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.

 

[CreamCloud0]

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.

i agree, but a more important factor than the characters being connected to each other is i think them having some anchoring connection to the local setting, so, okay sure, even if your character is a dragonborn from over a continent away, fine, but if that's true give us an answer for why did they end up coming here? that's a long way to travel for some random city, so why here specifically? do they have family, are they here to join the highly reputable mage's guild, was this their chosen bolthole to restart life after running from mob debts? and it can't be because of purely random chance in the vein of 'well they picked a name off a map'.

 

[Scott Christian]

The difference is, heroes can be in the wrong, some of the time, though they end up more right than wrong, or become so overall over time. Likewise, true unrepentant villains can be morally correct some of the time, about some things, but overall or ultimately they will end up more morally wrong than right.

100% pure B/W doesn't allow that. Villains are 100% evil forever. Heroes are squeaky-clean 100% good forever. And yes, this is in the thing I quoted. It mentions that villains are always wrong, about everything, at least morally. That, plus heroes being 99.9% incorruptible pure pureness. Either it's impossible for the heroes to do wrong, or it isn't impossible, but it's revealing their true colors--they were never really heroic to begin with.

Here's a good quote, from Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw on Fully Ramblomatic, talking about the same thing:

Spoiler

"Imagine the poor bastards on BioWare's writing team, all keen to apply their characteristic complicated storytelling and nuanced moral choices, when they were first told they had to work with the naughty word Star Wars universe. "There's two opposing groups, right? One side are space monks dedicated to peace and justice, and the other are genocidal murderers who dress up in black robes and skull masks and all have names like 'Bumplete Castard'. Now, write a story about that with some subtlety to it."

Star Wars has almost no subtlety unless you work really, really hard for it. The only hope for any villain is suicide in a way that is helpful to the heroes.

Perhaps it would be more instructive to use a well-known example of a work that does have sharp moral distinctions...but is also a world where people can be complicated, even if morality is not particularly so: Avatar: the Last Airbender. Aang, Sokka, Toph, even Katara, are all heroic people...but not one of them is 100% squeaky-clean completely free of ambiguities. Katara is 100% happy to murder the guy who killed her mom, for example--vengeance, not justice, a deeply unheroic motive from an otherwise extremely heroic character. She is allowed to be just the tiniest bit grey, even though by and large she is THE most pure-as-the-driven-snow character, morally speaking, even moreso than Aang.

The Fire Nation, as an institution, is clearly The Bad Guys, and both Azula and Ozai are villainous. We see Fire Nation soldiers being cruel and horrible on the regular. That, pretty clearly, shows that there is a bright-line distinction between good and evil--crisp and firm. Yet we also see that Azula is a deeply messed up, 14-year-old girl, and she goes through a painful psychotic break, which is not in any way characterized as some kind of deserved punishment, nor played for laughs. It's heartbreaking...and yet she is still, unequivocally, a villain: "No, she's crazy and she needs to go down," from the mouth of Iroh himself. And both Iroh and Zuko are living proof that being Fire Nation ethnicity doesn't make you evil--it's buying into Fire Nation propaganda that makes you evil.

Hopefully, that helps. I trimmed this down from where it was before, so I hope I didn't trim it TOO far.

Edit: And for an example from the other direction...Adam West's Batman. Stories like that have such incredibly squeaky-clean heroes that it becomes full-on B&W morality. West's Batman isn't just a goody-two-shoes who never even pokes his head out of a shadow, in that world, he's an official deputy of the police force, so he isn't even a vigilante anymore. He actually does legally arrest people and have them arraigned by the police. The Gotham Police are never corrupt; at worst, they're simply bumbling but well-meaning. Batman himself never breaks the law if he can avoid it, even though Batman in the comics kinda...has to break some laws (e.g. breaking and entering, stealing evidence, assaulting private citizens, etc.) to do most of the adventures he does.

Adam West played the character well, and there is a certain charm to his story. There's a reason people love it, despite knowing it's campy. But it's also pretty...flat, and usually the conflict is pretty boring. We enjoy it for the campy way they do it, not for the story itself.

Thanks. I get it. I was just reading your original definition like this:

"Please note even in a world where the moral lines are sharply drawn, there may still be characters or organizations that are presented as being 'grey'. A general rule of thumb as to whether or not black-and-white morality is present is that the heroes are almost always considered to be in the right, while the villains are always 'wrong'. Of course, the audience might disagree with the author's moral compass."

With the word "almost" allowing room for deviation, albeit slight. And the word "'wrong'" in quotes, as if to say, they could have a morally plausible reason, but their actions are evil.

Thanks for taking the time to explain.

And as a side note, you are the second person to use Last Airbender as an example to me in the last week. Perhaps I should go watch it, as I know nothing about it. Thanks again.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Thanks. I get it. I was just reading your original definition like this:

With the word "almost" allowing room for deviation, albeit slight. And the word "'wrong'" in quotes, as if to say, they could have a morally plausible reason, but their actions are evil.

Thanks for taking the time to explain.

And as a side note, you are the second person to use Last Airbender as an example to me in the last week. Perhaps I should go watch it, as I know nothing about it. Thanks again.

It's a very good show. I can't recommend the sequel series (Legend of Korra), but the original is genuinely great stuff.

The first season does have some goofy episodes, but in fairness, it is a show targeted at like 10-14 year old children.

 

[TiQuinn]

I still think that's a tall order for a couple of people sitting at a table eating snacks and rolling dice.

This right here.

I was reading through the posts and thinking some folks expect a lot out of people carrying on a regular job and other commitments who just want to play a game of D&D. Many players do not think about their characters outside of the moment they sit down at the table. Those players sure aren’t going think about how they need to get into character and prepare to act out the right tropes.

I still just think the reason for players choosing weird species is both aesthetics and mechanics. Tieflings look cool. Elves are hot. They get cool abilities. It’s not a new phenomenon.

 

[Hussar]

Just to add. I used FATE as an example, and that was perhaps a poor choice on my point. The point I was trying to make is that there are lots of games out there where your character does start very loosely sketched in and it's during play that details start fleshing out the character. The characters grow organically from what is going on in the game itself.

D&D is something of a weird game in that players come to the table with fully fleshed out characters that are not necessarily linked in any meaningful way to the campaign at hand. Lots of games make fully fleshed out character - Traveler, GURPS, Vampire. But, unlike D&D, a lot of games that have you create fully fleshed out characters have very strongly presented settings. Your Vampire character is expected to be part of the Masquerade. The character comes from one of the clans. Those clans exist within the world that you are playing in. It's very difficult to create a Man with No Name character in Vampire because you automatically have a Sire, you belong to a group and you are living in the (kinda, sorta) real world.

D&D is something of the outlier here where you can make a character that is completely divorced from the setting, has zero connection to anything and everyone. And a lot of players seem to think that it's the DM's job to figure out how to pound square pegs into round holes, if they think about it at all.