D&D 5E World-Building DMs

[pemerton]

I'd bring the gnome in from another plane (or crash on a Spelljamming ship). The reason I can do that is because all of my D&D campaigns are theoretically set in the multiverse that includes all of the other official settings that were around at my point of timeline alignment.

I agree with the spelljammer/planar travel aspect being the simplest and most seamless way to incorporate the character. It would have the least implications for the established history of Athas.

Personally, I would find a planar glitch mode of incorporating a PC, and even moreso a spelljammer mode, as extremely destabilising of any campaign world (including Athas/DS) that I could imagine GMing. It suggests that the world where the events of the campaign will actually be taking place (that little slice of geography and history) is not a very big thing at all, and that the real stakes are elsewhere.

Generally I don't bother with gnomes or halflings. To me, they don't carry any of the weight that elves, dwarves and orcs do. In the last long-running GH game I GMed I treated all references to gnomes and halflings as indifferent references to a particular, slightly smaller, variety of dwarf. In my 4e game I think one halfling NPC turned up early in the game (I had prepared an encounter for the first session when I expected one of the players to be playing a halfling, but at the last minute he changed to a half-elf), and I used a couple of gnome antagonists at one point also fairly early in the game.

If, for some reason, I had to incorporate a gnome into my game, I would generally take the player's lead on lore, given that they're the one who cares enough about gnomes to want to play one in the first place. (Eg in an earlier GH game a player of a gnome modelled them on the Petty-Dwarves that occur in the Silmarillion.)

 

[delericho]

Was hoping there would be constructive discussion on the nuances of "just how far" can a character concept go before it "ruins" a setting.

Ah, okay - I didn't pick up on that.

Or even can it?

It certainly can! About a decade ago, a friend of mine decided to run a Ravenloft game (actually starting in FR, but the Mists got us pretty much right away). And at the outset the DM said he wanted to run a "fairly serious game". Fair enough.

So we sat down to create characters, and things were going fairly well (although one guy 'rolled' the following stats: 14/17/18/18/18/10, but that's another rant), with the standard mix of character types - the Dwarven Ranger, the Elven Wizard, the Halfling Rogue.

The problem came when the player of the Halfling Rogue came to name her character, and in one word destroyed the campaign beyond recovery. She chose to call her character Jigglypuff.

 

[TwoSix]

The problem came when the player of the Halfling Rogue came to name her character, and in one word destroyed the campaign beyond recovery. She chose to call her character Jigglypuff.

I sincerely hoped someone flipped the table over at that moment.

 

[pemerton]

instant recognition is part of the reason you choose a campaign setting in the first place. Once you start adding in a host of caveats, the whole point of choosing a well-known setting is lost.

My general problem with the "Dark Sun gnome" is that every PC who's a weird exception is also a PC who's not building up the themes and tropes of the setting we chose to play in.

<snip>

Every gnome cleric PC in Dark Sun is a PC that could have been a thri-kreen psionicist or half-giant gladiator or something else that really tells a Dark Sun story, not a FR story in a Dark Sun costume.

I've never played or GMed in DS. I own and have read bits of the 2nd ed Dark Sun set (a fellow RPGer was cleaning out his shelves) and I own and have read the 4e DS books. If I was going to run another 4e campaign I would certainly think about using DS as a setting (though I'm not sure it has enough in it to support a full 30 levels of play).

For me, what is "instantly recognisable" about DS is the geography/ecology (desert) and the basic socio-political set-up (city states ruled by sorcerer kings) which together combine to yield a certain sort of aesthetic (sword-and-sandals, gladiators, pit fighters, caravan guards, wise hermits of the desert, etc).

I can see thri-keens contribute to this - they reinforce the insectoid/reptilian-over-mammalian vibe of this particular desert setting. Half-giants, on the other hand, do nothing for me at all and while I'd be happy to have one played their absence from the setting would (for me) change nothing of importance about it. (Half-giants don't particularly speak to desert geography or ecology, nor to sword-and-sandals, nor even especially to secondary tropes like mutation. Personally they evoke Lennie from Of Mice and Men, but Lennie can just as easily be a large, strong, somewhat simple-minded human, as he was in the novel.)

For me, having PCs that "tell a Dark Sun story" or support Dark Sun play would be much more about backstory, motivation and readiness to jump into the setting-evoking situations that confront the players, rather than gnomes vs halflings vs half-giants.

(On the whole "sorcerer kings as deriving their powers from genocide" thing, this is not stated in the 4e setting materials although their are hints in sidebars. This Wikipedia entry spells it all out, but references a revised, 2nd ed version. If the genocide stuff is in the original 2nd ed version I've missed it in my skim-reading, and personally it doesn't seem very crucial to getting the essential tropes of the setting into play.)

 

[TwoSix]

I've never played or GMed in DS. I own and have read bits of the 2nd ed Dark Sun set (a fellow RPGer was cleaning out his shelves) and I own and have read the 4e DS books. If I was going to run another 4e campaign I would certainly think about using DS as a setting (though I'm not sure it has enough in it to support a full 30 levels of play).

I've read through the 2e boxed set back in the day, and played a short campaign in the setting (albeit with the sort of depth you expect from a game played by 15 year olds ). It was the 4e book, which I feel is an under-appreciated gem, which really made a fan of the setting, though.

For me, what is "instantly recognisable" about DS is the geography/ecology (desert) and the basic socio-political set-up (city states ruled by sorcerer kings) which together combine to yield a certain sort of aesthetic (sword-and-sandals, gladiators, pit fighters, caravan guards, wise hermits of the desert, etc).

I can see thri-keens contribute to this - they reinforce the insectoid/reptilian-over-mammalian vibe of this particular desert setting. Half-giants, on the other hand, do nothing for me at all and while I'd be happy to have one played their absence from the setting would (for me) change nothing of importance about it. (Half-giants don't particularly speak to desert geography or ecology, nor to sword-and-sandals, nor even especially to secondary tropes like mutation. Personally they evoke Lennie from Of Mice and Men, but Lennie can just as easily be a large, strong, somewhat simple-minded human, as he was in the novel.)

To my mind, the focus of Dark Sun is the trope of "arcane magic has dark consequences" carried out to an apocalyptic endpoint. Arcane magic leeches the vitality of the world, and the biggest leechs of all are the sorcerer-kings. The engineered races like Muls and Half-Giants are playable demonstrations of the sorcerer-kings willingness to corrupt nature to their own ends.

For me, having PCs that "tell a Dark Sun story" or support Dark Sun play would be much more about backstory, motivation and readiness to jump into the setting-evoking situations that confront the players, rather than gnomes vs halflings vs half-giants.

I feel like it comes down to how much one has already internalized the concepts of the setting. One doesn't need to allow 50 different species to play in a Star Wars game, for example, but if in your Star Wars game the only 3 allowable species are Humans, Wookiees, and Elves, it's fair to say more than a few players are going to question the Star Wars feel, lightsabers or no.

 

[Shasarak]

Was hoping there would be constructive discussion on the nuances of "just how far" can a character concept go before it "ruins" a setting. Or even can it?

A whole setting in DnD? There is no possible character that can ruin a setting.

 

[Phantarch]

Devil's Advocate: Can I play a human wizard that is not a defiler or preserver in your Dark Sun game?

Actually, a buddy of mine is a big 2e era dark sun fan, and he told me of two other wizard traditions in darksun. I think they were traditionally powered by the Grey and the Black respectively. One drew power from undeath (the more zombies around, the more power I get) and the other from shadows, I think. (This is all from memory of a conversation, so I could be mistaken on the specifics.) So...there are possibilities for other choices beyond Defiler/Preserver, though it would be EXTREMELY rare.

Also, not to start an edition war, but there are significant enough differences between 2e Darksun and 4e Darksun that they are arguably two separate, though similar, campaign settings. Sort of like how the Bourne Identity novels and movies have the same name and a few similarities, but things can get pretty divergent.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

in your darksun game can I play a hafling from the moon? or one that landed his space ship when you thought it was a meter?

 

[Phantarch]

in your darksun game can I play a hafling from the moon? or one that landed his space ship when you thought it was a meter?

That's ridiculous. Everyone knows that in Darksun nobody comes to Athas from the Moon. The moon is a paradise that no one ever leaves. That's why every wizard or psion who has ever teleported to it never came back.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yeah, I think the 5e approach is better for creating the evergreen product they apparently want.

Nod, in that as in so many ways, 5e is doing what Essentials tried to do much more successfully than Essentials did. The slow pace of release keeps the ruleset consistent and, while there's precious little shelf-space being claimed by the game at the FLGS - making it look like anything but the dominant flagship of the hobby that it is - at least there's less confusion over what to buy to get started than when Essentials offered a starter set and /two/ 'Heroes of...' player books - along-side the 3 previously-published PHs!

A stable product, one that sits on the shelf for years or decades - recognizable to the parent who played it as a kid when they go shopping for their kids' - is the kind of known-quantity property Hasbro is used to dealing with. I think D&D is out of danger (of indefinite discontinuation, which seemed a very real possibility just a few years ago) for the foreseeable future. And, it leaves open taking the IP into other, more profitable realms, without putting the core TTRPG product on the line, again.