D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

[Swarmkeeper]

I’m conscious that I don’t want to bore people with long winded descriptions. And anyway, asking questions is a sign of engagement.

Of course! Succinctly touch upon 3-5 details of a scene that the adventurers can interact with - do not be long winded. And while my particular goal as DM is to have players grok the scene I’ve laid out and just tell me what their PCs would like to do next, I’d certainly rather have engagement in the form of questions than the alternative.

 

[DrJawaPhD]

So, as a player, putting me on the spot and saying, "You must come as a blank slate, and do all your character creation right now," is a great way for me to end up with a character I'm not really interested in playing, and that probably won't be all that interesting for others to play alongside, either. If you aren't going to give me much time to think about it, how about you just hand me a pre-generated character, and be done with it?

I've never done that before, or even heard of anyone attempting it, but it does seems like this could work REALLY well if everyone was on board with the concept that the entire first session (or maybe more!) is dedicated to taking however much time is required to create characters and party backstory together. It sounds like it would be a disaster with everyone being rushed so we can just start playing - but creating characters during the session doesn't automatically mean you won't have enough time to think about things, if everyone's on the same page that there is no rush to get started.

If you have been playing with the other players for a while and know campaign is going to last a long time without falling apart, this seems like a great way to kick things off. Doesn't work so well though in a group that could fall apart at any moment to scheduling issues, where there is more motivation to get things up and running quickly

 

[Umbran]

This, in my opinion, is definitely a case of a DM not doing their job to create a cooperative experience witht their players

So, that's not necessarily a GM's job - it is a style choice. Many GMs like to take that on, but it is not a requirement to run a game.

The FR GM in question did not claim they'd work backstories into play. They were not violating an agreement by not doing so.