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

[Kurotowa]

Let me rephrase. Players very rarely will care as much about a setting as the DM does. At least, that's been my experience. And my experience has also been that the players couldn't give a rat's petoot about setting when creating characters. They come with fully formed characters more often than not and then expect the DM to somehow fit that character into the setting.

My experience as a player is somewhere in between. I'll come up with the seed of a character idea and then focus on learning about the parts of the setting that are relevant to the character. Learning about everything is too big for me to keep in my head. But if I want to make, say, an orcish war veteran trying to make a new life, I'll look up info about major orcish settlements and recent wars.

Though to be fair, I've totally seen the people you describe who come up with the completely independent character. Or who come to the DM asking for instruction on how to fit their PC into the setting because they're not the sorts who RTFM themselves. But in general, what I see from the player side is people who zoom in on what relates to their PC and nothing else.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Those are a very small number of people who make a lot of noise. “You may not change a jot or tittle” nonsense. Most players don’t care.

Unfortunately, WotC listens to them. Y'know, given they were the ones who won the edition war.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Assuming the best of both parties, or just at the very least that they're not each stereotypical caricatures, I would expect this DM to have a conversation about it. A DM who doesn't is waving their own red flag just like the player who hears and agrees to the setting and tone pitch waves their red flag by insisting on a character that breaks it.

But how can I be an outraged GM ranting about the entitlement of players in that paradigm? How can I be an outraged player ranting about the Viking Hat in it? No no, this simply will not do. Far too reasonable. We'll fix it in post.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Unfortunately, WotC listens to them. Y'know, given they were the ones who won the edition war.

You still stuck on this? 4e was ditched because it didn’t sell.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Unfortunately, WotC listens to them. Y'know, given they were the ones who won the edition war.

This is not a healthy attitude to still have - firstly it has been years and secondly many of the ideas of 4e have found themselves in later editions and other games.
And plenty of us champion many of these ideas now, even when we didn't appreciate the edition at the time.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This is not a healthy attitude to still have - firstly it has been years and secondly many of the ideas of 4e have found themselves in later editions and other games.
And plenty of us champion many of these ideas now, even when we didn't appreciate the edition at the time.

Given those very people are the ones who killed the really creative and interesting Sorcerer and Warlock concepts from the "D&D Next" playtest? Whether it is a healthy attitude to have, we are still under its effects now. We are still shackled with that burden fifteen years on, and are likely to be so for another five to ten hence.

You still stuck on this? 4e was ditched because it didn’t sell.

Even though actual employees from the time have said it DID sell--it just didn't sell to the insane goals set for it.

But there's no point in debating it further. Whether or not you accept it, it is--quite simply--true that the people who have the "don't change anything" attitude are the ones who controlled how 5e was designed, and they remain one of WotC's primary demographics for what mechanics their designs pursue.

 

[Belen]

This is a real thing. How much do you expect you players to read? Answers from varuious games are all over the place.

They get a 1 page document with the campaign hook and starting area. It also details all available content that can be used in game. That is my character gen document for players to build a character and backstory.

They will then get a 5-10 page document that lists the gods, basic things to be known, nations or lands, etc.

It is never a lot of info to be absorbed.

 

[Belen]

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 expect the players to read my 1 pager if they want to play. If they are a cleric, they choose a deity and are expected to known the info about it.

The rest is optional but the folks who read it have more fun in my experience.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I play RPGs partially to escape the homogeneity of RL, so I think that diversity in party composition is desirable. But to make this work, it requires either a certain level of narrative hands-off-ness or otherwise strong narrative cohesion. Put another way, my question is mostly a matter of "How do you know each other?" and "How do you present your shared identity?"

Answers like "We are Vox Machnia" don't make much sense to me; it gives "secretest club" vibes, which is not what I am going for. But saying stuff like "We are Harpers" or "We are Expedition 33" DOES make a lot of sense to me because it situates the characters, no matter how diverse, directly into the narrative and faction play of the world.

On the other hand, having a rag-tag group of characters from several different guilds, I think, is deeply confusing without context. For me, you'd have to have them all participate in the same introductory storyline that defined the campaign, like in BG3.

Common organizations can help. I like to use big festivals or similar that they all have intersecting reasons for attending. In my current game they are all heading to the Noniad Games, a once-every-nine-years festival and competitions of athletic, magical, artistic, and combat, skill that draws people from the entire region the size of California to the great city of Parth, of the Nine River Gates and Nine Dragon Princes.

Sometimes i will ask during character creation, "You are meeting up after a year (or 3 years, or 5, whatever depending on the concepts) apart, havinf agreed to meet here on this day. Why did you agree to meet up? What were you doing?" Basically the Dragonlance Chronicles setup.

Its harder to encounter the 'weird and interesting' when to your left is Bob the Green Ooze Sorcerer, and to your right is Frank the Orc Bard.

From experience...not really.

I am running a game with an aasimar grave cleric who fights with a shovel, a semi felinoid (not a catgirl but feline eyes and some behaviors) gnome/elf girl scribe/assassin (ranger), a troll (orc reflavored to t the trolls of my world) monk, and a human thief with a construct arm, and the gnome girl's tressym-with a falcon head and wings but no front arms.

I have hit them with Wonder several times already, 3 sessions in. A forest dragon with great antlers and scales like river stones half covered in moss and fern-like protrusions, carrying strange tiny fey creatures on its back, is plenty weirder than any dnd party. So is a night sky where you can see the World Tree as your planet orbits it, and catch glimpes of the great ring of Jottuneim and beyond it the slow immense undulating circling of Jormangandr beyond that.