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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9805480" data-attributes="member: 7006">I think an important distinction here to find out about would be whether it is playing online with strangers that causes more DMs to have players showing up not having read or concerned themselves with the campaign themes and instead arriving with a full-formed PC at the go?The thing about online games that don't involve personal friends is that there's much more of a time crunch on behalf of players.  DMs that are preparing a game on FG or Roll20 or Foundry can take as long as they need to set everything up for their campaign idea and establish their parameters.  But as soon as they hit 'Post' to  start looking for players... the players who log in looking for games know there's only a short window to get themselves into the mix for that particular game before the window closes and there are too many applications submitted.  So they are incentivized to just hit 'Yes' as quickly as possible because otherwise they don't get to game.But what that means is that there's a better chance of these players not reading anything about the game itself because they just want to get their submission for playing in so they don't miss it.  And if those particular players just happen to have a character already made that they've been looking to play... if they are accepted into the game, it probably just becomes a "Well, it doesn't hurt to ask!" situation.  They just offer their preferred character to the DM even though it might have little to do with the campaign theme, and then the DM has to decide whether or not to say no.  And that's when the conflict might come in... with players wanting to play these characters they have in mind and scared about being dumped out of the game itself (since who knows how long it's taken them to get accepted into a game at this point), so they try and argue to convince the DM to let them play their character idea... and the DM fights back because the player didn't spend the time taking what at first glance seemed to be a completely simple request-- read the campaign info to make sure this was actually a game you wanted to play.And here's the thing... we all know that our online presences are more annoying and more combative than we'd ever actually be in face-to-face real life-- even places like here on EN World.  So what might have been a reasonable conversation between the DM and the player or two around a table can become more contentious when its annonymous and online.  Which is part of the reason I personally don't really ever want to play online, as I prefer to play with people whom I know and for whom I can have actual conversations with to work out any issues without them blowing up.I could be wrong about this theory of mine, but at least to me it seems a plausible possibility as to why it happens.</blockquote>

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