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

[Belen]

I give players a diverse range of options that are all explained in terms of how they fit. If it doesn’t fit, then they are planar in nature but have to contend with the odd person out.

I find it rare to see people choose anything other than humans, half-elves, elves or dwarves. I get the occasional halfling or gnome. My kid chose Dragonborn, once.

My games always have a curated list but usually a min of 15 options.

 

[Azzy]

No. And Thinking about "analogues" for what are fundamentally completely different deities is an element of Crawfordism-Perkinsism that I hope we leave behind.

Actually, it's a phenomena from the Real World™ when two different cultures tried to understand each other and equated their gods with the other culture's gods.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Which of course ends both sides of the issue. The DM doesn't have to create anything more than a few monsters and a place to smack them in, and the player need not concern himself with anything more than what is needed to smack them with. You don't need extensive settings full of lore anymore than you need extensive backgrounds on your PCs. You can't have players ignoring campaign lore if there isn't any lore to acknowledge.

Sure, and Heroes of the Boarderlands is a prime example of that. If your table likes lore and backstories you can do that stuff, if you don’t, then it’s not needed to play the game.

The disconnect seems to occur when certain players love all that lore stuff, become DMs to build elaborate worlds, then get annoyed when players aren’t interested in their third rate fantasy fiction.

 

[Kurotowa]

The disconnect seems to occur when certain players love all that lore stuff, become DMs to build elaborate worlds, then get annoyed when players aren’t interested in their third rate fantasy fiction.

The disconnect happens when either side, player or DM, forgets that a TTRPG is a collaborative endeavor and decides to just do whatever they want without considering the other party.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I smacked into this in a recent campaign.

Two of the PC's had backgrounds that they were from the Feywild. One was an owlkin, the other was dragonborn. Both fantastic players that I love to pieces. We were running the Candlekeep Mysteries campaign.

So, in one of the adventures, the party travels to a town that has been destroyed by Meazels. The evil fey had driven everyone into murderous rages that resulted in the entire town murdering each other. So, the party comes in, tracks down the evil fey who flee into the feywild through a portal to the feywild.

Now, this is where the total breakdown in expectations came in. And, I will freely admit, this was 100% my own fault for not talking to the players beforehand. See, to me, I see the Feywild as a horrific place where fey torture and murder and/or destroy the minds of anyone unfortunate enough to enter. It's a place that makes Ravenloft look like a picnic. The fey see any mortal as a pet, at best, to be treated like a pet and at worst, a toy in the same sense that your pet cat has a toy.

So, the adventure that I had laid out after they entered the feywild completely blindsided the two players. One player kept insisting that this wasn't the feywild at all and it was actually some sort of hell and refused (out of character mind you) to accept that this was the Feywild. The other player imagined the Feywild to be something like Grimm Fairy tales - sure, it's a bit dark and dangerous, but, overall, not a totally horrific place to live. My interpretation of the Feywild is a Kafka-esque hellscape of gaslighting and mental torture. Alice in Wonderland without the PG rating and Disney ending. Far more Pratchett.

The adventure totally broke down with the players being totally baffled by the scenario because it ran so counter to their expectations.

Again, I take total responsibility for this. It had honestly never really occured to me to think of the Feywild as any sort of nice place. Total mismatch in ideas.

But, this does rather dovetail with your example. The descriptions of the Feywild, such as they are (note, this was years before the Witchlight adventure came out) meant that all three of us were totally correct and totally wrong at the same time. I guess, at the end of the day, that does rather nicely encapsulate the Feywild, but, it doesn't really lend itself well to making a good game.

The Feywild draws more heavily on folklore than the usual fantasy fiction, and thus is more culturally diverse, and more real and personal to some people. One of my players has an eastern European background, and really didn't get on with Witchlight, which is mostly inspired by Wonderland (Gygax's take was darker) and Oz (I assume people who dislike "circus troupe" parties hate Oz). I suspect this has as much to do with the introduction of Domains of Delight (to try and make everyone's Feywild true somewhere) than simply mirroring Ravenloft.

It's further complicated by the current popularity of a certain Romantacy series (which I haven't read) that deals with fairie.

 

[Fenris-77]

given your previous comment and that you highlight 'what they look like' as your issue may i assume you never read the OP's post? where they point out their issue and the issue of the thread is not having the party being a menagerie of oddball species but rather the untethered nature of the player characters to the setting, the fact that entire parties can seem to be composed entirely of individuals who all separately originate 'from over the horizon' and have no ties to anything or anyone.

Over-analyzing word use can be perilous in text based communication. We're talking about the same thing. Me 'looking' there was more about character sheets in a pile than anything to do with the physical appearance of the characters. Characters with no ties to the setting or each other.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yes, all that happened on cultures that closely interacted on a single world. (And Krynn already has that - Paladine etc have different names and identities amongst difrferent cultures). But this is different planets we are talking about, where gods are real entities not just the syncretic creations of various people and cultures interacting.

Why would Bahamut be known as that specific name--"Bahamut"--to every culture which contains members of his flock?

If gods are polydimensional, or trans-planar, or what-have-you, why would they limit their worship to creatures inhabiting only a single livable space (plane, planetary body, self-intersecting doughnut, what-have-you)?

My point was that IRL there have been many gods who were seen as Very Completely Real by the peoples of our world--whether or not they actually were/are real--which were called by multiple distinct names in distinct cultural groups. The Greek/Roman overlap isn't the only example. The Romans were certain that the Norse revered Hermes above all other gods--by the name Odin. They were likewise certain that Anubis was Hermes as well. Likewise, Herodotus recorded myths claiming that the Egyptian gods were really just Greek gods in disguise while they hid from an enemy: Amon/Zeus, Osiris/Dionysus, Ptah/Hephaestus. I swear there was a fourth but I'm not seeing it now--but the point remains, this is obvious, intentional syncretism of genuinely distinct deities--such that the Greeks, or Romans, could claim that this other culture "really does" worship their same gods, such that they will call Amun/Amon "Zeus" even though...it isn't Zeus.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Plenty of real people are know by different names to different people. Lots of actors for a start.

 

[Remathilis]

Labirynth and Starfinder entered the chat.

I don't consider Starfinder a Pathfinder setting because it's essentially a different game with it's own PHB and Bestiary and unique classes and species. But I'll look into Labyrinth.

 

[Remathilis]

But, this does rather dovetail with your example. The descriptions of the Feywild, such as they are (note, this was years before the Witchlight adventure came out) meant that all three of us were totally correct and totally wrong at the same time. I guess, at the end of the day, that does rather nicely encapsulate the Feywild, but, it doesn't really lend itself well to making a good game.

Exactly. It's a mismatch of expectations that leads to a breakdown of the games lingua franca. And in this case, it really highlights the dangers of going against D&D's established tropes. You confuse players who hear their are a party of gnomes up ahead and think PHB gnomes only to discover your gnomes are 20 feet tall and eat nothing but tar.

It's part of the reason I reject the notion that D&D is a generic fantasy toolbox. The game drags too much expectation and assumption with it. Unless you are exceptionally up front with what you are changing (and I mean all of it) your going to end up with confusion and immersion collapse.

Though a hellish feywild does sound like an interesting adventure. If I was warned that's what the details was like before we went there.