D&D 5E When lore and PC options collide…

[Paul Farquhar]

That's pretty barebones compared to what D&D Beyond gives away in their basic rules free material.

True. But it's all you need to play the game. I know, because it's what we started out using.

 

[Xamnam]

That's pretty barebones compared to what D&D Beyond gives away in their basic rules free material.

Huh, definitely didn't know there was that much available there, thanks!

 

[Velderan]

I’ve met a guy who banned druids because they didn’t want animals sexualized.

That caused me to pause for a second, but then I remembered my 1 and only experience playing 3E with a DM who thought having PCs get sexually assaulted was funny. I'm pretty sure I left a cartoon dust cloud behind with how fast I left that table.

 

[Micah Sweet]

what then if it isn't just one... what if you sit down to play dragonlance and 5 players show up (1 with a half orc) and when you say know 3 of the 4 other players say "Just let it slide so we can all have fun"
then what?

6 people (DM plus 5 players) 1 wants to play something, 1 doesn't want them to play it and 3 other speak up to defend the 'want to play' (and just to round it out the last player doesn't care as long as we can get started before pizza gets here)

If I wanted to run Dragonlance I would let my players know ahead of time, including any restrictions. If they then come to the table with a PC that's outside those restrictions, I can't see that as anything other than being on them. Setting lore matters to me, so if a player disregards a pre-game discussion and won't adjust, then I won't run Dragonlance, and I'll probably be pretty salty that a player essentially lied to me.

But that's never happened in real life, so I'm not really worried about it.

 

[Ancalagon]

Not really. Any sort of creative process is in large part guided by personal preferences.

and constraints can spur creativity!

 

[GMforPowergamers]

But that's never happened in real life, so I'm not really worried about it.

this isn't true... you are worried enough about it to spend the last week on here argueing about it

 

[Oofta]

It's so bizarre. One would think that players are playing new PC's every week. Like allowing any option at chargen actually impacts the setting in any real way. Since the players are, over the course of a typical campaign, only going to play 1 or 2 PC's per player, the total number of "lore breaking" characters is miniscule. Who cares?

It really, really doesn't matter if Bob wants to play a plasmoid in a Dragonlance campaign. You find a simple background solution and move on. I just don't get this whole idea that if you allowed, again, a plasmoid PC, this would require anything more than 30 seconds work for the DM to slot in. There's a thousand possible ways to add that in.

It's such a bizarre hill to die on for me. It's almost like there's this idea that DM's have limited creativity. If we make the DM think too much, his creativity tank will be empty and the campaign won't be able to work because he won't be able to think of anything for the next NPC to say because he's totally out of creativity juice.

Again, if adding a single race to your campaign causes you that much angst, I really do think that this is indicative of far, far larger issues down the road.

If Bob survives his shock therapy and plays a plasmoid in my campaign that establishes the precedence that there are plasmoids in my world. A species needs a significant population to survive and I really dislike the "last of their kind" trope. Why has no one ever seen one previously in the history of my campaign? How many times can that happen? Beyond that, how are NPCs going to react to this bizarre blob person? How are other players going to react to the fact that there's now this weird creature they're just supposed to accept as normal when it's just plain weird to a lot of people.

Instead I'll work with the player and try to figure out what they really want out of that PC and why they thought plasmoid was the only answer. If they wanted to play someone that's a bit odd and out of the ordinary, cool. Let's see if we can come up with something. But no blob people have never existed in my world and I don't want to open the door to a kitchen sink campaign. There are other games out there that allow it if that's all that matters to you.

 

[Bill Zebub]

no one is 'not going with the GMs pitch'
we said sometimes we would ask 'why' and if the answer wasn't something we and the rest of the table could agree to THEN it MIGHT be an issue

In another thread somewhere Umbran said something to the effect of, "We start off saying pineapple pizza isn't so bad, and end up arguing that anything without pineapple couldn't possible be pizza."

I suspect lots of us have basically the same opinion here: players should be willing to be flexible, GMs should take into account what players want, and if the two can't agree they should probably find other folks to play with.
Somehow tiny differences get magnified into bitter turf wars.

I think we just need One Playtest #3 to argue about.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So they were excluded for arbitrary metagame reasons rather than something to do with the setting. And because the designers excluded halflings they inflicted Kender on the world; I think it's screamingly obvious that the designers made a huge mistake.

And when you start using that logic you are telling me that the assumptions of your campaign are not ones I want. Someone's ancestor did something bad and therefore their descendent is inexorably, inevitably evil? They are damned because of their blood and don't have free will?

Ideas by themselves are almost worthless. Creativity is all in the implementation.

This is something that should be applied first and foremost to the DM. If you get to set the constraints and the players followed the constraints then you do not have a leg to stand on when they subvert them and you start whining no matter how far outside what you expected they go. You set the constraints, they met them. The fault is entirely, completely, 100% on you simply because you can't handle creative players. The big difference here is that not only did the DM agree to the rules, they set the rules they agreed to and now are complaining about.

Alternatively you can stop treating the players like children and make setting the constraints a collaborative process. Instead of focusing on the constraints you focus on your vision. Let the PCs expand on that. Rather than trying to set constraints, set inspiration.

I've said in the past and I'll say again I've seen more entitled DMs than I have entitled players in terms of absolute numbers. And I've unsurprisingly seen way more players than I ever have DMs.

That doesn't make any sense to me. If the players agree to restrictions and then actively try to subvert them by trying to find a loophole, they are being disingenuous and shouldn't have agreed to the original restrictions (as is of course their right). Why wouldn't the unhappy player just tell the DM they don't want to play that way?

 

[Bill Zebub]

This isn't really a problem since I have a permanent table of players, and I present campaigns that both they and I find interesting, and if not we talk about modifikations to make the campaign. But there are almost always character restrictions in play, that's kind of a given, no matter what game system we use.

Yeah, see my previous post above.

Maybe it's a thing nowadays with the explosion of young and new players with very different expectations.

On the other hand, there are way too many "get off my lawn" posts in this forum.