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Yora
2019-01-15, 03:44 PM
Today I was thinking about why I always find it so difficult to start a new campaign after I have put together a setting. There are so many of my favorite things that I want to see in games and present to the players and want them to get as excited for as I am. But when it comes to setting up a first adventure to set off the campaign, I always come up empty. I have all a collection of my greatest hits from fantasy, but find none of them suitable for a starting adventure.

This led me to having a really strange thought: I think simply made my setting way too cool.

And no, this is not actually about the setting I made specifically. In hindsight, I notice that I've always been struggling with this with all the really cool and awesome settings that I considered running over the years.
I got yuan-ti, aboleths, kuo-toa, giant ruined towers, volcanoes, demon cults, elven barbarians on dinosaurs. And then, when I sit down to come up with something for a first adventure, it's "Alright, let's see what I can put together with bandits and goblins?"

Why does this always happen?

I've not played in a lot of GM's games, but I've seen lots of people describing the beginnings of their campaigns, and it doesn't seem like I am alone in this. It rather appears almost universal.

My favorite thing that has ever been written on RPGs is Your Demon Lord doesn't need that many Hit Dice (https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2016/04/your-demon-lord-doesnt-need-that-many.html). It's a neat little examination of how the biggest, baddest, and also best enemies in Dungeons & Dragons have been steadily pushed back farther and farther within a campaign.
Because campaigns aren't getting longer. From anecdotes, they are actually getting shorter, and so the most amazing and impressive material gets actually seen less and less often. But how many of us really go into a new campaign thrilled to fight rats and goblins. Isn't it rather the prospect of encountering big dragons and demon lords later in the game that gets us exited to start a new campaign?

It could be that I am simply a person with a very unusual taste in fantasy, who only sees examples of a conventional mainstream style that a big majority enjoys and is looking for. But when people get excited about something like Planescape or Eberron, that doesn't seem to be the case.

What is going on there? Have you made experiences that relate to this phenomenon?

Kaptin Keen
2019-01-15, 04:16 PM
I have behind me a trail of discarded worlds, like bread crumbs. Not all of them were good, not ... by even the wildest stretch of the imagination.

I find it's really hard to - correctly - bring an awesome idea to life. For me, the problem is I can't wait to get to the awesome. And leading with that is quite simply bound to fail. You have to start small. Small enough to comprehend. Small enough to grow familiar with. Then build on that.

It may not be the best world I ever came up with, but the village of Silverbrook is certainly the most succesful. By ... miles. Sure, there's a portal outside town that leads to Sigil, which effectively means the village lies right next to the entire multiverse. But I started out with gopher quests in town, tiny little jobs. Not even into the portal at first.

And for me at least, that seems to be working.

The world is larger than just the village, by the way. I could go on and on about the nations - Madripore, Æhrengaard, Ul Haq - but those are never the point. They're there in the background, lending life to the world at large. No one's ever uttered any interest in visiting the large cities, they're surprisingly fine wrestling the day to day troubles of that small village. And of course, as the story builds, the fate of the multiverse =)

Pelle
2019-01-15, 04:30 PM
Ask your players what they find enticing about your setting, and use that as inspiration for your adventure. Or, just constrain yourself to make an adventure with only the setting elements you highlighted above. And have them make the characters, and mine their backgrounds for hooks that you can tie into a developing plot.

I find it can be a big waste of work to put a lot of work into a setting up front. Start early with the characters, and make a setting where they belong instead.

zlefin
2019-01-15, 04:39 PM
why can't you just start at high level? I see plenty of games out there that just start at level 10, or level 20.

writing is hard to do well, and there's a lot of people who dabble in it.

can you make decent first adventures if it's a campaign that starts at high level and assumes all the PCs did lesser stuff in their past?
that would help distinguish whether your problem is with first adventures, or with low level adventures.
videogames are muhc more often about saving the world than saving one tiny little hamlet, and even early in the game you're often at least princes/princesses or saving a kingdom.

NorthernPhoenix
2019-01-15, 05:03 PM
Not only is "awesome" subjective, but is, imo, also highly related to context. Each "awesome" thing only exists in relation to its points of comparison. If you fill your world with so much Eberron x10 weirdness that it all blends into exasperated mush, what's the point? Things are nearly always awesome because they stand out. A dragon in a world with only one dragon will be awesome indeed, while a dragon in world where dragons are commonplace needs to be something special to be "awesome". This applies to everything from deviations from traditional fantasy tropes to concepts of scope and scale. A demon lord may not need a lot of hit points if his 50 hp are nonetheless very high in context, but if other characters have way more, he seems less cool. Replace "HP" with powers, station or whatever else and the general idea remains the same. A king is only "awesome" until he's one of a hundred others bending his knee to an emperor, and so on.

gkathellar
2019-01-15, 05:09 PM
why can't you just start at high level? I see plenty of games out there that just start at level 10, or level 20.

In many D&D-alikes, this can be somewhat uncomfortable to do, because you're starting at a fairly high level of complexity as opposed to easing into it more naturally. There's also sort of a ... feeling of accomplishment attached to the idea of starting at level 1. Like ... "this is how it's supposed to be," I guess? We're conditioned to it by the way the books are laid out. A 1-20 campaign is the ideal, whether it should be or not.

Man_Over_Game
2019-01-15, 05:16 PM
Today I was thinking about why I always find it so difficult to start a new campaign after I have put together a setting. There are so many of my favorite things that I want to see in games and present to the players and want them to get as excited for as I am. But when it comes to setting up a first adventure to set off the campaign, I always come up empty. I have all a collection of my greatest hits from fantasy, but find none of them suitable for a starting adventure.

This led me to having a really strange thought: I think simply made my setting way too cool.

And no, this is not actually about the setting I made specifically. In hindsight, I notice that I've always been struggling with this with all the really cool and awesome settings that I considered running over the years.
I got yuan-ti, aboleths, kuo-toa, giant ruined towers, volcanoes, demon cults, elven barbarians on dinosaurs. And then, when I sit down to come up with something for a first adventure, it's "Alright, let's see what I can put together with bandits and goblins?"

Why does this always happen?

I've not played in a lot of GM's games, but I've seen lots of people describing the beginnings of their campaigns, and it doesn't seem like I am alone in this. It rather appears almost universal.

My favorite thing that has ever been written on RPGs is Your Demon Lord doesn't need that many Hit Dice (https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2016/04/your-demon-lord-doesnt-need-that-many.html). It's a neat little examination of how the biggest, baddest, and also best enemies in Dungeons & Dragons have been steadily pushed back farther and farther within a campaign.
Because campaigns aren't getting longer. From anecdotes, they are actually getting shorter, and so the most amazing and impressive material gets actually seen less and less often. But how many of us really go into a new campaign thrilled to fight rats and goblins. Isn't it rather the prospect of encountering big dragons and demon lords later in the game that gets us exited to start a new campaign?

It could be that I am simply a person with a very unusual taste in fantasy, who only sees examples of a conventional mainstream style that a big majority enjoys and is looking for. But when people get excited about something like Planescape or Eberron, that doesn't seem to be the case.

What is going on there? Have you made experiences that relate to this phenomenon?

I can't say much how things have been, as I'm of the newer generation of DMs, but I can say that I actually enjoy the lower power level more on both sides of the table. At higher levels, who "wins" comes down to a sacred item, a powerful combination of spells, a hidden flaw of the enemy, or something of that nature. Big enemies, big events, all decided by a select few things.

But players tied up, surrounded by a mob of goblins? That is a lot more interesting to me. There's a bunch of ways players could *try* to deal with their circumstance that they all might think are feasible.

But nobody *tries* anything against an Ancient Dragon or a Demon Lord. You simply know what you're doing or you don't. Players take fewer risks, they spend more time preparing, and it all just kinda...bogs down everything. Adventures aren't as exciting, life isn't "lived on the edge". Living the next day feels like a life-or-death gamble, sure, but you're just working each day to create less random chance. Problems become easily solved with magic, or they're impossible, or there's a mission to gather that McGuffin for "That One Thing That's Gonna Save Us".

It feels overplayed, and surprisingly enough, it's less exciting. I have a rough idea as to what my players are going to do to deal with an Ancient Dragon, even if the group Wizard has 20 known spells of varying power. I have NO idea what a level 1 party is going to do tied up and surrounded by goblins.

Neknoh
2019-01-15, 06:02 PM
In part we fight with CR limitations, but people also tend to just grab at what is usually the standard "goblins attacking town" or "bandits on the road" and then seldom having that connect in any meaningful way to the rest of the campaign, it's just level-up fodder, it seldom establishes the world or gives player reason to go after later things, or to look back and go "yeah, man, now I know why those bandits were hunting for a resurrection diamond."

I wrote a thing on connecting your early work in a campaign to all of the late awesome work, posted it here on the forums as well.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?578246-Neknoh-s-Guide-to-building-a-living-open-world-campaign-on-a-coherent-theme

After having it let sit here and on reddit for a while, I'm second guessing the use of the word "theme." as many people grap onto it and start focusing on coding out what their theme is when it could just be an event or something else.

But tldr: it's easier than a lot of people think to connect the entire campaign in a non-significant way by asking yourself as a DM "How does this affect people on the lower level."

Once you have this theme, you can start looking at things other than kobolds and bandits that then make sense in what you're writing, rather than lazily reaching for the first group of goblins to attack the town.

Knaight
2019-01-15, 06:03 PM
I think a lot of it is just a preference for more ordinary characters in more grounded conflicts, for which bandits and soldiers are genuinely better suited opposition than dinosaur riding elven barbarians. Personally I tend to bounce all over, where the focus from game to game shifts dramatically. Sometimes the PCs are ordinary soldiers or the like, involved in conflicts that basically come down to surviving a famine. Sometimes I accidentally run blood opera because I didn't realize that's what happens when you try to combine wuxia with the Arthurian myth, where the PCs are shaping the fate of a nation with sword and spear, along with soft power and personal conflict with the other big names involved in its shaping. Or, in more futuristic settings sometimes the PCs are refugees trying to stay ahead of the people who just overthrew their government, and sometimes they're the senior officers on a ship that makes worlds. I don't use these more mundane ones because I'm afraid of too much awesome, as is evidenced by just how gonzo I've gone*. I use them because at that moment the group finds them more interesting, or at least I do and they'll go along with it.

There is also a system side here. Most players play D&D (I'd say the vast majority, but I've seen some data suggesting that's not the case so much anymore). Of those, most start at first level because the game and its culture sort of imply that that's just what one does. These first level adventures then tend to pull the same few first level enemies, which tends to segue into similar structures.

*Though admittedly gonzo and high powered can be different things. One of the lower power games I ran involved a fishing boat that accidentally pulled up a great treasure, and travelled across the sea to sell it and retire. Which, once setting specifics were in the concept meant the crew of a hot air balloon pulled by a team of draft wyverns between mountain peaks that rose over a poisonous fog.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-15, 08:47 PM
Why does this always happen?

I don't want to sound too harsh, but lot of people lack creativity and imagination. Even more so ''out side the box". Worse, most fiction...even more so fantasy fiction...really gets stuck in a rut. And for D&D...it's Lord of the Rings.

Also, mechanics is a HUGE problem here in many games. And the basic problem is very little effects. The vast majority of all the foes just do boring, blade, dull, mechanical effects. They have to. For the simple reason that no rules can have a whole ''mini game" per creature. In order for the game to work, the foes must have fire vs the characters with protection from fire.

The ''just like Earth" way does have a HUGE amount of fans. Such people want the game to be all most exactly like Earth. They want to fight rats with a weapon, and fight goblin bandits.



But how many of us really go into a new campaign thrilled to fight rats and goblins. Isn't it rather the prospect of encountering big dragons and demon lords later in the game that gets us exited to start a new campaign?

I'd hope the whole campaign had more of a focus then just pure combat.



What is going on there? Have you made experiences that relate to this phenomenon?

The opposite. The vast library of books, comic books, TV shows, movies and other fiction game me a very...unique spin on fiction. So no giant rats....but pan dimensional exploding space rats of Ill Omen, check.

I often drive players from my game with my unique spin on fiction. When they encounter a time raveling cyborg dream goblin, they just break down and leave the game. It's just to weird for them. They want goblins to just be bandits and stab with a spear.

Florian
2019-01-16, 12:19 AM
Surprisingly, I agree with DU on this.

As the creator of the game world, you already know everything, have a clear picture of what awesome things are possible and also when.

As a player, you're being thrown into a new thing and must start the entire learning process from the get-go, with means that the early levels have to be mainly based on something that they already know (no agency without understanding), as unlike with the gaming rules, it´s less likely that the players will try to learn the setting before the start of the game (even less likely with a homebrew setting).

That said, Paizo showcases that you can have truly awesome 1st level adventures as part of their APs. Carrion Crown opens up with exploring a haunted prison, Ironfang Invasion starts with a massive hobgoblin raid on a town, Wrath of the Righteous has the PC battle traitors and cultist while a Gold Dragon and Balor duke it out and Strange Aeons has the PCs be amnesiacs in an asylum which is under attack by the Dreamlands and rapidly turning unrealistic.

Point being, all the mentioned starting scenarios have something in common, they straight up set the mood for everything that is to come in the campaign.

Yora
2019-01-16, 02:13 AM
Exactly. Aren't we setting ourselves up for campaigns with generic humanoid raiders if we start with the default enemies?

I just looked at the Monster Manual for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edtion, and while there is lots of standard critters at the lower levels, there is also plenty more unusual and fantastic ones.
Mechanically, there is no reason to not start the campaign with cockatrices, jackalweres, myconids, sahuagin, aarakockras, bullywugs, kenku, kuo-toas, and blights. You could even throw in a carrion crawler, ettercap, or sea hag in as a major boss encounter.

It really doesn't seem diffiicult to do. But I find it really curious that this appears to be so very rarely done, that your instinct tells you not to.

Pauly
2019-01-16, 02:28 AM
Awesome is in the story, not the monster stats.

Some of my most challenging wins as a player have been in low level campaigns against low level bosses. At higher levels it can become more a game of inventory management and spell preparation than anything else.

Mordaedil
2019-01-16, 02:30 AM
I took five minutes to draw a map, thought of where my players started out and just started by evicting them from their starting homes and let them take over the reigns from there. The rest is just kinda coming on its own and I am in no rush to push the players forward or think my setting is more important than their characters or too cool not to explore. They take their pace and they take their priorities and sometimes that priority comes in the form of traveling to the plane of shadow to rescue their friend who got knocked down in a battle with higher-level shadowcasters.

I encourage people to go nuts.

Knaight
2019-01-16, 02:38 AM
Surprisingly, I agree with DU on this.

As the creator of the game world, you already know everything, have a clear picture of what awesome things are possible and also when.

As a player, you're being thrown into a new thing and must start the entire learning process from the get-go, with means that the early levels have to be mainly based on something that they already know (no agency without understanding), as unlike with the gaming rules, it´s less likely that the players will try to learn the setting before the start of the game (even less likely with a homebrew setting).
You can often get pretty abstract with "what they already know" though. "Those things trying to kill us are our enemies" are pretty straightforward, regardless of how weird those things are or the environment that all happens is.


Exactly. Aren't we setting ourselves up for campaigns with generic humanoid raiders if we start with the default enemies?

Yes. Often quite deliberately, because those generic humanoid raiders are exactly the opposition of interest during those campaigns, where the change here is going to be more on the "raiders" end than the "humanoid" end. Sometimes you just want to run low fantasy, or a historical game, or similar. There the question is less why you can't include "awesome" stuff and more why you're expected to include elves, dwarves, etc.

RPGs can be all over the place in terms of genre, and that's a good thing. The idea that "awesome" elements have to be included is as bad as the idea that they never should be.

Florian
2019-01-16, 03:02 AM
@Knaight:

The way I understood Yora, the question here is about why you start more or less "mundane", when the overall goal for a setting or campaign is to be "fantastic", instead of trying to hit the expected tone and mood right from the beginning. For example, when the campaign should include a lot of planes hopping, why not start your first adventure exploring a ruin with a permanent gate, instead of waiting till they can do plane shift?

@Mordaedil:

One of the main reasons to not use your 08/15 fantasy setting/middle earth clone number 456 is to provide new and different avenues for exploration. I would actually be quite disappointed when the players would act the same, no matter if it is your bog standard Forgotten Realms, or something based in RL Baltic/Slavic culture and folklore or a fantasy version of the Osman Empire.

@Yora:

That's why I agree with DU there. Not on the gonzo stuff, but at kicking verisimilitude in the bucket and going for different sources of inspiration to get things going.

One of the things I tend to use is "fantastic vistas", like:
-Ok, this is a bridge build by titans, to titan proportions, so it doesn't span a simple river, but an entire ocean.
- Good morning and welcome to the jungle. In the distance, you hear the frenzied roaring of a pair of mating Purple Worms.
- As you travel towards the village, the sun is suddenly blocked for some seconds when your are standing in the shadow of an ancient red dragon passing overhead.

Beyond that, all too often, we have the habit of crafting encounters that ought to make sense somehow, like it being a thing to have bandits on a road. At that point, hit the random encounter generator multiple times and more or less force yourself to just accept the results, no questions asked.

Milo v3
2019-01-16, 03:55 AM
This is one of the reasons I don't run low-levels D&D. If I'm running D&D or PF, the lowest I start off is 5th level, and even then I generally homebrew enemies a lot so that there can be more diverse cooler stuff without the math breaking that would happen using a creature several levels too high for the players.

Satinavian
2019-01-16, 04:38 AM
Beyond that, all too often, we have the habit of crafting encounters that ought to make sense somehow, like it being a thing to have bandits on a road.
Encounters that make sense are the only good encounters.

But that does not mean they have to be bandits on the road or goblins yet another time.

If your setting is actually interesting and different that means that "encounters that make sense" are also interesting and different.



And i really can't say i have seen the problem of the TO in games a lot.

Pelle
2019-01-16, 04:57 AM
Exactly. Aren't we setting ourselves up for campaigns with generic humanoid raiders if we start with the default enemies?


Yes. It's a good idea to display central elements of your setting with the first adventure. Then it's easy to follow loose threads from that adventure in the next one, and you are all the time exploring what's interesting settingwise.



It really doesn't seem diffiicult to do. But I find it really curious that this appears to be so very rarely done, that your instinct tells you not to.

It's not difficult. Just decide to do it. I don't understand the issue here, and can't say I share the experience. I agree it's easy to pick goblins and bandits since there are limited low level adversaries, but in your case you have plenty of cool other ones.

Elven kids from the village are kidnapped by cultists. All the elven warriors and their dinosaurs are away fighting yuan-ti, and only the PCs can rescue them!

The cultists want to sacrifice the kids at a volcano to summon a demon, to help them in their conflict with the kuo-toa in the ruined tower. The PCs may encounter the kuo-toa, who are controlled by an aboleth, and may either try to avoid them, to fight them or ally with them.

Mechalich
2019-01-16, 06:48 AM
I think this post is about two different things.

One is how D&D and similar systems have a lot of 'you must be this tall to ride' gatekeeping behind which certain monsters are hidden and in order to actually use the wild and crazy monsters the characters must have a certain quantity of levels, gear, and other assets or they will get slaughtered. The integration of skill systems into the game actually makes this worse because while in 2e AD&D a 1st level party could hypothetically talk to a Balor in Sigil and not lose their shirts, the nature of the skill system makes that functionally impossible from 3e onward. That's a problem of mechanical scale that is particularly pronounced in D&D and much less of a problem in other systems that aren't designed to engineer epic boss fights. Systems with a much flatter scale can avoid this problem, but lend themselves vulnerable to players using swarm tactics to overcome obstacles that are intended to be epic. Smaug dies from a single arrow fired precisely at a single missing scale in a shot for the ages. He's not brought down by a thousand mercenaries with crossbows. That's a mechanical problem that requires mechanics to address. 3.P D&D is doubly hindered in this regard by being overly swing-y at low-levels and absolutely broken at high-levels such that a huge amount of content isn't usable (Pathfinder's Bestiary 6 has a stupid number of pages devoted to completely unnecessary statblocks for things like Archdevils that you can't actually fight).

Two is having settings that are overstuffed. This is a fluff-based problem. Modern technology and modern games give us so many toys to play with, far, far more than you can actually fit into a legitimate setting. This isn't even a fantasy problem specifically. Major modern settings like the oWoD and futuristic settings like Eclipse Phase are arguably overstuffed worse. Eclipse Phase is a textbook case, since that basically took every major idea found in their 'sources of inspiration,' and put them all into the setting at once. Trying to fit everything into a setting makes it unwieldy and burdens verisimilitude hard. The average game system offers immense temptations to throw in too much. In a table-top gaming context this becomes worse for elements that are unrecognizable. Games with exotic or impenetrable lore lead new players to paralysis. As a simple example, the designers of the Planescape setting developed a complex system of slang for use in the setting, and it's very nice and flavorful and awesome, when you're reading the setting books as a GM. In play, actually running Planescape for players only passably familiar with the structures of D&D, I always immediately dropped the slang entirely and had everyone speak in modern English.

Arguably, table-top games have to rely on familiar tropes, recognizable elements, and known patterns more than any other form of entertainment because the amount of exposition you can impose on the players is so extremely limited. In fact, a computerized version of D&D can utilize the lore far more effectively than any table top game because it can force the players to read it (Baldur's Gate, which rests of highly familiar tropes, nevertheless has ten of thousands of words of expository dialogue and description to explain what all the crap that's going on actually is). As a result of having to lean on convention this makes it doubly hard to introduce weird and unusual elements in a believable way.

Now, you always can, of course, toss verisimilitude to the winds. In fact, I believe a great deal of the success attributed to Planescape is how willing it is to embrace the crazy. The setting is bonkers and makes no sense. All Planescape stories are inherently ridiculous and at best metaphorical, but it is completely not necessary to care.

Florian
2019-01-16, 06:51 AM
@Pelle:

I think what Yora is struggling with in this regard, is that the form of level-gating that happens in some systems pushes back some creatures in the later half of a campaign by default. That more or less forces you to spin very long arcs that can cover quite a level bracket and a lot of individual sessions before anything comes out of it.

That's IMO also the main difference between world building and campaign building.

It´s interesting to look at the Runelord trilogy for this.

Rise suffers the most here. It does exactly what Yora complains about, having you "upgrade" from goblins, to cultists, to ghouls, to ogres and so on, only bringing the main topic, the Runelords, into play in the last quarter of the campaign.

Shattered Star is already better designed. It´s basically an artifact hunt with a number of side quests, but will take you into locations and dungeons that are directly tied to the topic of Runelords right from the very start. Ok, you're still fighting bandits in the beginning, but at least at location like within an old rune lord laboratory or inside the he'd of a giant statues of Sorshen.

Return brings it to a point by having the full Runelords topic right from the start, with every encounter and location.

Edit and afterthought: Then there's the possible problem with overcrowding. PF does something with Golarion that people who're into verisimilitude hate: They broke down the map into thematic regions and mostly kept those regions separately. Varisia is the Runelords region and you're not bothered with that theme and topic beyond that region and so on.

Pelle
2019-01-16, 07:42 AM
@Pelle:

I think what Yora is struggling with in this regard, is that the form of level-gating that happens in some systems pushes back some creatures in the later half of a campaign by default. That more or less forces you to spin very long arcs that can cover quite a level bracket and a lot of individual sessions before anything comes out of it.


Yeah, I get that, and am somewhat sympathetic. But for the specific example of Yora's 5e setting, that is not the case.

I think it just goes to show that when world building for an rpg, it pays to have written some contstraints behind your ear (is that an English idiom?). Importantly, it should be possible to have adventures there. If you don't consider that at all when you build world, you need to do a lot of iterations before you end up with one that can be used.

Thrawn4
2019-01-16, 07:50 AM
There are so many of my favorite things that I want to [...] present to the players [...] yuan-ti, aboleths, kuo-toa, giant ruined towers, volcanoes, demon cults, elven barbarians on dinosaurs. And then, when I sit down to come up with something for a first adventure, it's "Alright, let's see what I can put together with bandits and goblins?"
[...]

Two things:

When creating a story/setting, you have to make sure that it is not to common and to strange. A common setting (queuing at an administration office) is boring, a strange setting is to compicated to understand. When I read "yuan-ti, aboleths, kuo-toa, giant ruined towers, volcanoes, demon cults, elven barbarians on dinosaurs", that raises a red flag, because I feel bombarded with strange terms that I cannot relate to. Even the terms I understand sound like someone tries to cramp to much stuff into one story.
Maybe the reason you start with goblin raids is that you are sub-consciously aware of that?

Others have pointed out that awesome is dependent on setting context and how much players can relate to it. Everything being awesome decreases the value of awesomeness, because it turns mundane the more common it is. I find that many people don't like low-level adventures because "they want to get to the good stuff". But a simple goblin encounter can be more exciting, the coming winter more deadly, and the friend in need more pressing than any demon lord that threatens the land. It is a matter of execution and fluff, not mechanics.

gkathellar
2019-01-16, 08:13 AM
A secondary issue arises when you consider that mainstream fantasy fiction has tended to edge in one of two directions over the past 15+ years: big, gonzo, and maybe a little stupid (your Warcrafts), or low-key, low-magic, and centered on human conflict (your Songs of Icicles and Fires). Blockbuster vs. prestige, essentially. It’s not a hard-and-fast division, but I think it’s there, and it effects the way we think about this stuff. So when we set out to tell serious, “deep,” stories, we often rule out big gonzo fantasy nonsense, and vice-versa. It doesn’t have to be that way, but I think it frequently is.

The Jack
2019-01-16, 11:06 AM
There's something that really makes Gonzo work

Making it Wrong.

I'm very fond of the Too-much-magic-world as an abberation, something that shouldn't be. The world is hostile and post apocalyptic because some wizard buggered it up.


That said, I also measure my fantastical elements with... reality,or reality through the lense of whatever I'm doing with magic. My games are often Reality+; I avoid rule of cool unless some metaphysical element allows for it.

Like yes, you can tame and ride the dinosaur and maybe graft a laser into it's skull, but You're really going to hurt the dinosaur if you try to use him to ram through stone fortifications, and you'll fly off and hurt yourself in the resulting crash.

Rhedyn
2019-01-16, 11:18 AM
I don't GM systems with hard levels like D&D anymore. So I can introduce the cool stuff whenever I want provided the party has the gear, allies, and tactics to handle the situation even if they lack experience.

But yeah, I get what you were saying. I ran one good 3.5 campaign from 1-36 but after that I just couldn't get the 3.x mojo going again as a GM. It doesn't help that I just don't like low levels and the players don't like just starting at higher levels.

SimonMoon6
2019-01-16, 12:22 PM
Yeah, there's something seriously wrong with the way D&D is designed.

A lot of people don't want to play at higher levels... for a variety of reasons. But one of the things that almost everyone complains about is just how HARD it is to play at those levels. And I don't even mean the complaints of "I don't know how to force the players to do what I want when they can cast teleport!" Those complaints are obviously stupid. The fact of the matter is that D&D adds complications every time that power levels increase. Instead of something like "That fire attack you had at 1st level now does 5d6 instead of 1d6 damage", the game says "You now have 10 extra slots in which to prepare brand new powers, which you have to choose from this list of ten thousand possibilities". And equipment gets harder to manage. And just general basic-level optimization (how to make sure your character doesn't completely suck) gets harder and harder. And a DM can get overwhelmed even more easily than a player. If a player thinks it's hard to make *one* halfway decent high-level character, think of the poor DM who has to make dozens and dozens of them for EVERY game session. Add to that those hopelessly pathetic yet all too numerous DMs whose entire adventures can be destroyed by one teleport spell, and it's easy to see why few people will play at high levels.

Even though that's where ALL the good stuff is.

And that's a problem.

Some people (not me) like the whole "zero to hero" aspect of D&D style levelling-up of characters. But the problem is that you may never get to "hero". The game ends before that because it's just TOO HARD. You get to go from zero to "see ya". And that's no fun.

JoeJ
2019-01-16, 01:05 PM
The integration of skill systems into the game actually makes this worse because while in 2e AD&D a 1st level party could hypothetically talk to a Balor in Sigil and not lose their shirts, the nature of the skill system makes that functionally impossible from 3e onward.

Not from 3e on, just in 3.x (and possibly 4e, which I know very little about). In 5e a balor has pretty good mental stats, but no skill proficiencies; a 1st level party negotiating with a balor is entirely feasible.

Yora
2019-01-16, 02:00 PM
The way I understood Yora, the question here is about why you start more or less "mundane", when the overall goal for a setting or campaign is to be "fantastic", instead of trying to hit the expected tone and mood right from the beginning. For example, when the campaign should include a lot of planes hopping, why not start your first adventure exploring a ruin with a permanent gate, instead of waiting till they can do plane shift?

Yes, that's the basic idea.

Of course, when you think generic fantasyland is the greatest thing ever and you really want to play just that, then knock yourself out. Embrace it. Own it. In the end, this is a purely aesthetic choice, which every pick being as equally valid as any other. (Except for portal fantasy. :smalltongue:)

But I feel that it should ba a choice. A deliberate decision that GMs and players make after having compared their various options. Yet what I feel is that over several past decades, fantasy roleplaying has turned into an environment in which the majority of take these things for granted. Which does include me, no questions about that. Nobody is individually doing anything wrong, but the goblins and bandits campaign openers have developed an overwhelming cultural inertia. People keep doing it because they've seen everyone else doing it. I've been reading a lot of tenfootpole (http://tenfootpole.org/) reviews over the last years, which certainly is very much an aquired taste, but between his nonstop rantings, Bryce does make very valid points about things that published adventures do, that really seem like bad things to do once someone points them out to you. And yet, the most puzzling thing about it, is that he's complaining about the very same things every time. Things that were bad design thirty or twenty years ago, and are still bad design now. But it was done by someone in the distant past, and today people constantly keep doing it, because they constantly see people doing it.
You just get used to it, and don't question it. And don't even ask yourself if there could be any other way to do it. Again, when you think the conventional, traditional way of running fantasy RPGs is the best thing you could ever have wished for, this really isn't a problem. But for me, this situation has been an actual obstacle that has made the running of games always a frustrating experience.

And I don't think that's just a case of me being bad at creating an unconventional setting for myself. Any time I see a discussion about Planescape, there seems to an almost universally agreed common consensus: "Planescape is amazing. But I have no idea what to do with it."


I think what Yora is struggling with in this regard, is that the form of level-gating that happens in some systems pushes back some creatures in the later half of a campaign by default. That more or less forces you to spin very long arcs that can cover quite a level bracket and a lot of individual sessions before anything comes out of it.

That's IMO also the main difference between world building and campaign building.

The system I've been running and playing the most by far is D&D 3rd Ed./Pathfinder, which I think was particularly bad at it. But not prohibitively so, I think. I am now getting into D&D 5th Ed. and it seems to be much less of an issue. Like it's predecesors, the system ranks creatures by their relative power and makes assumptions of what a party of PCs might be able to survive. And you can throw a creature of Challenge Rating 2 against a level 1 party without problem. Any ensuing fight might not be pretty, but it's not like you set them up for certain disaster. I have not counted it, but a quick look seems to put almost half of the entire Monster Manual at CR 2 or lower. Admitedly, a good portion of those are mundane animals, but a comperatively big amount of the more powerful creatures consists of every possible version of "dragon". There is plenty there that you can throw at a completely fresh party, if you encourage and accomplish a play style that isn't always blindly charing into the fray. Once the PCs get to third level, you can with a great degree of caution and care, slowly introduce them to CR 5 monsters. And then you have a considerable majority of the Monster Manual ready to use. Not the most fantastic creatures, which are of higher power still, but that's not the point here. There is a huge amount of exotic creatures that can appear even in low level adventures.
I think it just takes the ambition to do such a thing as a GM. I certainly want to try now.

Pelle
2019-01-16, 02:13 PM
I think it just takes the ambition to do such a thing as a GM. I certainly want to try now.

I think you can do it.

kyoryu
2019-01-16, 02:23 PM
It's a neat little examination of how the biggest, baddest, and also best enemies in Dungeons & Dragons have been steadily pushed back farther and farther within a campaign.

In fairness, there's a lot of things that don't compare that well. In AD&D, level 10 was appraoching the "elder game". You stopped really getting extra hit points, and getting high level spells wasn't guaranteed. Hitting level 20 was an exception, not an expectation.

Which doesn't mean the article is wrong, but level 10 in old-school games meant something very different than the current understanding of level 10.

Yora
2019-01-16, 03:45 PM
That is indeed true, though I think it only further complicates the issue.

It's not just that numbers got bigger. That would merely have been cosmetic. After all, level advancement sped up too. The big issue is that magic didn't get adjusted in the process. At 9th level, you get 5th level spells, just as you did 40 years ago. Because of this, you can't say "What used to be a 10th level character then is called a 20th level character now".

JoeJ
2019-01-16, 03:53 PM
That said, Paizo showcases that you can have truly awesome 1st level adventures as part of their APs. Carrion Crown opens up with exploring a haunted prison, Ironfang Invasion starts with a massive hobgoblin raid on a town, Wrath of the Righteous has the PC battle traitors and cultist while a Gold Dragon and Balor duke it out and Strange Aeons has the PCs be amnesiacs in an asylum which is under attack by the Dreamlands and rapidly turning unrealistic.

In 5e, Out of the Abyss does a wonderful job of dropping 1st level PCs into the middle of things in a fantastic environment:

The PCs begin in the Underdark as prisoners of the drow.

Arbane
2019-01-16, 05:33 PM
One of the best D&D (well, Pathfinder) games I was ever in had us start with 4th level characters. Our first battle was with a flock of some small bitey aberrations and a really big black pudding at the edge of a bottomless pit in the middle of a city ruled by a red dragon.


That is indeed true, though I think it only further complicates the issue.

It's not just that numbers got bigger. That would merely have been cosmetic. After all, level advancement sped up too. The big issue is that magic didn't get adjusted in the process. At 9th level, you get 5th level spells, just as you did 40 years ago. Because of this, you can't say "What used to be a 10th level character then is called a 20th level character now".

A gamedev I follow pointed out that in AD&D once you get to the level 6+ spells (at least for Magic-Users), they switch from 'dungeon crawler' to 'dungeon administrator'.

Quertus
2019-01-16, 07:57 PM
Yeah, I get that, and am somewhat sympathetic. But for the specific example of Yora's 5e setting, that is not the case.

I think it just goes to show that when world building for an rpg, it pays to have written some contstraints behind your ear (is that an English idiom?). Importantly, it should be possible to have adventures there. If you don't consider that at all when you build world, you need to do a lot of iterations before you end up with one that can be used.

I'm not sure about the idiom, but, yeah, it is, IMO, important to put the PCs not just anywhere in any old world, but in a time and place where you believe that the players will have fun.


Some people (not me) like the whole "zero to hero" aspect of D&D style levelling-up of characters. But the problem is that you may never get to "hero". The game ends before that because it's just TOO HARD. You get to go from zero to "see ya". And that's no fun.

Someone once gave me the writing advice that, if the good part would happen 200 pages in, just start the story there. Seems like the same logic is at work here.

The thing is, sometimes, you need the setup for that "good part" to make sense.

Personally, to put it in D&D parlance, I have no interest in an adventurer unless it's all but guaranteed that, if I finally find a character that I like, that I can run them to level 50+. This, given the brevity of most adventures, contributes to my love of playing existing characters in new adventures - their story isn't over yet.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-16, 09:12 PM
It really doesn't seem diffiicult to do. But I find it really curious that this appears to be so very rarely done, that your instinct tells you not to.

People are stuck in a Rut. A Rut the size of the Grand Canyon. If left to their own, few DMs even use all the other monsters. Myconids, sahuagin, aarakockras, bullywugs, kenku, kuo-toas are not common in a lot of games.


Yet what I feel is that over several past decades, fantasy roleplaying has turned into an environment in which the majority of take these things for granted.

A lot of people have fallen in the rut.



You just get used to it, and don't question it. And don't even ask yourself if there could be any other way to do it. Again, when you think the conventional, traditional way of running fantasy RPGs is the best thing you could ever have wished for, this really isn't a problem. But for me, this situation has been an actual obstacle that has made the running of games always a frustrating experience.

Most people can't even come close to handling it: they need giant rats and goblin bandits. Just a couple kuo-toa whips, and they are bewildered. And anything beyond that..well, they can run screaming from the game.



Any time I see a discussion about Planescape, there seems to an almost universally agreed common consensus: "Planescape is amazing. But I have no idea what to do with it."

This is the perfect rut example. The inability to think ''out side the box". A D&D story that is not Lord of the Rings. Planescape is the perfect example. The idea of a ''city" in the Abyss, or anywhere ''weird" is just too much for most. And anything beyond modern Earth or Old Earth...forget it.

Ravens_cry
2019-01-16, 09:33 PM
I actually think it would be nice if we did more smaller scale adventures. We've all saved the world a thousand times over, whether on the tabletop or in various video games, but how about something smaller, like saving a village where you get to know the various people you are saving, where it actually hits you emotionally when one is lost, not just " Random villager #203 is dead. How will we coooope."

Quertus
2019-01-16, 10:57 PM
I actually think it would be nice if we did more smaller scale adventures. We've all saved the world a thousand times over, whether on the tabletop or in various video games, but how about something smaller, like saving a village where you get to know the various people you are saving, where it actually hits you emotionally when one is lost, not just " Random villager #203 is dead. How will we coooope."

Agreed. Quertus, my signature academia mage, for whom this account is named, has saved over 100 worlds - it's rather old-hat for him.

This is also part of the reason that my characters are "not from around here" - because I want the opportunity to actually form connections with NPCs, rather than encounter " Random villager #203".

Florian
2019-01-17, 12:17 AM
I actually think it would be nice if we did more smaller scale adventures. We've all saved the world a thousand times over, whether on the tabletop or in various video games, but how about something smaller, like saving a village where you get to know the various people you are saving, where it actually hits you emotionally when one is lost, not just " Random villager #203 is dead. How will we coooope."

I actually had to think hard about when it was the last time that "saving the world" was something I did in a TTRPG.

My last campaigns, using PF and going on from 1 to 16/17, can be summed up as:
- Start a rebellion in the city and successfully plan and execute a secession.
- Depose the tyrant, help the rightful heir claim the throne.
- Survive a hobgoblin invasion and rescue as many of your countrymen as you can.
- Kill giants and take their stuff.

flond
2019-01-17, 12:47 AM
Agreed. Quertus, my signature academia mage, for whom this account is named, has saved over 100 worlds - it's rather old-hat for him.

This is also part of the reason that my characters are "not from around here" - because I want the opportunity to actually form connections with NPCs, rather than encounter " Random villager #203".

I admit, if played under the same GM, I don't see how this doesn't lead to Random Villager #203 in either case, except in the second they're the 203rd person who SPEAKS. SLOWLY. AND. LOUDLY. TO. MAKE. SURE. YOU. UNDERSTAND. :smallbiggrin:

As to the original prompt, I do think it has to do with
i. It's hard to trust the players to put in the work.
And for this, I think the only cure is either have players who already have at least some idea of the setting, or be willing to explain.
ii. You, the gm, really need to have a strong model of the setting in order to go weirder. Campaign books and the like can help a lot.
And the thing is, the solution to both of these is to ease people into things, but...I think that easing into things can end up with plot hooks, that carry over into more plot hooks and sort of become their own thing.
If my chuubo's players can get to the point of having to confront an immortal amalgam of cats that wants to eat the sun (A PC), in 6 months, players won't need more than 3 sessions to get used to squid people in the void, probably. If you need a "bandit adventure" to ease them in, just make sure it ends at the end of session 1.

Mordaedil
2019-01-17, 02:40 AM
@Mordaedil:

One of the main reasons to not use your 08/15 fantasy setting/middle earth clone number 456 is to provide new and different avenues for exploration. I would actually be quite disappointed when the players would act the same, no matter if it is your bog standard Forgotten Realms, or something based in RL Baltic/Slavic culture and folklore or a fantasy version of the Osman Empire.

Neat that you accuse me of this, when my players are going to the plane of shadows at level 1, because they stumbled upon a cult of shadowcasters in the basement of the inn they were staying at, in the first city they visit.

Florian
2019-01-17, 03:37 AM
Neat that you accuse me of this, when my players are going to the plane of shadows at level 1, because they stumbled upon a cult of shadowcasters in the basement of the inn they were staying at, in the first city they visit.

Maybe look at your initial post again and think a bit about it?

What you wrote is more or less: I didn't want to waste my time an scrawled some map on a piece of paper. Took me five minutes, damn that.

So, maybe you should take your time and think about/explain where there rest of it comes from? You know, like saying, ok, the D&D model uses planes and I fully assume that everything covered in core is also a part of my game. And, oh hi guys, I forgot to mention that I might have just snorted on a piece of paper and call that a map, Dis and the City of Brass are a thing, tho.

Pauly
2019-01-17, 04:56 AM
Players only have a limited amount of processing power in their brain box.

This is why combat heavy systems are light on diplomacy and vice versa. Systems that are heavy on tactical combat are light on details about individual weapons/spells and vice versa. I coukd go on but there is no successful system that is hyperdetailed about everything, has new and innovative game mechanics and has an original world unlike any other.

If you expect your players to process a new and fantastical world with new and original critters then they need to have familiarity with the game system and the mechanics of how different types of things interact.

The reason why a lot of low level adventures are written in the generic Tolkeinesque world is because they are written with the expectation that they will be played by players new to TTRPGs. People who don’t know the difference between a sword and a mace (well their in game effects at least). People who haven’t worked out when it’s safe to cast spells or when it’s time for the wizard to back off and create space. Their brainpower is being sucked up by the mechanics of this new and weird game, so much so that throwing a new and weird world at them would be overwhelming.

Lake Huron
2019-01-17, 05:05 AM
Many campaigns have lofty visions of a long term future, and when planning for that there's an understandable reluctance to throw out the best stuff and the biggest challenges from the jump. If you start at an 8 you have to do one of two things. You either really stretch out the 9s and 10s which can get super redundant at best and deadeningly paced at worst. Or you make the dial go up to 11, shatter the illusion and totally undermine your own project.

Ultimately I think we are, if anything, a little too covetous of awesome. So many campaigns define themselves by "moments" and often fall short of filling them with anything lasting and substantive. If you're biding time with bandits and goblins until you get to the more "awesome" stuff you need to reorient your thinking. Nothing should be padding and you shouldn't place so much value on "bigger" and "more awesomer".

Bandits and goblins can be great if you treat them with care, attention to detail and import. Not only is this just more fun to play, it makes the "big moments" more poignant and memorable when they do arrive.

MoiMagnus
2019-01-17, 05:31 AM
What is going on there? Have you made experiences that relate to this phenomenon?

I agree. Some solutions I've tried and was happy with:
+ Use simpler more narrative-focussed RPG than D&D. The main problem in D&D is that the power level of characters is linked to the complexity of gameplay. Some systems allow you to play superheros, gods or whatever without the complexity of high level D&D.

+ In 5e, starting at level 4. A lot of players will be happy to have their first feat to build their character with.

+ One level up per session. It might feel a little artificial, like instant power up in anime/manga/films. But guess what? Writter have the same problem as DM: they want to tell stories with powerful characters and high level stakes, but they need to start with "everyday man" for multiple reasons. In fact, you can look at how progression of characters is done in your favourite stories to see how to manage to quickly go to the interesting part.

+Alternatively, big step level up, using ellipses. Between each scenario, you let 5-10 years in-game pass, and everyone gain 3 levels (or whatever you want). Ex: you make the starting level 1, presenting them as a "flashback of how you encountered each others", then you jump to level 4 for the first true scenario of the campaign (which represent the routine of the adventuring group), then level 7 for the first confrontation with the main antagonist, then level 10 for "the return of the bad guy". Then with the threat killed (or the failure of the group), the group dissolve and try to live a normal life, but if put again together at level 13 for some plot reason, ...

Pelle
2019-01-17, 05:35 AM
If you expect your players to process a new and fantastical world with new and original critters then they need to have familiarity with the game system and the mechanics of how different types of things interact.


Are you saying players need to face regular bandits before they are able to process a fight with original critters of the same CR and complexity? If so, I think you are selling players short.

Mordaedil
2019-01-17, 05:42 AM
Maybe look at your initial post again and think a bit about it?

What you wrote is more or less: I didn't want to waste my time an scrawled some map on a piece of paper. Took me five minutes, damn that.

So, maybe you should take your time and think about/explain where there rest of it comes from? You know, like saying, ok, the D&D model uses planes and I fully assume that everything covered in core is also a part of my game. And, oh hi guys, I forgot to mention that I might have just snorted on a piece of paper and call that a map, Dis and the City of Brass are a thing, tho.
I guess I should also put into the post that I'm playing D&D and use all core books and splat books that aren't from specific settings? I mean, my point is that there is a thing such as overdesigning or reinventing the wheel when what is already given to you is more than enough.

That isn't to tear down people who spend time working on the maps or take time working out the details of every little thing in their game, but I think it's worth pointing out that every element you put down about your game is a box and the more boxes you put down the more constrained the game becomes. I found that the boxes I make are never as interesting as the space between the boxes, so I found that making a handful of them with a big overlying box serves my tables needs the best.

And I don't think it's really that I design the awesome. The players do that.

bryce0lynch
2019-01-17, 11:23 AM
Like the devil, I appear when my name is mentioned. Or I can follow back a referral link.

Rando Commentary

*) Sham's Grog & Blog, long departed form blogging, has some bestiary notes about the Bleak Beyond. How he reskins monsters. His reskins are very good and easily relatable to monsters.

*) Genero-monsters were a subject of the OSR-think-o-sphere awhile back. I think you can find some thing on Zak's sir. Goblins made up of leaves and bark, etc.

*) It's not a goblin. It's a 1hd humanoid. Looking back at the older version it becomes immediately clear, when you look at a summary table of the humanoids, that its all just "this is a humanoid with 1hd. this is humanoid with 2hd" and so on. This can help to free your thinking.

*) There's some marketing line from DCC that goes something like "Explore the cosmos and fight gods ... and thats before you're level one!" The good low level DCC stuff, from a design standpoint, has some great adventures/encounters with the cosmos/god/etc.

*) You can do the classics, but you need to put some work in to it.

and "Boo!" to whoever said something about players needing to understand the monster mechanics. Boo I say! Fear will keep the PC's in line, fear of the unknown.
[Edit: DERP! bad Grand Moff Tarkin allusion]]

Quertus
2019-01-17, 11:43 AM
So, OP, what if the game included - or the GM just created - some awesome but low CR opposition?

Like, say, Phase Goblins. Phase Goblins are descendants of goblins that spent too long in an area of warped space near a portal between worlds. They are never entirely in this reality, their bodies constantly warping in and out of reality in pieces. This causes those attempting to strike them to suffer a 20% miss chance. The Phase Goblins similarly have a 20% miss chance on their attacks and spells; a concentration check DC 15 as a move action will allow them to ignore this miss chance on their next action taken that round.

Or Drooze. Drooze are CR ⅒, ½-HD diminutive Oozes. Some species have 0 movement, others move at 5'. They have no attack (thus the CR ⅒), and subsist off nutrients in water, dust, or dew. The important part of Droozes is, that they were designed to be used as living compasses, and some created Droozes have special flakes floating in them that are attuned to specific energies, and will point towards their version of "magnetic north" (which could actually be magnetic north, or a Mythal, or whatever else the creator attuned this specific Drooze to). Wild Drooze have a 1% chance of having such a function.

Gem Spirits are incorporeal fey who live inside gems. Like a Hermit Crab, they will attempt to upgrade their gem. They can also possess and animate inanimate objects for limited periods of time, being forced back to their gem if the object is destroyed. Their greatest value to adventurers is that gems possessed by Gem Spirits can, if the adventurer finds some way to communicate with the fey and succeed at making them Helpful with a Diplomacy check, use their magic to treat their gemstone home as a Weapon Crystal. Higher HD Gem spirits can create stronger effects, but require more expensive gems for their homes.

The Hydra Snake looks like a simple viper, but, whenever attacked with a slashing weapon, splits, like a Black Pudding.

Levitation Spiders appear as small bulbous sacks floating 50' off the ground. They attack their prey by Reversing Gravity / Levitation-like effect under their feet (Reflex DC 8 avoids if there is anything to grab onto). They then attempt to attach their hair-like tendrils to the target (Spot DC 20 to notice them), only 6 of which will exist at any given time ("lost" tendrils "regenerate" at a rate of 1/round). When they eventually succeed at attaching these tendrils, they slowly drain the target, doing a single point of temporary ability damage to a random ability every hour. The Levitation Spider will remain attached to the target for 1 hour after its death before moving on. The body of the Levitation Spider is incorporeal, but the tendrils can be destroyed by any attack. After losing 1d20+1 tendrils, the Levitation Spider will give up on a given potential prey, which will lower slowly back to the ground.

Rustys are Undead Constructs, animated from bits of the rusty remains of Iron Golems. Statistically similar to Ghouls, but their paralysis is a disease, with an onset time of days, lasting for days rather than rounds, and elves have no immunity to this effect.

Add in some cool low-end areas and extras, like areas that rain up, or flowers that glow for days after being picked, or rocks that float in the air, or a Tower of Babble where words fail, and you've got something cool and unique that is accessible even to low-level characters.

Would you consider this to be "awesome", but still acceptable material for a beginner adventure?

Slipperychicken
2019-01-17, 12:41 PM
When I made my own custom monsters and things, I felt a need to establish the 'normal' world before sending them into all the cool stuff. That is, to build the characters' ideas for what the world looks like, so that all the awesome stuff can be framed by that.

Yora
2019-01-17, 02:01 PM
This is a view that I also always found very convincing. And it really makes a lot of sense after all. Players will only know what is extraordinary and fantastic to the characters once they have become familiar and acustomed to what is normal and mundane. And of course, we want our Big Bad Evil Critter to be a mind blowing reveal when the players first encounter it.

Movies do it, books do it. So it seems like a really good idea to do it in RPGs as well.

But I've turned to increasingly think about the meta-game aspects that are always part of the game. A game works very different from a movie. Games tick in their own unique way.
When a two hour movie spends 30 minutes establishing the mundane world of the story, that's a quarter of the whole story. But it's also still 30 minutes. When we are talking about slowly introducing players to the mundane game world for the first two or three levels, to stay with D&D as a reference frame, we are easily dealing with ten, twenty, or even thirty hours of play over several months.
Another aspect is that most of the time, players know what they are getting into when they sign up for the game. Nobody is actually going to be surprised when that dragon or demon actually shows up, and will be wondering what this strange creature might be. Even when you go through the motions of introducing the world as something more mundane first, I am getting less and less convinced that this actually works as we usually assume it does.
Lots of players get into a new game because they are already look forward to facing the demons and necromancers. You certainly can make campaigns with highly fleshed out goblins with complex motivations and numerous fully developed goblin NPCs. And I imagine this could actually be really cool. I've never played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay myself, but everything that I've heard about it very much sounds like it's specifically designed to be about intense conflicts with the most common rabble of Fantasyland. But I think a good majority of players don't go into a new campaign being hyped up and itching to fight random mobs and colect vendor trash. Nobody is excited for the padding.

And perhaps this might be the real heart of the issue at hand: As GMs, we have to make an effort to make the early game rewarding in itself, instead of it being padding.

And yes, of course this is hard. I think maybe we feel this gets easier later on in the campaign with more powerful characters, because then we can just throw some fireballs and tentacles at them. Instant success! We're so briliant! :smallamused:

I really want to thank everyone for all the many replies here. It feels like I tend to say no and make counter arguments against everything here, but this has been a really helpful thread for me so far. I really don't have any intend to judge any type of campaign as invalid. But I found that it's actually quite difficult for me to think outside the box when I want to do something different than usual. The thing about boxes is that you don't really notice that there is one while you're being in it.

D+1
2019-01-17, 05:34 PM
This is one of the reasons I don't run low-levels D&D. If I'm running D&D or PF, the lowest I start off is 5th level, and even then I generally homebrew enemies a lot so that there can be more diverse cooler stuff without the math breaking that would happen using a creature several levels too high for the players.
On the other hand I find the lower levels some of the MOST important and should not be skipped. No matter how much players put into building a PC on paper that isn't the same as inserting that PC into an active, reactive game world along with several strangers (no matter WHERE you start or how your PC backgrounds are tied together those other PC's are STRANGERS to you the player until you all have put in time interacting with each other - players to their PC's and PC's to each other). It is EASIER to meld a diverse group of characters together into a cohesive party when much of what they do involves simply struggling to survive together - relying on each other and each learning what the others can and will do, as well as what they themselves can do and are willing to do. When you start out at higher levels you take away that initial bonding-through-survival and replace it with, "Now you have all these added abilities at the outset that will occupy your time just getting comfortable putting your PC through even more mechanics."

Pauly
2019-01-17, 07:18 PM
Are you saying players need to face regular bandits before they are able to process a fight with original critters of the same CR and complexity? If so, I think you are selling players short.

What I’m saying is that when players are learning the basic mechanics of a new system in a new world then low complexity vanilla monsters are the best opponents.

If you throw at them an original monster that they have no point of reference to then they are not sure about whether the effects they have on the monster are due to their actions or it’s vulnerabilties or it’s strengths. If they are in a new original world they don’t know if/how their combat effects are interacting with environmental effects.

Of course if it is a game system they are already familiar with then you can go nuts on your original critter. If they know the game system and opponents you can go nuts with your world and how weird and wonderful it is.

It’s basic training. You break things down into elements, you train people on one element until they are proficient at that element and then move on to the next.

People, even experienced gamers, will get confused if you throw too much them at once.

Quertus
2019-01-17, 07:34 PM
As to why we don't do it, well, how can I tell how my half-dragon troll is performing, if he's fighting droozes and phase goblins? There needs to be a meaningful baseline established before moving on to stranger arenas, else the evaluation will be meaningless, because the spoo had to much fleem.

Milo v3
2019-01-17, 08:53 PM
On the other hand I find the lower levels some of the MOST important and should not be skipped. No matter how much players put into building a PC on paper that isn't the same as inserting that PC into an active, reactive game world along with several strangers (no matter WHERE you start or how your PC backgrounds are tied together those other PC's are STRANGERS to you the player until you all have put in time interacting with each other - players to their PC's and PC's to each other). It is EASIER to meld a diverse group of characters together into a cohesive party when much of what they do involves simply struggling to survive together - relying on each other and each learning what the others can and will do, as well as what they themselves can do and are willing to do. When you start out at higher levels you take away that initial bonding-through-survival and replace it with, "Now you have all these added abilities at the outset that will occupy your time just getting comfortable putting your PC through even more mechanics."

Except that still happens if you start in the mid-levels. Each game has completely arbitrary "minimum levels", a level one character in 3.5e is basically a level 2 or 3 character in 5e, does that mean that you need to play 5e DND to tell the same sort of story? If that were true then you wouldn't get that from people playing level 1 characters in 5e, just because it's a different starting power level? Or if I play 3.5e, should I be playing level 1 NPC class characters so we can work our way up to 1st level PC classes?

Regardless of what level you start your game at, you are inserting a premade personality and character into the game. Why would it have to be "poorly skilled soldier" level of competency to meld characters together well? Especially when different RPGs have different power-levels for their character creation?

EggKookoo
2019-01-17, 09:51 PM
Last campaign I ran, I started mid-combat. I even docked them HP and had pre-rolled init. I gave the players the briefest description and then told them the flash grenade left them momentarily blinded, and ran the combat from there. Worked well, but I don't know if I'd try it again.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-17, 10:33 PM
Players only have a limited amount of processing power in their brain box.


Very True.




Movies do it, books do it. So it seems like a really good idea to do it in RPGs as well.

It's not. They are wrong.



A game works very different from a movie. Games tick in their own unique way.

True. Movies have to be made for Ma and Pa Kettle, and Joe Mechanic, and Sally Secretary. This is why movies have to be half normal every day stuff. And even when they get to the weird stuff they must keep it simple. This is the classic things like ''explaining hyper space using a sheet of paper and a pencil through it". Gamers, on the other hand are at least Geeks, who understand things like a ''pre destination paradox" or even "San Dimas Time ".

While sure a pure newcomer knows nothing about RPGs, it does not take long to be in the know. The average gamer understands lots of basic concepts like ''hit points" and ''saving throws".



I really want to thank everyone for all the many replies here. It feels like I tend to say no and make counter arguments against everything here, but this has been a really helpful thread for me so far. I really don't have any intend to judge any type of campaign as invalid. But I found that it's actually quite difficult for me to think outside the box when I want to do something different than usual. The thing about boxes is that you don't really notice that there is one while you're being in it.

People get trapped in the imagination box from just about birth. And it's only gotten worse in the last couple of decades. You can see the bland copies done in movies, just think of how many Die Hard on a ______ you can think of? How about ______ In Space? Worse media shows a good guy being X, and the bad guy being Y, and the Woman being W, and the Kid being K.

And he whole censor thing..along with political correctness gives a HUGE list of what can be shown/done....and the list gets longer every year.

Also, special shout out to Disney. Disney is huge, and is a huge part of nearly all kids lives. Now when I was a kid, Disney was in a bit of a dry spell...but if you were born after say 1990, then it's safe to say the Disney Vision has dominated your life. For example, when asked what a princess looks like: most people would describe a Disney Princess.


What I’m saying is that when players are learning the basic mechanics of a new system in a new world then low complexity vanilla monsters are the best opponents.

I disagree. This is only true for pure mechanical, roll playing games.

If your whole point of the game is to get the players to understand ''water attack is plus +5 vs fire", so you have a Fire Troll attack and the players roboticaly say ''we attack with water" then it's great.




People, even experienced gamers, will get confused if you throw too much them at once.

Again, only if your talking about the rules. Any really if your talking about a game that is ''so cool" that it's not like D&D.


As to why we don't do it, well, how can I tell how my half-dragon troll is performing, if he's fighting droozes and phase goblins? There needs to be a meaningful baseline established before moving on to stranger arenas, else the evaluation will be meaningless, because the spoo had to much fleem.

The way I see it, players can go play in any other game and have fun fighting goblin bandits, again, or playing in the dirt. My game is different. A LOT of players come to my game....and STAY in my game, just for the unique game play. It's something they can't get anywhere else. And it's a challenge for a lot of people to stay in my game because of my personality, house rules, unfairness, and such.

Mechalich
2019-01-17, 11:37 PM
What I’m saying is that when players are learning the basic mechanics of a new system in a new world then low complexity vanilla monsters are the best opponents.

If you throw at them an original monster that they have no point of reference to then they are not sure about whether the effects they have on the monster are due to their actions or it’s vulnerabilties or it’s strengths. If they are in a new original world they don’t know if/how their combat effects are interacting with environmental effects.

Of course if it is a game system they are already familiar with then you can go nuts on your original critter. If they know the game system and opponents you can go nuts with your world and how weird and wonderful it is.

It’s basic training. You break things down into elements, you train people on one element until they are proficient at that element and then move on to the next.

People, even experienced gamers, will get confused if you throw too much them at once.

I don't think complexity is necessarily a major factor. Familiarity, including shared context and tropes, matters more. TTRPGs are inherently collaborative. The players have to create characters who can belong in, contribute to, and ultimately help shape the story. If the players have no understanding of what the world is about and how it is constructed their ability to do that is incredibly restricted.

One of the reasons many games, including many official settings, rely on such familiar monsters and other elements is that they are almost guaranteed to be familiar to the players. This is also why licensed settings are so consistently popular within the RPG market. If you pitch a game as: It's six months after Yavin and you're all Rebel Special Forces in the Outer Rim. To a random gaming table almost everyone will understand exactly what that means and be able to build a character appropriate to that campaign without needing anything but mechanical advice, simply because the Star Wars cultural currency is just that strong among the playerbase for TTRPGs.

On the other hand if your pitch is: You're part of a cabal of gunpowder-eating supersoldiers who have overthrown a mystical theocracy and now have to fight the enraged forces of a resurrected god from destroying the world in a quasi-Napoleonic setting, anyone who hasn't read the Powder Mage series is going to give you blank states because that series is exactly the kind of impenetrable 'awesome' being referenced in this thread.

Pitching a homebrew is, if anything, even worse. 9 out of 10 players will refuse to read much more than a page or two of background material. So if your setting doesn't match the expectations they have from popular media, they'll be totally lost. Traditional D&D, of course, at least partly matches popular media in a lot of ways, with things like the races cleaving to Tolkien extremely hard, and not surprisingly D&D's more traditional settings have always drastically outsold its 'awesome' ones.

Now, the less collaboration a GM expects from their players, the more gonzo they can go. Someone mentioned PF adventure paths earlier and yeah those can great pretty crazy. They are also incredibly railroady, because if your players don't understand the world they operate in, they must be kept to a well-defined path. So that's a compromise that has to be made.

Yora
2019-01-18, 02:00 AM
There needs to be a meaningful baseline established before moving on to stranger arenas,

Now that seems like a much better approach to this problmen than "default critters". That meaningful baseline could be anything low-powered with simple abilities.

Pauly
2019-01-18, 02:13 AM
I don't think complexity is necessarily a major factor. Familiarity, including shared context and tropes, matters more. TTRPGs are inherently collaborative. The players have to create characters who can belong in, contribute to, and ultimately help shape the story. If the players have no understanding of what the world is about and how it is constructed their ability to do that is incredibly restricted.
.

By complexity, I was referring to the complexity of the information, not the complexity of the mechanics of the game. Neuroscience shows that people can only handle a limited amount of new information at any one time.

Essentially the more that’s new the slower you can go, the more that’s familiar the faster you can go.

If you approached a group for a game and pulled out the Judge Dredd RPG in the UK most gamers would be up to speed about the world very quickly, but in the US it would be much slower.

NorthernPhoenix
2019-01-18, 02:54 AM
Now that seems like a much better approach to this problmen than "default critters". That meaningful baseline could be anything low-powered with simple abilities.

You could use the goblin and orc statblocks unchanged but describe them as "tentacle unicorn dinosaurs", but if you sprang that on me the only thing I'd be thinking would be "what are you trying to prove?"

Pelle
2019-01-18, 04:27 AM
If you throw at them an original monster that they have no point of reference to then they are not sure about whether the effects they have on the monster are due to their actions or it’s vulnerabilties or it’s strengths. If they are in a new original world they don’t know if/how their combat effects are interacting with environmental effects.


I understand what you mean, I just think that is not important at all. Players don't care about that. They don't need to find their place in the world relative to bandits before they can judge how they relate to the unusual things. It's not a priority, interacting with the cool stuff is.



As to why we don't do it, well, how can I tell how my half-dragon troll is performing, if he's fighting droozes and phase goblins? There needs to be a meaningful baseline established before moving on to stranger arenas, else the evaluation will be meaningless, because the spoo had to much fleem.

Who really cares about that evaluation though? If I take new players to rpgs and have them fight strange fishmen in their first encounter, they will be completely fine. They learn as they go.


This is all about setting the right expectations for the activity you are tempting people to participate in. If the game is going to be about strange things, start with strange things. Then they can make an informed decision of if this is something they should continue doing. If you know people are dedicated, and think starting boring can have a big pay-off long term, it's still a risk to take.

Mechalich
2019-01-18, 07:07 AM
You could use the goblin and orc statblocks unchanged but describe them as "tentacle unicorn dinosaurs", but if you sprang that on me the only thing I'd be thinking would be "what are you trying to prove?"

That's an overly extreme example. By contrast, in most versions of d20 a goblin or orc is basically just a 1st level warrior, and you can make almost any race a 1st level warrior. If your 1st level opponents are Nagaji and Ifrits rather than goblins and orcs that's still very different even if the mechanical changes largely amount to moving a few +1 bonuses around. That was how Planescape worked initially: characters walked through a portal and suddenly their urban setting was different and instead of Human and Dwarf gangs they faced Bariur and Tieflings, but you were still fighting street thugs (and if you compare walking around Athkatla in BGII to walking around Sigil in Torment you'll notice that exactly this happens).


Who really cares about that evaluation though? If I take new players to rpgs and have them fight strange fishmen in their first encounter, they will be completely fine. They learn as they go.

if the players are learning as they go, their characters are functionally foreigners in their own world. If that world goes further into the weird and doesn't play by rules the players expect - unusual magic, bizarre social structures, etc. - then it moves quickly into the realm of surrealism. That's perfectly fine if that's what you're going for, Planescape is certainly a surrealist wonderland, as is pretty much any game of Mage: the Ascension, but that limits tone and theme because you're drowning in the weird. For my expereince reading @Yora's posts in the worldbuilding forum, I suspect that is very much not their intention. The desire instead is for a world that is 'awesome' and includes non-traditional and bizarre fantasy elements, but can be interacted with on an in-depth level.

For a science fiction perspective this is the difference between Rifts and Eclipse Phase. The former game is utterly insane and everyone who plays it (though perhaps not its creator) knows this, doesn't care, laughs at all concepts of balance, and gets on with the business of creating cybernetic Aztec catmen and pillaging the lost treasures of floating vampire cities. The latter game absolute does care and wants players to consider the existential questions raised by a pseudo-post-scarcity economy, 'forking' of consciousness, back-up of consciousness, and other questions of transhumanism very seriously, only it's far too overstuffed for that to actually happen.

My experience suggests that there really are limits on how many elements you can include in a setting an retain a robust verisimilitude. The more unusual those elements are, both culturally and mechanically, the fewer of them you can ultimately include. Tog o back to the OP: elven barbarians on dinosaurs is a setting by itself. You don't need anything else. In fact, most of the other things you add will dilute attention from producing the best possible elven-barbarian-dinosaur setting you can.

Pelle
2019-01-18, 08:01 AM
if the players are learning as they go, their characters are functionally foreigners in their own world. If that world goes further into the weird and doesn't play by rules the players expect - unusual magic, bizarre social structures, etc. - then it moves quickly into the realm of surrealism.

I think that's exaggeration. Players are fully capable of assuming they come from a "normal" village etc, without having to start the game there. That's part of the premise of the game, explain narratively where they come from, but start them in the action with something interesting. Most new people I've seen don't need a fully fleshed out history and character before they start, filling in the blanks as you go is natural. They don't need to know the details themselves, as long as they can assume and trust that the character knows the details. Most people have no problem accepting that. Thinking that new players need to be eased into settings slowly with normal bandits is a mistake IMO.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-18, 11:41 AM
in most versions of d20 a goblin or orc is basically just a 1st level warrior, and you can make almost any race a 1st level warrior.

The big problem with d20, and most outer games have very basic mechanics. But, of course, this is reality as a rule book can only be so big.

And the problem is you can not have any real mechanical differences when your limited to a small set of rules. The game only has the one spell 'firebolt', so that is all you have to pick from. And you can't just change the fluff, make it 'waterbolt' or 'gravelbolt' and keep the mechanics of the 'firebolt, because then you might as well just use 'firebolt. And 'firebolt' can set things on fire...but, naturally, 'waterbolt' should not...but is should have some effect.

And this compounds the problem. For 'waterball' to be unique you need to make a whole new thing, add 'water' based magic rules, and often add a whole new mini game to the rules.

And this just makes a huge mess, and you face a huge amount of negativity. Even more by players. Change or add things in the rules and you are no longer playing ''the game", to the players.

And this is just the problem with adding water based magic, to add things like dream damage, temporal effects, or memory advantages would be a mini game so big, that it might be close to whole other game.




if the players are learning as they go, their characters are functionally foreigners in their own world. If that world goes further into the weird and doesn't play by rules the players expect - unusual magic, bizarre social structures, etc. - then it moves quickly into the realm of surrealism.

Though I'd point out that this type of thinking requires you to have and agree with the realism/surrealism idea in the first place.




but that limits tone and theme because you're drowning in the weird.

This is a good thing. And I can tell you from having tossed hundreds of players into the deep end of weirdness, that many can learn how to swim just fine.

Just a couple a weeks ago I had a game with a town of elves that had no concept of 'money' what so ever, but instead based thier interactions on Love. As you can picture(it looks like a guy with a bucket on his head walking into a wall), some players found this ''drowning in the weird" too much. Some players were able to ''swim" though.




My experience suggests that there really are limits on how many elements you can include in a setting an retain a robust verisimilitude. The more unusual those elements are, both culturally and mechanically, the fewer of them you can ultimately include.

It is true that each individual person does have such limits....and most of them a very, very, very low. This really is the more ''meta" thing: more people should be more open to new ideas outside their comfort zone.

Bohandas
2019-01-18, 11:58 AM
The web enhancement for Deities and Demigods 3e presents a deity named Erbin who only has a handful of hitdice (In most versions of his stat block anyway; they prrsent a few versions of him)

Arbane
2019-01-18, 12:19 PM
And the problem is you can not have any real mechanical differences when your limited to a small set of rules. The game only has the one spell 'firebolt', so that is all you have to pick from. And you can't just change the fluff, make it 'waterbolt' or 'gravelbolt' and keep the mechanics of the 'firebolt, because then you might as well just use 'firebolt. And 'firebolt' can set things on fire...but, naturally, 'waterbolt' should not...but is should have some effect.

From this, I can deduce that you've never played Champions, Mutants and Masterminds, or any other effects-based point-buy system. They call things like this 'power stunts'.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-18, 06:07 PM
From this, I can deduce that you've never played Champions, Mutants and Masterminds, or any other effects-based point-buy system. They call things like this 'power stunts'.

Well, I was talking about the d20 system, D&D, and games like that.

Though even the games that give the player 'awesome points' do have rules limiting the use of the points, and you still have the player limit problem.

Cosi
2019-01-18, 07:02 PM
You're part of a cabal of gunpowder-eating supersoldiers who have overthrown a mystical theocracy and now have to fight the enraged forces of a resurrected god from destroying the world in a quasi-Napoleonic setting, anyone who hasn't read the Powder Mage series is going to give you blank states because that series is exactly the kind of impenetrable 'awesome' being referenced in this thread.

You're pretty dramatically over-stating the complexity of the setting. The pitch for the Power Mage series is "The French Revolution, but with magic". The gods are a surprise in-setting, it's entirely reasonable to expect them to be a surprise for the players as well. The magic system is a reasonable point, but that's as much a function of "new mechanics are complicated" as "new fluff is complicated", if not more so.

Most fantasy settings are not actually that weird in terms of what you need to know to get started, unless they are explicitly Weird Fantasy. Understanding what kind of characters are viable in a game set in the world of Perdido Street Station is hard, but that is because the book is super weird. It would be a weird and confusing setting even if everyone had read the book, because the setting is supposed to be weird and confusing. But even stuff that is obscure is generally fairly comprehensible at the setting level.

Pauly
2019-01-18, 08:57 PM
You're pretty dramatically over-stating the complexity of the setting. The pitch for the Power Mage series is "The French Revolution, but with magic". The gods are a surprise in-setting, it's entirely reasonable to expect them to be a surprise for the players as well. The magic system is a reasonable point, but that's as much a function of "new mechanics are complicated" as "new fluff is complicated", if not more so.

Most fantasy settings are not actually that weird in terms of what you need to know to get started, unless they are explicitly Weird Fantasy. Understanding what kind of characters are viable in a game set in the world of Perdido Street Station is hard, but that is because the book is super weird. It would be a weird and confusing setting even if everyone had read the book, because the setting is supposed to be weird and confusing. But even stuff that is obscure is generally fairly comprehensible at the setting level.

Most RPGers I know aren’t conversant with the Napoleonic era to begin with. Even with hard core war gamers it’s considered a niche market.

If you want a setting that most RPGers can get into Tolkenesque high fantasy, Harry Potter/Twilight (hidden world) low fantasy, Star Wars, Star Trek, High Middle Ages (Knights in plate armor), Viking, Edo era Japan and 17th Century swashbuckling pirates/musketeers is probably the complete list. Anything outside those setting, or settings inspired by them will be a hard sell. Even we’ll kmown genres like steam punk or Cthulhu are several orders of magnitude lower on the scale of systems a random RPGer knows/cares enough about to jump straight into a game.

Knaight
2019-01-18, 09:11 PM
Most RPGers I know aren’t conversant with the Napoleonic era to begin with. Even with hard core war gamers it’s considered a niche market.

If you want a setting that most RPGers can get into Tolkenesque high fantasy, Harry Potter/Twilight (hidden world) low fantasy, Star Wars, Star Trek, High Middle Ages (Knights in plate armor), Viking, Edo era Japan and 17th Century swashbuckling pirates/musketeers is probably the complete list.

You don't need a setting that most RPGers can get into, you need the ones that a particular group can get into. More than that this complete list looks pretty incomplete - just about all of us took history classes, if you're playing with a local group they're probably at least roughly similar history classes, so you can at least dig into that. I can be reasonably confident that if I set something in, say, the American civil war everyone at the table will understand it. If I add some time travelers, well, I'm reasonably sure everyone will still understand it (it's an established trope). Toss in a conflict between time travelers tied into whether and how to change the timeline, and it's still pretty easy for just about anyone to understand.

Similarly WWI and WWII are both pretty close to universally usable time periods, liable to show up in everybody's historical knowledge for obvious reasons. Superheroes feel like a pretty safe bet too, especially given the money printing machine that the MCU has been recently. Modern settings are similarly usually pretty safe if you stay localish to the players.

Cosi
2019-01-18, 09:38 PM
Most RPGers I know aren’t conversant with the Napoleonic era to begin with. Even with hard core war gamers it’s considered a niche market.

It's not as well known as other things, but it's not obscure enough to provoke the level of bewilderment that Mechalich seems to think it would. Maybe I'm dramatically overestimating the historical literacy of the average gamer, but I think most people would be able to extract basic themes or touchstones like "reign of terror" or "beheading nobles" or "continental war" or "rights of man" and basic setting and tech level information like "basically like Europe" or "guns but no tanks" from the pitch "it's like the French Revolution". Particularly if you engage in good world-building, like starting off with relatively generic plots that explore, but don't depend on, setting-specific details. IIRC one of the first plot points of The Powder Mage trilogy is "go find this dude". The specifics of who the dude is, and why the characters are looking for him are dependent on the setting, but you can follow what is going on without needing details.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-18, 10:33 PM
Maybe I'm dramatically overestimating the historical literacy of the average gamer....

I'd say so.

Even more so the average gamer has an odd view of anything close to history, not to mention wildly inaccurate. The player wants a special setting fulfillment, with a faux historical cover.

Warlawk
2019-01-18, 10:38 PM
The opposite. The vast library of books, comic books, TV shows, movies and other fiction game me a very...unique spin on fiction. So no giant rats....but pan dimensional exploding space rats of Ill Omen, check.

I often drive players from my game with my unique spin on fiction. When they encounter a time raveling cyborg dream goblin, they just break down and leave the game. It's just to weird for them. They want goblins to just be bandits and stab with a spear.

My first reaction here was to roll my eyes, I hope the examples given are hyperbole because they just feel like trying way too hard. Strange and ridiculous does not innately equal good or interesting. If it doesn't fit and make sense with the context of both the world and the adventure, then it's just a waste, being strange for the sake of being strange.



This is the perfect rut example. The inability to think ''out side the box". A D&D story that is not Lord of the Rings. Planescape is the perfect example. The idea of a ''city" in the Abyss, or anywhere ''weird" is just too much for most. And anything beyond modern Earth or Old Earth...forget it.

Planescape and Dark Sun are both amazing settings that take people out of their comfort zone. I love them both.



Just a couple a weeks ago I had a game with a town of elves that had no concept of 'money' what so ever, but instead based thier interactions on Love. As you can picture(it looks like a guy with a bucket on his head walking into a wall), some players found this ''drowning in the weird" too much. Some players were able to ''swim" though.

That sounds like a really cool event/location to interact with.

EDIT because I meant to interact more with the topic as well:
As someone who has been playing since red box basic D&D I can certainly see how the system has restricted access to epic monsters and threats. Most things we would consider an "Epic Threat" in 3.X and beyond were much more accessible back in earlier editions. You could probably meet most threats of that class by level 10+ with good planning and gathering of resources. Now, there is a hard floor for many of those kinds of things. If you do not have ability/equipment X you cannot fight them, period.

This can be worked around with creative DMing, but it's certainly and obstacle and makes the job harder than it needs to be if your goal is the strange and unusual.

Milo v3
2019-01-18, 10:40 PM
Well, I was talking about the d20 system, D&D, and games like that.

Though even the games that give the player 'awesome points' do have rules limiting the use of the points, and you still have the player limit problem.

Mutants and Masterminds is a d20 system. It handles differing fire-blasts and water-blasts through it's descriptor, alternate effect, and stunt mechanics (which do not require spending "awesome points" to perform). If you think "oh, can I use my power to do x instead to it's default damage effect", you can buy it for only a single point so you always have it available in your toolbox of "things to do" but if you think up "I want to use my power to do x" in a situation you haven't thought of before you don't need to spend your limited points, you can just have your character expend extra effort to Power Stunt, giving them access to that methodology of using your power you just thought up as long as it makes sense.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-19, 01:02 AM
My first reaction here was to roll my eyes, I hope the examples given are hyperbole because they just feel like trying way too hard. Strange and ridiculous does not innately equal good or interesting. If it doesn't fit and make sense with the context of both the world and the adventure, then it's just a waste, being strange for the sake of being strange.

A lot of players feel the same way. They only like games with giant rats and goblin bandits.



That sounds like a really cool event/location to interact with.

Some players liked it, some did not.


Mutants and Masterminds is a d20 system.

I know noting about the game....but it does sound a bit like the old Marvel Super Heroes game.

Pauly
2019-01-19, 02:43 AM
You don't need a setting that most RPGers can get into, you need the ones that a particular group can get into. More than that this complete list looks pretty incomplete - just about all of us took history classes, if you're playing with a local group they're probably at least roughly similar history classes, so you can at least dig into that. I can be reasonably confident that if I set something in, say, the American civil war everyone at the table will understand it. If I add some time travelers, well, I'm reasonably sure everyone will still understand it (it's an established trope). Toss in a conflict between time travelers tied into whether and how to change the timeline, and it's still pretty easy for just about anyone to understand.

Similarly WWI and WWII are both pretty close to universally usable time periods, liable to show up in everybody's historical knowledge for obvious reasons. Superheroes feel like a pretty safe bet too, especially given the money printing machine that the MCU has been recently. Modern settings are similarly usually pretty safe if you stay localish to the players.

ACW is well known in the US, but not well known outside the US. However “Wild West” is universally understood. The Great War and the Second War are well known, but they aren’t commonly used game settings for RPGs. Superheroes as a genre is usually set in the present day.

Pauly
2019-01-19, 02:49 AM
It's not as well known as other things, but it's not obscure enough to provoke the level of bewilderment that Mechalich seems to think it would. Maybe I'm dramatically overestimating the historical literacy of the average gamer, but I think most people would be able to extract basic themes or touchstones like "reign of terror" or "beheading nobles" or "continental war" or "rights of man" and basic setting and tech level information like "basically like Europe" or "guns but no tanks" from the pitch "it's like the French Revolution". Particularly if you engage in good world-building, like starting off with relatively generic plots that explore, but don't depend on, setting-specific details. IIRC one of the first plot points of The Powder Mage trilogy is "go find this dude". The specifics of who the dude is, and why the characters are looking for him are dependent on the setting, but you can follow what is going on without needing details.

I wargamed Napoleonics fairly hard core for about 10 years. To do it properly there is a truly bewildering rat’s next of diplomatic interactions. The differences in troop types including functional differences, skill differences, experience and appearance is off the charts compared to any other period. If you want to bring naval elements into it that’s another huge ball of confuddlement.

Satinavian
2019-01-19, 03:05 AM
if the players are learning as they go, their characters are functionally foreigners in their own world. If that world goes further into the weird and doesn't play by rules the players expect - unusual magic, bizarre social structures, etc. - then it moves quickly into the realm of surrealism. Yes, that is why i hate that.

You can really have interesting settings with lots of cool stuff. Settings that are very much not standard D&D fantasy. But imho those work best if the players do know all of those setting details that are not explicitely a secret in game, Then player characters feel like real inhabitants of the setting not as if they were some strange aliens with a backstory that does not match.

Yes, that takes time before the start of the game. Yes, it is easier with established settings you can buy (or a historical setting). Otherwise you have to write all that stuff down. Yes, players will be able to poke holes into your setting and you can't change it on a whim anymore.

But it is really worth it and basically the oly way i would consider playing anymore.


I think that's exaggeration. Players are fully capable of assuming they come from a "normal" village etc, without having to start the game there.That has been done to death and was never a good idea.

So you have this really interesting, unique setting. And the PCs are bound from one of the most boring places in it and are clueless idiots who never cared for anything outside of their place and sust so happen to be in evey posible way most similar to the regular inhabitants of all the other places you have gamed in and don't have any of the peculiarities of this particular world.

No. Not interested. Why would i want to pley the least interesting persons the setting has to offer instead of being a natural part of whatever strangeness there is ?

Yora
2019-01-19, 03:40 AM
Because it's convenient and lets us start playing the actual game quickly.

When creating an unconventional setting, player accessibility was something that I put into my design principles. A setting that contains more new and unusual aspects for the players probably works best when it is designed as numerous fairly isolated places, instead of one big continuum of interwoven political and cultural elements. When you structure your campaign accordingly, you can gradually introduce new elements as the players are visiting new places, and at no point is it necessary to have a full grasp on the big picture.
Campaigns about international politics and diplomacy require the big picture, which makes them benefit greatly from highly traditional settings.

Knaight
2019-01-19, 04:08 AM
ACW is well known in the US, but not well known outside the US. However “Wild West” is universally understood. The Great War and the Second War are well known, but they aren’t commonly used game settings for RPGs. Superheroes as a genre is usually set in the present day.

The ACW is an example of local history - if you're meeting in person it's safe to assume you're all in the same country, and have learned a bit about it, and not unlikely that you're all from that country and have a similar educational background because of it. That people in other countries don't know the touchstones are irrelevant; I used the ACW because it matched my location. Were I elsewhere I might have used, say, seminal eras during the Algerian resistance to French occupation.

As for the Napoleonic period, you can make the same general argument for anything else. Anyone deeply embedded in a period can set its local complexities as necessary to do it right, and yes, at that point it's inaccessible. The medieval period was hugely complex, and plenty of fantasy settings "based" in it manage just fine barely scratching the surface.

Pelle
2019-01-19, 04:18 AM
No. Not interested. Why would i want to pley the least interesting persons the setting has to offer instead of being a natural part of whatever strangeness there is ?

I am saying if interesting setting elements are the draw for your game, you should lead with those in the first session. If you are not interested in that, you would rather spend the start of the game on boring day to day stuff in the village and normal bandits, to get aclimated to the normalcy, before you go out and face the strangeness? I don't understand your disinterest based on what you say you want. Sure, if you want to play as the strangeness don't assume you come from a village, but I wasn't saying anything about that.

Arbane
2019-01-19, 04:19 AM
No. Not interested. Why would i want to pley the least interesting persons the setting has to offer instead of being a natural part of whatever strangeness there is ?

Because you don't want to read 50 pages of single-spaced background info.

Satinavian
2019-01-19, 06:26 AM
I am saying if interesting setting elements are the draw for your game, you should lead with those in the first session. If you are not interested in that, you would rather spend the start of the game on boring day to day stuff in the village and normal bandits, to get aclimated to the normalcy, before you go out and face the strangeness? I don't understand your disinterest based on what you say you want. Sure, if you want to play as the strangeness don't assume you come from a village, but I wasn't saying anything about that.
I am basically saying first session is not early enough.

I want the interesting setting elements already available as part of the background of the PCs.

If we take the example of the setting with barbarian elf dinosaur riders and Kuo-toa from earlier in this thread, i don't want to play average Joe coming from a remote village that has neither, sees them in the first session and is supposed to be surprised.

I would sooner start with a barbarian elf venturing into the world trying to find and tame a specific dinosaur.


Because you don't want to read 50 pages of single-spaced background info.If the setting is interesting, i have no problem reading 50 pages about it before the game starts.

In fact, i usually read that much and more before i venture into a new campaign setting. Yes, most of those are official.

Mechalich
2019-01-19, 06:57 AM
If the setting is interesting, i have no problem reading 50 pages about it before the game starts.

In fact, i usually read that much and more before i venture into a new campaign setting. Yes, most of those are official.

That's awesome, and I wish I had nothing but players willing to do that. Sadly, it's not even close to common. Maybe 1 in 10 people in the TTPRG community are the 'read everything' type, and out of those, a huge percentage end up getting stuck being GM all the time because they're the only one at the table willing to put in the time to read the material. Most players are very lazy about looking up background information. Sales figures play this out. D&D's most popular setting is the blatantly generic Forgotten Realms. White-Wolf's most popular game was the blatantly generic Vampire: The Masquerade. Various iterations of Star Wars as a licensed tabletop product have consistently been a top-seller in gaming forever, and Star Wars is both a universal cultural touchstone and also cleaves incredibly hard to universal archetypes.

Pelle
2019-01-19, 08:21 AM
I am basically saying first session is not early enough.

I want the interesting setting elements already available as part of the background of the PCs.


Sure, but that's a different discussion. And that's not opposed to anything I said, given the premise was someone who started with a "normal" situation, and wondered if they could start introducing strangeness right away or stick to bandits.

Cluedrew
2019-01-19, 08:51 AM
I think the thread is asking the wrong question. For instance is a bunch of elf bandits riding dinosaurs attacking down inherently more awesome than a bunch of human bandits attacking town? I don't think so. Some other people have stumbled onto this already, but the issue is really about familiarity and communication of expectation.

Some of the best campaigns I have ever played in took place in non-standard settings. But they all made sure the players+ knew what was non-standard about it before we started playing. In fact talking about the setting probably took up more "session 0" time than creating our characters. So it does take energy and time to set up these things.

But why do it? If your campaign depends on it, because these different expectations are important to the campaigns premise than it should be worth it. If the setting's weirdness is completely independent to what the campaign is about though, why bother? It doesn't help and it takes extra time and energy. So just stick to a boring place and focus on the other interesting bits of the campaign.

I say this as someone who tends towards weird, but I try to make good use of it.


White-Wolf's most popular game was the blatantly generic Vampire: The Masquerade.To its credit, some of the generic vampire story elements can be traced back to Vampire. Or so I have been told, I'm not a huge fan of vampire stories myself and haven't really verified the histories myself. Anyone into vampire stuff before Vampire: The Masquerade came along?

Bohandas
2019-01-19, 11:44 AM
My favorite thing that has ever been written on RPGs is Your Demon Lord doesn't need that many Hit Dice (https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2016/04/your-demon-lord-doesnt-need-that-many.html). It's a neat little examination of how the biggest, baddest, and also best enemies in Dungeons & Dragons have been steadily pushed back farther and farther within a campaign.

The thing is that you don't want to run into a situation where the cleric is more powerful than his god or where the gods can't do the things that they're supposed to do

Yora
2019-01-19, 11:48 AM
True, but then you shouldn't give stats to gods at all.

SimonMoon6
2019-01-19, 11:53 AM
I think the thread is asking the wrong question. For instance is a bunch of elf bandits riding dinosaurs attacking down inherently more awesome than a bunch of human bandits attacking town? I don't think so.

I think it can be. Mere ordinary human bandits attacking town is a scenario that might very well be instantly relatable. Without knowing anything about these specific bandits, you probably have a good idea what their motivations are and what kind of environment they came from. So, that's instantly boring because you already know them, you already "grok" them.

But when the completely unexpected comes to town, you have to think, "Well, why is *THIS* happening?" and that is instantly interesting. Of course, I would be assuming a setting where the townsfolk have never encountered this sort of thing before. Reactions could be anything like "Wait... you mean elves are REAL?" to "Why are our friends (the elves) attacking us?" to "Why are the elves riding bizarre creatures that we've never heard of before?" to "What are those weird looking humanoids doing riding those weird looking horses?" to "Wait a minute, I thought dinosaurs were extinct!" to "Why have those elves subjugated our friends (the dinosaurs)?"

But I'm probably expecting a reaction of "Okay, I've heard of elves and I've heard of dinosaurs, so I'm not surprised that they exist, but I am surprised that they are TOGETHER... and furthermore, I am surprised that they are HERE and that they are ATTACKING." Why are they together? Why are they here? Why are they attacking? These are all great mysteries to solve, and it might lead to a story along the lines of the G-series which led to the D-series modules (the Giants were attacking because of the actions of the drow, so now you have to fight the drow... and then you have to fight the queen of the demonweb pits).

Darth Ultron
2019-01-19, 12:14 PM
Because it's convenient and lets us start playing the actual game quickly.

The problem is that it's too convenient and it makes the game too quick. The game will suddenly be ''oh, giant rats...again" in no time.

I find the best way to do it is Clueless Characters and Clueless Players. Basically the classic Planescape Way: the game world is a weird, wondrous place and you won't 'get it' or understand it at first. But once we get a couple games in you will be fine.


If we take the example of the setting with barbarian elf dinosaur riders and Kuo-toa from earlier in this thread, i don't want to play average Joe coming from a remote village that has neither, sees them in the first session and is supposed to be surprised.

I would sooner start with a barbarian elf venturing into the world trying to find and tame a specific dinosaur.


Sadly, I find this just about never works.

The setting has barbarian elf dinosaur riders, and the player reads that and gets ll excited and wants to do that...well, sort of. They like the vague idea and maybe the rule mechanics, but will be unwilling to even try to role play. So they will have a barbarian elf dinosaur rider that is just ''like the player'', is a ''greedy murderhobo" or just acts randomly. So the player is sort of happy the character gets a +2 to ride a dino....but then everything else falls flat.

Simply put, few players are willing to immerse themselves in a role.


That's awesome, and I wish I had nothing but players willing to do that. Sadly, it's not even close to common. Maybe 1 in 10 people in the TTPRG community are the 'read everything' type.

This is true. Though it is possible to open a players eyes. I've done this forever, and it's amazing. Throw players in the deep water...and some will swim.

A lot of players come to my game with some RPG experience...they have kill giant rats in a game before. And even when I say my game is different, they think of the boring different like ''oh, the giant rats will attack from the South". After just as little as an hour of shock, awe and confusion; they learn a new definition of different.

Then they get the choice to sink or swim....and many choose to swim. When they encounter Jor the Dino riding elf barbarian NPC they are amazed...and want to make a character like that. I'm more then willing to help, and give them things to read and do. And with the goal in sight they do. At first they do just 'parrot' me, but if they can get the hang of it they can soon be surfing in that deep water.

Arbane
2019-01-19, 05:29 PM
To its credit, some of the generic vampire story elements can be traced back to Vampire. Or so I have been told, I'm not a huge fan of vampire stories myself and haven't really verified the histories myself. Anyone into vampire stuff before Vampire: The Masquerade came along?

"Interview With A Vampire" was a big seller right around the time V:tM came out, and there was a MUCH less well-known RPG (whose name I'm blanking on) that let people play urban-fantasy monsters that predated it slightly.

JoeJ
2019-01-19, 05:56 PM
I'm a big believer in beginning as you mean to go on, which means that whatever you focus on in your elevator speech to prospective players should be a part of the first adventure. So if, for example, you tell the players that the game will be about the tales of the Space Patrol, then the first adventure should have the PCs dealing with criminals of some sort in outer space. Or if the theme is supposed to be defending the kingdom against an invasion of dragons, have them face a wyrmling dragon on their first adventure.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-19, 06:16 PM
I'm a big believer in beginning as you mean to go on, which means that whatever you focus on in your elevator speech to prospective players should be a part of the first adventure. So if, for example, you tell the players that the game will be about the tales of the Space Patrol, then the first adventure should have the PCs dealing with criminals of some sort in outer space. Or if the theme is supposed to be defending the kingdom against an invasion of dragons, have them face a wyrmling dragon on their first adventure.

I think this is a good example of a good part of the problem. Narrow, limited game settings are a bad idea.

When you do Space Cops, you can only to a couple 'space cop' stories...and anything else is ''wrong''.

But when your game setting is Endless Wondrous Adventures in Time and Space, nothing is ever 'wrong'.

JoeJ
2019-01-19, 06:35 PM
I think this is a good example of a good part of the problem. Narrow, limited game settings are a bad idea.

When you do Space Cops, you can only to a couple 'space cop' stories...and anything else is ''wrong''.

But when your game setting is Endless Wondrous Adventures in Time and Space, nothing is ever 'wrong'.

And without any kind of a theme to tie those endless adventures together, they can get boring pretty fast.

Warlawk
2019-01-19, 09:24 PM
And without any kind of a theme to tie those endless adventures together, they can get boring pretty fast.

Having different types of encounters and new different challenges is good, but I completely agree. Without some sort of central theme to tie things together, what's the point? Being strange and unusual is dirt simple, anyone can throw a bunch of random descriptors onto an otherwise vanilla monster and throw it at their players. Many people don't like it because it makes no sense and it's the lazy way out.


A lot of players feel the same way. They only like games with giant rats and goblin bandits.



false dichotomy
English
Noun

false dichotomy (plural false dichotomies)

A situation in which two alternative points of view are presented as the only options, when others are available.

Another option being that just randomly tossing together things that don't fit the theme and make no sense whatsoever in the larger context of the story is pointless. It's simple, boring and lazy, relying on spectacle to keep people interested instead of quality content.

Florian
2019-01-19, 09:57 PM
[QUOTE=Warlawk;23648412]Without some sort of central theme to tie things together, what's the point?/QUOTE]

I think this is why D&D-likes are continually stuck with faux medieval settings and we have endless discussions why human dominate the settings, not dragons or other such stuff, because we tend to model everything in a more or less understandable manner and have to move the whole fantastic stuff to some underworld or over to the planes, least they break verisimilitude.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-19, 10:49 PM
And without any kind of a theme to tie those endless adventures together, they can get boring pretty fast.

Some would think so. Others would say the game does not have to be a single straightforward story.



Another option being that just randomly tossing together things that don't fit the theme and make no sense whatsoever in the larger context of the story is pointless. It's simple, boring and lazy, relying on spectacle to keep people interested instead of quality content.

Well, of course, the answer here is to not have a theme. And even more so to not be judgemental about ''what goes with what". It's the really ''out of the box" thinking.

Too many people have a lot of baggage: this does to fit with that, this is good, that is bad, and so on. But once a person can drop all that baggage they can move on to other things.



I think this is why D&D-likes are continually stuck with faux medieval settings and we have endless discussions why human dominate the settings, not dragons or other such stuff, because we tend to model everything in a more or less understandable manner and have to move the whole fantastic stuff to some underworld or over to the planes, least they break verisimilitude.

Most people are very much stuck in the sort of medieval Disney politically correct setting. All the bad stuff from real history, and anything people just don't like is swept away.

Warlawk
2019-01-19, 11:05 PM
Some would think so. Others would say the game does not have to be a single straightforward story.

Well, of course, the answer here is to not have a theme. And even more so to not be judgemental about ''what goes with what". It's the really ''out of the box" thinking.

Too many people have a lot of baggage: this does to fit with that, this is good, that is bad, and so on. But once a person can drop all that baggage they can move on to other things.

Most people are very much stuck in the sort of medieval Disney politically correct setting. All the bad stuff from real history, and anything people just don't like is swept away.

A lot of this again presents False Dichotomy, it's fallacious argument and really just serves to make some people dismiss what you're trying to say out of hand.

We have very different types of gaming that we enjoy then and that's fine. You and (some) of your players enjoy your way so more power to you.

Everyone I game with and I think a lot of others grew out of thinking that random strange and unusual things were cool around the end of high school. If it works for you and your table then more power to you, lords knows there are plenty of juvenile jokes and events at our table to go around.

I think you might find that your message is better received if you were less dismissive of people who don't appreciate your way of playing the game. ZOMGI'MSORANDOM as an approach to DMing is not "out of the box thinking", it's just a different approach. Maintain an interesting, engaging and coherent story with a solid overarching theme while still using some very strange and unusual things and that would be out of the box thinking.

Again, it works for you, it wouldn't for me and judging by responses many of your own potential players and the forum community. Nothing wrong with that.

Yora
2019-01-20, 03:16 AM
I'm a big believer in beginning as you mean to go on, which means that whatever you focus on in your elevator speech to prospective players should be a part of the first adventure. So if, for example, you tell the players that the game will be about the tales of the Space Patrol, then the first adventure should have the PCs dealing with criminals of some sort in outer space. Or if the theme is supposed to be defending the kingdom against an invasion of dragons, have them face a wyrmling dragon on their first adventure.

For my next campaign, I want to do something with yuan-ti and aboleths (David Cook is the bestest of D&D creators), but I also want to start at 1st level. I can't have the players fight yuan-ti or an aboleth in the first session, but I can have them have an indirect presence. Snake cultists and kuo-toa worshipping an idol of a tentacled fish are no problem for 1st level characters to deal with. Later they can visit abandoned yuan-ti and aboleth ruins, long before they actually meet a living one.

geppetto
2019-01-20, 04:21 AM
Another option being that just randomly tossing together things that don't fit the theme and make no sense whatsoever in the larger context of the story is pointless. It's simple, boring and lazy, relying on spectacle to keep people interested instead of quality content.

Dont tell that to Micheal Bay, we wouldn't have any transformers movies.

Theres nothing wrong with the occasional adventure thats pretty much all action movie flash without depth. I wouldnt make it a habit, but occasionally its fun.

JoeJ
2019-01-20, 04:37 AM
For my next campaign, I want to do something with yuan-ti and aboleths (David Cook is the bestest of D&D creators), but I also want to start at 1st level. I can't have the players fight yuan-ti or an aboleth in the first session, but I can have them have an indirect presence. Snake cultists and kuo-toa worshipping an idol of a tentacled fish are no problem for 1st level characters to deal with. Later they can visit abandoned yuan-ti and aboleth ruins, long before they actually meet a living one.

I agree that an aboleth is too powerful to fight directly at 1st level, but a yuan-ti pureblood or possibly a broodguard (from Volo's Guide to Monsters) are within reason for a 1st level party. A group of cultists, of course, can work at any level.


Dont tell that to Micheal Bay, we wouldn't have any transformers movies.

Which would be bad because...???


Theres nothing wrong with the occasional adventure thats pretty much all action movie flash without depth. I wouldnt make it a habit, but occasionally its fun.

I agree. The occasional stand alone adventure, with no connection to the main theme of the campaign, can be fun. Having a theme doesn't mean that's the only thing happening in the world.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-20, 12:07 PM
We have very different types of gaming that we enjoy then and that's fine. You and (some) of your players enjoy your way so more power to you.

Though note I'm also talking about things beyond the game play that effect the game play.



Everyone I game with and I think a lot of others grew out of thinking that random strange and unusual things were cool around the end of high school. If it works for you and your table then more power to you, lords knows there are plenty of juvenile jokes and events at our table to go around.

As you say, your circle of friends has self limited yourselves. As a group you have decided X is X, and your set in your ways, unwilling to free your mind, expand your horizons or look out side the box. This is common, after all it is the exact thing the OP said: ''being afraid of too much awesome".

Yes groups, and people are different. You, and your group, come with a huge amount of baggage of things you like, dislike, say must be one way only, say must be done or must not be done, and more. A bunk ton of personal rules and limits.

Compared to me, my game and players where: anything goes.




I think you might find that your message is better received if you were less dismissive of people who don't appreciate your way of playing the game. ZOMGI'MSORANDOM as an approach to DMing is not "out of the box thinking", it's just a different approach. Maintain an interesting, engaging and coherent story with a solid overarching theme while still using some very strange and unusual things and that would be out of the box thinking.

I'm not dismissive, I'm straightforward. Just look at it like this:

1.Statement: I see many examples of a conventional mainstream style that a big majority enjoys and is looking for and almost nothing else.What is going on there?

2.Statement: I don't think random strange things are cool and I'm against using them in my game. For example my game must have giant rats, goblin bandits and never have good drow or were hamsters.

3.Me: Anything Goes. There is no reason why you can't have anything. You should always feel free to do whatever you want without ANY limits imposed by yourself or the public.


I can't have the players fight yuan-ti or an aboleth in the first session

Ok, now see this is my above point: the use of the word ''can't". Now, if you Want to start the whole campaign at 1st level with giant snakes and lizard man bandits and only have the yaun ti or aboleth come in at like 5th level maybe a year down the road: that is fine.

But your you are saying you ''can't'' have yaun ti or aboleth because <insert reasons or reason here>, then I would say don't think so inside the box and limit yourself. You can do it.

For example:

1.Scale (haha) down the monsters. Yes, I know the page in the book says they are ''X''. But who cares? Make a lower leveled/power version. (Also D&D lore has tons of examples spread throughout the editions)

2.Add in some weird and strange. Again the by-the-book monsters can do the plain things set in the rules. Again, who cares. Add more fun stuff. Like: poison blood, poison descriptor spells(poison metamagic), snake spears(they look like normal snakes, but you can pick them up and straighten them into a spear, throw them, hit and do damage plus poison and then the snake wiggles and attacks), and so on.

3.Use the Epic. Yes the epic monster is too much for the 1st level PCs. And yet again, who cares. Just have the monster encounter where the monster slaps the PCs and tosses them in a lake.

The basic point: you CAN do anything. Don't limit yourself EVER.

Warlawk
2019-01-20, 03:19 PM
As you say, your circle of friends has self limited yourselves. As a group you have decided X is X, and your set in your ways, unwilling to free your mind, expand your horizons or look out side the box. This is common, after all it is the exact thing the OP said: ''being afraid of too much awesome".

Yes groups, and people are different. You, and your group, come with a huge amount of baggage of things you like, dislike, say must be one way only, say must be done or must not be done, and more. A bunk ton of personal rules and limits.

Compared to me, my game and players where: anything goes.


Sounds like you're making a lot of judgements about people you've never met. I never said anything at all about how we do play, only my opinion about your approach. You've laid out opinions that were never stated and attributed them to me to strengthen your own position, it's called Straw Man, another fallacious argument technique. So far we have Hyperbole, False Dichotomy and Straw Man as well as a form of Ad Hominim in your approach of implying that everyone but you is stuck inside the box and only want to blindly accept fantasy cliches and tropes. Does this kind of faulty logic usually work for you, because generally the whole point of fallacious argumentation is that the argument lacks the strength to stand on its own.

Florian
2019-01-20, 04:59 PM
He still has a point, tho. PF now features 6 full hardcover bestiaries, as well as some softcover plus the smattering of addendums found in the APs. There is extremely odd, weird and fantastic stuff available that simply blows any kind of faux medieval settings to smithereens and therefore seems to get hardly any use at all. PF being a level-based system with a huge gain in power, quite a lot of it is CR/level-gated is shifted to the later levels, somehow with the expectations that you leave faux medieval Golarion behind and will slowly transit more into space or to the planes, probably in an attempt to preserve the initial look and feel of the game world, which sticks closely to the fantasy standard that has been common for quite some time.

I've mentioned it before, but verisimilitude is not a thing that is very high on my priority list and I've long dropped the habit of engaging into "if then?" speculations on the effect that the monsters and magic could and should have on a setting, but I also dislike going full gonzo when it comes to that.

Still, I like using stuff like gigantic giant space whales and at least try to intersperse it with the more grounded content for an even mix.

Bohandas
2019-01-20, 05:24 PM
My favorite thing that has ever been written on RPGs is Your Demon Lord doesn't need that many Hit Dice (https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2016/04/your-demon-lord-doesnt-need-that-many.html). It's a neat little examination of how the biggest, baddest, and also best enemies in Dungeons & Dragons have been steadily pushed back farther and farther within a campaign.
Because campaigns aren't getting longer. From anecdotes, they are actually getting shorter, and so the most amazing and impressive material gets actually seen less and less often. But how many of us really go into a new campaign thrilled to fight rats and goblins. Isn't it rather the prospect of encountering big dragons and demon lords later in the game that gets us exited to start a new campaign?

OK, I've created (but not playtested) a villain to remedy this. He's a demon lord that should be an appropriate challenge for midlevel 3.5e characters (though I don;t know what his exact CR should be). (And due to his particular specialization this power level fits without falling into the god-not-powerful-enough-to-control-the-thing-it's-god-of issue I mentioned earlier)

Demeicro
King of the Manes, The Prince of Dimness

Portfolio: Manes demons, stupidity

Similar to how Malcanthet is the Queen of Succubi and Kardum is the Lord of Balors, Demeicro is the King of the Manes (the most basic type of demon, Fiendish Codex 1, Pg 45). As lord of the weakest demon type he is one of the weakest demon lords possibly the weakest. This is one of the demon prince positions with the highest rate of turnover; He isn't the first to hold this position, he won't be the last, and he may not even be the only one (similar to how Malcanthet and Shami-Amourae are both Queen of the Succubi). He is also one of the dumbest of the demon lords and the demonic patron of stupidity, earning hin the derisive title "The Prince of Dimness". He seems to think that this has to do with literal dimness and has developed some magical abilities to match

He appears as a giant manes demon and is usually surrounded by a retinue of manes, In combat he has a tendency to throw these minions at people, using their acidic cloud death throes as a bomb. Sometimes he will go through several before realizing that an enemy is resistant or immune to acid. He dwells in a shoddily constructed fortress and rules his minions from a makeshift throne made from chicken bones and dead animals all piled up

CE Large outsider (chaotic, evil, extraplanar, tanar’ri)
Init: +2
Senses: darkvision 90 ft.; Listen +0, Spot –1
Languages: Abyssal; telepathy 100 ft.
AC: 15, touch 7, flat-footed 15 (-1 size, -2 dex, +8 natural)
HP: 95 (10 HD; 10d8+50); DR 5/cold iron and good
Immune: electricity, poison
Resist: acid 10, cold 10, fire 10
Saves: Fort +12, Ref +6, Will +6
Speed: 20 ft. (4 squares)
Melee: 2 claws +15 (1d6+6 Plus 1 Vile) and bite +13 (1d8+3 Plus 1 Vile)
Base Atk: +10; Grp: +20
Abilities: Str 22, Dex 6, Con 20, Int 9, Wis 9, Cha 9
SQ: acidic cloud, tanar’ri traits
Feats: Gruesome Finish (Exemplars of Evil), Improved Initiative, Multiattack, Vile Natural Attack (BOVD/Elder Evils)
Skills: Balance +4, Climb +19, Escape Artist +4, Hide +7, Intimidate +1, Jump +19, Knowledge (Arcane) +0, Knowledge (Planes) +0, Listen +0, Move Silently +9, Spellcraft +0, Survival +12, Use Magic Device +6

Acidic Cloud (Su):
When the prince of dimness is wounded for 5 or more HP with a slashing or piercing weapon acidic vapor sprays out in the direction the attack came from. Anybody standing in that square must make DC 15 Reflex save or take 1d6 points of acid damage
If the Prince of Dimness is killed, it dissolves into a cloud of noxious vapor. Anyone within 20 feet who fails a DC 15 Reflex save takes 2d6 points of acid damage

Charm Manes (sp)
Three times per day Demeicro can attempt to charm a manes demon. This works like the spell charm person except that it works on manes and only on manes.

Summon Manes (Sp)
Once per day the Lord of Dimness can attempt to summon 4d8 manes with a 60% chance of success. Alternately he can automatically summon 2d4 manes. This ability is the equivalent of a 6th-level spell.

Spell-Like Abilities
cl 10
At Will- Acid Splash, Daze (DC9), Greater Teleport (self plus 50 pounds of objects only), Mage Hand, No Light (BOVD)
3/day- Darkness, Delusions of Grandeur (Dragon #324) (DC11), Doom (DC10), Magic Stone, Obscuring Mist, Ray of Stupidity (SC)
1/day- Cone of Dimness (SC) (DC12), Desecrate, Feeblemind (DC14), Mind Fog(DC14), Stinking Cloud (DC12), Touch of Idiocy

Darth Ultron
2019-01-20, 06:09 PM
Sounds like you're making a lot of judgements about people you've never met. I never said anything at all about how we do play, only my opinion about your approach.

Well, you did type: "Everyone I game with and I think a lot of others grew out of thinking that random strange and unusual things were cool around the end of high school". So, seems clear that you and the people you know think random strange and unusual things are uncool.

And, if you were an Out of the Box Thinker, then you would agree with me....but you don't. So that does put you in the box.

I think we are talking about two different things and three types of games:

1.The afraid of too much awesome game. The limited game that has no random strange and unusual things. You seem to be here from what you have posted: and it's all good and fine. If this is your game style: game on.

2.The afraid of too much awesome game, BUT they see and feel the limitations and wonder why, and if there is another style. The OP.

3.Anything Goes.

So:

1. and 2. are both ''the characters fight some giant rats in the just like Earth type barn on a farm.

3.Is astereater space rats in a infinity vine farm on an asteroid within a broken sky shield.

Now if you run and like a type one game above, fine. But my point is for the type twp person of: it does not have to be that way if you don't want it to be.

Warlawk
2019-01-20, 07:33 PM
Well, you did type: "Everyone I game with and I think a lot of others grew out of thinking that random strange and unusual things were cool around the end of high school". So, seems clear that you and the people you know think random strange and unusual things are uncool.

My apologies for the unclear statement then, let me clarify.

"Everyone I game with and I think a lot of others grew out of thinking that random strange and unusual things which are random and unusual for the sake of being random and unusual, were cool around the end of high school". Random and unusual things that serve to reinforce a story point and make sense within the context of a larger plot or theme can be very cool. Random for the sake of random isn't. Anyone can roll on a random table of monsters and templates and put together the examples you've given thus far, that doesn't make it profound.



And, if you were an Out of the Box Thinker, then you would agree with me....but you don't. So that does put you in the box.


Another false dichotomy. How's that fallacious argumentation working out for you? Plenty of space outside the box that doesn't match up with your approach. Seems like you're not outside the box, just in a different box and if someone doesn't agree with you they clearly are sheeple.

Knaight
2019-01-20, 07:34 PM
And, if you were an Out of the Box Thinker, then you would agree with me....but you don't. So that does put you in the box.

Yes, because there's tons of different ways to be in the box, but all out of the box thinkers clearly agree about everything because that's one position.

Warlawk
2019-01-20, 07:35 PM
Yes, because there's tons of different ways to be in the box, but all out of the box thinkers clearly agree about everything because that's one position.

Right? Lol. As I posted just above... he's just living in a different box and decrying anyone who isn't there with him.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-20, 08:41 PM
Random and unusual things that serve to reinforce a story point and make sense within the context of a larger plot or theme can be very cool. Random for the sake of random isn't. Anyone can roll on a random table of monsters and templates and put together the examples you've given thus far, that doesn't make it profound.

Well, I'm not sure what you mean by story point, plot or theme. To me, it sounds like your setting hard limits of when, where and how strange and unusual things can come up in the game. An example of what your talking about would help.



Another false dichotomy. How's that fallacious argumentation working out for you? Plenty of space outside the box that doesn't match up with your approach. Seems like you're not outside the box, just in a different box and if someone doesn't agree with you they clearly are sheeple.

Well, my approach is 'do anything' vs the box of 'here is my list of things'.


Yes, because there's tons of different ways to be in the box, but all out of the box thinkers clearly agree about everything because that's one position.

Maybe your thinking of the wrong box?

Inside the box is using the common things: start at a tavern, giant rats and goblin bandits....again. And having person rules and limits saying that you ''can't" do anything else for <reasons>.

Outside the box is simply ''doing anything you want".

For a recent, extreme, example: The characters are told of a new 'strange monster' in the ruins and go to check it out. And they find a Mechasauras Rex 3000 (robo dino from the future). Some players just keep on playing the game....but then there is 'box guy': he yells a screams and complains that I'm ''not playing D&D right" and that I'm ''ruining the game" and many other rants as he leaves.

It's not just him ''not liking robots in D&D", it's his crazy rant that the idea is ''wrong" or something.

Warlawk
2019-01-20, 10:10 PM
For a recent, extreme, example: The characters are told of a new 'strange monster' in the ruins and go to check it out. And they find a Mechasauras Rex 3000 (robo dino from the future).

Ok, I'll bite. What world did this happen within? Why was said monster there, how did it get there? In what way is this connected with the plot or theme of the game?

Darth Ultron
2019-01-20, 10:49 PM
Ok, I'll bite. What world did this happen within? Why was said monster there, how did it get there? In what way is this connected with the plot or theme of the game?

1.Toril(Forgotten Realms)

2.In the nearby woods is a malfunctioning elven time portal that has been time scooping up people and things and dropping them off in the current era.

3.It's the introduction to Weird Woods( the Time Scoop Module), the hook to get the character's interested in discovering what/where/how the monster came from. The characters were quick to figure out the mechasaurasus rex was ''not a normal construct" and was ''not from around here".

NorthernPhoenix
2019-01-20, 10:53 PM
For a recent, extreme, example: The characters are told of a new 'strange monster' in the ruins and go to check it out. And they find a Mechasauras Rex 3000 (robo dino from the future). Some players just keep on playing the game....but then there is 'box guy': he yells a screams and complains that I'm ''not playing D&D right" and that I'm ''ruining the game" and many other rants as he leaves.

It's not just him ''not liking robots in D&D", it's his crazy rant that the idea is ''wrong"

I feel like you're overegsagerating ("screams", really?) a person's pretty reasonable response to make yourself look better better. What you're describing is a classic example of "full gonzo" or "lolrandom", and it is understandably disappointing for anyone who was fully expecting normal DnD.

Try correctly setting expectations. Subverting just to subvert is the worst form of "surprise". It isn't clever, it's just disappointing.

Warlawk
2019-01-20, 11:11 PM
I feel like you're overegsagerating ("screams", really?) a person's pretty reasonable response to make yourself look better better. What you're describing is a classic example of "full gonzo" or "lolrandom", and it is understandably disappointing for anyone who was fully expecting normal DnD.

Try correctly setting expectations. Subverting just to subvert is the worst form of "surprise". It isn't clever, it's just disappointing.

Well said.


1.Toril(Forgotten Realms)

2.In the nearby woods is a malfunctioning elven time portal that has been time scooping up people and things and dropping them off in the current era.

3.It's the introduction to Weird Woods( the Time Scoop Module), the hook to get the character's interested in discovering what/where/how the monster came from. The characters were quick to figure out the mechasaurasus rex was ''not a normal construct" and was ''not from around here".

As long as the expectation was set before hand that this game is "not-your-daddy's-D&D" I would be ok with this encounter and plot. There's nothing random or nonsensical about this, it makes sense in the larger context and follows a coherent theme. That said, it's not my cup of tea. It simply isn't what I want out of a game when I'm playing D&D, there are other systems that do this sort of genre mixing better IMO. It's simply not interesting (to me) and far from awesome, much less too much awesome.

Fortunately, that kind of definition is not objective and if you find it awesome you can play it. Continually dismissing everyone who doesn't agree with you that this sort of thing is awesome though just makes you look pretty small minded and stuck "in the box" of your own ideas. Different people have different tastes and that's ok, so you might think about stopping with the belittling commentary directed to everyone who doesn't agree with you. Yes, stating that everyone else is stuck in the box and can't think for themselves is absolutely a belittling and dismissive stance. You don't want people to tell you that you're playing wrong, perhaps you should extend the same courtesy.

Of more topical relevance to the OP I think the concern here is more that things like Gods, Demon Lords and truly terrible monsters are simply not usable until close to epic levels which takes a VERY long time to get to if you start at level 1 and play with recommended pacing and XP rewards. Most fantasy RPGs these days suffer from this issue and I think it's a valid concern. You can work around it by refluffing and other such things, but it's a lot of work for the DM. I think this is a very valid concern and would love to see some of the publishers taking note of this and looking at presenting options in the future to address it. I think 5E D&D bound accuracy was a step in the right direction for this but it still maintains the approach that those epic threats are simply not something you can deal with until very high level.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-20, 11:13 PM
As long as the expectation was set before hand that this game is "not-your-daddy's-D&D" I would be ok with this encounter and plot. There's nothing random or nonsensical about this, it makes sense in the larger context and follows a coherent theme.

I'm not sure why you tossed 'random' in: I never said anything about 'random'.



You don't want people to tell you that you're playing wrong, perhaps you should extend the same courtesy.

I'm not sure why your stuck on wrong. The question is how/why do most games get stuck in the rut of the same things over and over again. Many have the idea that the game ''must" be that way. My point is, yet again, you can say: anything goes. It's in no way saying any way is 'wrong'.

So again, it's not about different taste or style. If a game is happy with ''giant rats attack for the 25th time", that is all fine and good for them.

But then take 'person A', who says "man..it's boring to have giant rats in my game all the time". I say "Well, anything goes, have any other creature". And then the person snaps back and says ''oh no, i must use the giant rats..because <reasons>". And yes, this is where I say you just have to drop, ignore or change the reasons you have to limit yourself.



I feel like you're overegsagerating ("screams", really?) a person's pretty reasonable response to make yourself look better better. What you're describing is a classic example of "full gonzo" or "lolrandom", and it is understandably disappointing for anyone who was fully expecting normal DnD.

Try correctly setting expectations. Subverting just to subvert is the worst form of "surprise". It isn't clever, it's just disappointing.

I'm not over-exaggerating .

It does show my point. When someone limits ''what" D&D "is" (let alone normal D&D) in their mind, it's not a good idea.

It's fine to not like robots in D&D, but it's not fine for you to say it's ''not real D&D" or worse "a person is playing the game wrong".

And it's impossible to ''set expectations" to a person stuck in the rut box. When I say ''anything goes" in my game: they think ''oh so the DM will have the giant rats attack from the left side" or ''the goblin bandits will have a couple hobgoblins with them".

NorthernPhoenix
2019-01-20, 11:20 PM
And it's impossible to ''set expectations" to a person stuck in the rut box. When I say ''anything goes" in my game: they think ''oh so the DM will have the giant rats attack from the left side" or ''the goblin bandits will have a couple hobgoblins with them".

It's only impossible if you can't help yourself from trying to "gatcha" people. Instead of vaguely saying "anything goes" try something as simple and short as " it's DnD but with robots, aliens and stuff, like crazy sci-fi DnD!!!" That way people actually know what you're doing.

Warlawk
2019-01-20, 11:30 PM
But then take 'person A', who says "man..it's boring to have giant rats in my game all the time". I say "Well, anything goes, have any other creature". And then the person snaps back and says ''oh no, i must use the giant rats..because <reasons>".

Could you please point out to me, within this thread, where anyone but you and hypothetical people you've made up for the purpose of example, has taken this stance?

Darth Ultron
2019-01-20, 11:32 PM
It's only impossible if you can't help yourself from trying to "gatcha" people. Instead of vaguely saying "anything goes" try something as simple and short as " it's DnD but with robots, aliens and stuff, like crazy sci-fi DnD!!!" That way people actually know what you're doing.

Now note, yet again, the limit.

To say DnD but with robots, aliens and stuff, like crazy sci-fi DnD limits the game to just that right? The game can't have all that other stuff, right?

And it's not about the 'gatcha' it's more just I think differently. A player used to the typical D&D game has a big reaction to things in my game. Though, if they are good players, they do learn how to go with it.



Could you please point out to me, within this thread, where anyone but you and hypothetical people you've made up for the purpose of example, has taken this stance?

Well, how about Yora:



And then, when I sit down to come up with something for a first adventure, it's "Alright, let's see what I can put together with bandits and goblins?"

Why does this always happen?

I've not played in a lot of GM's games, but I've seen lots of people describing the beginnings of their campaigns, and it doesn't seem like I am alone in this. It rather appears almost universal.

Warlawk
2019-01-20, 11:58 PM
Well, how about Yora:

I think your interpretation of that meaning that the story "must have those things" is once again, hyperbole. It seems to me that it's a statement that indicates that is the rut most games are in, not that they HAVE to have those things, just that it is the accepted way to start. You've exaggerated the stance (Hyperbole) in order to set up your own argument instead of the actual point being made, which is a Straw Man fallacious argument.


Now note, yet again, the limit.
To say DnD but with robots, aliens and stuff, like crazy sci-fi DnD limits the game to just that right? The game can't have all that other stuff, right?


Not at all, but it does give the player a better idea of what to expect. Your experiences have shown you that your gaming style is not what people expect when they join a D&D game, you have the capability to give them a clearer picture of what to expect, and choose not to which certainly comes across as trying a "gotcha" moment on them.



And it's not about the 'gatcha' it's more just I think differently. A player used to the typical D&D game has a big reaction to things in my game. Though, if they are good players, they do learn how to go with it.


Thus the implication that anyone who doesn't find your way of playing enjoyable is not a good player, yet you insist you aren't dismissing or belittling people who don't play your way. Pretty clear statement here that your actual feelings are otherwise.

You aren't in your own box, you've flipped it over so you can stand on it to preach at people who disagree with you and thus far, most seem unimpressed.

Drascin
2019-01-21, 04:38 AM
I'm a big believer in beginning as you mean to go on, which means that whatever you focus on in your elevator speech to prospective players should be a part of the first adventure. So if, for example, you tell the players that the game will be about the tales of the Space Patrol, then the first adventure should have the PCs dealing with criminals of some sort in outer space. Or if the theme is supposed to be defending the kingdom against an invasion of dragons, have them face a wyrmling dragon on their first adventure.

Yeah, as I've become older and played more games, I've kind of increasingly started to want campaigns to have a pitch. Something the campaign is about. Random fantasy sandbox where quests happen doesn't pique my interest - and if you have a hook it better come in inside the first four sessions.

Also, I kind of find that a lot of posts in this thread rather underestimate players. "Well they'll be confused if you have something other than your bog-standard goblins and orcs in Standard Badly Misinterpreted Middle-Earth Clone world", what. I've played with perfectly normal people, not even gamers, and still had zero trouble setting up a world with much stranger interactions. I've dropped people who didn't even know what D&D was two days ago straight into Sigil and after ten minutes they got it. Fantasy videogames and movies and stories have made people a lot more conversant on unusual settings, and a lot better at inference. Give people a chance, they might surprise you!

Satinavian
2019-01-21, 07:19 AM
Also, I kind of find that a lot of posts in this thread rather underestimate players. "Well they'll be confused if you have something other than your bog-standard goblins and orcs in Standard Badly Misinterpreted Middle-Earth Clone world", what. Most of that comes from one person. I don't think it is a prevalent opinion in the tread itself.

Mechalich
2019-01-21, 08:18 AM
Also, I kind of find that a lot of posts in this thread rather underestimate players. "Well they'll be confused if you have something other than your bog-standard goblins and orcs in Standard Badly Misinterpreted Middle-Earth Clone world", what. I've played with perfectly normal people, not even gamers, and still had zero trouble setting up a world with much stranger interactions. I've dropped people who didn't even know what D&D was two days ago straight into Sigil and after ten minutes they got it. Fantasy videogames and movies and stories have made people a lot more conversant on unusual settings, and a lot better at inference. Give people a chance, they might surprise you!

Planescape is a gonzo mess. There is, in a very real way, nothing to get, because the setting fundamentally doesn't work as a coherent backdrop. Now it explicitly does not need to, and that's fine. In fact it's all the better for being so blatantly ridiculous rather than trying to be coherent on the surface while failing miserably when examined with any depth in the way a great many more typically constructed settings such as FR or Golarion do. It also tends to fit well the dynamic of many gaming tables, where gameplay is low immersion, low emotional investment, and the ridiculous is celebrated for its comedic value.

If that's your game, that's fine, and in fact fantasy video games, with their general ridiculousness and bypassing of even an attempt at reasonable verisimilitude in recent years - When Disgaea first came out it was clearly a parody and felt like a parody. That was 2003. It doesn't really feel like a parody any more - have primed players to roll with this sort of thing. Additionally, D&D, as a system, is among the more forgiving systems in terms of not caring about the backdrop and just rampaging around and killing stuff.

However, not all games are structured that way. If there's a higher level of immersion involved and the expectations are that the characters will actually act like people familiar with the world they occupy, then it really does matter how hard it is for the players to interpret the setting. Planescape has a provision for acting like a clueless idiot - most settings don't have that. The character you are playing lived somewhere within it's boundaries, grew up there, and is expected to be conversant with it's rules. L5R is a good example of a setting where this sort of thing matters. It has a very clear cultural context and breaking from said context carries significant in-game consequences.

Now this doesn't mean that a setting can't have a lot of 'awesome.' While settings like FR, Golarion, Eclipse Phase, and the oWoD are absurdly overstuffed, there's a huge range of gradation between that and, say, ASOIAF levels of minimalism. "yuan-ti, aboleths, kuo-toa, giant ruined towers, volcanoes, demon cults, elven barbarians on dinosaurs." Is by no means necessarily overstuffed, though it is somewhat discordant and will require careful management. Also, if those are the central elements of the setting it is important to keep the focus on those things and avoid garden-variety kitchen sink D&D stuff that doesn't belong (a particular problem D&D has in this vein is that when standard mechanics are maintained it's far too easy for the greater multiverse to reach into the seeking and gets its generic-y stain all over everything).

JoeJ
2019-01-21, 12:34 PM
The character you are playing lived somewhere within it's boundaries, grew up there, and is expected to be conversant with it's rules. L5R is a good example of a setting where this sort of thing matters. It has a very clear cultural context and breaking from said context carries significant in-game consequences.

Which is why the GM should be ready to take a moment and make sure the player understands the implications of their character's action before it occurs. "Having grown up in this world, you are aware that the gods frown on desecrating each other's shrines, so if the god of this shrine happens to be watching and decides to come after you, your own deity won't protect you." The player still has the freedom to do what they first stated, but now they're making a choice informed by their character's knowledge of the world.

The Jack
2019-01-21, 02:08 PM
I've only read a little of L5R but it's cultural context is really, really dumb.

Everyone from the crab clan is like this, and from the crane crab they're like that...
Silly japanese misconceptions everywhere.
So on and so forth.

Arbane
2019-01-21, 04:41 PM
I've only read a little of L5R but it's cultural context is really, really dumb.

Everyone from the crab clan is like this, and from the crane crab they're like that...
Silly japanese misconceptions everywhere.
So on and so forth.

L5R is to Japan what Middle-Earth is to Europe. Or something.

The Jack
2019-01-21, 04:55 PM
L5R is to Japan what Middle-Earth is to Europe. Or something.

Middle earth had a lot of thought put into it's cultures, histories and people. It's comprehensible to a sociologist. L5R upholds it's social systems through contrivance.

Mechalich
2019-01-21, 07:16 PM
Which is why the GM should be ready to take a moment and make sure the player understands the implications of their character's action before it occurs. "Having grown up in this world, you are aware that the gods frown on desecrating each other's shrines, so if the god of this shrine happens to be watching and decides to come after you, your own deity won't protect you." The player still has the freedom to do what they first stated, but now they're making a choice informed by their character's knowledge of the world.

Well yes, of course, but certain types of players find this sort of this to be patronizing and/or railroading and certain GMs get tired of holding their player's hands.

If a setting takes a book's worth of reading to understand, and the players aren't willing to read the d*** books, then the GM gets saddled with massive amounts of explanation, exposition, and management and the game in general slows down.

A lot of the issues with having settings that are highly complex and build expectations into character behavior disappear if the table is content to have the game run like a novel and the players get railroaded hard. If you start a campaign with the pitch of 'where's running adventure path X' then that adventure path can be almost impossibly crazy, because that's what everyone has agreed to do. This sort of gameplay doesn't exactly play into the unique strengths of table-top though.

JoeJ
2019-01-21, 07:41 PM
Well yes, of course, but certain types of players find this sort of this to be patronizing and/or railroading and certain GMs get tired of holding their player's hands.

If a setting takes a book's worth of reading to understand, and the players aren't willing to read the d*** books, then the GM gets saddled with massive amounts of explanation, exposition, and management and the game in general slows down.

A lot of the issues with having settings that are highly complex and build expectations into character behavior disappear if the table is content to have the game run like a novel and the players get railroaded hard. If you start a campaign with the pitch of 'where's running adventure path X' then that adventure path can be almost impossibly crazy, because that's what everyone has agreed to do. This sort of gameplay doesn't exactly play into the unique strengths of table-top though.

For any given playstyle, game mechanic, or campaign theme there will be some players and GMs who hate it. They should play something they else; something that they enjoy. My suggestion was intended for players who want to explore the GM's complex campaign world but do not (for quite understandable reasons) understand it as well as their characters do.

Cluedrew
2019-01-21, 08:23 PM
Without knowing anything about these specific bandits, you probably have a good idea what their motivations are and what kind of environment they came from. So, that's instantly boring because you already know them, you already "grok" them.Really? So you know the answers to why a bunch of people with some combat training and access to weapons are suddenly looking for... food? gold? slaves? Why hasn't the local government dealt with this issue yet?

Where they came from? Are they local or traveling. Where are they traveling from? Why? Did they come alone or are they perhaps part of an army, collecting supplies and loot to keep the army going as it makes it way though unfriendly territory.

Unless we are talking about game-y bandits to bust into existence with an overwhelming desire to set fire to the town where the hero lives I'm not so sure.

(I once wrote a script for a Computer RPG that centered on a war over wheat fields. I think about these things.)


L5R is to Japan what Middle-Earth is to Europe. Or something.I think Forgotten Realms to Europe would be a better comparison. Middle Earth is meticulously laid out, still has problems of course but a lot more though went into it than any role-playing game setting I know. Or pretty much any setting ever. Really the Lord of the Rings is an excuse to have a story happen in Middle Earth as much as it is its own thing?

Tanarii
2019-01-21, 10:16 PM
Most of that comes from one person. I don't think it is a prevalent opinion in the tread itself.
Chiming in to say I found this opinion being questioned to be spot on. RPGs that are useful for new players to the entire concept are the ones designed to assist new players learn the game rules first, and the more fantastic elements of the game world second. As the market leader and a grower of the market this time around, the latest iteration of D&D is very well executed in that regard.

Meanwhile RPGs for advanced players, while they often contain a "new to RPGs?" section in the front out of old-school tradition going back to the TSR days (and their early competition), are really designed for an experienced player being able to quickly absorb how the rules work, to the point the can grok the underlying meta, and thus be thrown into the weirdness pot on the setting side.

There's potential solutions of course. For example, you've got experienced players in a system that intentionally has "tutorial levels" before "the awesome", e.g. D&D 5e ... start them off at higher level! Unfortunately some players can't handle this conceptually, since they feel like they missed out on something.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-21, 10:35 PM
.
Also, I kind of find that a lot of posts in this thread rather underestimate players. "Well they'll be confused if you have something other than your bog-standard goblins and orcs in Standard Badly Misinterpreted Middle-Earth Clone world", what. I've played with perfectly normal people, not even gamers, and still had zero trouble setting up a world with much stranger interactions. I've dropped people who didn't even know what D&D was two days ago straight into Sigil and after ten minutes they got it.

It's possible for some players to ''get things'', as I have said: but just as many ''don't get things".

Psikerlord
2019-01-21, 11:32 PM
I think if you want to face big demons and dragons and so on early in the game, play something level-less (like shadowrun) or if dnd like then play from 11th level. Or use lots of lesser demons or dragons etc. Or play a system with a smaller level band but the same big bad monsters at the 7+ end of things.

Jophiel
2019-01-25, 02:11 PM
The thing is that you don't want to run into a situation where the cleric is more powerful than his god or where the gods can't do the things that they're supposed to do
I'm starting a campaign where the planned (haha, I know) arc is for the characters to be trying to stop some critters from summoning a god around level 5. In reality, the plan is to have the critters summon a "herald" of the god, a massive aberration which is itself tasked with doing the actual deity summoning as the cultist critters don't actually have that level of power. This lets the party battle a deity-by-proxy without the issues of a 5th level party slaying a deity.

As for the "random world" stuff, I think a valid point is that my play time is limited by real life concerns. While I don't want to spend my time solely fighting A_Giant_Rat01, there's a big spectrum between that and "Cyber-Phase Demon Rats that spit Water Balls and have giant sucker-disc feet". The closer we are to the former, the 'safer' the game will be for my couple hours a week available time. The closer to the latter, the more likely I'm going to be wasting my time on some goofy lolrandom nonsense without coherent rhyme or reason that feels more like DM self-edification and cleverness boasting than it feels like an actual game world. An argument can be made that there's a chance that world will be simply amazing but experience suggests that it's a sliding scale of probability because most people just don't have it in them to make an amazing (sigh) "outside the box" milieu. The risk:reward keeps me more interested in the A_Giant_Rat01 side of the spectrum and others can roll their eyes and call me boring and pedestrian but you guys all had your chance when I was in my 20's and 30's. If I have three hours a week to spend on this, I'm not likely to spend it praying that this starting town of Time Traveling Robot-Fishmen from the Abyss is going to pay dividends.

That said, many of the examples given aren't all that out there. If I saw elven barbarians on dinosaurs, I'd just immediately think "Ok, some flavor of wild elf in a Lost World type setting" with neither wild elves or Lost World settings being anything extraordinarily new to me. A raid by them or a raid by horse-riding bandits is pretty much the same thing just with pointier ears and more bite-y mounts. Doesn't mean it can't be cool or worth doing but it's not a much different reskin than "Goblins, except with purple fur".

Spore
2019-01-25, 03:23 PM
What is going on there? Have you made experiences that relate to this phenomenon?

Yes, actually. We played Pathfinder, and our DM provided a great magepunk world. Our primary adversary was a red dragon pacted to Asmodeus. The problem was, after a bit of coordinating, and everyone bringing their A game, our group clicked so well that we started killing creatures 5 or 6 levels above us. We faced a Pit Fiend at Lv 9.

Technically ANYTHING was killable by us, we could very well safe the world(s) by force. So our DM had to decide to make his by then four big bads almost invincible. The halfling necromancer had a magical watch that revived him every time he died. The drow theurge had 9th level spells on the cleric and the sorcerer side and could cough us out of existence (we still would have had good chances if the cleric decided to craft cloaks of resistance and people stood next to my paladin boosting the saves). The half-fiend red dragon was ancient and had a customized spell list (not that it stopped my paladin trying to smite her by flying a plane into her flank). The barbarian king had a crown that cast a continuous antimagic field around him (and none of us where magic-less enough to be able to challenge his reign).

So the DM had to adjust his campaign to make sense of our characters. Other than that, the only thing I can advise is pumping the early encounters up (seriously have you ever judged a 3.5 goblin monster entry? the average farmer is more skilled killing them with an wood cutting axe than those warriors are at fighting) and perform a palette swap, and adding in non-combat abilities.

Want a sea faring campaign where merfolk attack and kidnap people? Give them partial concealment and a swim speed in watery areas but give them hobgoblin stats otherwise.

Want a few magitech golems attacking the heroes? Make them from leathery sinew and odd elemental combinations, and let them resist fire, but almost freeze up when cold damage is introduced.

Want an adventure with fey spirits? Make them almost unhittable and annoying as heck, with their only weakness being laughed at.

A big memorable villain is pretty important but the journey has to be worthwhile too. I distinctively remember the bogeyman that killed my half-elf with phantasmal killer, and the druid that raised him back as a goblin. I remember the illusory red dragon that was vulnerable to fire, the mad dwarf king that was good with baking until he was resurrected and was suddenly bad at baking (and also mad). I remember the samurai my alchemist charged in a duel that almost killed him in a single stroke. I remember my catfolk paladin trying to prevent my adventurer's guild to accidentally burning down the slums and paying for fixing the wall we just destroyed with a bomb.

But yes, no one remembers the mook battles if their only point was to slow you down.

Darth Ultron
2019-01-25, 08:35 PM
Yes, people are afraid of too much Awesome: or to put it better: people don't like things too different.

A great many players, and some DMs, want very specific things from and out of the game. And in order for this to happen, the game world and setting must be a set way. To give a couple examples:

On the Role Playing side we have:

1.An Open and Free Social Society- This is almost taken for granted as an automatic Way This Must Be. The vast majority of any players typical role playing requires a open and free social society a LOT like 20th/21st century Earth. People need to talk to each other, hang out, make cities and towns, and maybe most of all make taverns. A player character can't drink at a bar, pick some pockets or get into a bar fight...unless taverns exist in the free and open social society.

2.Fame- A lot of players want to be famous IN the game. So that NPCs will recognize the character, ooh and ahh over the character, but the character drinks and so forth. This is, of course, only possible if the game world even HAS the concept of Fame.

3.Money and Value- A lot of players like to play greedy characters that are out after loot. This, of course, requires the game HAVE loot and money and things to buy AND places value on items.

This might be worse on the mechanical (roll playing) side, as we have:

4.Special Star- A lot of players like to feel that their character is super special and that they stand far about the vast majority of the world..and nearly all NPCs. This requires NPCs to be weak and not have any real mechanical powers. This makes many mechanically weak races perfect as they, at best, have like a +2 on rolls to farm. Then a character, even with just a slight amount of mechanical power feels like a Superman Demi-God. The NPC guardsman with a Jump +1 just falls flat on his face...but the PC with the Jump of +4 fells like the Lord of All Jump when they bound over a wall. This falls apart very fast if the world has NPCs with any amount of power. A city of spider folk that can jump and climb with huge mechanical skill or a city of demons that can teleport at will make the PC with the Jump skill +4 feel weak and useless.

5.The Easy Button A lot of players like the easy world where doing things in the world is only a slight challenge or no challenge at all. So no matter the PCs level, all locks are like DC 20. NPC have no mechanical magic and little mechanics at all. The PCs mechanics can effect everyone all the time with no limits. This world wants 1st level warrior guards of a weak mechanical race like humans. Then ANY PC can use magic or a skill like diplomacy and do anything they want. Again, this breaks down if the world has any amount of mechanical power. A construct guard or ghost guard make all 'easy' magic and skills impossible.

6.Up Staged- A lot of players don't have the skills, intelligence, game experience and rule and system mastery to use all the game mechanics at even an 'average' level, let alone 'optimized'. Very often the DM will have all that, and with even a low powered NPC with mechanical powers can do great things: right in the players faces.

This is just a sampling of things most players want in a game. A game without such things, simply won't be ''as much" fun for them.

Just take a Elf Dino setting as an example: The Dino Riders of Aerwi. They have no concept of money or even the value of ''things''. They are social in small family units, but have no alcohol or taverns. And they have no concept of fame. The elf barbarian with his triceratops mount is way more mechanically powerful then that human warrior with a dog. And even if the player has their own dino, there is a good chance the DM has NPCs way more powerful then the character just by using common game knowledge. In short, the player won't be very happy.

Son of A Lich!
2019-01-25, 10:52 PM
Yora, if you ever pursue a creative career (Like acting, writing, painting etc.), get used to this feeling of being afraid of too much awesome.

You've just discovered your first "Gap".

When I first decided I wanted to be a novelist (I have never actually wrote a novel, mind you, just a pipe dream while I was in the service), I had loads of crazy cool ideas to challenge the medium of written form. But when it came to actually sitting down on the computer and composing the novel into something interesting and fun and captured the feeling of awesomeness I was envisioning in my head, it always came off as trite.

It turns out, my brain space is completely tied off from everyone else in the universe, and I cannot telepathically invoke the same epic feeling through the pages of a novel that I felt conceptualizing the premise I was working on. I wasn't as good of an author as I wanted to be. I was blind to my own faults, because I was caught up in the feeling I was trying to express to focus on the how to express that feeling to create a sympathetic link of awesome in my audience.

Steampunk world where engineers are a religious order, countered only by plague doctors who hide their identity to seek a better world for the sick and weak. A plague of nano bots that replicate by first making two smaller versions of themselves from their scrap parts. Steam Punk Nanobots, who travel in a noxious green cloud and over work the contraptions of the city, causing mass panic and destruction. A 24 novel series where the main character was going to be hidden amidst the side characters and it would be up to the audience to figure out who Doctor Shepard is.

Sounds awesome (To me at least)! But how do you GET there, how do you introduce the world? The people? The setting? How do I hide the identity of the main character without lying to my audience with red herrings and false leads? What if they did figure it out in the first book and the second book made them question their analysis? What if I mislead my audience away from their catharsis?

Could this novel series be written? Of course! But I, SoaL, have come to accept that I'm not skilled enough to write something as cool as I am imagining properly to invoke the feeling in my audience.

This isn't an issue of creativity or levels or game balance; it's a matter of communication and your skills as a story teller. Sturgeons Law dictates that 90% of what you produce will be crap; You are skilled enough to know what is a crappy way to depict what you are imagining, but not skilled enough to figure out how to depict it effectively.

Does that make sense?

Spore
2019-01-26, 02:25 AM
Sounds awesome (To me at least)! But how do you GET there, how do you introduce the world? The people? The setting?

Ultron may have provided you with the answer. Take a well known time period from earth and take it as a back drop. Maybe a medieval Europe of the 13th-14th century is good for that. The fear of knowledge is great, yet doctors are needed. A secret society has saved all the stuff from the Dark Ages in some vaults under known castles (which could act as your points of conflict: how does the scientist get into the castle and retrieve the parchments of forgotten knowledge without the castle owner's consent).

But really, most stories that want to subvert expectations change one small thing that really shines against a mundane backdrop. As Ben Croshaw (Zero Punctuation) once put it [paraphrased]: 'I am surprised by the utter mundanity today's audience finds in so called fantasy. Dwarves, elves and other fantastical races should blow your socks off, but they are run of the mill standard issue stuff."

Salvatore had its hero be a dark elf. Yes, this was innovative back in the late 80s, when it was still more than ten years to go that you could play as a "monster", and even then people where a bit against half-orcs. What else did he change? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. I am absolutely unsure if he invented matriarchal drow society which is NOT the norm but certainly not a "first" since amazons exist/existed. For another play on the "technology and religion" see the Thief games. All of it works

Heck, even Harry Potter exists before the backdrop of the muggle world, and even though the hero is more into the wizarding world by book 5+ than the muggle world, for the sake of relatability, he stays pretty pragmatic (so he does not empty his trash cans by magic) and reacts to magic as something unique and wonderful and not something mundane (something other characters certainly do).

Florian
2019-01-26, 02:49 AM
To my surprise, some of the Pathfinder Tales are actually quite good fantasy novels in their own right, especially the ones that showcase the more specific or weird things in the Golarion setting. There's a lot to learn here, how to balance the easily relatable mundane with the fantasy elements.

BWR
2019-01-27, 05:46 PM
I've only read a little of L5R


There's your problem. If you actually read more you'll find nuance.



Everyone from the crab clan is like this, and from the crane crab they're like that...


It is a setting with highly static and formalized methods of behavior, rigid social stratification and extreme social/peer pressure to fit in and individualism is strictly limited - it's no wonder people tend towards certain behaviors. There are exceptions, there is room for variation but it is a setting and system that promotes and rewards stereotypes rather than snowflakes. You can excel but it is best to excel within the acceptable limits.



Silly japanese misconceptions everywhere.
So on and so forth.


Japanese misconceptions maybe, but Rokugan, as they say, isn't Japan (except when it is). It's not pretending to be historical Japan, it's not trying to be particularly accurate, any more than any number of 'obviously based on real world cultures settings' in numerous other settings are.

Jophiel
2019-01-27, 06:32 PM
Salvatore had its hero be a dark elf. Yes, this was innovative back in the late 80s, when it was still more than ten years to go that you could play as a "monster", and even then people where a bit against half-orcs. What else did he change? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. I am absolutely unsure if he invented matriarchal drow society which is NOT the norm but certainly not a "first" since amazons exist/existed.
Salvatore had nothing to do with the drow's matriarchal society. By the time the Icewind Dale trilogy started, the Unearthed Arcana had been out for three years and people playing dark elves weren't especially rare since the combination of no-penalty dual wielding and innate spell abilities was plenty attractive to power gamers. The supposed penalties for light/daylight were ignored or handwaved away just like Salvatore did, "He, uh, has a hood so that negates sunlight, right?"

Mordaedil
2019-01-28, 02:44 AM
Funny thing is that the daylight penalty makes more sense as a form of vertigo from being underground for their whole life. So it makes sense that drow would get used to being above ground after a while.