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

[Hussar]

And you need to recognize that there are players--quite a lot of them IME--who don't want to seriously deal with any setting's lore. And no, not playing with such players is not a functional option for everyone.

I think this, right here, is the basic issue. This is something that is quite common IME. It's not that players don't care. It's that they will never care as much as you do about your setting. If you're DMing, you're thinking about this stuff all the time. When you design a scenario, the setting is something you're drawing on a lot of the time and you're probably spending some mental effort trying to make whatever scenario you're building fit within the campaign.

IOW, a DM won't deliberately (most of the time) make material that is totally divorced from the campaign. That's kinda that point of a campaign. You are making material for that campaign which means you are making material for that world. As a player, you never have that level of involvement in the setting. Not in D&D at least. Which means that the players are automatically a step or two removed from the setting.

And we see that remove in the characters they bring to the campaign.

 

[Azzy]

Really, I have the impression that a setting should be lightly sketched out and malleable, with the lions share of the setting lore being introduced during play (because most players' eyes seem to glaze over when you give them even short documents on lore) and verbally during Session 0. Also, during Session 0, the DM and players need to have a two-way conversation during character creation so that all the players and the DM are on the same page and pass ideas between them.

 

[plecostomus]

Look, i can respect wanting to stick to a setting’s lore, but for all the horror stories I’ve heard online about kender players being, well, kender players, I’m just a little surprised i still hear GMs choosing to enforce using kender over halflings in DL when a player wants to play a halfling.

Oh don't worry, he was stealing things even before I explained to him that kender have some notoriety in that direction. Maybe the player did not know in his brain what he was, but it seems his heart has always known.

 

[TwoSix]

Really, I have the impression that a setting should be lightly sketched out and malleable, with the lions share of the setting lore being introduced during play (because most players' eyes seem to glaze over when you give them even short documents on lore) and verbally during Session 0. Also, during Session 0, the DM and players need to have a two-way conversation during character creation so that all the players and the DM are on the same page and pass ideas between them.

Unless we’re doing a game based on established IP and all the players have a decent amount of background with the IP, that’s how I run all my games.