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

[Remathilis]

Seriously, this isn't some statistical anomaly I'm talking about. I'm talking about every single game I've tried to run for anyone but my dedicated home group.

The plural of anecdote is not data. But I will point out a trend that I cannot prove, but tends to be the root of most of these horror stories: Non-dedicated groups tend to run the wackiest, most balls-out stuff possible. Every one of your examples tells me that you were finding the same kind of players who felt your game (for whatever reason) was an opportunity to blow off steam and create the most crazy-ass idea they have. In fact, D&D Tik-Tok is FULL of people pitching this "cool idea" character that is literally that kind of non-serious ideas like "what if your warlock patron was your PC from a future timeline?" or "What if your character was an awakened mongoose who was polymorphed into a gnome?"

But then again, I can count on one hand how many players I knew who played that sort of joke/weird character for more than a few sessions. Mostly for one-shots, convention games, or pick-up casual or AL games, but then dumping them as soon as the joke got old. I've had far more DMs who demanded they take their game Deadly Serious than I've seen players make joke PCs, but then again, my anecdotes hold the same weight as everyone elses.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

If you pour your heart and soul into a work, into anything, and the audience responds with disapproval...what other medium says "no, the audience are all JERKS for not liking what you made! They should be THANKFUL for all the WORK you did!"?

...you would be shocked.

 

[Hussar]

Yup. You'll always get that one guy who, when to tell them you can't be a ninja in a wild west campaign, ends up a ninja with a cowboy hat.

One guy? What's that like?

Me? I've spent years with experiences far closer to @DammitVictor than not. From the player in a high concept, post-humanist SF game who wants to play an Amish luddite in the group of high tech robot people, bioengineered spacers and the like, to players who, as a group, after being pitched an exploration, low magic game, come to me with not one, but THREE full caster character concepts who want to stay at home. To the Waterdeep-Dragonheist game, a campaign of urban intrigue, where I got FIVE PC's, all from parts unknown, none of which had any social skills and all just wanted to play murder hoboes.

I've largely given up to be honest. I lost this fight long ago and I'm too tired to try to buck the trend. Play whatever the heck you want to play and I'll make it work somehow. Because, frankly, it's just not worth the energy anymore. I put zero effort into settings anymore because there's no point. The players could not give the slightest rat's petoot. They will come with their fully formed characters, no matter if I say I would like to do character generation as a group and not individually.

I just can't be asked anymore. The player's win. Decades of the same thing, over and over again. Didn't matter if I was playing homebrew or published. The players couldn't ever be bothered actually taking the 15 minutes to read the campaign primer and always insisted on playing what they wanted to play.

 

[Remathilis]

Me? I've spent years with experiences far closer to @DammitVictor than not.

You know, it's funny I've never heard about these entitled snowflake players until maybe the last few years and almost always in the context of this board. I'm not disputing anyone's lived experience, but I seriously question if it's as endemic as the Internet would have you believe.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

...you would be shocked.

Perhaps let me rephrase then: In any other medium, at least as far as I'm given to understand, such a response really is understood as bad form. That's an artist being overly precious about their work--perhaps even being juvenile. "No I deserve praise for all the hard work I did" type thing.

You know, it's funny I've never heard about these entitled snowflake players until maybe the last few years and almost always in the context of this board. I'm not disputing anyone's lived experience, but I seriously question if it's as endemic as the Internet would have you believe.

Oh, I've been hearing the complaints about "player entitlement" for ages now. The vast majority of them need all of two or three questions asked before it's clear that most such situations involve at least some degree of "first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye." (Matthew 7:5, NIV)

 

[The Firebird]

Beyond that, the point of a "pitch" is to sell folks on a concept. If they do not stick to the concept, one possibility is that they're being disingenuous jerks who faked agreement and then immediately reneged on that agreement. Another possibility is that the pitch failed, that is, it did not "sell or win approval" and thus the player didn't engage with it all that much.

I understand that GMs put in work. I'm a GM myself. But something critical is that the GM has to actually put that work in...for desirable things. Stuff the players want to engage with. It's not the players' fault if the GM does a crapload of work on something they genuinely do not feel any motive to embrace. Rant and rave all you like about how hard you work as GM, if you're offering something that just doesn't catch their interest, that's your fault as GM, not their fault as players for failing to fall in line.

Which is a big part of why I just...don't take the whole "I worked so hard and they were just jerks!" argument even remotely seriously. If you pour your heart and soul into a work, into anything, and the audience responds with disapproval...what other medium says "no, the audience are all JERKS for not liking what you made! They should be THANKFUL for all the WORK you did!"? Even in the TTRPG space, if someone pre-orders a book and then decides they think it's garbage, they're gonna return it and expect a refund--and I don't see why they shouldn't expect that.

If you're consistently, without fail, getting players that aren't actually compelled by the pitch you're offering, perhaps it's the hundreds of totally unrelated disparate people, reflecting a horrifically bad community that craps on GMs left and right and has no respect whatsoever....or maybe, just maybe, the issue lies in the pitches themselves.

I think the example you use, comparing the GM to a service provider like a publisher or an author, perhaps explains some of the divide. That is not how I conceive of GMing. You're not a service provider. You're not providing a product to a paying audience.

You're the member of the friend group who spent extra time putting something together that you all can enjoy. If your friend plans a weekend trip to the beach, then yeah you're obligated to try and have a good time, rather than complaining about how the mountains would be so much better. If you're that invested then you plan the next trip.

 

[DammitVictor]

Another possibility is that the pitch failed, that is, it did not "sell or win approval" and thus the player didn't engage with it all that much.

So it's a bad pitch that nobody wants to play, but they're going to join the game anyway and ruin it for the person who wants to run that game and the theoretical players that actually joined that game because they wanted to play that game?

And  somehow that's supposed to make them less of an naughty word than the person who wanted to try something specific and/or didn't do a very good job of explaining what they were trying to do?

Sorry, no; I'm not buying this argument at all. If the game they want to play is so much better/more popular than the games they're trying to crash, there should be no shortage of those games for them to join, play, and mutually enjoy.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

Sure, but while I'm complaining about the plague of selfish, self-centered egoists making the hobby and community worse for everyone else, let me point out that as a helpful member of the community... I'm primarily interested in solving my problems and helping people with similar problems solve theirs.

If my "anecdata" lines up with a bunch of other people's "anecdata" and helps them make their games better... I've contributed to the betterment of civilization and done my part for the greater good.

The Greater Good.

Non-dedicated groups tend to run the wackiest, most balls-out stuff possible.

Not gonna lie, I am aware of this and I know it's a big part of my problem. I'm just not interested in episodic convention-style play... and most people say they're not, either. Most of the people who are doing this will swear that's not what they want, and that's not what they're trying to do.

But they still do it every time and still fight any measure intended to give them the game they say they want.

I'm not interested in speculating on their motivations or their moral character. I just want to identify the best practices for identifying the people who want to play the kinds of games I want to run, and deliver those players the best game experience according to that desire.

The players I want and the players who want to play in my games exist..
just like the players who want and deserve to play in the games they want to play. They're both being drowned in the same sea of entitled prima donnas.

In fact, D&D Tik-Tok is FULL of people pitching this "cool idea" character that is literally that kind of non-serious ideas [...]

Not Gonna Lie, I'm still looking for DMs who'll let me play some of my "stupid PC tricks" characters... like thr 4E Rocket Fist or the 3.PF 6 INT/WIS Arcane Hierophant whose companion familiar is smarter than them and/or possibly the smartest member of the party.

Am I "just as bad", or is my shame mitigated by the fact I want to be upfront about this, join a suitable game, and make the effort to make my "joke" characters feel like naturally weird expressions of a world that makes sense?

I want to run high gonzo games, too. But when I do that, I'm going to be inundnated with pitches for po-faced "Four in the Core" pizza cutters.

But then again, I can count on one hand how many players I knew who played that sort of joke/weird character for more than a few sessions.

"A few sessions" is longer than most online games last, especially when they're undermined by these... if not "players", because they'll "act different" in a "real game", but by these behaviors/mindsets. How do you run the kind of game most people say they want when most people are the ones sandbagging you?

I'm not always in the mood for Dead Serious, either, but sometimes I am and sometimes lots of other people are. They should be able to make that choice. For me, even when I'm "trolling"-- with people who want that-- committing to the bit by playing it Dead Serious is an important part of my fun.

I don't want  anyone to not be able to find and play the kinds of games they want to play in. Not even the people I'm complaining about. I just want them to stop ruining everyone's fun, including their own, by demanding that everyone else cater to their narcissitic BS. It doesn't matter if they're the pizza cutter or the spinach fairy, they'd also have a lot more fun if they'd be more considerate of other people's preferences.

You know, it's funny I've never heard about these entitled snowflake players until maybe the last few years [...] I seriously question if it's as endemic as the Internet would have you believe.

I was having these exact same arguments--from your side--on this board 25 years ago as part of the AD&D-3rd Edition flamewars, because of 3.0 doing away with a ton of character restrictions.

I was having them 30 years ago on AOL's TSR portal, between "Forgotten Realms" 2E fans (when FR was a vanilla kitchen sink) and "Planescape" 2E fans who wanted a 4E/5E style everything bagel kitchen sink. There wasn't an edition war or generational facet to those arguments--that I remember--just people.complaining that they were outnumbered by the small umimportant minority of players who refused to play the game right.

Maybe a hot take, but it's not "cultural trends" or "design philosophies" exacerbating the problem... it's more people playing with strangers and more people playing D&D without needing to have friends who play D&D with them.

Those are good things, not problems I want to solve, but they're part of the problems I do want to solve.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Every time I've tried to run Street Fighter online, with an explicit pitch about the system/setting itself and the campaign itself, the very first application-- on more than one occasion, more than half the applications-- were for characters who couldn't/wouldn't fight. Every. Single. Time.

I make it clear that I rely on collaborative worldbuilding, something I thought most "creative" roleplayers would love-- and I don't just get people with pages of prewritten backstory, I get people with pages of prewritten backstory who resent being asked to help make the world fit their backstory as much as they resent being asked to make their backstory fit the world.

I pitch a game about freelance law enforcement on the frontier worlds of a space fantasy setting, I get  children, literal children... once an eight year old girl in an eighty year old woman's body, with advanced senile dementia, and once a dragonborn warlock using being dragonborn and being a warlock to act out their babyfur BDSM sexual fantasies.

One time I had to repeatedly remind a player that while I allowed her to  base her character on her favorite PC from another game-- complete with godlike backstory that I was willing to work with-- that this was a fantasy setting with no Earth in it and no real-life Earth beings from D&DG, and she got pissed at me every time.

are you sure you are not just cursed at this point this sounds like you are either getting the worst luck or are looking in the worst possible locations for players

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

One guy? What's that like?

Me? I've spent years with experiences far closer to @DammitVictor than not. From the player in a high concept, post-humanist SF game who wants to play an Amish luddite in the group of high tech robot people, bioengineered spacers and the like, to players who, as a group, after being pitched an exploration, low magic game, come to me with not one, but THREE full caster character concepts who want to stay at home. To the Waterdeep-Dragonheist game, a campaign of urban intrigue, where I got FIVE PC's, all from parts unknown, none of which had any social skills and all just wanted to play murder hoboes.

I've largely given up to be honest. I lost this fight long ago and I'm too tired to try to buck the trend. Play whatever the heck you want to play and I'll make it work somehow. Because, frankly, it's just not worth the energy anymore. I put zero effort into settings anymore because there's no point. The players could not give the slightest rat's petoot. They will come with their fully formed characters, no matter if I say I would like to do character generation as a group and not individually.

I just can't be asked anymore. The player's win. Decades of the same thing, over and over again. Didn't matter if I was playing homebrew or published. The players couldn't ever be bothered actually taking the 15 minutes to read the campaign primer and always insisted on playing what they wanted to play.

That is actually really sad.

I think some of your players frequent these boards - Would any of the players in Hussar's current or recent games willing to speak up to talk about why they act like this, and whether they are aware that they are driving Hussar to this state?

 

[DammitVictor]

I've largely given up to be honest. I lost this fight long ago and I'm too tired to try to buck the trend.

Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist, or maybe I just don't have any better hobbies, but I think these are solvable problems. Even on a cultural level, but especially on an individual table-by-table level.

I've had some luck with my "house rules", and I've had some luck with Brown M&M*s in my online application processes. I feel like those individual coping strategies would be more effective for more people if there were more cultural awareness of this problem outside of the "Mos Eisley Cantina Problem" and the debate between the "Judge Dredd" and "Blazing Saddles" solutions to it.

Insisting on what you want doesn't always mean you get it, but giving up on it always means you don't.

The players could not give the slightest rat's petoot. They will come with their fully formed characters, no matter if I say I would like to do character generation as a group and not individually.

There are better players out there. According to the people who disagree with me-- and I believe them-- most players are either better than this or want to be. Nobody actually wants to be the guy running the wrong game, any more than they want to run the game that's been hijacked by trolls; nobody actually wants to be playing in the wrong game, any more than they want their character to be ignored and/or persecuted by a passive-aggressive DM.

Everyone wants this problem to be solved, so they can enjoy playing the kinds of games they want to play. They just think it's everybody else's fault and therefore everyone else's problem. You can make your games better for yourself, and the more other umpires and players try to do the same thing, the easier it's going to be for everyone.

* Van Halen, in the Eighties, used to have a provision in their contracts for live performances that they required a big bowl of M&Ms (at least five pounds) with all of the brown ones picked out. No bowl, bowl too small, a single brown M&M... And they walked. Breach of contract, kill fee, the whole works. For years, metal fans used to use this as an example of the prima donna mentality of party rock and glam metal performers.

Thing is, Van Halen shows involved a lot of stunt choreography and pyrotechnic displays. The kind of crowd-pleasing showmanship that almost killed Michael Jackson and James Hetfield a few years later. A five pound bowl of M&Ms in their dressing room told them someone at the venue read the contract; the absence of brown M&Ms in that bowl told them they honored the terms.

I'll admit, for as much as I bitch about selfish and lazy players (because I'm usually the umpire), they've never actually set me on fire. Especially online. But why risk it?