them to say, "hey, I really love X, can I play one?"
THAT is the true insult here.
That's just wrong.
Max doesn’t need me to defend him, but here’s the quote:
No one was called a douche for wanting to play a PHB race/class.
See above.
I didnt insult anyone, but you are right, people are certainly acting as if cleaving to the lore of a setting is some act of violence against their person.
Only because the pro-restriction folks had already painted 99.99% of players as petulant jerks who make requests for banned things
exclusively to screw with the DM and cause group disruption, and explicitly said that players treat DMs as their "plaything," cruelly and maliciously destroying the enormous amounts of hard work those DMs do.
Yep. Despite being told multiple times that I wasn't referring to anyone here AND telling him exactly what the comment was for,
@GMforPowergamers is still willfully misrepresenting my words and intentions.
Thanks for stepping in.
See above, Max. The true insult wasn't calling people douches. It was the assertion that only a tiny vanishing proportion of people would ever do something like asking for an option because they just really, earnestly like it, and instead saying that the overwhelming majority is people with active malicious intent.
Three-word answer: consistency, fairness, precedent.
I will neither play in nor run a game/campaign that doesn't base itself on all three of those precepts.
And of course that third one means you never will make any changes or do anything differently, so you are invulnerable to criticism. Nicely done.
Man, good to know it's your world top to bottom, and your players just happen to interact with it!
I get that the number of characters is limited and I said as much in my post, but that doesn't answer my question. If I have to allow whatever the players want, how does that not put literally everything on the table as something to be allowed?
Sure, and during session -1 we come up with a campaign for me to run in a method that I've described here a number of times in other threads. That's not the same as everything being allowed, though.
It does not put "literally everything on the table" because your players aren't (and cannot be) playing literally everything. Like...this is so simple I genuinely cannot believe you don't see this; I am frustrated because I cannot see any charitable interpretation of what you've just said. So I guess let's walk through it.
You have a finite number of players. Let's say six, that is a little high but not too high. And, for argument's sake, we'll say that not only does each of them choose a unique race and class, but they really push the envelope here, none of them are "traditional" options. Hexblade, Totem Barbarian, Wildfire Druid, Clockwork Sorcerer, Eloquence Bard, and Battlesmith Artificer. And we'll say they went for so-called "exotic" races. Dragonborn, tiefling, loxodon, owlin, changeling, firbolg. Some PHB options there, but most are further afield.
Now let's say you happen to have a high lethality game. Over its course, the players each lose their starting character. And because we're taking this to its most maximal extent, not a single one of them chooses a class or race that has been played in this game before when playing their character (and, where possible, they avoid taking any "traditional"/"core four" options.) So whatever they end up pursuing, it adds another race and class per player. This is a pretty high turnover rate for 5e and an actively "push the boundaries" group....and you still never need to allow more than 12 races and 12 (sub)classes. Period.
There are, as of this writing, many times that number of races (something like 50, and that only if you lump all subraces together as one; if we split apart the various kinds of elves and tieflings etc. it's 166 according to my sources.) So...how are you "allowing everything"? 12 is not everything! And in a more typical 5e group (5 characters, with few to no permanent character deaths and a high likelihood of playing a race someone else has already played), you're looking at maybe 8, and that's counting the core four races that people are so hung up on.
If you want the setting to have any cohesion or sense of verisimilitude, yes it does.
Some DMs and players, clearly.
It doesn't matter to you. Clearly it matters to a lot of other people.
There's also 61 other races not including subraces. The player can pick something else. This would require less than 30 seconds work for the player. "No plasmoids, okay. How about a firbolg?" Or, if we're being honest, the DM limiting races is going to tell the players up front what's on the menu. It's only a problem if the player decided that no matter what they were going to play this one and only character before they even joined the game. Now it's a problem. And it's not on the DM.
No, just limited time to be creative. I'd much rather spend that time making a kick-ass game to play than arguing about why you can't play something that violates the lore I've decided on and that you've agreed to abide by. It's such a bizarre hill for a player to die on. Are players limited in creativity? Can't they come up with a different character idea? Do they only get one?
If we make the player think too much, their creativity tank will be empty and the next character won't be able to work because they won't be able to think of anything for the next PC to be because they're totally out of creativity juice.
Hint: it's a lot more effort and creativity to run the entire world of a setting than it is to run a single PC. Maybe the player can be "burdened" with a little extra work for a change.
Again, if making a single new character for a campaign causes you this much angst, I really do think that this is indicative of far, far larger issues down the road.
I would respond in depth, but folks have said they dislike that.
So all I will say is, you again emphasize how belabored and put upon the DM is, and go out of your way to crap upon even the
suggestion of discussion and compromise. Your choices are meek submission or voting with your feet; how very Hobson. And folk wonder why these threads devolve into hyperbole!
Seriously, do people do this in other games? Demand to play Sidereal Exalted in Vampire the Masquerade, to play GURPS Supers character in GURPS Napoleonics game? This is so bizarre.
What if I write my own game from scratch? Am I then also required to include anything players might imagine?
False equivalency, and you know it. Where are the folks mocking the hyperbole? Or is their mockery only reserved for people remotely critical of the "DM must protect themselves from wicked players" argument?
