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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DammitVictor" data-source="post: 9805154" data-attributes="member: 6750908">Oh, sure, now you're interested in having a coherent baseline... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f913.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":geek:" title="Geek    :geek:"  data-smilie="30"data-shortname=":geek:" />Seriously, this isn't some statistical anomaly I'm talking about. I'm talking about every single game I've tried to run for anyone but my dedicated home group.Every time I've tried to run Street Fighter online, with an explicit pitch about the system/setting itself and the campaign itself, the very first application-- on more than one occasion, more than half the applications-- were for characters who couldn't/wouldn't fight. Every. Single. Time.I make it clear that I rely on collaborative worldbuilding, something I thought most "creative" roleplayers would love-- and I don't just get people with pages of prewritten backstory, I get people with pages of prewritten backstory who resent being asked to help make the world fit their backstory as much as they resent being asked to make their backstory fit the world.I pitch a game about freelance law enforcement on the frontier worlds of a space fantasy setting, I get children, literal children... once an eight year old girl in an eighty year old woman's body, with advanced senile dementia, and once a dragonborn warlock using being dragonborn and being a warlock to act out their babyfur BDSM sexual fantasies.One time I had to repeatedly remind a player that while I allowed her to base her character on her favorite PC from another game-- complete with godlike backstory that I was willing to work with-- that this was a fantasy setting with no Earth in it and no real-life Earth beings from D&DG, and she got pissed at me every time.It's really not about players versus umpires. It's not about people with competing and unexpressed aesthetic preferences... either habitually, or for a specific game. It's about people who want to play a game with other people versus people who want to narratively fulfill themselves with an audience and people who can't tell the difference.My methods aren't ideal for everyone, but they're generally good enough for the former-- who get to play a complex character with deep ties to the setting, PCs, and NPCs-- and mostly either moderate or weed out the latter.I was never the "i wanna play my donut steel guy", but I was always the guy who wanted to stretch the bounds of the system and setting. Being honest, when I was younger, I didn't want to color inside the lines at all, stuck playing with the kinds of umpires you're describing. I know they're not just strawmen, either; I've been on the receiving end of the Blazing Saddles treatment many times.It took a lot of experience, and experiencing games with shared chargen and worldbuilding, to realize I was just as much at fault as the "Fox Only, No Items, Final Destination" guys I was playing with. It took running a lot of bad vale tudo pickup games before I learned that boundaries and guidelines weren't just good for people who wanted "basic" games, they were also good for people--like me-- who wanted "extra" games.Whether you want to color inside the lines or outside the lines, the lines themselves are a critical part of enjoying the experience and helping everyone else at the table enjoy it. Everyone at the table, from the "PHB Only" to the 'Wikid Dandies", needs everyone else and their conflicting approaches for the best play experience.</blockquote>

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