Rant time With Regius: Picky Players

[Regius]

so here's the Rub.
I run games in the homebrew setting I've run for years now, of which almost all is in my head or in various folders for diffferrent games and I do mean various. This is because, mostly I can normally just spew it at my players and from the garbage inside my head they can build the world up. I had up until now no desire to collate it all together into something like a setting book. however recently I have begun setting up a game for some players who for lack of a better turn are well, let me explain.

it started off with a good friend of mine expressing me the desire to begin playing DnD, for one reason or another the only day he could make was saturdays. so through the LFG forums on roll20 I managed to find a couple of players straight away. and I was all happy and hunky-dory. they contacted me on discord and started asking qyuestions about the setting and style of campaign I ran, I explained to them a bit of a berief summary and asked if they were still intrested, and they said yes. Then the questions contiued, prying deeper into the setting, "Great" I thought "they're genuinley intrested in my setting" and they reall seemed it, asking about pantheons and citties and towns, questioning how I ran various deities. creating charactters based around the history the gleamed from my words, only it hasn't stopped, or letup,, or slowed. As I write these words I am formulating the 30th paragraph of settting info that I have had to spew onto a page, and it's just not how I work. I tend to work better as a queston and repsone dealio,, ask me some questions, recieve some spew, ask me some more, and recieve some more, but they keep basically just asking me to write them a setting book to pull from. at the end I am a loss, I haven't even had time to sort any other LFG applications out.

Help me playground I need some moral support.

[CaptainSarathai]

My players hit me with a similar issue. During creation, I didn't give them all the info that I wish I had, because I do write a book's worth of setting material beforehand, but feel awful throwing 20 pages of reading at someone just to understand my setting. I figured that a simple, "it's like XX, but with these changes" would work, and it totally didn't.
Now they're finally asking questions and trying to work their characters into the world around them; "who is the god for my War Cleric?" etc. The problem is that the setting is largely monotheistic, so there's no war god, just a holy order devoted to war. Now they're grumpy because they didn't know.

In my experience, only give them the info that is relevant to their character or to the campaign. You can even shift some of the onus onto them to work out. For instance, if they want to know who the Storm God is, and you don't have an answer ready but also know that the Storm God doesn't even feature in this campaign, then just give them free reign to make one.
I did this with a player who wants her character to pray to older, pagan gods rather than the dominant religion in the setting. That's fine - pagan gods exist, but nobody really worships them or remembers them, so I told her to make up a personal god.

Also, remind them that there's no need to metagame. If all your players are from Alpharia City, they don't really need to know the racial demographics of the Betaxian Empire next door. They've never been, they don't know. If they want the answer, they can travel there themselves. Be wary of filling in all the empty space on the map. Leave some wiggle room and some mystery - tell your players that they can always discover this info during the game itself.

[qube]

(1) if your player asks for it, explain that it's simply not how your brain works. If the player is 85%+ human, he'll probbably understand

(2) indd, as CaptainSarathai, pointed out, don't be afraid to respond "your character doesn't know that". or even "you think it's ..."

[Herobizkit]

Some players WANT that kind of information so they can design a character that 'fits' into a world. Unless you state up front "Forgotten Realms" or "generic fantasy world", people need to know what's different from 'Vanilla'.

The easiest way to cut the questions is to limit the size of the starting area. Usually the size of a modern U.S. county or, say, Lichtenstein is a good start. If you start with an underground civilization, perhaps they haven't actually BEEN to the surface world and only heard vague rumours of what's on the World Above.

Also important is whether the focus will be on city, wilderness, or dungeon-crawling. Most adventures have a mix of all three, but if you favor one over the others, players will want to know that ahead of time.

Also races. The PHB Basic rules allow for 4 races (dwarf, elf, halfling and human); the PHB calls out the less common races as being optional if the DM desires. Putting consideration as to what race is the most dominant in a region can change how the area "feels" to players.

Finally religion. Does it even have a place in your game? If so, you'll want to get at least a handful of god/desses, or if you're brave, let the Cleric player pick one and decide how that god/dess is represented in your world. Older editions of FR had hundreds of local god/desses and cults, some of which didn't see worship outside of specific villages or nationalities.

Once you get your Campaign Bible together, tell the players to save some of their questions for inside the game (anything that could be answered with a Knowledge-type check) as you prefer to improvise some things.

[Beelzebubba]

Yeah, you've already done more than your fair share of work. There's something else going on here. They're usually being this way because of a bad DM experience before, and they need some kind of assurance you're not going to waste their time.

I would start asking questions back.

'Why is this important? What would change about your character based on this? What are you trying to do?' Be Socratic. Respond to every question with a question. Keep going until they give you a clear, unambiguous answer. THEN give them an answer with that core need in mind.

That's solved 95% of the stuff I've ever had like this.

If you do all that and they keep digging on that one topic, then you know what kind of game you're in for, and IMO you have to make the call if you are the right people to game together.

[Cybren]

I think this is an inevitable consequence of playing with strangers using a very specific and detailed homebrew setting while making yourself the sole gatekeeper of access to the details on that setting. If you want to retain 100% authorship over the world, then you need to give a lot of information for the players if you expect them to have 100% authorship over their characters. Perhaps a better approach would have been to give a broad outline of the relevant cultures, people, etc, and then when players ask for more detail you can invite some collaborative worldbuilding and offload some of the work of sustaining an entire reality onto someone else's brain. Else, maybe get the interested parties together and do a session 0 of just establishing world information & build characters collaboratively.

[Biggstick]

Yeah this is what you get for building your own world and having Players who are just as interested in being a part of the world you've created.

Someone above mentioned answering your Players' questions with a question yourself, to find out what they really want to do with the knowledge you're about to give them. I would say this is a good way to get past a ton of extra writing down of information.

Don't block the Players access to knowledge of your game world. It sounds like you're complaining that Players want to know about your world. To me, both as a Player and a DM, I definitely think it's unfair if basic world knowledge is locked to only you the DM. You are the only one that actually knows anything about anything in the game world, unless you specifically tell your Players.

Create a basic-setting-document that doesn't extend past two pages. You sound like a good DM, and a good DM can condense the campaign setting down to a couple pages imo.

[Regius]

Yeah this is what you get for building your own world and having Players who are just as interested in being a part of the world you've created.

Someone above mentioned answering your Players' questions with a question yourself, to find out what they really want to do with the knowledge you're about to give them. I would say this is a good way to get past a ton of extra writing down of information.

Don't block the Players access to knowledge of your game world. It sounds like you're complaining that Players want to know about your world. To me, both as a Player and a DM, I definitely think it's unfair if basic world knowledge is locked to only you the DM. You are the only one that actually knows anything about anything in the game world, unless you specifically tell your Players.

Create a basic-setting-document that doesn't extend past two pages. You sound like a good DM, and a good DM can condense the campaign setting down to a couple pages imo.

from what I've written for them I have already gone past 6 pages of setting.

[War_lord]

...That's homebrew, if you didn't want to have to actually build a world, use a pre-built setting. I'm really tired of people on roll 20 say "oh yeah, we'll be running my homebrew setting" and then it turns out they don't even have a pantheon.

[Regius]

{{scrubbed}}

[War_lord]

How pleasant.

I didn't say you specifically didn't have a pantheon, just that bad "homebrew" settings are common on Roll20. That's probably why they're asking so many questions, to sus out whether you actually have a setting homebrewed, or if it is just as cobbled together was what every other DM brings. I mean your complaint boils down to "they're too interested in my setting I claimed to have".

[LudicSavant]

If it doesn't end, it's possibly because you're not actually answering the relevant questions. I've seen a lot of worldbuilders write small books worth of information and still manage to answer none of the questions a PC needs the answer to in order to make fitting characters.

These questions can be summed up as "What's the initial hook of the game? Where can I come from, what is my culture, and what would my character know? What does it mean to be a person living in this world? What are pressing current events in my area? What organizations/religions are available to me? Am I free to embellish the setting with my own details and run them by you? What are your house rules and character creation criteria?"

I have seen so many Roll20 ads that fill tons of space with descriptions and fail to answer absolutely any of these things, and all of them can be answered in a good one page writeup (or less, even). And then these new DMs get confused when players don't seem to have any of their questions answered already when they arrive.

I've also seen a lot of examples of people thinking they are answering these questions but not really doing so. The most common form of this is "proper noun dump." In these sorts of writeups, inexperienced writers will list off tons of names... but tell you very little about what those names actually refer to. "There's the country of Moranda on the continent of Ravnica." Okay. Cool. I now know absolutely nothing of value about the continent or the country.

[Easy_Lee]

Sheesh, I envy you OP. I wrote up an ~80 page book one time only for the players to not even look at it or bother to even understand the rules. The campaign fizzled out due to me having one very interested player and three others talking about playing something else. I don't think it was me, either, the interested player still talks about that campaign sometimes and she wants me to DM it again.

People being interested in your world is a good thing. You don't have to be consistent about lore. Here's a tip: say "it's commonly believed that" or "your character has heard" instead of giving hard answers. That way, you can change your mind later and explain it away as being a mystery to everyone.

[Contrast]

Yeah, you've already done more than your fair share of work. There's something else going on here. They're usually being this way because of a bad DM experience before, and they need some kind of assurance you're not going to waste their time.

I would start asking questions back.

'Why is this important? What would change about your character based on this? What are you trying to do?' Be Socratic. Respond to every question with a question. Keep going until they give you a clear, unambiguous answer. THEN give them an answer with that core need in mind.

A slightly less passive aggressive approach would work better in my opinion. Explain you're having to invest time preparing stuff that you'd prefer to spend directly prepping for the game. Reassure them that if something comes up in game that they should know about you'll give them a heads up. Why are you writing up pages of text? Would it be simpler/less time consuming to set aside an hour to talk to all the players and do character creation together? They can just ask you any questions they have direct then. If a DM responded to questions about his setting I was trying to use to frame character creation with needling questions about why I needed the knowledge I would be pretty put off - if you don't want people to have to ask lots of questions about your setting, don't use a homebrew setting.

That all said...


Snip

I get that you came here for moral support not criticism but perhaps take a deep breath and consider if your own patience may be something you need to work on too :smallwink:

[Haldir]

Play an established setting. It will make you a better DM and worldbuilder. Since it seems this is an extra group with two strangers and a newbie, you're setting up a situation where having a ton of material on-hand and pre-published might be handy. Also, getting down and dirty with a boring established world will make you compare it to your worlds, which will spin up those creative gears in your brain.

[Theodoxus]

Eh, let them build characters in FR and then, first session, they're on a floating caravan, sailing from Waterdeep to Neverwinter when they pass through "the Bermuda Triangle" and end up on some alien (ie your homebrew) world.

Congrats, now they have a "Wizard of Oz" type adventure figuring out how to exist in this foreign world they (and their characters) know nothing about while trying to get back home.

I might consider stating in the session 0 that knowledges will not be used. Then, after they transition - if there's anyone super serious on being a loremaster type, can scrounge up information on the local gods, flora and fauna, notable villains and heroes of ages past and/or how magic works.

I also suggest that the homebrew pantheon's god who closest resembles the clerics god (if there is one) contacts them through a dream and be all "I know you worship 'X', but (s)he's not here. I'm their local representative. Welcome to the family!"