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

[Mind of tempest]

Nope. They could lean into the tropes that used to define the other species instead of reduce them all to funny hats.

that runs into the problems of either using tropes badly, using tropes that are just bad and endless overuse.

none of us could really care about 1e kobolds as they are just goblins but smaller.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Not even tieflings would have made Gone with the Wind anything other than a racist snooze-fest.

okay, i will admit i've never even made gestures at reading GwtW, i just pulled it's name as an example because it's a big famous book that i could be 99% sure didn't have elves in it

 

[W'rkncacnter]

that runs into the problems of either using tropes badly, using tropes that are just bad and endless overuse.

you can use anything badly or in excess, that's a non point.

none of us could really care about 1e kobolds as they are just goblins but smaller.

then you can lean into modern kobold tropes. the point i took from scribe was less that "We should stick to the past when playing races/species/whatevers" and more "Other races/species/whatevers had tropes to lean into for a reason".

 

[Bae'zel]

Just to clarify my point.

The OP talks about how he finds it jarring that groups do not reflect the campaign setting. My solution to that was to suggest that the main problem is that character generation is often done in isolation, away from the group and therefore, to fix the problem, don't do character generation in isolation away from the group. If chargen is done as a group exercise, with everyone talking to each other and collaborating, then the whole "wildly diverse circus troupe" group goes away. The group now has a reason to exist as a group and you no longer dump all the work onto the DM to figure out how to make a group created in isolation actually work in the setting.

Well written. You’ve summed up my feelings on the matter very succinctly.