Would you play in a campaign with racial/class limits of it fits the story?

[TheSword]

So, I love DMing campaigns that focus on periods of time gone awry or fantasy/history as a background to gameplay.

So if a DM said I have a campaign idea, but you can't play elves or mages or wombats in drag or whatever, is that a deal breaker or do you accept that the game can be fun within set parameters?

No wrong answers, just opinions. Understand this isn't about writing the DM's next novel or railroading just there is a reason that these don't exist. (Like no samurai in a Norse setting).

Alternatively, what would keep you from playing a situational campaign and why?

I’d play in campaign with limits even if it wasn’t necessary for the story.

Limits make people more creative. People also like the boundaries limits provide for comfort. Everyone plays by the same rules. Greater choice isn’t always a good thing… ask a restaurant.

It one of the reasons 3pp make for great monsters and adventure supplements. Not so much with player options. (Sorry Level Up)

 

[FrogReaver]

Limitations are fine.

I once played in a Star Wars game where the DM disallowed force users. That was disappointing for me given my proclivities nearly always playing a wizard of some sort. I discussed his goals and asked if I could play a gadgeteer. He was all smiles with that and we had a great game.

Yea. I find DM's that narrow the focus are very open to creative alternatives when they are pitched.

 

[TwoSix]

Yea. I find DM's that narrow the focus are very open to creative alternatives when they are pitched.

Yea, generally true, and definitely a red flag when they aren't. That's when the DM doesn't want a limited palette for characters, they want paint-by-number.

 

[FrogReaver]

As an example of the above. My most recent campaign features a human theocracy style society. To emphasize that the DM limited class choices to Paladin's, Clerics, Monks. I had thought that he said warlocks were allowed and so had created a hexblade. He thought about it a moment and said you can be a Celestial Warlock (more fitting of the theocracy theme). Not the subclass I would have chosen but it's been very fun. It's a subclass I probably would have never otherwise played.

 

[MGibster]

Totally fine if the DM is aiming to provide a specific experience. Not as fine if the DM is like "I just don't like gnomes, LOL".

I picked gnomes as my extinct race that had been wiped out by the big bad evil empire. But I would have allowed a gnome PC as a last of his kind concept.

What would you make of a historical game set in the Viking age, where men would be barred from, or at least heavily ostracized for becoming a magic-user?

For historical games, I always keep in mind people like Bass Reeves and Stagecoach Mary who managed to buck expectations and lead interesting and exceptional lives in spite of the social conventions of the era they lived in. So more often than not, I'm willing to work with a player to see what we can do to bring their vision to the tabletop. If I'm running a Call of Cthulhu game set in the 1920s, a female character who is a combat veteran and an officer in the United States Marine Corps during the Great War isn't going to work because such a thing simply didn't exist. But we can work with this. Perhaps the character is a Mexican woman who led a band of guerillas during the Mexican Revolution? Or maybe she was a member of the 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death and saw combat during the Great War. We can probably find a way to make the character concept work somehow.

 

[FrogReaver]

I picked gnomes as my extinct race that had been wiped out by the big bad evil empire. But I would have allowed a gnome PC as a last of his kind concept.

For historical games, I always keep in mind people like Bass Reeves and Stagecoach Mary who managed to buck expectations and lead interesting and exceptional lives in spite of the social conventions of the era they lived in. So more often than not, I'm willing to work with a player to see what we can do to bring their vision to the tabletop. If I'm running a Call of Cthulhu game set in the 1920s, a female character who is a combat veteran and an officer in the United States Marine Corps during the Great War isn't going to work because such a thing simply didn't exist. But we can work with this. Perhaps the character is a Mexican woman who led a band of guerillas during the Mexican Revolution? Or maybe she was a member of the 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death and saw combat during the Great War. We can probably find a way to make the character concept work somehow.

The important thing is that the player and dm both be flexible in modifying the character a bit to fit the campaign. If the player balks and wants to play the exact version he initially came up with then that isn’t going to end well.

 

[nevin]

i might try a all divine party concept but I'd be leary. A few bad DM's in my past have made me leery of playing c haracters like warlocks and divine casters because they thought the Dark crawl through glass while you try to understand why your god wants something that seems bad was a fun story arc. Dm probably wouldn't like me in that story arc. I'd just dump the god and move on.

 

[MGibster]

The important thing is that the player and dm both be flexible in modifying the character a bit to fit the campaign. If the player balks and wants to play the exact version he initially came up with then that isn’t going to end well.

Bingo. And while I don't expect DMs to be historians, I think they need to tread lightly when it comes to limiting player choices based on what they think they know about the past. When I ran a 1930s Trail of Cthulhu game I had the players make investigators who were connected to the NYPD. And their characters were just "normal" people. They weren't psychics, wizards, or anything like that just regular humans. During the course of our discussions on characters, one of the players said he wanted to be a pilot. I hadn't considered that, but some very light research showed me that the NYPD actually had pilot officers in the early 1930s. Great. I don't know how I'm going to fit a pilot into the campaign but I'm willing to give it a shot.

But then things took an odd turn. The player wanted to be a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who flew in that conflict. Since the game started in 1933 and the Spanish Civil War in 1936 this was a problem so I suggested we look for another conflict. Why not the Great War? That seems like a popular choice. No dice. The player pitched a time traveler. In my Cthulhu game where they were just normal humans. I couldn't work with that. No dice. He ended up making a psychologist who occasionally consulted with the NYPD instead.

 

[Lanefan]

I ban murder-hoboes. Would that count?

Yes, that would count.

But it wouldn't even get that far: you posted upthread you don't allow players to play characters not of their own gender, and I'd be out at that point.

 

[reelo]

I would say that while that constitutes sexism in the modern sense of the word, it works in the setting. And there are other options as casting runes WAS allowed. By the same token women were never allowed in raiding parties but were allowed to train with weapons for home defense. That would mean, for me as a DM, that I would need to come up with an acceptable reason to allow a historical anachronism to exist in the context of the campaign.

Yes, that is my take on it as well, pretty much. If I were to run, for example, Mythras in such a setting, I would allow women to be Völva (weaving magic through incantations), and men to become runecasters (imbuing items with magic). Same spells, more or less, but different ways of working magic.

As for women using weapons for more than just home-defense, that is an anachronism that is, to me, always allowed, and never up for discussion.