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

[...m...]

Humanoids Handbook is 2E, as are Planescape and Dark Sun. D&D's greatest competition was a system full of vampire and werewolf PCs. This has all been common for longer than most 5E players have been alive.

...ow, did you have to kick me right in the telomeres?!.

 

[Hussar]

I could be wrong about this theory of mine, but at least to me it seems a plausible possibility as to why it happens.

While I don't think it's limited to online play, I do think you have a strong point here. I wonder if the difference isn't online/offline, but rather, playing with friends/playing with strangers?

 

[Hussar]

I don’t think that this phenomenon with players is out of malice, it’s just one of those quirks about the hobby. Like scheduling chaos, tabletop games being literally the lowest priority activity ever in the ladder of human priorities, DMs spending tons of cash, players tending to be overly casual etc

Can’t take it personally, although DM burnout is a recognized thing, while still generally getting demonized as overly controlling and mean to players. I understand why DMs are scarce in the hobby.

Now this I totally agree with. It's 100% not done out of malice. I'm very sure that most of the players that I've dealt with over the years wouldn't dream of doing this out of spite. I think largely what happens is that players often get a concept in their head that they want to play.

The DM announces that a new campaign is going to start up and the players start spitballing different concepts. And, often, they come up with a concept before session 0 has hit the ground. So, they're already coming in with 3/4 of a character already on the go. I know I've tried multiple times to insist that character generation be done as a group activity, only to have players come with fully formed characters pretty much every single time.

But, no, I totally agree with you here. This isn't done because they want to piddle in anyone's cornflakes. They are doing it because they want to play. And the faster you get through chargen, the faster we get to play.

The one thing that always baffles me though when DM's announce that they are going to use X setting, why don't players take that setting under consideration? I've mentioned this before, but, if the DM tells me that the campaign is going to be in X setting, I'm going to try my level best to make a character that is embedded in THAT setting. What's the point of playing a character from another setting? I just don't really get it to be honest. If you're playing in Forgotten Realms, you have literally tens of thousands of pages of material to draw from. Or Eberron or whatever. Make a character that leverages that setting as much as you can.

I don't get the attraction of playing a Vulcan in someone's Star War's campaign.