When Do Limited Options Become Stifling?

[The Glyphstone]

It's fairly common that a GM will say 'no species A' or 'no class B' when listing available options for character creation. But what about when a GM says 'only X species, chosen from A, B, C, D, etc.)' or 'only Y classes/subclasses, chosen from Aa, Bb, Cc, Dd, etc.' Assuming the list still includes all the typical roles, how narrow can the set of X and Y be before people start to feel like they're being creatively or mechanically straitjacketed?

[stoutstien]

Too many factors to tell but it really comes down to what system you're using. The more flexible individual choices are the less restrictive it feels when you opt in/out material.

I also think that theme and setting restrictions are viewed differently than solely mechanical ones. Saying you don't want cyborgs in your histrionic medieval fantasy setting is different than saying you don't want cyborgs because they have op features.

This is why I think some of the better systems have a interesting dichotomy where they have really specific features or classes that have a fairly flexible flavor. It allows you to have your cake and eat it too.

[Xervous]

Depends on the system and the campaign themes. I can accept restrictions that help with themes of the setting, but I won’t like it when stuff is off the table because the GM erroneously deems it OP or too complicated.

Ban deckers in Shadowrun because Pizzarun? Great!

Ban wizards in 3.5e because this is the age of dragons and sorcerers? Great!

Ban psykers in Dark Heresy because OP? That gets me thinking you’re qualified to be a doorbell servitor.

Low magic 3.5? Again, servitor.

It’s impossible to quantify the amount of options that would need to be restricted to get a response from me in a general, system agnostic sense. A good pitch for a Street Sam only group could work for SR, the same as a cleric only party in D&D. It’s mainly when I encounter poorly reasoned restrictions that I feel stifled.

Edit: As I’m to be exploring the world through the character, if the restrictions bring the GM’s competence into question or suggest a distasteful campaign lies ahead I’ll be burning my spare time elsewhere.

[Anonymouswizard]

I also think that theme and setting restrictions are viewed differently than solely mechanical ones. Saying you don't want cyborgs in your histrionic medieval fantasy setting is different than saying you don't want cyborgs because they have op features.

I mean, I'll still grumble about not being allowed a clockwork arm.

I'm also going to note that, even beyond a system and setting level, this is a very personal thing. Particularly for races, I have no issue with going human-only (although getting back into Shadowrun has made me lighten up on that on the GM side), other people will revolt if they have to play a race that looks basically human (such as Tieflings). Both sides are completely valid, but can't always compromise.

Generally the more flexibility you have in character creation the less people mind, especially if other options are more viable. No casters in D&D 5e feels limiting due to only three classes being available, but it's more acceptable in Fantasy AGE despite it leaving only two classes (because as F-AGE only has three classes to begin with most options are still on the table), and it's s the standard for GURPS games.

[False God]

IMO, as long as the setting/world are developed enough to compensate for the enjoyment and interest derived from whatever is missing, I don't really care about race/class options being limited. If the entire world is humans, I expect to see nations and cultures. If there's no casters, I expect to see variety in martial combat styles (even if only descriptive).

I'm bigger on the customization options. No feats, no play. No MC, no play.

[Telonius]

I think the "stifling" part isn't necessarily a function of "how many options." It's more about "how much trust." If you trust the DM - if you have buy-in for the setting, if the choices seem to make sense and aren't arbitrary, if you're confident they know what they're doing and have a reason for the restriction - it won't feel stifling.

[Ionathus]

I think the "stifling" part isn't necessarily a function of "how many options." It's more about "how much trust." If you trust the DM - if you have buy-in for the setting, if the choices seem to make sense and aren't arbitrary, if you're confident they know what they're doing and have a reason for the restriction - it won't feel stifling.

This is my answer. Plus a side of being "bought in" to the concept, which may just be Telonius's statement paraphrased :smallwink:

Every TTRPG game should start with everyone agreeing on the kind of game they want to play. That's where the DM would lay out their proposed limits, world concept, party composition idea...

I've pitched a "God Squad" game before, where everyone has to bring a 5e cleric or paladin to the table. We played a one-shot with it and had a blast. If the players aren't excited about it, though, then I ditch it and wait for players who are excited.

[JellyPooga]

For me, it's the GM's prerogative to set the tone and style of the game and that includes A) considering what the players are going to enjoy, B) the specific game rules and setting being pitched and C) the actual campaign in question.

No matter how much Player A wants to play a Half-Dragon Paladin, knight-in-shining-armour for all that is holy and pure if Players B through D all want to play an Evil Campaign, they're playing Cyberpunk 2020 and the premise of the game is The Corps vs. The Street Rats, "No Mercy" edition. If Paladin is all you want to play right now, go find another game.

Limited options are only a problem if you feel entitled to pick and choose what you want, regardless of what anyone else wants. Don't like it? Don't play.

Of course, this comes with it's own rebuttal and onus on the GM (as I opened with) to provide a game that players will actually enjoy; limit the options or change the rules too much and you might find yourself without a player-base. Anecdotally, I once ran a fantasy game in which I made language an actual in-game concern (i.e. I killed "Common" as a language and made literacy a learned skill instead of automatic); none of my players cared to play Linguists & Ledgers, so they intentionally went out of their way to avoid that entire subject; carefully choosing their own languages known to be compatible and adventuring in locales they knew to speak languages they could speak or translate easily, etc. I should have seen the writing on the wall from the start, but persisted in my notion thinking it would enhance the game, when with that particular group it very much did not. With another group using the same rule (a one-shot this time), it went over much different; they dove headfirst into battling out translations and finding scholars to help them with scrolls and messages they couldn't read.

[Zuras]

It’s a weird psychology thing, most of the time. Basically people are far more unhappy when they feel things are taken away from them than when they never had them in the first place.

Nobody complains that you have limited options in B/X D&D just because the classes have fewer features, and they will actually feel more limited in a feat-less 5e game, even though they have dozens more options even in featless 5e.

In a tabletop RPG, restrictions only become stifling when you already have something in mind and you’re told you can’t do it. That has very little to do with the rules, and everything to do with player expectations. People played original D&D for years, and play OSR systems now, without feeling constrained by the utter absence of class options. I’ve also seen people quit campaigns that allowed every official 5e rule and more besides, because the DM wouldn’t make up economic rules to track how much money their bard could make as a touring performer.

[Vahnavoi]

Absolute numbers are meaningless before knowing the attitude a player has when coming to a game.

In every case, the minimum number of playable roles to draw in a player is one (1), provided that role is something the player finds interesting. How many other roles are available is of no consequence.

Likewise, the minimum number of omitted roles to push a player away is one (1), provided that role is the only one the player finds interesting. How many other roles are available is of no consequence.

In other words, what you're looking for is an overlap between what a player wants to play and what kinds of roles a game offers. The latter can be absolutely massive yet still feel stiffling to a player if the overlap is small. It can also be absolutely tiny (literally one accepted role) and still make a player feel free as a bird in the sky provided that role answers or exceeds their needs.

There are several different metagames a player could be following that influence this, depending on context.

For example, a player can show up with the expectation that the game host has done all they can to make the game interesting. For them, the relevant option was whether to play this game or not, and they've already demonstrated their choice by showing up. They will extend benefit of doubt to and accept any role offered, even if it's just one pregenerated one.

Alternatively, a player can show up with the expectation that a game will allow them to play a specific pet character they already have in their head. They won't commit if the game does not allow sufficient fidelity to their pregame ideas.

Or, a player can show up with the expectation that they will be active participant in character design. They don't know what kind of character they want and are willing to compromise, but they see the space of available roles as their room of negotiation. They won't commit if said negotiation space is too small, even if there technically is a role they might like in there, because thet use size of that space as proxy for measuring how much their contribution will be valued elsewhere.

So on and so forth.

[stoutstien]

I mean, I'll still grumble about not being allowed a clockwork arm.

I'm also going to note that, even beyond a system and setting level, this is a very personal thing. Particularly for races, I have no issue with going human-only (although getting back into Shadowrun has made me lighten up on that on the GM side), other people will revolt if they have to play a race that looks basically human (such as Tieflings). Both sides are completely valid, but can't always compromise.

Generally the more flexibility you have in character creation the less people mind, especially if other options are more viable. No casters in D&D 5e feels limiting due to only three classes being available, but it's more acceptable in Fantasy AGE despite it leaving only two classes (because as F-AGE only has three classes to begin with most options are still on the table), and it's s the standard for GURPS games.

All about framing. clockwork is just a term that just set off bells for certain DM in regards to settings but the actual effects won't.
Iron and wooden artificial limbs aren't even magic tech. Some RL examples from the 1400s were refined enough to hold a quill and write with.

Artificial limbs is a popular Troupe so all you need is to modify to fit.

[Jay R]

First of all, different players are different. It depends on the players, what experiences they have had, and whether they had already decided what characters they want to play next.

My personal approach? I don’t care. If I am required to play a half-orc rogue with DEX 11, and the game is exciting and fulfilling for a half-orc rogue with DEX 11, then I will have fun. If all options are available and the game is dull, then I won’t have fun.

Among other things, this means that deciding what character you want to play before finding out about the DM’s world is a poor plan. It’s setting yourself up for possible disappointment.

When I’m invited into a game, I want to find out as much as possible about the game and the world before I start thinking about my PC. Especially, I want to find out about the culture of the world, and about any specific DM rules interpretations or changes. Then I start thinking about what sounds like it might be fun within that set-up, that I never played in before. This might give me an idea for a character that fits perfectly into that world, and that I might never have considered otherwise.

But another player can be different, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If somebody has a complete build she’s been working on for months, and it’s exactly perfect for the role she wants, and the DM disallows one single feat or other ability that she is counting on, then she will be disappointed and stifled.

In the game I’m currently running, there were no elves. [I intend the elves, when they finally appear, to be the elves from Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies.] My "Introduction to the Game" document told them they couldn’t be elves, but I also tried to deal with any possible disappointment. I wrote:


You cannot play a true elf. Your character has never seen an elf, or met anybody who has ever seen an elf. [If your character idea requires elves, talk to me, and we’ll try to invent a work-around – possibly Fair Folk from the Prydain Chronicles, or an Elfquest-style race not called elves. But there are no Tolkien-like elves in this universe.]

One player is playing a half-Fair-Folk, and another designed an Elfquest-like race of wolf-riders called Pinis. [Unfortunately, he moved away before the game started.]

So, yes, it can feel stifling, but the DM can also work to prevent that, by inventing a workaround that fits the DM’s goal [I]and the players’ goals.

[Pex]

For me it's hard to give a number. It's more I'll know it when I see it than declare a universal answer. Even so, if a DM says PHB races only I wouldn't bat an eye. A defining factor is not what things are restricted but why. Not having the sourcebook is fine. Not wanting a kitchen sink world is fine. Complaining about min-maxing power gamers, I want roleplayers not rollplayers, and other "Optimizers go to Hades" rhetoric I will give pause.

I also give pause when a DM proudly emphasizes a "low-magic world". It's fine if that just means no permanent magic items until level 8 say. (I will refuse to play in a no magic items at all game), but if it means no spellcasting classes at all, then no, I won't play either. I want to play D&D, and that includes spellcasters even if I'm not playing one. This just tells me the DM hates players doing anything more than "I attack for 1d8 + 3" damage." It's really an "Optimizers go to Hades" game in disguise.

[LibraryOgre]

Settings become an issue for me when they don't make sense for the setting, or for the campaign.

If I'm in a Dragonlance game and the DM says "No warforged", yeah, that makes sense. No Half-orcs? Well, there's no orcs on Krynn, so sure. But we're going to need a reason for "No wizards", because those are an integral part of the setting.

[Satinavian]

It’s a weird psychology thing, most of the time. Basically people are far more unhappy when they feel things are taken away from them than when they never had them in the first place.

Nobody complains that you have limited options in B/X D&D just because the classes have fewer features, and they will actually feel more limited in a feat-less 5e game, even though they have dozens more options even in featless 5e.

In a tabletop RPG, restrictions only become stifling when you already have something in mind and you’re told you can’t do it. That has very little to do with the rules, and everything to do with player expectations. People played original D&D for years, and play OSR systems now, without feeling constrained by the utter absence of class options. I’ve also seen people quit campaigns that allowed every official 5e rule and more besides, because the DM wouldn’t make up economic rules to track how much money their bard could make as a touring performer.
I wouldn't agree with that.

If the options are lacking in the first place instead of being taken away, you probably get people suggesting other systems or finding another hobby if none of the playable characters appeal to them.

[Anonymouswizard]

All about framing. clockwork is just a term that just set off bells for certain DM in regards to settings but the actual effects won't.
Iron and wooden artificial limbs aren't even magic tech. Some RL examples from the 1400s were refined enough to hold a quill and write with.

Artificial limbs is a popular Troupe so all you need is to modify to fit.

I mean, my intention is for fantasy clockwork, a.k.a. magic, but if a GM asked I'd settle for more historically accurate as long as I've 'adjusted' to it enough to not have any numerical penalties (some level of 'your hand just can't do that' is fine).

I just like prosthetic limbs from an aesthetic point of view, and don't want my characters punished for it.

[stoutstien]

I mean, my intention is for fantasy clockwork, a.k.a. magic, but if a GM asked I'd settle for more historically accurate as long as I've 'adjusted' to it enough to not have any numerical penalties (some level of 'your hand just can't do that' is fine).

I just like prosthetic limbs from an aesthetic point of view, and don't want my characters punished for it.

Which is fair. like I said it's a very popular trope and the concept itself is probably not what is hanging up in the allow/disallow section as much as framing and theme. Clockwork is just one of those weird catch-all terms that can range from anything from really finely craft slightly magical stuff to full blown kooky steampunk.

It's sort of like if you describe an arm as Da Vinci inspired design it wouldn't set off the flags.

That's why as long as the system is flexible enough it doesn't really matter the absolute number of options you have. You only need to have enough options for the players to fulfill their thing within reason.

[JellyPooga]

Which is fair. like I said it's a very popular trope and the concept itself is probably not what is hanging up in the allow/disallow section as much as framing and theme. Clockwork is just one of those weird catch-all terms that can range from anything from really finely craft slightly magical stuff to full blown kooky steampunk.

It's sort of like if you describe an arm as Da Vinci inspired design it wouldn't set off the flags.

That's why as long as the system is flexible enough it doesn't really matter the absolute number of options you have. You only need to have enough options for the players to fulfill their thing within reason.

This is where player entitlement and GM prerogative come into conflict; not all settings are that flexible. Yes, in some kitchen sink fantasy, a clockwork or other prosthetic arm is part and parcel, in others it's practically unique and in others still, the entire concept is as anathema as including laser guns and starships. No amount of "it's my preference" or "I just want it", regardless of game balance, is going to persuade me (as GM) that your wild-west gunslinger with a clockwork arm is going to fit into my swords & sorcery game set in Howard's Hyperboria. If you want to come to me with a character that shoots magical missiles and has a necromantically animated prosthetic arm that uses the exact same rules as the clockwork gunslinger...then I'm listening (depending on the setting/gamen of course), but theme is everything compared to rules.

The same applies to every setting and ruleset; yes magic is integral to 5e D&D, but if the premise is that only rare NPCs have access to magic, then there's no point coming to me (the GM) as a player with your idea of playing the only non-setting-critical character in the universe that casts magic any more than coming to a LotR game trying to play as one of the Nazgul or literal Gandalf is going to fly when the premise is "Gondorian Soldiers on the frontier". Expectation is everything in that regard.

[Wintermoot]

way back in the land of 2e, when the brown class-kit books came out, my lads and I picked up the complete fighter's handbook and immediately played a campaign where we were all fighters with different kits. It was a blast. Wouldn't want to do it for every game though.

I have a high tolerance for tightened restrictions leading to creative thinking.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I'm probably a bit weird. In that if I don't have restrictions, if the DM says "all sources, anything goes", I'm more likely to back out.

There are specific restrictions and reasons for restrictions that will make me look askance and consider not joining. But really volume of restrictions/available options isn't that important.

At the system level, I prefer 10 well thought out, properly working, thematically coherent options and no bad ones to 1000 with low levels of any one of those criteria and 100 good ones. A system that floods the board with crap loses my attention really fast.

[Psyren]

For me it's less about what the specific restrictions are, and more about why they're there. I'm happy to play in, say, a humans-only no-spellcasters campaign or similar so long as it's justified - whether that's by the specific setting (e.g. "We're playing a Westeros campaign!") or the specific story the DM wants to tell; weighting the former more heavily than the latter usually. But if the DM tries to impose those same restrictions on say Faerun or Golarion, I'm going to be taken out of the experience by asking why/why not left and right, and probably back out of the game.

Above also determines where I draw the line of "not enough." If I'm sitting down to play Dragonlance or Dark Sun, I'm going to go in expecting fewer player options than I would get in Spelljammer, Forgotten Realms or even Ravenloft. And I'm certainly not going to sign up to play a Dark Sun game and then complain about the fact that there are more race and class restrictions than I would deal with in Eberron, it would be pretty silly to do so.

But conversely - if I can think of a fun justification to allow something, I'd prefer to have a DM that at least hears me out, even if the end result is a no. (Preferably, it would be "no, but...")

[Pauly]

I prefer limited campaigns for a number of reasons.
1) It puts all the players on the same footing. Allowing everything and the kitchen sink campaigns can be frustrating when other players are running something you can’t because you don’t have access to the book. Also if another player turns up with an esoteric build with some weird doodads from an obscure sourcebook you have to trust that they have read and understood the source material properly.
2) It is administratively easier. Fewer books and fewer rules to reference make running the game simpler and easier.
3) It allows for a higher level of versimiltude in the setting.
4) It allows for thematic campaigns.

As for how many restrictions are OK before it becomes problematic, that depends on the rules, setting and campaign theme.
Traveller with procedurally generated characters and a default party make up of people who happened to wash up on this chunk of space rock together makes it both difficult to justify many restrictions at all and not very thematically correct.
Call of Cthulhu on the other hand has a default party makeup of people who live in [this place] and are of [this social status] which creates at least a social expectation among players that the party will compromise of reasonably compatible characters. I don’t think I’ve seen it personally but GM vetoes of character concepts is a thing I’ve heard of in CoC.

[Hrugner]

If the players have enough creative space, in actual play, to keep them entertained, then they don't need many options in character creation. If the DM railroads the players, and runs DMPCs to handle every story beat, then character creation is all they have left and will probably rebel at restrictions to what they can make. It's the same reason why players tend to turn murder hobo, they have no other buttons to push.

[Anonymouswizard]

I'll note that part of the reason I'm generally hesitant about banning mechanical options is because most systems are fairly focused on a particular playstyle by design, and removing parts can cause it to crash and burn. TSR D&D does not work as intended without the Fighter and it's offshoots, whereas WotC D&D generally throws a 404 once you remove spellcasting.

That's not to say that games don't work when you remove large parts, Unknown Armies and AGE are more than functional without their magic systems because the intended mechanical loop is focused elsewhere (sanity for UA, critical successes for AGE). You could even make D&D5e work after removing the magic system, add the necessary abilities back in somehow (probably new classes) and refocus attrition on hit points and hit dice. Other games are intentionally designed for you to not use all options, generally crunchier generics.

But if it's 5e, you allow Wizards, and you ban Artificers, I'll start wondering why you think 'magic craftsman' doesn't fit your setting. This one actually specifically annoys me because artifice should probably be an older magical style than wizardry, it feels like everybody banning it for flavour reasons has it backwards. And yes, if I have to I'll be an illiterate orc making temporary magic spears by binding sharp things to sticks with string (although you've probably accidentally banned illiteracy already...).

Actually the 5e Artificer could really do with a couple of low tech themed subclasses, I'll see if I can think some up.

[Jay R]

If you ban virtually all options except that one single option that the player wants to use, it is not stifling — or at least, it doesn't feel stifling to that player.

If out of all the options in all the splatbooks, you only ban one thing, but it's something that a single player wanted, then it is stifling — or at last, it feels stifling to that player.

[Duff]

There's no hard and fast rule.
A short campaign where everyone's an elvish fighter could be fine.
The pitch "You're out drinking to celebrate having graduated fighter collage when stuff happens".

Some things to consider:

How much is designing your character (rather than playing it) an important part of your game?*
How long is it running? Limitations on shorter games should usually be more acceptable
How experienced are the players? Very new players might be better off with limited options. Very experienced players will usually be able to make any given set of limitations work; Like in an Iron Chef competition, the limitations are part of the fun, not an impediment. But there's a middle a
rea where not being able to create the character you want will be annoying.

There's a game called Pendragon where there's only one class. Congratulations, you're a knight! You ride a horse, you have mail armor, you use a lance and you have the choice of a sword, axe, mace or flail as your other weapon. Do the math and there's about 4 efficient arrangements of stats (from memory)

* I want to be clear. I don't think there's a wrong answer here. Different tables, different games, different players. Enjoy the way you play

[MoiMagnus]

Always and Never.

"Always" because even if you don't put any additional restriction, the base rules can already feel stifling. That's one of the reasons why peoples push for homebrew content and rule of cool.

"Never" because with the appropriate GMing style, you could give pre-generated characters (with pre-planned level ups) and still have enough room for creativity in how the characters are played.

IMO, the question is more one of

(1) mismatched expectations: players that fail to immerse themself in the universe because they expected more tools to customise their characters, or fail to have fun because their character is to similar to the previous one they played, etc.

(2) coupled with the fact that GMs that are very restrictive on which race/class is available are also in average more restrictive on how one character should be played and which solutions are acceptable to a given problem given to the players. Hence too many restrictions can be a red flag for a GMing style that stifle creativity.

[Jay R]

From an emotional standpoint, it feels stifling if the restrictions are announced after the players have already joined the game. I tend to send out an email saying, "I'm starting a game with the following rules and restrictions. Do you want to play?" That way, any player who joined already knew the restrictions, and accepted them, before he started to think about the game.

[Pex]

This is where player entitlement and GM prerogative come into conflict; not all settings are that flexible. Yes, in some kitchen sink fantasy, a clockwork or other prosthetic arm is part and parcel, in others it's practically unique and in others still, the entire concept is as anathema as including laser guns and starships. No amount of "it's my preference" or "I just want it", regardless of game balance, is going to persuade me (as GM) that your wild-west gunslinger with a clockwork arm is going to fit into my swords & sorcery game set in Howard's Hyperboria. If you want to come to me with a character that shoots magical missiles and has a necromantically animated prosthetic arm that uses the exact same rules as the clockwork gunslinger...then I'm listening (depending on the setting/gamen of course), but theme is everything compared to rules.

The same applies to every setting and ruleset; yes magic is integral to 5e D&D, but if the premise is that only rare NPCs have access to magic, then there's no point coming to me (the GM) as a player with your idea of playing the only non-setting-critical character in the universe that casts magic any more than coming to a LotR game trying to play as one of the Nazgul or literal Gandalf is going to fly when the premise is "Gondorian Soldiers on the frontier". Expectation is everything in that regard.

I agree with you philosophically. If the game is about the PCs being the holy order of philanthropists spreading good cheer to a weary world, no player can play a pirate ninja assassin no matter how much he begs. Even my cynical self when the DM has a world campaign premise with restrictions I can acknowledge it's really about the setting and not a DM who hates players doing more than "I attack for 1d8 + 3 damage". However, accepting that, I can still find the DM has restricted too much and I wouldn't want to play in that game. Then it's just a matter of personal taste. That DM and I are incompatible for that game even though neither of us are wrong about what we prefer.

[Slipjig]

I think the answer to that is largely going to depend on whether the player shows up for Session Zero with a fully developed character in mind, and then it turns out that their character concept is incompatible with the campaign the DM is working on. At that point, the player should either pick a new concept, adapt their concept, or leave the game.

Granted, it's helpful if the DM puts out some initial guidance BEFORE Session Zero, especially they are planning on doing something that takes core races or classes off the table.

It also depends on whether the restrictions are because of story reasons or because the DM thinks they are dumb or OP. If you are playing in the Dragonlance setting during the period when there is no divine magic, it would make sense to say no Clerics or Paladins. If the campaign is going to involve a revolution, it's reasonable to say that they all have backgrounds where they would naturally tend to be on the same side (even if that might change later).

But there will always be a small % of players willing to throw a tantrum because you the DM has written a all-Human Viking campaign, when they had their heart set on playing a Balrog Roboticist/Ninja gestalt class they found on Reddit. It's good to identify these players early, because it's MUCH simpler to kick them out before the campaign starts. Being a DM is already hard enough, there's no reason to add to your stress load by trying to incorporate a player who doesn't want to participate in the campaign you are actually running.

[Quertus]

For me, it's pretty simple: whenever a GM talks about limiting things, I start mentally printing their "Idiot" sign, and work to uncover just what kind of idiot they are. Historically, there's 1 answer they can give that will invalidate the idiot sign: if they give an answer purely based around the experience for the character. Like, "This is a survival-based game, and I therefore want you all to create highly-competent survivors (Rangers, Druids, Robots, Undead, Robots with built-in Replicators, whatever)", or "I therefore want you all to create highly-inept survivors (unskilled Fighters, Academia Mages, city-boy nobles, helpless princesses, whatever)". If the focus is on the feel and the fun, if the GM demonstrates that they actually understand the concept of having fun and put that first, then that's fine.

Similarly, "this module is for X characters, from level Y to Z" is theoretically the type of bound designed to ensure a certain type of experience; if the GM can have a conversation about the type of experience changing those numbers will have, and whether they believe that such changes will be a good experience for the group, and are focused on the concept of a good experience, that's fine.

EDIT: "Bob is afraid of spiders, so no spider-themed characters or abilities" is obviously also very much an appropriately enjoyment-themed limitation. And there's doubtless many other sub-categories to "for fun".

Any other response I've seen, I've responded with an attempt to educate the GM on how that's an inferior PoV, or otherwise attempted to up their game, before applying their corresponding failure tag to their profile.

So, for me, any restriction that is dumb and reduces the enjoyment ceiling of the game is too much, and is a sign of what kind of failure as a GM the individual making those restrictions is. On the flip side, any number of restrictions that are made for the purpose of improving the game (and are, you know, actually good at what they set out to do) are fine, at least so long as everyone can come up with an acceptable character under those restrictions. If someone in the group can't enjoy playing a high-competence survivor, for example, then that's a bad restriction for that group, rather than a sign of a true failure on the part of the GM.

EDIT: In case it wasn't clear, there are 1 or 2 possible reasons to restrict things that I haven't encountered IRL, that I probably could accept as reasonable, especially if (depending on the specifics) the GM could accept a reasonable alternative, or was able to give good reasons surrounding their decision. But, for every restriction my senile mind can remember encountering at an actual table, I can sort them pretty well into "for a fun experience" and "skill issue".

[Leon]

Really depends on how limited and to how much it fits with what the game/ expectation of the game is to be.
Generally some limits are good to have as kitchen sink games can often get too bogged down with options particularly if its an expansive system.

[Tanarii]

When the restrictions will make it hard to effectively play the game using that system.

Or

When the table agrees they're too stifling. Assuming the table came together before the decisions were being made. (E.g. a group of friends gathering to play as opposed to players deciding to join an open table game with predefined rules.)

[Telok]

Always and Never.

"Always" because even if you don't put any additional restriction, the base rules can already feel stifling. That's one of the reasons why peoples push for homebrew content and rule of cool.

"Never" because with the appropriate GMing style, you could give pre-generated characters (with pre-planned level ups) and still have enough room for creativity in how the characters are played.

Excellent answer.

To me it's as soon as I'm saying "meh, nothing interesting so... what do?". Which could be as simple as the system making it bad to do anything but spam your main attack (or enforced attack sequence) in combat and flip yes/no coins for everything else. It could be a terrible GM railroad where success or failure is certain and all paths lead to the same place. It could be just a character class that stops doing anything at a certain point, which itself can depend on the roleplay of the character (like d&d 5e celestial warlock run as mostly support / debuff / heals hits 12th level and sees the rest of the class being generic blaster caster or generic edgelord anti-hero dark powers).

Interesting choices are fun for me. Lol-random dice ruling the game or just having only one decent option 90% of the time isn't fun.

[catagent101]

Yeah, to go along with everyone else, it depends on the context and what the motives for it are there's no hard and fast red line. In my case I generally find more limited creative environments interesting so I don't have a problem with it on a basic level (tho it depends on the system of course).

[gbaji]

In very broad terms, when I write an adventure, I first pick a game system, and then a game setting. And there will be restrictions, but it will always be based on those two things. If the players are going to be starting characters in TownA, in KingdomB, on ContinentC, then they're going to have to pick from stuff available in that town, or at least that kingdom. Over time, as the scope of the game expands they may be given additional options, but I'm actually pretty darn firm on "no outside stuff" in a game setting. You pick from what would reasonably actually be living in the area the game is playing in. No "My character is a dimensional traveller who appears there one day" kind of nonsense will play very far with me.

Within that specific setting, however, there's a ton of different "roles" that can be played. But yeah, pretty firm restrictions on races and often classes available.


Alternatively, a player can show up with the expectation that a game will allow them to play a specific pet character they already have in their head. They won't commit if the game does not allow sufficient fidelity to their pregame ideas.

And this is specifically the kind of player for whom my rules exist. I've just run into too many players who first come up with a character concept and then look for a game to play it in. Or they have their one "favorite character" and play a variation of it in every single game. I don't consider said restrictions stiffling. I consider the players inability to be flexible with their charcter concepts stiffling.



If the players have enough creative space, in actual play, to keep them entertained, then they don't need many options in character creation. If the DM railroads the players, and runs DMPCs to handle every story beat, then character creation is all they have left and will probably rebel at restrictions to what they can make. It's the same reason why players tend to turn murder hobo, they have no other buttons to push.

And this is the key IMO. If you make the adventure itself interesting, with lots of stuff to do and figure out and obstacles/opponents to overcome, the exact character classes/races/whatever really don't matter much. I've found that players who start out thinking that they will only have "fun" if they get to play some oddball character concept with some unique/strange powers/abilities, once they actually play for a while, discover that "country bumpkin heads to the big city and gets pulled into adventuring" actually is a heck of a lot of fun. And they discover that the gains and changes along the way are what matters the most, not what they wrote up prior to playing the character for even one session.

Character creation should be a starting point, not the defining story arc for the characters life. I actually prefer for players to be as basic as possible with their characters. Just enough to explain who they are, why they have the skills/class/whatever they are, what motivates them to go on the adventure in the first place, etc. What happens during play is what should grow and build the character. Starting out with specific expectations is a recipe for disappointment. Starting out with very basic stuff, is like a blank canvas on which you paint your character over the course of playing. Which I think is a much much better approach.


There's no hard and fast rule.
A short campaign where everyone's an elvish fighter could be fine.
The pitch "You're out drinking to celebrate having graduated fighter collage when stuff happens".

Yup. One of my fellow GMs literally ran an adventure where the kick off was "folks hung over from the after party from the storm gods holy day ceremony hear about sometihng and decide (perhaps in a still somewhat drunken stupor) to go investigate". Every single character had to be races local to the area *and* had to be followers of just two deities that would be participating in said holy day ceremonies. It worked out extremely well. Even when most of the adventure ended up being underground.

Players should be able to create unique personalities for their characters beyond mere class/race (or even deity worshipped) criteria.



How much is designing your character (rather than playing it) an important part of your game?*
How long is it running? Limitations on shorter games should usually be more acceptable
How experienced are the players? Very new players might be better off with limited options. Very experienced players will usually be able to make any given set of limitations work; Like in an Iron Chef competition, the limitations are part of the fun, not an impediment. But there's a middle a
rea where not being able to create the character you want will be annoying.

Yup. The first is key IMO. I think too many players spend too much time "designing" their charcters, complete with long complicated history and motivations and planned story arc they want the GM to create for them.

If the GM is creating a very broad framework and then using the character's the players create for inspiration, that works great. I've played in games like that and had a lot of fun. But players should also respect (and frankly appreciate) when a GM has actually pre-written the setting, including plot hooks, and scenario possibilties, prior to day one, and invite you to play in this setting. And yeah, some players might consider that stiffling.

Honestly, I consider that to be their loss. I've played in and enjoyed both types of games. Intentionally limiting yourself to only one style of play to "enjoy" seems self limiting IMO.


There's a game called Pendragon where there's only one class. Congratulations, you're a knight! You ride a horse, you have mail armor, you use a lance and you have the choice of a sword, axe, mace or flail as your other weapon. Do the math and there's about 4 efficient arrangements of stats (from memory)

Yup. Played Pendragon back in the day. What's interesting is that the lack of huge variation in the characters themselves stat and weapon wise, actually made for a great deal of variation in terms of personality. That game also had virtues/vices IIRC (not even sure if that's what they were called), which further defined the characters personalities. It was really really focused on actual roleplaying. Combat/skill resolution was actually a pretty minor component to the game. It was all about talking to various NPCs, figuring out what was going on, and how everyone "fit" in, making decisions about what you were going to do, who you would support/oppose and otherwise playing out some very knight like decision making.

And yeah. It very much lent itself to things like "I know this is probably a bad idea, but it's what my character would do here, so....". And the system really rewarded players for playing within the personality definitions of the characters far more than how well they rolled the dice.



For me, it's pretty simple: whenever a GM talks about limiting things, I start mentally printing their "Idiot" sign, and work to uncover just what kind of idiot they are. Historically, there's 1 answer they can give that will invalidate the idiot sign: if they give an answer purely based around the experience for the character. Like, "This is a survival-based game, and I therefore want you all to create highly-competent survivors (Rangers, Druids, Robots, Undead, Robots with built-in Replicators, whatever)", or "I therefore want you all to create highly-inept survivors (unskilled Fighters, Academia Mages, city-boy nobles, helpless princesses, whatever)". If the focus is on the feel and the fun, if the GM demonstrates that they actually understand the concept of having fun and put that first, then that's fine.

Similarly, "this module is for X characters, from level Y to Z" is theoretically the type of bound designed to ensure a certain type of experience; if the GM can have a conversation about the type of experience changing those numbers will have, and whether they believe that such changes will be a good experience for the group, and are focused on the concept of a good experience, that's fine.

EDIT: "Bob is afraid of spiders, so no spider-themed characters or abilities" is obviously also very much an appropriately enjoyment-themed limitation. And there's doubtless many other sub-categories to "for fun".

None of those are criteria I've ever used for placing limitations or requirements on player character creation choices. I mean, I suppose if a player has some specific phobia or something I'll avoid that thing, but that's not really relevant to limiting character choices in a game though. Again. To me, the most rational reason to limit those choices is based on the setting and "what should reasonably be there in the first place".

Then again, I tend to pay in my own custom made settings, and not some published worldbook. And yeah, I do that specifically because I don't want someone showing up with some obscure thing that I have no clue what it is or where it came from and them pointing to some source out there on the interwebs that added this class/race into the published setting and so it's allowed or something. If that's stiffling, so be it.

And only in very broad terms do I put out "suggestions" for specific skills/abilities relevant to the scenario I'm going to run. And it's usually more of a "you guys are going to be hunting down some folks thorugh the wilderness, so someone should have a decent tracking skill, maybe cartography for reading/making maps, etc". But that's about it. And only if there's some reason why they would know this ahead of time (they're picking from a stable of characters to go on the adventure). If I'm starting something "new". I start them off "new". The characters will learn the skills/abilities they need along the way. If someone starts out with something useful, great. It's never a requirement though.

I tend to expect the characters to "grow into" the setting over time. And they will be presented with opportunities to learn new and useful things that will help them along the way. In skills based games, this means access to new skills, or items/whatever that will help them. In class based, it means opportunities to pick different classes to take levels in which maybe weren't available when they started. They discover that they are spending a lot of time tracking things through the wilderness, so someone decides to take some levels in ranger along the way. They spend some time in a city with an arcane guild, and one of them decides to take levels in spellcasting there. Find a city with a well stocked library? Someone can spend time there reading the old dusty books and scrolls (benefits varrying depending on the game system).


So, for me, any restriction that is dumb and reduces the enjoyment ceiling of the game is too much, and is a sign of what kind of failure as a GM the individual making those restrictions is. On the flip side, any number of restrictions that are made for the purpose of improving the game (and are, you know, actually good at what they set out to do) are fine, at least so long as everyone can come up with an acceptable character under those restrictions. If someone in the group can't enjoy playing a high-competence survivor, for example, then that's a bad restriction for that group, rather than a sign of a true failure on the part of the GM.

Those are incredibly subjective concepts though. What is "dumb and reduces the enjoyment ceiling of the game"? What is "for the purpose of improving the game"? I think that all GMs, when they create any restrictions in their games, do so believing it's for good/positive reasons.

I also think this is highly dependent on the player though. I had a player who decided to play a very effete, well dressed, snooty, merchant type character in a game where they were basically slogging through the wilderness. His trading and bargaining skills came in handy on a couple of occasions when they had to "negotiate with savages" and whatnot along the way, but that was about it. But he had a total blast roleplaying his character, constantly complaining about the conditions, sleeping outdoors, no decent food, horrible bathroom conditions, etc. And yeah. Along the way, his character had to learn some new skills and abilities. He had to learn how to fight effectively (And I think he totally mastered the "hide behind someone big and whack someone with my stick when they aren't looking" attack).

Sometimes the most "fun" is had when playing a character that isn't designed for the adventure. So I never require that. I only restrict chacters based on class/race that is available in the region. What specifics you pick, and whether those are super applicable to the exact events that will occur? Not a consideration (for the most part). I just never assume that the most "fun" is had by always having the most effective character for the situation at hand.

[Quertus]

they're going to have to pick from stuff available in that town, or at least that kingdom

I only restrict chacters based on class/race that is available in the region.

You're running a game set in Waterdeep? I'm playing a Thayan spy. Not from the same town or kingdom, makes perfect sense.

You're running a game set in Metropolis? I'm playing Not!J'onn. Not from the same town or kingdom, makes perfect sense.

You're running a game set in Essen? I'm playing a wandering Elf (and I wasn't the only one), or a Norskin trader. Not from the same town or kingdom, makes perfect sense.

I don't know about the settings you run, but IME there's not only perfectly plausible reasons for elements outside your restricted set to be present, but usually the GM (or content creator, if different) has already placed those elements in the starting area anyway.

Which brings us to why you set that limitation. Was this bad limitation the result of a faulty Simulationist concern, where you just weren't able to see how unreasonable that limitation was? Or was there some other reason? Let's explore that reason, to see if it was as poorly thought through as such a hypothetical Simulationist concern would be, or if you actually have good reasons designed to improve the fun of the game.


I had a player who decided to play a very effete, well dressed, snooty, merchant type character in a game where they were basically slogging through the wilderness.

Sometimes the most "fun" is had when playing a character that isn't designed for the adventure.

Strongly agree. You're clearly ahead of most GMs I've encountered in that regard. Which means you should already have some idea what dumb restrictions, and restrictions that unnecessarily lower the ceiling on fun might look like, no? If you had unnecessarily restricted your player from playing that character, they might well have had less fun. That's it. That's my point. You already get what I'm saying. I'm counting the number of vectors in which the GM is placing unnecessary restrictions on character selection, potentially reducing the ceiling for enjoyment of the game. (And evaluating why they're doing so, what their blind spots are, and giving a name to my pain, but that's just extra.)

[Satinavian]

In very broad terms, when I write an adventure, I first pick a game system, and then a game setting. And there will be restrictions, but it will always be based on those two things. If the players are going to be starting characters in TownA, in KingdomB, on ContinentC, then they're going to have to pick from stuff available in that town, or at least that kingdom. The general idea is not bad.

However, i have seen a lot of GMs make the starting area as bog standard and boringly generic as possible. Usually so that new players don't have to read anything about the setting and to be able to gradually introduce all the interesting and fun stuff later and get some reaction out of it.

Limiting option to setting appropriate not just generally but to a specific region is fine... but only if you can catch the players interest with that specific region and the people living there. Otherise it is too restrictive.

once they actually play for a while, discover that "country bumpkin heads to the big city and gets pulled into adventuring" actually is a heck of a lot of fun.Maybe once. Or twice. But i have played enough country bumbkins to last the rest of my life and would only choose such a character for a very specific theme group and when i am in the mood for it.


Character creation should be a starting point, not the defining story arc for the characters life. I actually prefer for players to be as basic as possible with their characters. Just enough to explain who they are, why they have the skills/class/whatever they are, what motivates them to go on the adventure in the first place, etc. What happens during play is what should grow and build the character. Starting out with specific expectations is a recipe for disappointment. Starting out with very basic stuff, is like a blank canvas on which you paint your character over the course of playing. Which I think is a much much better approach.For this i prefer something inbetween. I don't like new characters to be basically white sheets. I want to know who they are from the first minute of play. However i don't like planned out storyarcs or set in stone development. Even a well defined character can change and the future is unknown.

But that is connected to something i have learned the hard way : If i put a long term plan and motivation in my backstory than that is usually something that tells the GM something about motivation and hooks the character takes. It is usually not meant as "this should be an achievable goal/playable experince". But that needs to be clearly communicated.

I tend to expect the characters to "grow into" the setting over time.Honestly, that sounds not appealing.

If i play a character who is from the setting, than i want to play a character who knows the setting because they lived their whole life in it. "Growing into/discovering" the setting is something for outsider characters. And the cop out of "all the characters are totally uneducated and from somewhere extremely remote"... just no.

[PhoenixPhyre]

If i play a character who is from the setting, than i want to play a character who knows the setting because they lived their whole life in it. "Growing into/discovering" the setting is something for outsider characters. And the cop out of "all the characters are totally uneducated and from somewhere extremely remote"... just no.

My personal preference as a DM--

1. I want characters who are embedded in the setting. Doesn't necessarily have to be that small region (the setting is set so adventurers are drawn from a much wider sub-continent-size region), but they should not be aliens from somewhere else. Characters from outside the main play area (the sub-continent) need approval and workup so I know how much they'd know.
2. I want characters who know stuff. I try to be very generous with "here's what your character would just know by having lived here for X period", but there are limits. So "utterly ignorant country bumpkin" or "alien from somewhere else" aren't my favorite characters to run for, because the only sane option is "you know nothing, any INT check that isn't just figuring it out on the fly automatically fails because you can't have the knowledge base". And that sucks.
3. I want characters who have
a) defined personalities
b) reasons to be adventuring
c) exposed plot eye-bolts.
d) and ideally some mysteries. Questions they want answered about themselves.

What's a plot eye-bolt? It's the complement of a plot hook. It's a place where the player has said "I'm totally ok with you grabbing on to this chunk of my backstory and will accept hooks based on it." What I want is players to affirmatively opt in to give me handles. Hermetically-sealed backstories are great...but don't really expose any surface for me to touch. These could be a flaw, a mystery, a family back home that you're willing to let me meddle with, relationships, bonds, ideals, etc. Just something the world can grab on to that you're fine with me fiddling with. I need something here. "I want to get rich" is ok as a starter, but tends to peter out fairly fast as a motivation.

I also love mysteries in backstories, open questions that the player trusts me to develop and bring out over the course of the campaign. I've had things ranging from "I don't really know who I am except <a few things>" to "I have these markings on my arm and want to find out what they mean" to "I know I went crazy for 3 years and want to find out why and what I did". And smaller things about families, relationships, etc. It's just more ways to tie the narrative into the characters and world. I don't require these, but enjoy them.

I also appreciate small-scale, cooperative worldbuilding. Things like families, villages, customs, etc. I love when players want to collaborate with me on them. But I don't require it.

[Rynjin]

If i play a character who is from the setting, than i want to play a character who knows the setting because they lived their whole life in it. "Growing into/discovering" the setting is something for outsider characters. And the cop out of "all the characters are totally uneducated and from somewhere extremely remote"... just no.

Yeah. I typically give a lot of "benefits" to specific characters from specific regions. What may be a DC 15 Kn. Local check to a wanderer from Varisia may be common knowledge to someone form Irrisen, and vice versa.

Even in homebrew settings I encourage players to just...make up their hometown, and sometimes even broader stuff (country, rough culture, etc.) and roll with it. It's more fun that way if the storytelling is collaborative and the player is super invested in not just their character and who they are, but how that character interacts with other characters, locations, events, etc.

[Satinavian]

@PhoenixPhyre
Yes, that would overlap pretty strongly with my preferrences. Both for characters to play and to run for.

Too bad we disagree about system and setting preferrences and live presumably far away from each other and don't share a native language.

[gbaji]

You're running a game set in Waterdeep? I'm playing a Thayan spy. Not from the same town or kingdom, makes perfect sense.

You're running a game set in Metropolis? I'm playing Not!J'onn. Not from the same town or kingdom, makes perfect sense.

You're running a game set in Essen? I'm playing a wandering Elf (and I wasn't the only one), or a Norskin trader. Not from the same town or kingdom, makes perfect sense.

I don't know about the settings you run, but IME there's not only perfectly plausible reasons for elements outside your restricted set to be present, but usually the GM (or content creator, if different) has already placed those elements in the starting area anyway.

Yes.That's the point. I place those other things in there. There may not be a Thaya, much less be spying on where you are. Or there may be other areas, and you could be from them, but only if it's been defined previously as part of the setting. The limitations are not arbitrary is the point I'm making.


Which brings us to why you set that limitation. Was this bad limitation the result of a faulty Simulationist concern, where you just weren't able to see how unreasonable that limitation was? Or was there some other reason? Let's explore that reason, to see if it was as poorly thought through as such a hypothetical Simulationist concern would be, or if you actually have good reasons designed to improve the fun of the game.

I'm trying to describe a process here. If I'm starting a new game in a new setting, there may not be much defined yet. Maybe a kingdom with a few towns/cities, and maybe a few nearby kingdoms and some very broad descriptions of their relationship to the one the players will be starting in and playing in.

I've been doing this for a very long time. One of the things I've learned is that for player groups to work, their characters have to have a reason they are working together (even if just for this one adventure). While having a whole group full of people from "other places", each with their own agenda, can be interesting to play out, it usually results in a ton of conflict over time. Which often results in unhappy players. Also, while players often want to play these sorts of "spy from nearby kingdom", "stranger from far away looking for <something>", and "alien species lost in a shipwrek on our shores" sorts of things, I find that they often end up as one trick poney type characters, and the setting itself has to constantly adjust itself to "fit in" the character (instead of the other way around).

As the campaign moves on, I absolutely allow for more "interesting" origins. But by then, the players themselves have a greater understanding of what is there and how everything fits together. So they will better know how to actuall play a "spy from nearby kingdom", or whatever, while actually having real reasons for interacting positively with the other PCs *and* they will actually enjoy it more.

Day one? First adventure in a new setting? Yeah. I'm going to restrict the options to "stuff that actually lives in the area". It's not really about the character limitations, but the players at this point. I'm trying to introduce an area of a world to the players. It's far far far easier to do that first and *then* over time introduce more exotic elements. It will make the setting feel like a real place and not just a mish mash of things that make no sense. And yes. I've found that players actually enjoy that far more and that said enjoyment would have been reduced if a zillion "outside elements" were allowed in on day one.



Strongly agree. You're clearly ahead of most GMs I've encountered in that regard. Which means you should already have some idea what dumb restrictions, and restrictions that unnecessarily lower the ceiling on fun might look like, no? If you had unnecessarily restricted your player from playing that character, they might well have had less fun. That's it. That's my point. You already get what I'm saying. I'm counting the number of vectors in which the GM is placing unnecessary restrictions on character selection, potentially reducing the ceiling for enjoyment of the game. (And evaluating why they're doing so, what their blind spots are, and giving a name to my pain, but that's just extra.)

I know what I consider "dumb restrictions". I'm not sure what you do though. Hence why I asked the questions.


The general idea is not bad.

However, i have seen a lot of GMs make the starting area as bog standard and boringly generic as possible. Usually so that new players don't have to read anything about the setting and to be able to gradually introduce all the interesting and fun stuff later and get some reaction out of it.

Sure. Depends on the setting itself though. I tend to play highish fantasy game settings most often (done many others though). But I also build my settings with an eye towards rationality and stability. I try to create real seeming places and people. Which yeah, means that most things are "boring/normal" things. Towns are just towns. With people. Most of whom are farming, or raising animals, or building stuff, or providing other goods/services in said town.

I think there is a tendency for some GMs to go for the strange/exotic right out of the gate. I think that's a mistake. I mean, you can start out the campaign set in a city on the ruins of a crashed ancient spaceship, with alien tech everywhere and strange random things going on. And an order of powerful wizards there. And powerful priests. And shamans. And psionics. And thieves guild. And construct characters. And robot/cyborg people. And Elves. And Trolls. And <insert every possible thing here>. And I've done stuff like that. Believe it or not players get bored faster with that. Largely because the setting itself become a mess of <everything> and ironically that feels even more generic then if it was more restricted.


Limiting option to setting appropriate not just generally but to a specific region is fine... but only if you can catch the players interest with that specific region and the people living there. Otherise it is too restrictive.
Maybe once. Or twice. But i have played enough country bumbkins to last the rest of my life and would only choose such a character for a very specific theme group and when i am in the mood for it.

Was just an example. I think many GMs offset poorly written adventures with an "exciting" setting. I go the other direction. The setting is pretty normal. The exciting stuff is in the stories and plots involved in the adventures the characters are going to engage in. I guess the point here is that if the setting is "bog standard fantasy/medieval setting" and the characters explore and learn new/different things, become more skilled/powerful over time, and find powerful items/magic/whatever, then the PCs feel "heroic". They can both see how far they have come, but also understand why their characters are "special".

If the setting is so chock full of "strange/exoctic beings/things", then they're just one more in a world full of such things. Sometimes, as a GM, I'm going for that (I'm looking at you Shadowrun/Cyberpunk/etc). But a lot of the time? The players want to feel that their characters are "special". If you give them that via strange/exotic starting characters on day one, then it's hard to rationalize why this is actually strange or exotic, right? If the very first town you ever played in had a troll/cyborg, and an alien garthmog from planetX, and an elf princess with "wild magic", and a alchemist who can turn stuff into gold at will, and an ancient sentient construct war machine, and a half dragon half human with psionic abilities, then where do you go from there? You've literally created a "kitchen sink" setting here. So nothing feels "special" from that point on.


For this i prefer something inbetween. I don't like new characters to be basically white sheets. I want to know who they are from the first minute of play. However i don't like planned out storyarcs or set in stone development. Even a well defined character can change and the future is unknown.

Absolutely. Everything I'm talking about is about growth. In the characters. In the setting. And in the players themselves as they learn more about the "world' they are playing in.


But that is connected to something i have learned the hard way : If i put a long term plan and motivation in my backstory than that is usually something that tells the GM something about motivation and hooks the character takes. It is usually not meant as "this should be an achievable goal/playable experince". But that needs to be clearly communicated.

I don't usually start a new setting with a huge plot and plan. I start small. I may have some ideas for hooks and things going on around the starting area, but that's about it. I allow the world to grow organically over time. I try to find a balance between "interesting things to do, and things going on" and "I'm trappped to a story I wrote prior to day one that I'm not finding interesting and neither are my players".


Honestly, that sounds not appealing.

In what way? When I say that characters "grow into the setting", I mean that they aren't going to start out on day one as world changing powers running amok. They're going to be relatively low powered, having minimal effect on the world around them. They "grow" over time in power and influence. If you start out at the top, there isn't anywhere to go with the setting and characters, and people lose interest. If they start out small, then over time they find new/bigger/badder things in the world and are now powerful enough to handle them.

When those same players find themselve now handling opponents and threats they would have just died to at the beginning, they will feel a heck of a lot more satisfaction with their victories then if you'd handed them that stuff on day one.


If i play a character who is from the setting, than i want to play a character who knows the setting because they lived their whole life in it. "Growing into/discovering" the setting is something for outsider characters. And the cop out of "all the characters are totally uneducated and from somewhere extremely remote"... just no.

Ok. I think you misunderstood me. Your character will be fully aware of the town they grew up in. And the people there. And the kingdom that town is part of. And some information about neighboring kingdoms. They will know what people live in the area. The history. What wars have occurred. What temples are there. Some info about the politics of the area. But they wont know anything about what's going on 1000 miles away up the coastline on the continent they are on. Or what's on another continent across the sea. Or what's 1000 miles on the other side of the continent they are on either. They wont know that there's an ancient tomb in the desert 500 miles away over the mountains, and have never even heard of said desert either. They don't know anything about who lives elsewhere.

That's what I mean by "growing into" the campaign. As their adventures take them to distant lands, or over those mountains, or across the sea to that other continent, they will learn what is there. And along the way, they will encounter strange/exotic things. They will gain power/levels/whatever.

And here's the funny thing. I don't know any of that stuff on day one either. I haven't written it yet. When I decide that as part of some adventure they'll travel to <some island nation> I'll detail that island nation, and they'll expore it and deal with whatever the adventure it about. Same deal when they have a reason to travel across the mountains, and maybe explore that desert, and maybe have to find the whatsit in the ancient tomb. But those are adventures for later on, when they have more power and capability and their scope has expanded. Today? They're dealing with the local plots and schemes. The evil baron over there. The bandits in the hills. Maybe there are orcs or whatever periodically threatening the border areas. Maybe there's something bigger behind them causing this. Maybe there's some smugglers doing evil things. Maybe there's a cult of blood magic users causing problems. Maybe they find some clues that lead them into other things. And yeah, over time, they will discover greater connections between some of these things and other things, that will take them farther and farther away from their home town as they "outgrow" the local stuff and become more regional, then perhaps more global.

Again. Starting there on day one of a setting provides no real room for growth. Well, or you have to immediately jump to interdimensional aliens, and introducing strange rulebreaking stuff just to make things "interesting". I find that's a recipe for a rapid end to a campaign.

[Satinavian]

Sure. Depends on the setting itself though. I tend to play highish fantasy game settings most often (done many others though). But I also build my settings with an eye towards rationality and stability. I try to create real seeming places and people. Which yeah, means that most things are "boring/normal" things. Towns are just towns. With people. Most of whom are farming, or raising animals, or building stuff, or providing other goods/services in said town.

I think there is a tendency for some GMs to go for the strange/exotic right out of the gate. I think that's a mistake. I mean, you can start out the campaign set in a city on the ruins of a crashed ancient spaceship, with alien tech everywhere and strange random things going on. And an order of powerful wizards there. And powerful priests. And shamans. And psionics. And thieves guild. And construct characters. And robot/cyborg people. And Elves. And Trolls. And <insert every possible thing here>. And I've done stuff like that. Believe it or not players get bored faster with that. Largely because the setting itself become a mess of <everything> and ironically that feels even more generic then if it was more restricted.You can easily make an exotic and somewhat different setting without going for kitchen sink or unbelievable.

For example i could easily imagine a campaign starting small in a town. But instead of being the bog standard quasi-medieval one it is a lizardmen town with a culture taking cues from bronce age mesopotamia and having heavy modifications to account for lizardmen biology. Maybe we even allow some other races like nagas. No humans in sight or even heard of, anywhere.
Now that would be something special with characters that are bound to be a bit different and probably remembered.


Was just an example. I think many GMs offset poorly written adventures with an "exciting" setting. I go the other direction. The setting is pretty normal. The exciting stuff is in the stories and plots involved in the adventures the characters are going to engage in. I guess the point here is that if the setting is "bog standard fantasy/medieval setting" and the characters explore and learn new/different things, become more skilled/powerful over time, and find powerful items/magic/whatever, then the PCs feel "heroic". It doesn't feel "heroic", it feels as if as if the PCs are basically barred from everything that makes the setting interesting and might, at best, be allowed to look at it from afar, when the adventure allows.

I mean, i hate it already as a literature/movie tradition when utterly boring everymen types get dragged into exotic places to marvel at exotic things without really understanding them. Why would i want to have that in a tabletop-RPG ?


Not interested. I'd sooner play another Shadowrun campaign.


I don't usually start a new setting with a huge plot and plan. I start small. I may have some ideas for hooks and things going on around the starting area, but that's about it. I allow the world to grow organically over time. I try to find a balance between "interesting things to do, and things going on" and "I'm trappped to a story I wrote prior to day one that I'm not finding interesting and neither are my players". So the interesting parts of the setting are not only hidden, when the game starts, they don't even exist yet ? Only the utterly forgettable stuff is there ? Count me out.

In what way? When I say that characters "grow into the setting", I mean that they aren't going to start out on day one as world changing powers running amok. They're going to be relatively low powered, having minimal effect on the world around them. They "grow" over time in power and influence. If you start out at the top, there isn't anywhere to go with the setting and characters, and people lose interest. If they start out small, then over time they find new/bigger/badder things in the world and are now powerful enough to handle them.I want starting characters to actually be competent professionals. The kind of people who get asked to solve the kind of problems that make up the adventures. Not the kind of people who would better seek help themself.
That doesn't mean starting out with world shaking power. Honestly i prefer systems with less dramatic power increase than D&D offers. More powerful in the beginning, less powerful at the end of their career.

Ok. I think you misunderstood me. Your character will be fully aware of the town they grew up in. And the people there. And the kingdom that town is part of. And some information about neighboring kingdoms. They will know what people live in the area. The history. What wars have occurred. What temples are there. Some info about the politics of the area. But they wont know anything about what's going on 1000 miles away up the coastline on the continent they are on. Or what's on another continent across the sea. Or what's 1000 miles on the other side of the continent they are on either. They wont know that there's an ancient tomb in the desert 500 miles away over the mountains, and have never even heard of said desert either. They don't know anything about who lives elsewhere.Sure. But then i don't make a PC group that is all from the same fleshed out area only to play 1000 miles up the coastland/on the other side of the continent. Unless it is explicitely an expedition campaign.

[Telok]

As a GM I'm cool with backstories that have hooks, hermetrically sealed backstories, excessive emo death & doom backstories, happiness & light backstories, etc. I'm happy to get anything that says the player thought about the character as a personality and looked at anything about the setting. I'm happy they aren't showing up with another damn tabula rasa stat block they don't even have a name for. I always put more stuff in the setting than just mechanics, I like PCs that are also more than just mechanics.

As a player I'm fine with limits. I had perfectly good fun in OD&D where elf & dwarf were classes and we rolled stats on 3d6 straight. I'm personally good with wide open options too. The only thing I throw fits about is game systems lying to me. Call of Cthulhu with everyone playing bums, young journalists, and first year university students? No problems. The system matches your character's description to the general skills & capabilities. A D&D-like where the PCs are all pimply teens with hand me down weapons & scavenged armor? Fine, I expect to get ganked by the first goblin we meet, but no worries.

A game that tells me the character is an veteran professional swordsman and makes the character about as dangerous as a dog? Something's wrong. And then some nameless bums for a filler fight at the tavern have higher attacks & damage? Yeah, no. Don't tell me my character is a veteran soldier, learned sage, or professional thief only to make me mechanically slightly better than random animals or no-skill nameless set dressing npcs and only have 50/50 chances to do stuff.

I don't mind limited meaningful options that make a real difference. But false options, irrelevant options, and those that don't match what gets said to what they do or mean. Those annoy me to no end.

[MrStabby]

The main thing for me is to be able to chose something I actually want to play. If that is chosen from a list of 4 things, then fine.
If it's chosen from a list of 100 things... that's also fine. Sometimes restrictions can help, but sometimes they hinder.

I play quite a bit of d&d 5e and find it restrictive. There are a lot of classes and options and thematically cool things that are just not good enough to be able to play at a table of optimisers. Though there are a hundred options it kind of feels like there might be about 4 options I might want to play in a restrictive game. Ban bards and wizards and then skills, rather than magic can solve more problems and classes like the rogue are attractive.

Or ban feats and magic items and then monks become something I would have fun playing. A lot of my ability to enjoy a class is context dependant - change the context and change the fun.

For many years the 5e Sorcerer got a lot of criticism - but it never seemed bad, just overshadowed by the wizard. I image a lot of the critics would be correspondingly happy with the sorcerer in the absence of a wizard class in a campaign.

Bans don't worry me if I understand why. I did a chunk of the Curse of Strahd campaign with paladins banned because the DM felt they were tok good in that setting. I can work with that kind of logic - it certainly would make barbarian, ranger, monk and fighter PCs look a bit sorry.

I have also had DMs Ban a lot of spells like divination spells for spoiling the plot/mystery of a campaign based around it.

I would generally take things on a case by case basis but would look favourably on a DM that had put the thought in to making their campaign work more smoothly and had set our expectations accordingly.

[Quertus]

"you know nothing, any INT check that isn't just figuring it out on the fly automatically fails because you can't have the knowledge base". And that sucks.

As an absent-minded genius, that kinda describes, you know, my life. I can figure out things on the fly, but don't walk into situations with any expectation of using my knowledge.

So what makes that bad, in your opinion? For me, it's just another day that ends in 'Y'.

[gbaji]

You can easily make an exotic and somewhat different setting without going for kitchen sink or unbelievable.

For example i could easily imagine a campaign starting small in a town. But instead of being the bog standard quasi-medieval one it is a lizardmen town with a culture taking cues from bronce age mesopotamia and having heavy modifications to account for lizardmen biology. Maybe we even allow some other races like nagas. No humans in sight or even heard of, anywhere.
Now that would be something special with characters that are bound to be a bit different and probably remembered.

When did I once mention "humans" in my earlier posts? I said that the race/class availbility will be based on the setting and "what is there". The town you start in, and the kingdom it's in, and the other kingdoms around them could very well be lizardman inhabited. Or elven. Or dwarven. Or trolls. Or <anything at all>. You are making assumptions that I did not actually state.

But in your example, you are also "limiting" the players to characters that are lizardmen, right? If someone want's to play a human, they can't. Because there are no humans in the area. What's strange is you call this "interesting", while my own statements, which had no mention of any specific race at all, are... not?

I also said nothing about culture. I said nothing about technological setting (aside from my preference for fantasy settings). Could be bronze age lizard men. Could be iron age humans. Could be elves with laser weapons. I never actually stated a specific limitation. Only that I create a setting, and flesh out "what is there", and the players are expected to actually play characters that fit into that setting. Nothing more.


It doesn't feel "heroic", it feels as if as if the PCs are basically barred from everything that makes the setting interesting and might, at best, be allowed to look at it from afar, when the adventure allows.

I'm struggling to understand how you got that from what I wrote.


I mean, i hate it already as a literature/movie tradition when utterly boring everymen types get dragged into exotic places to marvel at exotic things without really understanding them. Why would i want to have that in a tabletop-RPG ?

What made you think that all characters must be incompetant ignorant people? I didn't say that. I did mention the "country bumpkin" background, but that was just an example, intended to contrast something super exotic. There's a whole range of stuff in between. Said "country bumkin" could also be an expert tracker and hunter, who has trained with the local militia with his father and brothers for 10 years now, worships the local earth goddess and has picked up some useful spells, and is otherwise a quite competant character. Another could be an apprentice to the town scribe, and has learned quite a bit of interesting knowledge, perhaps worships the knowledge god, and has picked up some useful skills and magic. Another could be a veteran of the local military, just mustered out after 5 years of service, has fought in multiple scirmishes, brings tacitcal and intra-kingdom knowledge to the group. Yet another works at the local healers temple, and has useful skills and healing magic.

Why assume that "local" somehow means "incompetant"? What I generally will not allow on start up in a new campaign are folks who are "the best at what they do in the whole wide world". They're going to be "competant", and capable. But yeah, there will be others around who are better. But those people are the experts already employed doing stuff, and likely aren't going to run off to go adventureing. The best healers work full time at the healing temple. The best scribes have contracts with all the locals to write documents and whatnot for them. The best warriors are the ones who are still in the miltary, maybe hold high ranks, and are tied down by responsibilities.

Character concepts do not have to be "exotic" to be competent, capable, and interesting. From just those few starting points, you can then flesh out a personality for each of these characters. What drives them? Why would they go off investigating something rather than leaving it to others? Why would they join up with these other folks in the first place? To me, that's what makes a game interesting. Not the list of weird powers and abilities you have wirtten on your character sheet.


So the interesting parts of the setting are not only hidden, when the game starts, they don't even exist yet ? Only the utterly forgettable stuff is there ? Count me out.

Trust me. There's nothing "forgettable" going on. If you have to use "faraway and exotic" as a crutch to make adventures interesting, then you are probably doing something wrong. Also, as I kinda pointed out before, the stuff that is "nearby" where the people start out and live and maybe even have family, will actually matter to them more. If they are just a transplanted stranger wandering along, there isn't much of a tie to make them actually care about what's going on in the setting.

So yeah. I like to start out characters in a single location and then have them gradually spread out from there. Works far better IMO. And no. I'm not detailing the entire world at the start. That's not a flaw at all. There's plenty to do nearby.



I want starting characters to actually be competent professionals. The kind of people who get asked to solve the kind of problems that make up the adventures. Not the kind of people who would better seek help themself.
That doesn't mean starting out with world shaking power. Honestly i prefer systems with less dramatic power increase than D&D offers. More powerful in the beginning, less powerful at the end of their career.

Already addressed this. You don't need "exotic" to have "competant". Again, I never said there were specific restrictions on things like magic available, skills available, etc. Only that the players will be expected to start out playing characters that fit into the area we are playing in. That area isn't just "featureless farms with no people skilled in anything, no temples, no magic, no knowledge of any kind". I literally never said that. These are fully fleshed out locations where people live. Lots of different people, with different interests and activities. Plenty of choices in terms of class/skills/magic/whatever to be had.

My point is that, having built that, if a player comes to me and says "I want to play <something totally alien to the environemt>". I'm going to say no. After we've played in this setting awhile, and I've maybe introduced some weird race that lives "over there", or some other things that justify someone playing such a thing? We can talk then. But on day one? First adventure? Nope.


Sure. But then i don't make a PC group that is all from the same fleshed out area only to play 1000 miles up the coastland/on the other side of the continent. Unless it is explicitely an expedition campaign.

Where did you get "only to play 1000 miles... <away>". I specifically stated that you start out playing in the area you start in. Over time, adventures may take the characters to distant lands. I'm honestly struggling to understand how you got that I'm having them create a limited set of characters "because you start in <small town full of nobodies>", and then instantly put them on a ship and drop them off in some distant area full of exotic things? That's not at all what I was trying to say.

Years later. After having explored and adventured in the nearby areas, they may run across some plot hook that leads them to some faraway land, where they will have other adventures, and encounter strange exotic things. But that's *not* going to happen on day one. Again. The setting and campaign grow over time as the players explore it. It gives them some sort of grounding in "where we came from", but allows them to grow out of that over time. Starting out <anywhere/nowhere>, short circuits this process, and I've found leaves the players more or less bored very quickly. There's no growth to be had if you start out with "everything exists wherever we go and is available to play".

[PhoenixPhyre]

As an absent-minded genius, that kinda describes, you know, my life. I can figure out things on the fly, but don't walk into situations with any expectation of using my knowledge.

So what makes that bad, in your opinion? For me, it's just another day that ends in 'Y'.

You have more knowledge than you think, because without a core set of knowledge you can't actually figure stuff out on the fly. Figuring stuff out on the fly relies on having a large knowledge base to interpolate/extrapolate from. Its why kids who "learn to read" without actually learning facts and context never actually learn to properly read--they're reading the words but bouncing off the surface.

Imagine if you asked "what do I see" and the DM answered in a language you don't speak or only used made-up words you'd never heard. IRL. That's how your character feels--they see things but have no idea what any of them mean (in the extreme case). In the less extreme case, any attempt to engage in social actions randomly runs the risk of you falling afoul of cultural conventions. Plus you can't read anyone, because you don't know how their culture acts. And you can't speak any of the languages, because the language here and the language there aren't the same. And you're not sure how many moons there are supposed to be, or whether that particular strain of grass is going to kill you if you step on it, or any number of other things.

At the game level, you're reduced to guessing blindly. Without information you can't make meaningful choices. And most of that information is stuff that any sane character who grew up in that area would know but you'd have no hope of knowing. DC Do Not Pass Go.

And you can't say "well, I'd pick it up fast"--it takes most people their entire childhood to get to that state. And even in the very similar cultures on Earth[1], people who are foreign to a culture still make stupid mistakes on a regular basis that a "native" wouldn't make.

Beyond that, as a DM I like giving information about the setting. And having players who want to know and who want to act in accordance with the setting's established nature. "I'm an alien outside observer" means you cut off most, if not all, of those accesses. You'll never (in the course of a game or even a lifetime of games) get beyond kindergarten level--there's just not enough time. And I want people who have reasons to have shortcut that process. Where I don't have to spell out everything and play the 20 questions game for basic concepts (like local religions, etc). Where I can just say "you'd know that..." and give the relevant information.

I've found that building characters that are embedded in the setting and have reasons to know things is critical to having long-running, well-meshing games. Every time I've had an "isekai"-like scenario (whether literally from outside the world or just out of their own context), that character and player have struggled to find reasons to be there and to interact. They're operating at a significant deficit from the starting line.

[1] compared to a world where you literally have 700 year old elves, 10k year old dragons, infinitely old beings of sentient evil and good, and 3' tall people and 9' tall people mixing around, Earth's differences in cultures are tame. We're all the same kind of person underneath and the variations are fairly small.

[Satinavian]

But in your example, you are also "limiting" the players to characters that are lizardmen, right? If someone want's to play a human, they can't. Because there are no humans in the area. What's strange is you call this "interesting", while my own statements, which had no mention of any specific race at all, are... not?Well, yes. Are you remembering that i never said something about limiting selections being wrong ?


Trust me. There's nothing "forgettable" going on. If you have to use "faraway and exotic" as a crutch to make adventures interesting, then you are probably doing something wrong. Also, as I kinda pointed out before, the stuff that is "nearby" where the people start out and live and maybe even have family, will actually matter to them more. If they are just a transplanted stranger wandering along, there isn't much of a tie to make them actually care about what's going on in the setting.

So yeah. I like to start out characters in a single location and then have them gradually spread out from there. Works far better IMO. And no. I'm not detailing the entire world at the start. That's not a flaw at all. There's plenty to do nearby.It all comes back down to "If start your campaign in a single location and limit the possible characters accordingly, you better make sure your players find the particular location and character options interesting." Otherwise that setup is too limiting.

[gbaji]

Well, yes. Are you remembering that i never said something about kimiting selections being wrong ?

I appologize if that's not what you meant. It sure seemed that way when you said this:

Now that would be something special with characters that are bound to be a bit different and probably remembered.

In reference to the exact same setting, just with lizardmen instead of humans.

And this:

It doesn't feel "heroic", it feels as if as if the PCs are basically barred from everything that makes the setting interesting and might, at best, be allowed to look at it from afar, when the adventure allows.

In response to me talking about starting settings "small" and growing them over time.

And this:

I mean, i hate it already as a literature/movie tradition when utterly boring everymen types get dragged into exotic places to marvel at exotic things without really understanding them. Why would i want to have that in a tabletop-RPG ?

In response to my suggestion that characters start out as more "normal" people who are part of a "normal" setting starting location and then explore and grow rather than starting out as worldly explorers or alien travellers or <insert other "outside" non-local thing here>.

And this:

So the interesting parts of the setting are not only hidden, when the game starts, they don't even exist yet ? Only the utterly forgettable stuff is there ?

In esponse to my statement that much of the world will then be explored over time as the characters gain in power and experience through the course of a campaign rather than starting out with this on day one.

To be fair, a lot of your responses were about the setting itself and not specifically the types of characters in the setting. But that was part of my point. When you have a setting starting point that allows "anything from anywhere" for character selections, you kinda have to make that starting setting include all of those things from day one. You have to explain why an elven traveler is in this town, despite not yet having decided where elves exist in your world maybe. Or where this alien dimensional traveler guy came from (and thereore that dimensional travel exists in your game setting). Or why there are sentient constructs walking around (and again, that they exist in this setting). Whereas if you start the setting detailing one area, with the surrounding towns/cities/kingdoms, with a set of different types of races, classees, guilds, temples, etc that are there, you may be "limiting choices" for the players, but they are logical choices based on the setting, and don't blow up the setting.

So yeah. I find these two things to be quite interconected.



It all comes back down to "If start your campaign in a single location and limit the possible characters accordingly, you better make sure your players find the particular location and character options interesting." Otherwise that setup is too limiting.

I agree. completely.

However, my follow up point is that it's a mistake to think that by including "exotic" things for the sake of including them, or just because the players want to, that this will mke things interesting. Your comment about basically swapping in lizard people for humans is a case in point. What makes things "interesting" in a game is the inteaction between characters (both player and non-player). The plots, schemes, twists and turns in stories, discovery, etc. Simply swapping one character template for another may seem interesting in the short term, but once the initial ("weee. I'm a <whatever> instead of human/elf/dwarf") wears off, the players will be bored. They quickly realize that there's nothing more "special" about being one lizardman in a world full of lizardmen, than being one human in a world full of humans.

Hence, why I said to focus on the adventures themselves as the thing that should be most interesting and not trying to just insert "exotic things" into the setting instead. The former will maintain the players interest for a lot longer than the latter. Of course, over time, as your campaign expands, you can introduce more exotic locations and creatures, and open up these opportunities to the players. But now those things really will feel "exotic and interesting" when played in a setting they already know and have become familiar with. And they will enjoy and appreciate it a lot more than if you'd allowed those things on day one.

[Satinavian]

In response to me talking about starting settings "small" and growing them over time.Now that was more about "experience cool stuff as an outsider through discovery" vs "experience cool stuff as an insider". I generally do prefer the latter as it tends to have far more intimate interaction and exploration of ideas and concepts.

So yeah. I find these two things to be quite interconected.Well, i don't.


However, my follow up point is that it's a mistake to think that by including "exotic" things for the sake of including them, or just because the players want to, that this will mke things interesting.A GM who thinks they know better than their players what their players really want is probably very wrong.


The plots, schemes, twists and turns in stories, discovery, etc. Simply swapping one character template for another may seem interesting in the short term, but once the initial ("weee. I'm a <whatever> instead of human/elf/dwarf") wears off, the players will be bored. They quickly realize that there's nothing more "special" about being one lizardman in a world full of lizardmen, than being one human in a world full of humans.If you can't imagine a lizardmen group in a lizardmen dominated setting that is not medieval to play completely different to a medieval standard mostly human setup, it casts doubt on the ability to produce interesting settings and cultures.


Hence, why I said to focus on the adventures themselves as the thing that should be most interesting and not trying to just insert "exotic things" into the setting instead. The former will maintain the players interest for a lot longer than the latter. Of course, over time, as your campaign expands, you can introduce more exotic locations and creatures, and open up these opportunities to the players. But now those things really will feel "exotic and interesting" when played in a setting they already know and have become familiar with. And they will enjoy and appreciate it a lot more than if you'd allowed those things on day one.Or you could just take an established setting that the players have the same familiarity with and unlock those options from the start.


I do see the appeal for theme groups of limited options. But i really don't see he appeal of gradually unlocking cool stuff during the campaign.

[kyoryu]

Never.

The vast majority of fiction we've read and consumed, the vast majority of characters we've loved, are plain jane humans, often with no special powers.

Of course, any player is welcome to not play in any game, and is completely justified in backing out of a game for any reason. The idea that there's some objective level of "proper" is kind of weird to me, yet is a common thread.

Restrictions (narrative or mechanical) can create different experiences. I don't see anything wrong with that, and even in a party of NG Human Fighters, you should still be able to have characters that are all very different people. But it's also valid to say "that's not an experience I care about".

[Quertus]

You have more knowledge than you think, because without a core set of knowledge you can't actually figure stuff out on the fly. Figuring stuff out on the fly relies on having a large knowledge base to interpolate/extrapolate from. Its why kids who "learn to read" without actually learning facts and context never actually learn to properly read--they're reading the words but bouncing off the surface.

Imagine if you asked "what do I see" and the DM answered in a language you don't speak or only used made-up words you'd never heard. IRL. That's how your character feels--they see things but have no idea what any of them mean (in the extreme case). In the less extreme case, any attempt to engage in social actions randomly runs the risk of you falling afoul of cultural conventions. Plus you can't read anyone, because you don't know how their culture acts. And you can't speak any of the languages, because the language here and the language there aren't the same. And you're not sure how many moons there are supposed to be, or whether that particular strain of grass is going to kill you if you step on it, or any number of other things.

At the game level, you're reduced to guessing blindly. Without information you can't make meaningful choices. And most of that information is stuff that any sane character who grew up in that area would know but you'd have no hope of knowing. DC Do Not Pass Go.

And you can't say "well, I'd pick it up fast"--it takes most people their entire childhood to get to that state. And even in the very similar cultures on Earth[1], people who are foreign to a culture still make stupid mistakes on a regular basis that a "native" wouldn't make.

Beyond that, as a DM I like giving information about the setting. And having players who want to know and who want to act in accordance with the setting's established nature. "I'm an alien outside observer" means you cut off most, if not all, of those accesses. You'll never (in the course of a game or even a lifetime of games) get beyond kindergarten level--there's just not enough time. And I want people who have reasons to have shortcut that process. Where I don't have to spell out everything and play the 20 questions game for basic concepts (like local religions, etc). Where I can just say "you'd know that..." and give the relevant information.

I've found that building characters that are embedded in the setting and have reasons to know things is critical to having long-running, well-meshing games. Every time I've had an "isekai"-like scenario (whether literally from outside the world or just out of their own context), that character and player have struggled to find reasons to be there and to interact. They're operating at a significant deficit from the starting line.

[1] compared to a world where you literally have 700 year old elves, 10k year old dragons, infinitely old beings of sentient evil and good, and 3' tall people and 9' tall people mixing around, Earth's differences in cultures are tame. We're all the same kind of person underneath and the variations are fairly small.

Hmmm… I’ve played the extreme of “no shared language”; it only worked due to the shared culture of the players at the table. Whereas walking into an online multiplayer game with no concept of the game and no ability to communicate with other players is a really rough learning experience.

Ignoring such extremes, if you share a language and a basic anatomy, like I do with many humans irl, I can listen to comments and observe things like the look of horror when I go to enter their house without taking off my shoes, and respond accordingly. Watching how others avoid the grass works when others are around, ****s to be you when you walk on the poison grass when no one is around, or when you lack wisdom and take the obvious path no one else is taking assuming they’re all idiots for not taking it (it’s a great way to find wet paint irl).

So, yes, there’s obviously a certain level of knowledge involved; I was talking about (my hatred for knowledge skills and) the difference between knowing the final solution and having to work up to it from basic principles.

So, for someone with actual intelligence, they’re not reduced to guessing blindly. With a shared language or similar biology, or even just the willingness to wait and observe, they can take their cues from others, and not just walk out into the busy street. Even if they maybe don’t get crosswalks, or that the “paths of safety” aren’t all active at the same time.

Without enough of a basic framework of understanding, I can see why you’d think it was terrible. If they cannot communicate, and don’t know enough to even begin to understand what’s going on (a caveman listening to a modem, or the poor AI watching that caveman and squawking on that modem at them not realizing that there’s any other way to communicate or that not all moving things are programmed to follow their instructions, for example), yeah, there’s nothing to work with.

You not wanting to spend time answering detailed Player questions about your setting details, or having them learn such things in character by trial and error, like how the natives know that the popping sound precedes a gout of flame in the fire swamps, is a valid preference, but it’s not universal, and it’s not one I share - I love watching or running PCs who move towards the source of the sound to investigate it. :smallamused: That’s not terrible, it’s maybe just not for you.

Yes, someone who doesn’t start at the conclusion will make mistakes, but they’ll also be likely to explore the setting more deeply, and to not be caught by the same blinders and assumptions as everyone else, because they had to actually evaluate why things are so. So it’s a merit and a flaw, so long as they have enough of a baseline to hang their observations and hypotheses on.

Or, you know, that’s my experience from computer games, RPGs, and irl.

But, yeah, I think I get your ideas, that too much of a disconnect to advance beyond kindergartener within the timeframe of a campaign is terrible, and even intelligent instigator might not be something you personally enjoy. Sound right?

[gbaji]

A GM who thinks they know better than their players what their players really want is probably very wrong.

All the time? I tend to agree. In some specific cases? Not so much. When you GM for a long enough time, one of the things you will realize is that it's quite common for what players say they want, and what players will actually enjoy playing, to be very very different. Eh... And this really does come down to degrees though. It's kinda like how a profesional chef knows better than the average customer what will actually make for good tasting food, but that doesn't mean that the chef can tell someone what their favorite food is.

So kinda like that. I can't tell this player right here "you will enjoy this. Or else!". But I can absolutely say that for a group of players, they will enjoy "these types of things" more than "those other types of things", more often and more consistently. And I can say with a high degree of certainty that the players who most want to play strange/exotic characters in every setting are also the first players to get bored. Now maybe these are just players with short attention spans and they'd have gotten bored anyway? But IME, what the players get bored with is the very "strange/exotic" characters they are playing. Once that new-character-smell wears off, they are itching to play something else different instead. Oddly, if you take the same players and actually require them to play a more "normal" character, where what makes the character "interesting" isn't some physical/racial/whatever trait, but some personality quirk, or association with things in the game, or whatnot, then the players actually focus on those things instesad, and because these are defined by their own imagination instead of a stat block they picked out of a book, they tend to be more invested in it and remain interested in the character longer.

Put it another way (and on a different axis). You're playing D&D. You start out the players at level 1. They play these characters for a long time and reach level 20. Lots of growth and change and experiences along the way, right? What if you just started the characters at level 20 instead? I mean, it's what the players were working towards anyway, right? So why "stiffle" them? Give them what they want! A level 20 character, right? Which one do you think they will play longer and be more interested and invested in? The one they progressed from level 1, right? Getting to that point is what makes it valuable.


If you can't imagine a lizardmen group in a lizardmen dominated setting that is not medieval to play completely different to a medieval standard mostly human setup, it casts doubt on the ability to produce interesting settings and cultures.

There is literally no culture of lizardmen you could come up with that I couldn't come up with the exact same thing for a culture of humans. Bronze age? Sure. Worship <insert deity here>? Sure. Eat sentient flesh? Sure. Complex social structure with strange rules/customs/whatever? Why not? The only difference is the race you are running here. That's it.

Aside maybe from the "ritutal regrowing of tails" or other purely physical trait differences, there's no actual difference that is based solely on it being lizardmen instead of humans, or dwarves, or elves, or well anything. That's not what makes the environment "interesting".


Or you could just take an established setting that the players have the same familiarity with and unlock those options from the start.

I was specifically talking about creating a new setting. Sure. If I'm playing in a published setting, I'll use whatever the setting includes as well. I tend to not do that because I actually find published settings 'stiffling'. I'm stuck with what was previously written, often by authors who did not well coordinate what they were writing, nor really think things through (or even care to do so past the suppliment/adventure they were writing at the moment). So no. Mostly hard pass. Unless I'm just really feelling lazy and bored I suppose.


I do see the appeal for theme groups of limited options. But i really don't see he appeal of gradually unlocking cool stuff during the campaign.

I'm not sure if you and I are thinking the same thing when you say "unlocking". To me, it's more about exploring the world. If they start in an area where there are no dwarves, and then years later, while adventuring, they encounter dwarves for the first time, now they know about dwarves and how they fit into this world. And sure. If, at some later point, someone asks "hey. Can I play a dwarf character from <place where dwarves are>? Maybe now that the PCs have encountered them, and opened up the secret passage of doom that was sealing off their underground city, some dwarves might want to travel to their lands and be emmisaries and learn their culture and whatnot. Or I'm part of a trade delegation. Or <something else>". And, if this makes sense, my answer will be "yes".

That's all I'm talking about here. But what's interesting is that I find that the players will be a ton more interested in actually playing a dwarf if they were introduced that way in the game over time, then if they'd been there on day one as a play option.

You enjoy dessert more if you only have it occasionally, and have to finish eating your dinner first, right? I know. Sounds very patronizing. But believe it or not, this is true and it does actually work. You hand out the coconut cream pies right off the bat, no one eats the more nurishing food. And pretty soon, they get sick of eating the pies too. You know, for a somewaht silly food related analogy I guess.


Never.

Don't know if I'd say never. I've spoken most about things people think will be stiffling, but I don't believe actually are. Um... But there are things you can do that will stiffle the players. And this is (to me anyway) more about creative personalities being blocked, or character choices/actions being blocked. Let the players play their characters. Make sure they know the setting and rules and whatnot, but make sure they have plenty of options as to how to actually play. And be good about allowing them to make their own choices, and playing out the responses to those choices in a fair and evenhanded way.

IMO, what stifles players more than anything else is when GMs force the PC choices to be what they want, or force outcomes no matter what the PCs do. That's something that players pick up on very very quickly, and really don't like. Like a lot.

My approach is to lay out "what is there", for the PCs. I then add in "what's going on", and even "what things happen" (which can act as hooks to adventures I have rumbling around in my head). What the players choose to do? That's 100% up to them. If they want to completely ignore every hook or plot I've put out there and go wandering around the wilderness? I can run that. Probably wont be as much interesting stuff out there, but there will be "something". There are no rails present, merely specific "things that are happening". If they want to engage with those things, then I provide the hooks and clues to do so. And I'd say that 99.9% of the time, that is what they will choose to do. But very very rarely will there ever be a "you must do this, or else!" situation (and those only with known characters in an established setting, where maybe there's some bad guy doing something directly to them for some reason maybe). But yeah. Those fall into "as the world grows, so do the characters" sort of things. Greater involvement in the setting goes both ways here.



Restrictions (narrative or mechanical) can create different experiences. I don't see anything wrong with that, and even in a party of NG Human Fighters, you should still be able to have characters that are all very different people. But it's also valid to say "that's not an experience I care about".

Abolutely. What may appear on paper as identical characters can be played out very very differently.

A good player should be able to take any character and make something interesting out of it. I guess part of this comes from playing in and running RPG tourneys back in the day. You would commonly be handed a character sheet. That's as "stiffling" as it can get in terms of character class/race/whatever choice, right? Yet, people managed to play those characters and had a great time doing so. It's what you do with the character that matters, not so much what's written on the sheet. At least in terms of "roleplaying" anyway.

EDIT: Additional thought. This is actually one of the reasons I'm not a huge fan at all of strict alignment systems (whether by system, or GM approach). IMO, this "stiffles" players more than anything else. In theory, it can be used just as a broad guideline to roleplaying and be a positive. But it can also be a tool used by the GM to basically tell the players how they should be playing their characters, even if the player wants to play that character differently. Taking even a bit to far and it basically prevents players from being creative or inventive with their characters. Taken to an extreme, you get GMs who use this to effectively railroad PCs down the tracks, or basically "take over" the characters and tell them that "because you're <alignment> that's what you would do here".

And I suppose a side bit (and another admittedly personal perception) is that players often choose to play strange/exotic race/class combos as an alternative to actual roleplaying (or maybe as a way to avoid GM fiat as to how they "should" play). As if they think that there's one "stereotypical" way to play a given race/class/alignment and thus that's all that is. So if they want to play something "different" they must change those things. I've just seen this mindset so many times, that I suspect it's one of the reasons why my (admittedly somewhat kneejerk) response to such requests will usually be "no". And also likely why I prefer not to include such things in game settings, at least until the players have settled in a bit (hey. I'm capable of self reflection here).

I should be able to hand 6 players 6 completely identical character sheets and have them play them all with no problems. A whole family of Zathras' basically. Each one slightly different, with slightly different pronunciations of their names, personalities, quirks, likes dislikes, etc. Over time, as the players play them, they should become quite distinct characters. The fact that they were all identical clones of eachother on day one should not make any difference. In fact, now I'm thinking I want to play this out sometime!

[Satinavian]

All the time? I tend to agree. In some specific cases? Not so much. When you GM for a long enough time, one of the things you will realize is that it's quite common for what players say they want, and what players will actually enjoy playing, to be very very different. Eh... And this really does come down to degrees though. It's kinda like how a profesional chef knows better than the average customer what will actually make for good tasting food, but that doesn't mean that the chef can tell someone what their favorite food is.How does this chef example fit your point ? We are talking about players making their preferences well known. And when a customer says "I don't like X", then a chef won't make him X because he knows that X is known to taste good. A chef will instead assume that a customer knows their own taste and no culinary experience will be more accurate.

Now maybe these are just players with short attention spans and they'd have gotten bored anyway? But IME, what the players get bored with is the very "strange/exotic" characters they are playing. Once that new-character-smell wears off, they are itching to play something else different instead. Oddly, if you take the same players and actually require them to play a more "normal" character, where what makes the character "interesting" isn't some physical/racial/whatever trait, but some personality quirk, or association with things in the game, or whatnot, then the players actually focus on those things instesad, and because these are defined by their own imagination instead of a stat block they picked out of a book, they tend to be more invested in it and remain interested in the character longer.That does not fit my experience. There are players who switch characters a lot. There are players with a short attention span. There are players who like exotic characters. But there is no noticable correlation between those groups.

Put it another way (and on a different axis). You're playing D&D. You start out the players at level 1. They play these characters for a long time and reach level 20. Lots of growth and change and experiences along the way, right? What if you just started the characters at level 20 instead? I mean, it's what the players were working towards anyway, right? So why "stiffle" them? Give them what they want! A level 20 character, right? Which one do you think they will play longer and be more interested and invested in? The one they progressed from level 1, right? Getting to that point is what makes it valuable.But we are not talking about a lv 1 vs a lv 20 character. We are talking about a non exotic lv1 character (e.g. a human fighter) vs an exotic lv1 one (e.g. a grippli inquisitor). both are supposedly the same powerlevel and and will supposed growth and change along the way.


There is literally no culture of lizardmen you could come up with that I couldn't come up with the exact same thing for a culture of humans. Bronze age? Sure. Worship <insert deity here>? Sure. Eat sentient flesh? Sure. Complex social structure with strange rules/customs/whatever? Why not? The only difference is the race you are running here. That's it.

Aside maybe from the "ritutal regrowing of tails" or other purely physical trait differences, there's no actual difference that is based solely on it being lizardmen instead of humans, or dwarves, or elves, or well anything. That's not what makes the environment "interesting".Of course physical traits are the cause of the difference. That is the whole point of playing other species. E.G. the last time i had an actual lizardmen culture in game, it had noticable differences in form of no family relations because females abandon their eggs and young lizards are only taken into society after surviving some years in the wild. This also meant no dynasties, no ancestors, no filial piety, no inheritance along family lines etc. Parents and children in any classical sense just did not exist. A small detail, but a tremendous impact on actual playing such a character. And that is only one of many points in which this culture was distinctively not human.


I was specifically talking about creating a new setting.I personally don't create settings all that often. But when i do, i prefer to do it as a group affort, not as something a GM does alone.

I know. Sounds very patronizing. But believe it or not, this is true and it does actually work. It does indeed sound very patronizing.

But more importantly i think it is wrong. People have limited free time to play games. It is best to make the best out of that time. If what the player wants to play is the coconut cream pie in the analogy, then the whole time between sessions where you are working and managing your life is the nourishing food. If even in the few hours you can scrape together once in a while to enjoy your hobby you get told to not enjoy it too much so that rare moments of getting what you enjoy don't lose their specialness, then i can find a better use for my time.



A good player should be able to take any character and make something interesting out of it. I guess part of this comes from playing in and running RPG tourneys back in the day. You would commonly be handed a character sheet. That's as "stiffling" as it can get in terms of character class/race/whatever choice, right? Yet, people managed to play those characters and had a great time doing so. It's what you do with the character that matters, not so much what's written on the sheet. At least in terms of "roleplaying" anyway.A good player can play every character. Just like a DM can. But does this include finding enjoyment ? Not really. Enjoyment can't be forced and i have seen many characters being abandoned because the player didn't have fun with them. Yes, good players who were totally able to play them.
That is why people don't like being handed a character sheet and this hardly exists outside of conventions.

[gbaji]

How does this chef example fit your point ? We are talking about players making their preferences well known. And when a customer says "I don't like X", then a chef won't make him X because he knows that X is known to taste good. A chef will instead assume that a customer knows their own taste and no culinary experience will be more accurate.

The analogy is going to a restaurant with an executive chef who specializes in Mongolian/French fusion food, and then insisting on ordering a pizza. The chef sets the menu. The chef decides what the options are. Just as a GM createes the setting, and decides what is there, and therefore what options are available to play. If anything, the restaurant is more flexible, since said chef could whip up a pizza for someone if desired and it wont affect anyone else's dining experience. But inserting a race into a location in a setting that wasn't written in originally by the GM so as to satisfy one players desire, will effect the entire setting and therefore everyone else's experience of that setting.


But we are not talking about a lv 1 vs a lv 20 character. We are talking about a non exotic lv1 character (e.g. a human fighter) vs an exotic lv1 one (e.g. a grippli inquisitor). both are supposedly the same powerlevel and and will supposed growth and change along the way.

Sure. But then why would the player need to play that exotic race/class in a setting that doesn't natively contain that in the first place? There must be some reason for that want/need by the player. Something they feel they will be missing if they play something that the GM has already stated is available and native to the region. You figure out why players feel this need, and then figure out how to fill that need with other things in gameplay.


Of course physical traits are the cause of the difference. That is the whole point of playing other species. E.G. the last time i had an actual lizardmen culture in game, it had noticable differences in form of no family relations because females abandon their eggs and young lizards are only taken into society after surviving some years in the wild. This also meant no dynasties, no ancestors, no filial piety, no inheritance along family lines etc. Parents and children in any classical sense just did not exist. A small detail, but a tremendous impact on actual playing such a character. And that is only one of many points in which this culture was distinctively not human.

The Baraduinian culture treats family as a internally disruptive force, and clan/tribe is all. To this end, children are removed from their mothers at birth and raised by tribal appointed "child rearers", and taught to have loyalty to the tribe berfore all other things. At the age of 10, these children are required to undergo a series of trials to prove their fitness and loyalty. Those who pass are re-integrated into the tribe. Those who fail are outcast or killed. To even refer to someone by biological relation is taboo. All possessions are to be used for the good of the tribe, and upon death, passed out among those who need them the most, always with the good of the tribe in mind. As the Barauinian's grew into a large and more widespread culture, they adopted additional social tools to allow tribes to gradually merge into larger groups, form towns and kingdoms and now span a somewhat large empire, controlling a large section of the Northwestern continental landmass. Strangers are seen with suspicion, but those born as citizens are marked as such by the, now much more formalized, child rearers guild, and are treated with respect and as equals. <add more details about social, economics, trade, relations with outsiders, nearby nations, past conflicts, internal structures, crime, laws, etc>.

Done.


But more importantly i think it is wrong. People have limited free time to play games. It is best to make the best out of that time. If what the player wants to play is the coconut cream pie in the analogy, then the whole time between sessions where you are working and managing your life is the nourishing food. If even in the few hours you can scrape together once in a while to enjoy your hobby you get told to not enjoy it too much so that rare moments of getting what you enjoy don't lose their specialness, then i can find a better use for my time.

Eh. Then why bother rolling the dice? I can just hand the PCs loads of treasure for showing up, right? Yes. Reductio ad absurdum. I get it. My point is that somewhere along that range of "I'm making things impossibly difficult and annoying" to "I'm just going to hand you whatever you want" lies "fun". I tend towards "the players actually want there to be challenges to overcome in the game as part of their fun". I also tend towards "the players expect me to create a consistent and rational game world for them to play in, so that the choices and actions they take have meaning, and thus value to them". So yeah. This means that if I determine that <this list of things> is what is located somewhere, then that's what's there. Period. End of story.

There's a little bit of slippery slope potential to "player asks me to change game setting to include X", to "player asks me to change <other things he wants>". I mean, it's a far more significant change to my game setting to include <some random race>, than it is to say "the thieves guildmaster is really my first cousin and we're best buddies, so I should be able to get X", or "I'm the fourth cousin of the King, so I should get Y", or "I think that there should be ships delivering <some good they want> at port". One requires a significant re-write to the entire world. The others are minor details that don't really affect anything beyond themselves (but may have significant adventure relevance of course).

[KorvinStarmast]

It's fairly common that a GM will say 'no species A' or 'no class B' when listing available options for character creation. You don't like the limits, you GM. Play that game that's offered or do something else with your free time.
Also: what Kyoryu said.
Also: I am on campaign 3 with Phoenix. His approach works very well.

[sithlordnergal]

It becomes stiffling the moment you're unable to effectively achieve whatever it is you're trying to build. And the key word here is "effectively".


So, I tend to focus on the mechanical build first, with backstory coming last. I'll focus on trying to optimize something mechanical with the build over personality or whatever. Like, say I want to make an optimized Dual Wielder. My go to build is a Goblin Fighter/Paladin/Sorcerer with the Dual Wielder feat, Two-Weapon Fighting, that rides a Medium mount, and dual wields Lances. It makes for a very effective Dual wielder, even if its a very silly mental image. Once I have that, i'll work to fit them into the world.

Now, you can add some limits in order to keep things less silly. For example, I don't have to play a Goblin, its just my preference cause I adore playing Goblins. Any small race will be effective with this build. I also don't have to mutliclass. A pure Paladin works, though you lose out on Two-Weapon Fighting and having more spell slots to Smite with. The only limit that harms the build's effectiveness is the multiclass ban, but even then I'm only losing out on a small amount of damage, and a few bonus spell slots.

However, I would not be able to make this build in a game that removed feats entirely, or restricted you to Medium sized races. The entire build falls apart if you can't take Dual Wielder, since it lets you use any one handed melee weapon, even if its not Light. And while a Medium sized race still, technically, works, the fact that I'd need a Large mount would make it effectively impossible to use inside of dungeons where a Large mount likely wouldn't fit. Without the feat I'd be stuck using Light Weapons, which is the exact opposite of effective and you may as well use a Great Sword instead. And with the Large mount I'd be stuck with a headache that's more trouble than its worth.

EDIT


The Baraduinian culture treats family as a internally disruptive force, and clan/tribe is all. To this end, children are removed from their mothers at birth and raised by tribal appointed "child rearers", and taught to have loyalty to the tribe berfore all other things. At the age of 10, these children are required to undergo a series of trials to prove their fitness and loyalty. Those who pass are re-integrated into the tribe. Those who fail are outcast or killed. To even refer to someone by biological relation is taboo. All possessions are to be used for the good of the tribe, and upon death, passed out among those who need them the most, always with the good of the tribe in mind. As the Barauinian's grew into a large and more widespread culture, they adopted additional social tools to allow tribes to gradually merge into larger groups, form towns and kingdoms and now span a somewhat large empire, controlling a large section of the Northwestern continental landmass. Strangers are seen with suspicion, but those born as citizens are marked as such by the, now much more formalized, child rearers guild, and are treated with respect and as equals. <add more details about social, economics, trade, relations with outsiders, nearby nations, past conflicts, internal structures, crime, laws, etc>.

Done.


I mean yeah, you can make a generic culture for anything. But lets be honest, a tribe of Lizardfolk that does that will inherently be more interesting than a tribe of Humans that do that because you don't see Lizardfolk in the everyday world. Where as I wouldn't be surprised to see that sort of idea taking hold as some sort of weird cult in the middle of America. One is an interesting tribe that helps to highlight the differences between Human and Lizardfolk culture and morality. The other would be a group that I ignore cause they're just another bunch of crazy Humans, and probably a cult that we'll fight later, about on the same level as an Elemental Cult.

[Satinavian]

The analogy is going to a restaurant with an executive chef who specializes in Mongolian/French fusion food, and then insisting on ordering a pizza. The chef sets the menu. The chef decides what the options are. Just as a GM createes the setting, and decides what is there, and therefore what options are available to play. If anything, the restaurant is more flexible, since said chef could whip up a pizza for someone if desired and it wont affect anyone else's dining experience. But inserting a race into a location in a setting that wasn't written in originally by the GM so as to satisfy one players desire, will effect the entire setting and therefore everyone else's experience of that setting.Why would someone who doesn't like Mongolian/Frensh food go to a restaurant specializing in it ?
If a player does not find the setting interesting or the potential character options inspiring, they would be well advised to not play in it. Becsaue they most likely won't like it.


Sure. But then why would the player need to play that exotic race/class in a setting that doesn't natively contain that in the first place? There must be some reason for that want/need by the player. Something they feel they will be missing if they play something that the GM has already stated is available and native to the region. You figure out why players feel this need, and then figure out how to fill that need with other things in gameplay.Sure, you try to find a compromise, some option the player has overlooked or was not aware of and that catches his interest. But the main problem is "none of the available options seems like something i would enjoy playing" and that is not really something that can be directly tackled without changing the available options. Sure, a GM might try a sales pitch to convince the player they would have fun but IME that rarely worls out.


Eh. Then why bother rolling the dice? I can just hand the PCs loads of treasure for showing up, right? Yes. Reductio ad absurdum. I get it. My point is that somewhere along that range of "I'm making things impossibly difficult and annoying" to "I'm just going to hand you whatever you want" lies "fun". I tend towards "the players actually want there to be challenges to overcome in the game as part of their fun". I also tend towards "the players expect me to create a consistent and rational game world for them to play in, so that the choices and actions they take have meaning, and thus value to them". So yeah. This means that if I determine that <this list of things> is what is located somewhere, then that's what's there. Period. End of story.I have never in my whole life had players saying they just want to be handed over treasure for showing up.

I have had players tell me they want to have it easier, that they were in here only for personal drama between PCs, not for extrernal challenges.
I have had players tell me they want to have higher difficulty because they feel bored if they don't lose when they don't pull out all stops and use their abilities in highest synergy.
I even have had both in the same group which was kinda a challenge.

But i can't say i have ever had players tell me what they want and what is fun for them and me knowing it better then them.


There's a little bit of slippery slope potential to "player asks me to change game setting to include X", to "player asks me to change <other things he wants>". I mean, it's a far more significant change to my game setting to include <some random race>, than it is to say "the thieves guildmaster is really my first cousin and we're best buddies, so I should be able to get X", or "I'm the fourth cousin of the King, so I should get Y", or "I think that there should be ships delivering <some good they want> at port". One requires a significant re-write to the entire world. The others are minor details that don't really affect anything beyond themselves (but may have significant adventure relevance of course).Well, yes.

I don't particular like rewriting a setting just to include a thing a player finds cool as well. If i have a player that really likes X, i will generally keep that in mind the next time i choose a system/setting, not rewrite the current one unless it would fit in pretty seamlessly.

But i do choose settings that have things my players like. Often after asking what my players like and have an open table discussion, especially with new members. And if i by some mistake turn up with something they don't want to play, then i shelf it and look for a better fit. I don't go "Well, just try to play those characters you are totally not interested in in a place you find dull, that will all change during play."

[Tanarii]

You don't like the limits, you GM. Play that game that's offered or do something else with your free time.
Or if you're okay with the systems, join D&D or Pathfinder official play. Then you can have your unique PC walk into a bar with an entire fantasy menagerie party. :smallamused:

Official play is ripe grounds for finding players for a homebrew open table living world campaign that actually has limits if you run them in the same game stores.

[kyoryu]

I guess there's two ways of looking at it - how much is excluded, and how much is included.

And no matter how much is excluded, there's an unlimited set of characters inside just about any kind of bounds - even single race, single class, or single alignment. Most characters in most fiction are just plain vanilla humans, with no special abilities, and yet they are still very distinct.

So I think it's just a matter of knowing what the boundaries are, and picking a point inside that still-limitless space.

In my experience, people that hate boundaries will always want to pick something outside of the boundaries, no matter where those are drawn. The draw to them literally is being outside the boundary. People that can work with boundaries are mostly happy regardless of where they are.

[KorvinStarmast]

Or if you're okay with the systems, join D&D or Pathfinder official play. Then you can have your unique PC walk into a bar with an entire fantasy menagerie party. :smallamused:

Official play is ripe grounds for finding players for a homebrew open table living world campaign that actually has limits if you run them in the same game stores. Great advice, :smallsmile: I should have added "public play" in my answer.


And no matter how much is excluded, there's an unlimited set of characters inside just about any kind of bounds - even single race, single class, or single alignment. Most characters in most fiction are just plain vanilla humans, with no special abilities, and yet they are still very distinct. Yes.

In my experience, people that hate boundaries will always want to pick something outside of the boundaries, no matter where those are drawn. The draw to them literally is being outside the boundary. People that can work with boundaries are mostly happy regardless of where they are. It is indeed the archer, not the arrow. :smallwink:

[Tanarii]

I guess there's two ways of looking at it - how much is excluded, and how much is included.

And no matter how much is excluded, there's an unlimited set of characters inside just about any kind of bounds - even single race, single class, or single alignment. Most characters in most fiction are just plain vanilla humans, with no special abilities, and yet they are still very distinct.I think there's clearly a point at which a line is crossed ... and that line depends heavily on the system.

If for example we're going to play the Spartans from 300, we can all be Human Fighter (class) Warrior(backgrounded). But the system better give us more to do during a fighting sequence than "I attack".

Personality can only make one stand out so much. Going back to 300 ... I couldn't distinguish between the warriors at all once they had their helmets on. It wasn't until afterwards when someone was talking about the narrator and the one guy & his son that I realized that I didn't even realize the narrator had left the battle nor that there was any difference between narrator and the one guy and his son. There was the Leader, and there were Line Troops.

Incidentally this is why Hollywood always wants to show the audience faces instead of helmets, personality alone isn't enough to make characters stand out. The same principle applies to TTRPGs, personality alone isn't enough, it's what the character is seen to be doing at the table that counts. (Which can of course be driven by personality.)

Of course, what many players forget is that under the same principle, no one cares or even remembers that you are a Goblin or Catfolk or Edgelord instead of a human. Unless it becomes relevant at the table. And even those players that don't forget that tend to try and address it by hamming it up. :smallamused:

[icefractal]

Incidentally this is why Hollywood always wants to show the audience faces instead of helmets, personality alone isn't enough to make characters stand out. The same principle applies to TTRPGs, personality alone isn't enough, it's what the character is seen to be doing at the table that counts. (Which can of course be driven by personality.)Very true, and it applies to mechanics as well - it's not what's written on your character sheet that matters, it's what results that produces in play. If you have to say "just look at my character sheet* / read my backstory and you'll see that my character's interesting" then it isn't yet interesting, and you should figure out how to convey that interesting-ness in play.

Yes, this does mean that "character who's been involved with all kinds of crazy **** but pretends to be totally normally (and is good at that)" is a rather difficult concept to make work unless you get some help from the GM (having that crazy **** come up in-game in ways that make sense). I've tried this and failed, and I realized the problem was that in media, you'd cut-away to the character's flashbacks or show them doing stuff alone that contradicted their mild-mannered image, but in most TTRPGs that kind of "camera shift" isn't a thing, and would be kinda spotlight-hogging if only one player was doing it.


Of course, what many players forget is that under the same principle, no one cares or even remembers that you are a Goblin or Catfolk or Edgelord instead of a human. Unless it becomes relevant at the table. And even those players that don't forget that tend to try and address it by hamming it up. :smallamused:Also true, but I don't think hamming it up is a bad thing. IME, in the significant majority of campaigns the characters aren't super-deep, are in fact somewhat stereotypical, and that's fine.

*Ok yes, there's also being interesting on a purely mechanical level, like "I made a healer+exorcist without any levels in divine classes", which does generally involve looking at the character sheet, but that's different than being interesting in-play.

[Tanarii]

Also true, but I don't think hamming it up is a bad thing. IME, in the significant majority of campaigns the characters aren't super-deep, are in fact somewhat stereotypical, and that's fine.
Having taken a "boring" basic 4e Human Cleric Str pre-build and hammed up the battle cries to Pelor for a few weeks of play, it got compliments. Not sure if it would have gotten old, otoh if it had been a regular group instead of open play it might have only been necessary for occasional reminders after it was burned into everyone's brains.

But conversely I've seen enough hammed up beer or ale swilling Scottish dwarf fighters to last a lifetime. Would it kill folks to play them as Norse dwarves for once? :smallamused:

Edit: Of course, on the second point that's one of the reasons why folks want to make a manic pixie catfolk sorcerer or something in the first place. But still "I'm not the human you see sitting in front of you" is a necessary reminder one way or the other.

[sithlordnergal]

I guess there's two ways of looking at it - how much is excluded, and how much is included.

And no matter how much is excluded, there's an unlimited set of characters inside just about any kind of bounds - even single race, single class, or single alignment. Most characters in most fiction are just plain vanilla humans, with no special abilities, and yet they are still very distinct.

So I think it's just a matter of knowing what the boundaries are, and picking a point inside that still-limitless space.

In my experience, people that hate boundaries will always want to pick something outside of the boundaries, no matter where those are drawn. The draw to them literally is being outside the boundary. People that can work with boundaries are mostly happy regardless of where they are.

I feel like this is a bad faith argument, even if its not meant to be. Just saying "There's an unlimited set of characters no matter how much is excluded because different personalities exist" isn't worth anything because RP personalities aren't worth much to begin with when it comes to significantly differentiating a character. If there's only a single class/race/build/ect., then Joe the Cowardly Fighter is exactly the same a Bob the Brave Fighter. The only difference is it takes longer for Joe to get into combat. Once the mechanics of the game start being applied, they are exactly the same.


I also feel that your experience might not be that widely shared. For example, I play in a game with a decent number of boundaries. One being that the Druid class is banned completely for in-game story reasons. Now, I'm very much a person who hates boundaries. I've convinced a DM to let me player an Awakened Maple Leaf that was named Lief Oakenbranch as an actual character for a year long campaign. But I'm also more than willing to work within boundaries as long as they are reasonable.

I had said it in a previous post of mine on the last page: But Limiting options becomes stifling once you are no longer able to effectively create your idea. And the key word is "effectively". For me, that's mechanical builds, cause I find the mechanics of a game to be far more fun, engaging, and interesting than RP. For others, that could be RP. But in either case, the line remains in the same place: The moment you can't effectively create what you set out to make, then its stifling.

[Vahnavoi]

Most characters in most fiction are just plain vanilla humans, with no special abilities, and yet they are still very distinct.

I'm going to challenge you on that and say that no, they aren't all that distinct, and that there isn't even room for them to be all that distinct.

Why? Because empirical factor analysis on how human personality traits correlate does not support an infinite or even large number of independent dimensions to it. Using HEXACO as baseline example, we have six dimensions. From that, by varying each dimension between low, middle and high result, we get 3^6=729 personality archetypes.

Now, you might argue that the variance within dimensions is more granular than that, and that's how we'd get a much larger amount of different possible people. That would be true, but only in a technical sense that doesn't make much practical difference. These colors are all of a different hexadecimal value, but how many do you see, nevermind have distinct names for? Telok's findings in the "Sweetspot for chance of success" thread becomes relevant here. People are good at noticing difference between zero and none, and 90% versus 10%, but middle values are hard and 60% versus 40% is regularly considered 50/50. Minor variation, especially in middle results, is lost to everyday observers.

Now consider if I took a deep dive in TV Tropes and caught you 729 pages worth of archetypes. How much of fictional characters you think that'd cover? I'm reasonably sure a fraction of that would be enough to cover vast majority of popular characters. Because they aren't even that distinct in personality and motifs.

Furthermore, there is a practical limit, relevant to roleplaying games, that has to do with player skill. It takes effort, from the confines of your own personality, to convincingly play someone of different personality. So, do you have any confidence that a player showing up to your table would be able to play even 729 different personalities? Hell, can you name a professional actor that's even come close to that number? Indeed, many professional actors notably play same kinds of roles over and over.

[sithlordnergal]

The vast majority of fiction we've read and consumed, the vast majority of characters we've loved, are plain jane humans, often with no special powers.


To add to what Vhan said, this statement is untrue in a literary sense. Unless you're looking specifically at an underdog type of story, very few beloved characters are plain jane humans with no special powers. Be it in literature, movies, video games, and more. A majority of well beloved characters are exceptionally special. Luke Skywalker is not a "plain jane Human", Harry Potter is not a "plain Jane Human". John Wick, James Bond, Batman, Superman, Spider Man, Hulk, The Master Chief, Doom Guy, Link, all of them have special powers of some sort that set them above and beyond the rest. In fact, I'd go on a limb and say most of them are mary sues in their own little way. But you could never say they're regular Humans, because none of them are. Not a single one.

In fact, off the top of my head, the only character that would come close to being a main character with no special powers is Frodo Baggins. But he's sort of an exception to the rule because the entire point of Frodo is that he is just a regular guy. He is just some regular guy with nothing special about him, that was given the responsibility of saving the entire world, and is surrounded on all sides by insanely powerful heroes and villains. Which is the entire point of that narrative.


And all those powers, or lack there of in the case of Frodo, are used in tandem with their personalities to make each character distinct. Personality is only half of the coin, and the application of what makes a character special is the other half.

[Vahnavoi]

Once you consider field of fiction as a whole, kyoryu probably is right that vast majority of characters are ordinary humans. I'm not contesting that part; I'm contesting the idea that they are distinct in terms of personality.

If we were talking about "special powers", I'd point out the same logic applies to them: there isn't an unlimited amount of ideas for them that are both usable and interesting. Which is why, if you take a selection of fictive works centered around "special people", you will find some powers reoccur time after time, while others appear maybe once as a joke. Of the above short list (Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, John Wick, James Bond, Batman, Superman, Spider Man, Hulk, The Master Chief, Doom Guy, Link), every single one represents a whole genre of protagonists, and even on this list some already share a genre (go ahead, tell me with a straight face how distinct Master Chief is from Doom Guy. I dare you. I double dare you.).

[MrStabby]

I feel like this is a bad faith argument, even if its not meant to be. Just saying "There's an unlimited set of characters no matter how much is excluded because different personalities exist" isn't worth anything because RP personalities aren't worth much to begin with when it comes to significantly differentiating a character. If there's only a single class/race/build/ect., then Joe the Cowardly Fighter is exactly the same a Bob the Brave Fighter. The only difference is it takes longer for Joe to get into combat. Once the mechanics of the game start being applied, they are exactly the same.


I also feel that your experience might not be that widely shared. For example, I play in a game with a decent number of boundaries. One being that the Druid class is banned completely for in-game story reasons. Now, I'm very much a person who hates boundaries. I've convinced a DM to let me player an Awakened Maple Leaf that was named Lief Oakenbranch as an actual character for a year long campaign. But I'm also more than willing to work within boundaries as long as they are reasonable.

I had said it in a previous post of mine on the last page: But Limiting options becomes stifling once you are no longer able to effectively create your idea. And the key word is "effectively". For me, that's mechanical builds, cause I find the mechanics of a game to be far more fun, engaging, and interesting than RP. For others, that could be RP. But in either case, the line remains in the same place: The moment you can't effectively create what you set out to make, then its stifling.

I get that you want to represent an idea effectively, though my experience is that the issue is more about the fundamental game system than about a restrictive subset of features being enforced. I usually play 5th edition d&d and I find that wherever I try and follow some kind of character concept rather than optimize, my characters are exceptionally weak. The game itself supports certain clusters of options very well but the spaces between the classes are poorly supported.

If my issue is about not being able to play a concept I like, then I am as likely to reject a game on the basis of the system as any other restrictions.


People are good at noticing difference between zero and none, and 90% versus 10%, but middle values are hard and 60% versus 40% is regularly considered 50/50. Minor variation, especially in middle results, is lost to everyday observers.

Well yes... but that's what happens when you use the wrong tool. If you want changes to the extremes on the same scale as the middle, you can just use log-odds.

[Tanarii]

If my issue is about not being able to play a concept I like, then I am as likely to reject a game on the basis of the system as any other restrictions.

Agreed. And sometimes the worst GM restrictions are ones that attempt to make a whole system work like something it doesn't in pursuit of a cluster of concepts.

Take WotC D&D and anything inherently low magic. This includes basically any classical concept, but in particular it kills Swashbuckling Pirates / Musketeers and Medieval Knights and Vikings, but also Victorian unless you want to go full Magitech/Eberron-style Victorian.

And both TSR and WotC D&D can't handle Intrigue, Mystery, or Horror. Including things that are a blend like Werewolf/Dracula (c.f. see the failed attempt that is Ravenloft) nor Cthulhu.

[sithlordnergal]

I get that you want to represent an idea effectively, though my experience is that the issue is more about the fundamental game system than about a restrictive subset of features being enforced. I usually play 5th edition d&d and I find that wherever I try and follow some kind of character concept rather than optimize, my characters are exceptionally weak. The game itself supports certain clusters of options very well but the spaces between the classes are poorly supported.

If my issue is about not being able to play a concept I like, then I am as likely to reject a game on the basis of the system as any other restrictions.



Interesting, I haven't ever had any real issue with creating a concept via the fundamental game systems. I only run into issues when a GM starts restricing things. But then again, that might be because I put a higher focus on the mechanical side of a build. The restrictions from the game system tend to make it a more interesting challenge, and while they can be restrictive I tend to find you can still do it effectively.

I wonder if the way the system handles the rp makes it harder to effectively make the character you're after? I honestly am not sure, as I don't really focus on the rp side of things.

[Mechalich]

Agreed. And sometimes the worst GM restrictions are ones that attempt to make a whole system work like something it doesn't in pursuit of a cluster of concepts.

Take WotC D&D and anything inherently low magic. This includes basically any classical concept, but in particular it kills Swashbuckling Pirates / Musketeers and Medieval Knights and Vikings, but also Victorian unless you want to go full Magitech/Eberron-style Victorian.

And both TSR and WotC D&D can't handle Intrigue, Mystery, or Horror. Including things that are a blend like Werewolf/Dracula (c.f. see the failed attempt that is Ravenloft) nor Cthulhu.

There are limits on how many concepts any given mechanical system can support at similar levels of efficacy. TTRPGs, being inherently mathematically simplistic systems attempting to represent an extremely large range of outputs, have this problem really bad, but even video games with significantly more robust mechanical systems and a greatly restricted set of inputs and outputs still have this problem. For example, later-era Dynasty Warriors style beat 'em up games tend to have over 50 playable characters, each of who represents a different combat concept (usually weapon+style variations), but if you play those games a bunch you'll find that a small fraction of the characters, probably around 20%, end up being top-tier and are just better at meeting the game's core needs than everyone else.

This presents an argument that a system should limit the available options to only those it can effectively support. The problem for TTRPGs is that the combination of simple mathematical models and a wide range of inputs/outputs means that doing this produces a list of options that is tiny. A good example is found in the Owlcat Pathfinder games, which are written in such a fashion that they demand relentless optimization from the player to meet in game benchmarks and therefore despite supposedly having access to thousands of potential ability combinations, only an extremely limited array of builds can be utilized in successful play.

This sort of design failure is sometimes described as a 'one true build' problem, and it is a very clear case where limited options stifle play. It's also an important example of how the options a system claims to offer may have no resemblance to the options in fact available to the players (or the GM if players utilize highly optimized builds and the GM wishes to build opponents capable of legitimately challenging them) for use in play.

[MrStabby]

Interesting, I haven't ever had any real issue with creating a concept via the fundamental game systems. I only run into issues when a GM starts restricing things. But then again, that might be because I put a higher focus on the mechanical side of a build. The restrictions from the game system tend to make it a more interesting challenge, and while they can be restrictive I tend to find you can still do it effectively.

I wonder if the way the system handles the rp makes it harder to effectively make the character you're after? I honestly am not sure, as I don't really focus on the rp side of things.


I guess it depends on what you want to play. A few characters I had issue with win D&D 5e:

An excorcist - this was something I thought would be cool. Using magic to defeat fiends and undead. Fiends tend to be magic resistant so the concept doesn't work unless you can find enough good spells that use attack rolls. Basically you can only really play a warlock and even then you are denying yourself a huge chunk of heir spell list trying to keep even remotely close to theme.

A knight in service to Kossuth - If you want to have a fire themed marial character, you are hurting again. It isn't like you can't remotely make such a character, its just if you do then its bad. A light cleric with greenflame blade will do something - but not much and when you want to be putting feats into martial prowess it doen't leave a lot of space and an eldritch knight using its sparse spell slots for fire damage isn't great either.

Any kind of wizard specialising in a particular type of magic. There is no benefit and just the downside of missing lots of really good spells.

[Vahnavoi]

Well yes... but that's what happens when you use the wrong tool. If you want changes to the extremes on the same scale as the middle, you can just use log-odds.

I was talking of human ability to spot changes in distributions, as applied to human personalities; the tool being used is human perception and I'm not sure what your suggestion is even supposed to mean in that context.

[Quertus]

Most characters in most fiction are just plain vanilla humans, with no special abilities, and yet they are still very distinct.


To add to what Vhan said, this statement is untrue in a literary sense. Unless you're looking specifically at an underdog type of story, very few beloved characters are plain jane humans with no special powers. Be it in literature, movies, video games, and more.

And it’s even less true for RPG-style characters in media.

Elminster is an immortal human Wizard with “Chosen of the gods” plot powers.

Drizzt is a Dark Elf Ranger who duel-wields magical scimitars (one named Twinkle) with enough skill to solo dragons, summons the displacer beast whose name starts with G, and can dodge spells that auto-hit, like Magic Missile.

Raistlin is a former human deity Wizard with a sickly body and Chronomancer eyes.

I think that’s the top 3 big named protagonists from the top RPG brand, and they don’t sound terribly ordinary to my ears.

[kyoryu]

It's almost like I used the generic term "fiction" on purpose.

Weird, that.

Yes, obviously that's less true in genre fiction.

[Vinyadan]

When you only allow thieflings, it becomes sthiefling.

[icefractal]

It's almost like I used the generic term "fiction" on purpose.

Weird, that.

Yes, obviously that's less true in genre fiction.But the vast majority of TTRPG settings are genre fiction.

And IMO that's not by coincidence. A great writer can make virtually any premise compelling, but most GMs (including myself) aren't great writers. The typical situation is more like an amateur improv group with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The premise has to carry a lot more water.

[Mechalich]

But the vast majority of TTRPG settings are genre fiction.

And IMO that's not by coincidence. A great writer can make virtually any premise compelling, but most GMs (including myself) aren't great writers. The typical situation is more like an amateur improv group with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The premise has to carry a lot more water.

Also, producing a compelling story for an audience is not the goal of D&D gameplay (and attempts to use D&D for this purpose tend to bend the rules is very substantial ways for this reason). The goal is for the participants to have a good time, usually in a fairly low-brow, lightly comedic way, and often with a large number of repeated, similar tasks with minor variation.

A wide range of options, notably, is a means to fight boredom. A game where the characters perform the same attack over and over in every fight because it represents the most optimal approach (there are many cRPGs like this, were the most efficient option is normal attacks + out of combat healing) rapidly becomes bland, especially given that TTRPG combat is inherently slow paced compared to video games - in an arena fight in something like Borderlands 3 each player might kill hundreds of opponents in 10 minutes. Doing that in tabletop might take days. D&D has a zillion monsters all with their own slightly different quirks because this provides variety to combat encounters.

The needs of a fun game and a compelling story are often in tension, this is one of the many reasons video game adaptations often fail. This is compounded in that a writer will often produce a fictional setting specifically to tell a single story. The world only needs to support that one scenario. A TTRPG setting however, needs to build dedicated fans who play many campaigns over time. That means producing new and different options for veteran players who have already used all the old ones. The problem with this is that option creep destroys both mechanics and fluff as they accrete.

[MrStabby]

Also, producing a compelling story for an audience is not the goal of D&D gameplay (and attempts to use D&D for this purpose tend to bend the rules is very substantial ways for this reason). The goal is for the participants to have a good time, usually in a fairly low-brow, lightly comedic way, and often with a large number of repeated, similar tasks with minor variation.

A wide range of options, notably, is a means to fight boredom. A game where the characters perform the same attack over and over in every fight because it represents the most optimal approach (there are many cRPGs like this, were the most efficient option is normal attacks + out of combat healing) rapidly becomes bland, especially given that TTRPG combat is inherently slow paced compared to video games - in an arena fight in something like Borderlands 3 each player might kill hundreds of opponents in 10 minutes. Doing that in tabletop might take days. D&D has a zillion monsters all with their own slightly different quirks because this provides variety to combat encounters.

The needs of a fun game and a compelling story are often in tension, this is one of the many reasons video game adaptations often fail. This is compounded in that a writer will often produce a fictional setting specifically to tell a single story. The world only needs to support that one scenario. A TTRPG setting however, needs to build dedicated fans who play many campaigns over time. That means producing new and different options for veteran players who have already used all the old ones. The problem with this is that option creep destroys both mechanics and fluff as they accrete.


Whilst this is true, I am also struck by the extent to which it almost isn't.

The elements of a good story are often the elements of a good D&D type game. Compeling characters, a good cause and all that for sure, but also something about the combats.

A fight should be tense in both - balanced enough to feel genuine threat. Where fights are not balanced and he antagonists are superior, this should be clearly telegraphed such that either an epic heroic death is earned or a tense flight ensues. Whilst the overlap isn't complete, a great game world is also frequently a great world for stories.

[sithlordnergal]

It's almost like I used the generic term "fiction" on purpose.

Weird, that.

Yes, obviously that's less true in genre fiction.

I can't even say that's true for general fiction. Even when looking at stories that are set in a world of just Humans, with no magic or super powers at all, the character the consumer roots for tends to have some special ability that makes them stand out, above the rest of the crowd. This could be a higher intellect, greater perception, an understanding of something beyond what the normal populace has. But relative to the rest of the world they are in, they do tend to have some sort of special ability that makes them above the general populace.

Now, I do say "tend to", because there are are at least a few genres that buck that trend. Anne of Green Gables doesn't really have any special powers to speak of. That is a book that falls into fiction. But for every Anne of Green Gables, you have two or three Sherlock Holmes. Human characters in a world just like our own, blessed with some sort of special ability that makes them stand above the crowd.


EDIT: Also, just using the general term "fiction" on its own applies to such a wide descriptor of things that its borderline meaningless. Anne of Green Gables, Sherlock Holmes, Star Wars novels, the Forgotten Realms books, 1984, A Brave New world, they all fall under the massive umbrella that is the term "fiction". But I doubt you could really put Anne of Green Gables, 1984, and Gauntlgrym on the same table and say "These are all similar books".

[Easy e]

It is too stifling anytime there is a class system in place

[sithlordnergal]

It is too stifling anytime there is a class system in place

I see your "class systems are too stifling" and raise you "having a system is too stifling" =p

[Pex]

It is too stifling anytime there is a class system in place

A Point Buy system is no better because you never have enough build points.

[Mechalich]

The elements of a good story are often the elements of a good D&D type game. Compeling characters, a good cause and all that for sure, but also something about the combats.

A good D&D game maps well to a type of fairly simple form of story. Specifically, the kind of short story that unfolds as 'go to place A, face problem B and complication C, overcome using cool stratagem X and plucky effort Y, grab rewards and go home. Many of the Sword & Sorcery short stories that inspire D&D - Conan, Nehwon, etc. - do in fact unfold in this fashion. In more modern parlance a lot of effective TTRPG storytelling represents the better class of procedural TV episode - there's a team of characters, they are presented with a problem, and they solve it while dealing with various complications. Games set in modern settings can in fact be built explicitly off this model (ex. The Mentalist can be modeled without basically any alteration at all as an oWoD Technocracy game).

However, there are complications. 'Don't split the party' is a very obvious one. Splitting the party is an incredibly useful storytelling technique that is widely employed in fiction for all kinds of reasons, but it destroys tabletop games (games in modern settings can get around this through the miracle of cell phones) because it demands all the principles be in every scene.


A Point Buy system is no better because you never have enough build points.

Point buy systems mostly represent a shift in responsibilities. The whole point of a class-based system is to provide option sets that are intended to be viable for gameplay needs simply by picking them (insofar as this often doesn't work, that is a major design issue). In point buy, the GM and player have to evaluate the resulting capabilities of every character and ensure that the character is neither useless nor absurdly OP, something that often requires considerable system mastery to do effectively. For example, it was widely joked that every WW 'sample character' ever made (and this is literally hundreds across dozens of books) was jaw-droppingly terrible and often completely incapable of doing the things the write-up stated the character must to be able to do.

A properly-designed class system is limiting, but it's limiting in that it cuts out the vast array of theoretical outputs that won't fit the system. cRPGs, which often do math hammer out the outputs, tend to be good at this, with games with active management like MMORPGs constantly tweaking those outputs to make sure the classes remain balanced. It's worth noting that most point-buy systems include guardrails of this kind too, such as the FATE pyramid, that are designed to keep characters within certain boundaries.

[Duff]

To add to what Vhan said, this statement is untrue in a literary sense. Unless you're looking specifically at an underdog type of story, very few beloved characters are plain jane humans with no special powers. Be it in literature, movies, video games, and more. A majority of well beloved characters are exceptionally special. Luke Skywalker is not a "plain jane Human", Harry Potter is not a "plain Jane Human". John Wick, James Bond, Batman, Superman, Spider Man, Hulk, The Master Chief, Doom Guy, Link, all of them have special powers of some sort that set them above and beyond the rest. In fact, I'd go on a limb and say most of them are mary sues in their own little way. But you could never say they're regular Humans, because none of them are. Not a single one.

In fact, off the top of my head, the only character that would come close to being a main character with no special powers is Frodo Baggins. But he's sort of an exception to the rule because the entire point of Frodo is that he is just a regular guy. He is just some regular guy with nothing special about him, that was given the responsibility of saving the entire world, and is surrounded on all sides by insanely powerful heroes and villains. Which is the entire point of that narrative.


And all those powers, or lack there of in the case of Frodo, are used in tandem with their personalities to make each character distinct. Personality is only half of the coin, and the application of what makes a character special is the other half.

You're overlooking whole genres of humans:
The entire romance genre. 1000s of books, people who bought dozens of them and could tell which characters are in which books
The "Soap Opera"
Most Sitcoms
Most Sims and most Sim games (eg SimCity)
Historical(ish) games like Civilization and Europa Universalis are all about people
The overwhelming majority of police procedurals like NCIS (OK, not actual cops as such in this case)
Most Sci Fi - Star Trek, Bab-5, stargate. Normal humans are central. Aliens etc are generally normal for their people and are mostly secondary characters
While Luke isn't a normal human, Han and Leah are.

[sithlordnergal]

You're overlooking whole genres of humans:
The entire romance genre. 1000s of books, people who bought dozens of them and could tell which characters are in which books
The "Soap Opera"
Most Sitcoms
Most Sims and most Sim games (eg SimCity)
Historical(ish) games like Civilization and Europa Universalis are all about people
The overwhelming majority of police procedurals like NCIS (OK, not actual cops as such in this case)
Most Sci Fi - Star Trek, Bab-5, stargate. Normal humans are central. Aliens etc are generally normal for their people and are mostly secondary characters
While Luke isn't a normal human, Han and Leah are.

So while there are genres that include regular humans, such as the ones you listed, I would contend that the number of genres that include a main cast that are above and beyond regular humans relative to their world is greater. Additionally, I would say that most sci-fi actually do contain humans that are "plain jane humans with no special powers". Now, keep in mind that everything is going to be relative to the world they're from. But for example, I couldn't really call most main characters from something like Star Trek "plain jane humans with no special powers". The show tends to focus on the best of the best, with the most average of all being, weirdly enough, the captain. But even then? I can't really call Picard, Janeway, Kirk, or Sisco average.

Though I guess Star Trek does have a way to writing their characters in such a way to seem pretty average despite being well beyond the average character for the universe.

[icefractal]

I think there's also a distinction between "normal human" and "average/normal person".

Tony Stark is a "normal human", in the sense that he's biologically/physically within normal human parameters, and doesn't have any inherent abilities outside the unmodified human range (yes, he's a genius, but not beyond what other genius characters in the setting are).

However, being extremely rich, a genius, having all kinds of advanced technology that the population at large has no access to (and being able to build more), having gone to other planets and dimensions, etc, etc - he's very much not "normal" in the sense of "just some normal dude".

[PhoenixPhyre]

For me, the limitations are the entire point. But then again, I think I approach characters differently than many here. I don't have a mechanical "build" in mind or even a mechanical niche. I generally start with an archetype--what FATE would call a "high concept"--picked from the "supported archetypes" of the game system and then go from there. Generally, I have little in mind for where I want the character to go past the starting point, just some open ended motivations and unknowns. In part, that's because discovery (what's over that hill?) is one of the major sources of fun. I want to see how the character evolves both mechanically and personality.

And mechanics only exist (for me) to bring out pieces of the character--since I don't have a power set in mind or even a really strict theme, I can play it by ear. Systems where I can't and have a reasonably effective character (aka 3e D&D and PF, both versions, all of which demand "build thinking" from the get-go) annoy me.

So for me, a system, world, or even campaign having strong thematics and restrictions enhances my fun, as long as the overall thematics is something I enjoy[1].

This also makes me prefer class-based systems over point-buy, since class-based systems inherently (or at least when they're not trying to do point-buy, but badly[2]) promote strong archetypes. The Noble Paladin, Guardian of the Weak. The Strong Barbarian, Raging Terror. The Nimble Rogue, Sly Shadow Sneak. The Learned Wizard, Scholar of the Arcane. They clearly say "this is what our game supports and encourages." And I like that.

[1] by which I mean things like "I don't like evil campaigns" or "horror isn't my jam".
[2] often, trying to provide build granularity ends up giving you a menu of directly-comparable things of varying value...but all the same cost. CF D&D spells, where even spells of the same level (and thus cost) vary tremendously even for the same mechanical niche. Or D&D feats, with 3e/PF/PF2 having the worst versions of this. If you're going to do a point-buy, build-a-bear system...go all in. Don't do point-buy badly. Some parallel power-structures are ok, especially when they're truly parallel. So you're not trading off the thing you're supposed to be good at for a shiny-but-weak toy or worse, encouraged to spend your theoretical "versatility picks" on pumping your numbers higher. Or yet even worse, tricked into thinking that you have freedom...when all you have is freedom to make the wrong choice and fall behind. Where if you pick optimally, you keep up with the system's baseline, but if you don't you fall inescapably behind expectations. D&D 4e with the Weapon/Implement Focus feats, I'm looking at you with both eyes on that one.

[Mechalich]

often, trying to provide build granularity ends up giving you a menu of directly-comparable things of varying value...but all the same cost.

In fairness, matching value against cost is among the most difficult things to do, in pretty much any system once you escape from pure numbers. For example, even mathematically robust tRPGs regularly fail to value status effects properly, such that they are most often either useless or the one true path to power. Any state in between is quite rare. And that's for purely combat-based abilities on a grid. Trying to properly match supernatural abilities that can be used more or less at any time against each other is a nearly impossible challenge. There's no way to just math-hammer results effectively, the only solution is trial-and-error through massive amounts of playtesting.

And, when it comes to playtesting, WotC is basically the only company with the money necessary to significantly playtest soft abilities of this kind. TTRPGs aren't really amenable to the kind of 'public beta or public test server approaches used by certain cRPGs, and those methods have problems of their own such as providing a preference towards the hardcore contingent at the expense of the far more numerous casuals. Once upon a time, White-Wolf theoretically had the money to perform extensive playtesting, but...didn't (somewhat infamously, the Guide to the Technocracy credits two playtesting groups, which appears to have been twice as many as the average product received).

So, while WotC is clearly not doing as well as they could on this front, many D&D spells have been clearly unbalanced for decades at this point, everyone else is stuck giving things their best guess and hoping it works out.

[gbaji]

I mean yeah, you can make a generic culture for anything. But lets be honest, a tribe of Lizardfolk that does that will inherently be more interesting than a tribe of Humans that do that because you don't see Lizardfolk in the everyday world. Where as I wouldn't be surprised to see that sort of idea taking hold as some sort of weird cult in the middle of America. One is an interesting tribe that helps to highlight the differences between Human and Lizardfolk culture and morality. The other would be a group that I ignore cause they're just another bunch of crazy Humans, and probably a cult that we'll fight later, about on the same level as an Elemental Cult.

My example was purely to show that any cultural differences can be generated without requiring racial differences as well.

One needs to ask the question: Is what makes this interesting the fact that they are lizardmen instead of human? Or the fact that they have a strange/alien culture with different rules and whatnot, so you have to (are able to?) roleplay characters from that area very differently and also roleplay how you interact with characters (PC and NPC) from that area differently? My position is that it's the latter that makes these "interesting" and "non-stiffling".

And I guess my further point is that within any given race/class limits, there are still a ton of different types of characters you can play. I tend to focus more on character traits/personaltiy/whatever as an internal component of the character itself, rather than as some sort of racial attribute. And yes, my experience is that many players use race as a crutch to create those things instead. Which is what leads them to want to play other races.

That's not to say that I run a lot of games that are "human only" or some such. In fact, I can only think of two game systems I've ever had that requirement: Call of Cthulhu and Paranoia (cause that's all you have to play). So no. I don't consider racial restrictions to be stiffling at all. If you can't figure out how to play a given personality as whatever races are available in the game, that's really kinda on you IMO. And all that's left aside from that are physical traits, which yeah, maybe folks want, but... well... that's an even longer discussion to have.


Sure, you try to find a compromise, some option the player has overlooked or was not aware of and that catches his interest. But the main problem is "none of the available options seems like something i would enjoy playing" and that is not really something that can be directly tackled without changing the available options. Sure, a GM might try a sales pitch to convince the player they would have fun but IME that rarely worls out.

I'm honestly curious. What exactly do you think is being limited here? It's not like I'm presenting exactly 8 character templates, complete with backstory and personality, and that's all you have to choose from or something. It's "here's the list of races who live in the area" and "here's the various cultural organizations which exist there", so "here's the <somewhat long> list of different types of classes you can choose from".

And honestly? I most commonly play in games that don't have classes at all. So... Um... You can be anything you want to be. I'm literally running a game right now, where one of the characters is the bastard(ess?) daughter of a somewhat crazed healer guy who takes his fertility goddesses ideas literally, who grew up in the healing temple, but at an early age discovered that she really didn't like healing (sick people are gross!), so she ran away and lived on the street for a number of years, picking up some theifly skills, until she was picked up by a priest of the local theatre guild, who got her into street performances, and has been mentoring her from there.

That's not enough variation and choices? They're literally limited only by "what is there". And there's a heck of a lot of "there" to pick from, and combinations of "there" as well. I once ran a character who started out life as a soldier, but liked gambling (a bit too much), then got picked up and recruited by a cult of gamblers, left the military and started working the bars and streets to make money, sometimes helping out the local thieves types as an enforcer (he was a big tough guy, so what sort of thing do you think he did for the local street types? He was certainly more lookout than second story guy, right?).

So you've got a character with some healing skills, and some thiefly skills, and some performance skills (acrobatics, juggling, etc). Another with some decent fighting skills, but also gambling skills, and some of the less stealth related thiefly skills (lock picking, rope work, forgery, etc). How is that limiting? And note, that this is before even considering what race this person may be, and what other additional stuff you might add in based on starting culture, and their relationship on that level.


But i can't say i have ever had players tell me what they want and what is fun for them and me knowing it better then them.

Not that exact sequence, no. But I have absolutely had players ask for something very specific (like the addition of a specific class/race/religion in a game), and for me to look around at the setting and suggest an alternative that fits into the setting better and had the player find it quite enjoyable. On a couple occasions, I've even had players comment to me that they would have never considered that particular class/race/religion combination before, but had played <the thing they asked for> several times (which was why they asked for it), and are glad that I didn't let them do it, because they've actually expanded their list of "things they like to play" as a result.

I think that there's a lot of range here, and we may be quibbling over the far edges a bit too much. Most players are going to have no trouble finding a large range of "things I'll have fun playing" in any given setting. Rarely have I ever encountered someone who just refused to play anything but "narrow list of things", which is usually what has to happen for there to be any conflict or issue at all. And yeah, IME in most of those cases, it's the player really restricting themselves far far more than anything I could do with my game setting. I can't say why some players do this, but I've seen it (rarely thankfully). But it's pretty much the only time this comes up, and yeah, those are the cases where I'm also going to put my foot down.


I don't particular like rewriting a setting just to include a thing a player finds cool as well. If i have a player that really likes X, i will generally keep that in mind the next time i choose a system/setting, not rewrite the current one unless it would fit in pretty seamlessly.

Oh absolutely. I've had players ask to play in a game like X or Y or whatever, so they can explore different ideas. Some work out great. Some are hilarious failures. Usually great fun anyway though.


But i do choose settings that have things my players like. Often after asking what my players like and have an open table discussion, especially with new members. And if i by some mistake turn up with something they don't want to play, then i shelf it and look for a better fit. I don't go "Well, just try to play those characters you are totally not interested in in a place you find dull, that will all change during play."

I guess it depends on how invested I and the rest of the players are in the game and setting. If it's some new thing we just started and we run through a short adventure or two and the players just aren't enjoying it, we'll move on to something else. No biggie. But if 4 out of 5 players are having a good time, and I'm having a good time writing stuff for them, and one player is not enjoying their character? Create a new character maybe?

Again. I guess I just find the entire concept that someone could not find anything at all interesting to play in a given setting somewhat alien. Game system not fun? Seen that (a lot actually). Game setting/campaign not clicking? Seen that. But this thread was about stiffling player character choices. And I don't think I've ever run an game (other than some very very short one shots) with anything near a limitation on character types so tight that a player (let alone many players) coudln't come up with something they were not only interested in, but excited about playing.

I think the key here is making the actual play interesting. You can take any set of characters being played by the characters and make things interesting and exciting if the actual adventure they're doing is interesting and exciting. IMO, the opposite just isn't true. No amount of interesting character choices on start up is going to make up for a boring and overly predictable (or overly random!) campaign. I'm pretty sure I could start a campaign by handing out a half dozen vritually identical characters to the players, and have every single one of them totally invested in the characters, and enjoying their growth and adventures as they play.

I often try to make the point that 90% of the character should be about what happens *after* they start adventuring, not before. Backstory and origin is great and all, but that's just a starting point. At my table, if I ask my players "list the top 10 most interesting/amusing/important things about all of the characters you've ever played in my games", I'm reasonably certain that none of them would list a single thing that was part of any character's backstory. That's just the way I run my games.


I guess there's two ways of looking at it - how much is excluded, and how much is included.

And no matter how much is excluded, there's an unlimited set of characters inside just about any kind of bounds - even single race, single class, or single alignment. Most characters in most fiction are just plain vanilla humans, with no special abilities, and yet they are still very distinct.

So I think it's just a matter of knowing what the boundaries are, and picking a point inside that still-limitless space.

Pretty much my position as well. I'd also add that it can be somewhat of a "glass half empty/full" situation. Depends on how you view things. And yeah, it also helps a ton to *not* play in a stock setting in the first place. When you eliminate expectations, then it's more about "what is available", and less about "why isn't this thing here?". I don't have to remove anything if it wasn't there in the first place.


In my experience, people that hate boundaries will always want to pick something outside of the boundaries, no matter where those are drawn. The draw to them literally is being outside the boundary. People that can work with boundaries are mostly happy regardless of where they are.

I don't know if it's quite that direct (although I suppose it could be for some people). I really do think that some people do believe that variety is dependent on being "different" but maybe can't create those difference themselves, so they fall to pre-defined differences instead. It's a lot easier to point to some obscure class and say "that is different, so my character will be different if I run that". It's a lot harder to look at a more standard class and say "what differences can I make to this character?" Also, many players are looking more at stats on sheets than personalities inside their own head. So more "rollplaying" versus "roleplaying". Which can be where dependence on race/class differences comes into play.


I had said it in a previous post of mine on the last page: But Limiting options becomes stifling once you are no longer able to effectively create your idea. And the key word is "effectively". For me, that's mechanical builds, cause I find the mechanics of a game to be far more fun, engaging, and interesting than RP. For others, that could be RP. But in either case, the line remains in the same place: The moment you can't effectively create what you set out to make, then its stifling.

And I think that's where we may differ signiicantly. To me, the mechanical differences are not what should be focused on. I guess, if it's a very mechanical game, that may be true. But that's somewhat circular. I don't tend to run overly mechanical games. There's no single ability or whatnot that's going to win the day for the party, so having some special unique set of such things isn't really much of an advantage. It's there. And certainly players may enjoy various different things. But I'm not going to reward some sort of min/maxed character build exercise or something in my games. Not going to penalize it either, but...

And again, I mostly play in classless/leveless games. So there's no such thing as "I can't do this unless <class X> is available to play". Just doesn't exist. You want to be good at "some strange combination of things"? Well. Take that combination of skills and abilities and we'll see how that works for you. But guess what? Outside of those skills/abilities/spells/whatever, it's going to be about the choices you make that really matter in terms of success and failure. Sure, your specific abilities are going to matter in terms of the specifics of what you do within a party structure, but that's about it. And a heck of a lot of what your character becomes over time is going to be about what you choose to do with that character during play, and sometime some random stuff too. It happens. Always the choice of the player which direction the character goes in, but sometimes things that happen along the way may present new options and directiions that the player would have never considered at start up.


The needs of a fun game and a compelling story are often in tension, this is one of the many reasons video game adaptations often fail. This is compounded in that a writer will often produce a fictional setting specifically to tell a single story. The world only needs to support that one scenario. A TTRPG setting however, needs to build dedicated fans who play many campaigns over time. That means producing new and different options for veteran players who have already used all the old ones. The problem with this is that option creep destroys both mechanics and fluff as they accrete.

Yup. Which is a very good reason to *not* make "new and interesting" about introducing or allowing new races/classes/whatever with new powers/abilities. That often is more about increasing mechanical capabilities and may have downsides over the long haul.

I would also argue, strongly, that firm limits on "what is here" is vitally important if you want to actually build a long lasting game setting that can last through multiple campaigns, with multiple different PC parties running through different adventures over time. That's not to say you can't have a lot of variation, but game settings tend to blow up if you don't keep at least some geographical stuff consistent. I've tried to run "kitchen sink" campaigns, and while they are fun in the short term, it's nearly impossible to make them work long term.

Ironically, having limits based on "what is in the area", allows for you to create variation by moving the location within the setting. If my players want to run with a set of different characters, we can start up some in a different part of the same game world, where there are different races living there, and different cultures, social structures, religions, magic availability, etc. Heck. Some can be different tech levels too. We once decided to run some characters on a particular far off isolated island in the game world, with pretty primative folks living on it. We're talking stone axes and simple shamanistic magic. It was a blast. Sure. These characters were never going to rise to "world spanning" power levels, but it didn't change that relative to what we were dealing with, we still had tons of fun.

I ran another entire (pretty long) set of adventures starting out characters who were part of an "evil" empire. Of course, from their perspective they were the good guys, and working to root out the "evil outsiders". Some of our most interesting adventures occurred in that one (I did a creepy "children of the corn" type of scenario with this group that my players still talk about today).

If the entire setting is "flat" (meaning you allow everything everywhere), then there's nothing you can really do to expand it, and not a lot of reason for the PCs to actually go anywhere (meet the new kingdom, same as the old kingdom). Avoiding that in the starting area, allows you to expand over time, introducing more "things" as the players explore the world. Which makes the world actually interesting to explore. Dunno. I just find that starting small and simple and then building over time (but also keeping each other area similarly "small and simple", but with differences in specifics) tends to work best. It allows for a wide assortment of "things that can exist", while restricting "things that are present right here" down to a manageable level.

[Duff]

Yup. The first is key IMO. I think too many players spend too much time "designing" their charcters, complete with long complicated history and motivations and planned story arc they want the GM to create for them.



Thankyou for the general vote of confidence. On this specific point I disgree with you.
Thre's no wrong way to enjoy your roleplaying

[Satinavian]

I'm honestly curious. What exactly do you think is being limited here? It's not like I'm presenting exactly 8 character templates, complete with backstory and personality, and that's all you have to choose from or something. It's "here's the list of races who live in the area" and "here's the various cultural organizations which exist there", so "here's the <somewhat long> list of different types of classes you can choose from".I didn't say that specifically what you are offering is too limiting. I don't know your games. I did say that when neither the setting nor the character options inspire the player, then it is too limiting. I might go back to this point a couple of times.

And honestly? I most commonly play in games that don't have classes at all. So... Um... You can be anything you want to be. I'm literally running a game right now, where one of the characters is the bastard(ess?) daughter of a somewhat crazed healer guy who takes his fertility goddesses ideas literally, who grew up in the healing temple, but at an early age discovered that she really didn't like healing (sick people are gross!), so she ran away and lived on the street for a number of years, picking up some theifly skills, until she was picked up by a priest of the local theatre guild, who got her into street performances, and has been mentoring her from there.I play mostly in classless systems as well.

That said, if this is meant to show how flexible and unique the PCs in your game are, it really falls flat. So you have basically a thief character with some healing powers she is not particularly invested in and the classical "I cut bonds with my family and go on a different path in my life than my parent", which is just backstory and so common that it is pretty much clichee.

How is that limiting? Those are utterly bog standard characters. Nothing wrong with them, but i wouldn't be surprised if some people find them too boring.


I think that there's a lot of range here, and we may be quibbling over the far edges a bit too much.Probably. If your players alwways find interesting things to play in your games, your games are obviously not too limiting.

Most players are going to have no trouble finding a large range of "things I'll have fun playing" in any given setting. Rarely have I ever encountered someone who just refused to play anything but "narrow list of things", which is usually what has to happen for there to be any conflict or issue at all. Nope. Settings being too narrow happens all the time even for players that generally would play a lot of different characters.

An example would be a group wanting to start a V:tM campaign and a player saying "Nah, i don't like vampires. I'll sit out this one." That is obviously too narrow a focus for this player. And stuff like this happens all the time.

I guess it depends on how invested I and the rest of the players are in the game and setting. If it's some new thing we just started and we run through a short adventure or two and the players just aren't enjoying it, we'll move on to something else. No biggie. But if 4 out of 5 players are having a good time, and I'm having a good time writing stuff for them, and one player is not enjoying their character? Create a new character maybe?Yes. Or quit if the player thinks that would not help. Of course if you have a campaign with a happy GM and four happy players you keep that one running. But don't expect that just because 4 people enjoy it, the fifth one will eventually change their opinion and enjoy it as well. Tastes are different.


I think the key here is making the actual play interesting. You can take any set of characters being played by the characters and make things interesting and exciting if the actual adventure they're doing is interesting and exciting. No.
When you are pitching the campaign, you can't rely on the adventures to make it interesting. You basically have to convince with the setting here. And during character creation, you can't rely on the actual play either, the players must find something they think would be fun to play in your character options.
When the actual play starts, players are already committed and characters made. That is too late to show off how that whole campaign might be fun.


I often try to make the point that 90% of the character should be about what happens *after* they start adventuring, not before. Backstory and origin is great and all, but that's just a starting point. At my table, if I ask my players "list the top 10 most interesting/amusing/important things about all of the characters you've ever played in my games", I'm reasonably certain that none of them would list a single thing that was part of any character's backstory. That's just the way I run my games.If I would ask that, i probably would get a lot of events where characters could shine using their particular mechanical quirks or connect the adventure plot with their personality or backstory.
I would hardly get situations where the characters exact abilities and behavior don't really matter and would basically replaceable with other adventurers of the same power.



And again, I mostly play in classless/leveless games. So there's no such thing as "I can't do this unless <class X> is available to play". Just doesn't exist. You want to be good at "some strange combination of things"? Well. Take that combination of skills and abilities and we'll see how that works for you. Obviously classless games tend to be less restrictive in the first place so it is more likely that a player can make a character they like.
However even those games tend to be as limited if not more limited when it comes to species and the important question is always what kind of abilities are even available.


Ironically, having limits based on "what is in the area", allows for you to create variation by moving the location within the setting. If my players want to run with a set of different characters, we can start up some in a different part of the same game world, where there are different races living there, and different cultures, social structures, religions, magic availability, etc. Heck. Some can be different tech levels too. Sure. I prefer that as well. However :

1) If you consider all the possible starting locations, why choose a particularly boring and generic first as you seem to suggest ? Why not start at an interesting place from the get go even if the other interesting places are beyond the horizon for a while ?

2) You can only choose a different location if there are different locations. Which your approach of "make a starting location and maybe add something else in later when the adventurers go there" does not provide.

[kyoryu]

(This is agreement, expansion, and discussion, not argument, just to be clear up front)



And I guess my further point is that within any given race/class limits, there are still a ton of different types of characters you can play. I tend to focus more on character traits/personaltiy/whatever as an internal component of the character itself, rather than as some sort of racial attribute. And yes, my experience is that many players use race as a crutch to create those things instead. Which is what leads them to want to play other races.

I find the number one thing to make a character interesting is goals or values. Preferably more than one. Preferably ones that have a reasonable chance of coming into conflict with each other.

Someone that wants to be rich can be interesting. Somebody that wants to be rich, and wants to protect their family can be more interesting. Somebody that wants to be rich, protect their family, overthrow the evil ruler, and learn ancient mysteries is awesome - there's so many ways that those can conflict, and make interesting conflict.

In Star Wars, Han was pretty much the most interesting character. He's the only one that really had two motivations - be a good person, and pay off Jabba. Those conflicted with each other. Everybody else was, frankly, fairly one-dimensional.

It was only in ESB that Luke started getting different motivations - become a Jedi vs. confront his father vs. save his friends. And that's where he really started to shine.

There's two problems with this in RPGs.

1. Most RPGs don't expose this, so people don't think about it and learn how to do it.
2. A lot of RPG structures are such that your character motivations don't matter. You're playing through the adventure path, and if the adventure path doesn't care about those things, they're not gonna matter at all.


So you've got a character with some healing skills, and some thiefly skills, and some performance skills (acrobatics, juggling, etc). Another with some decent fighting skills, but also gambling skills, and some of the less stealth related thiefly skills (lock picking, rope work, forgery, etc). How is that limiting? And note, that this is before even considering what race this person may be, and what other additional stuff you might add in based on starting culture, and their relationship on that level.

Yeah, even that is, I think the least interesting bit of a character as a character. As a mechanical game piece, sure.


I think the key here is making the actual play interesting. You can take any set of characters being played by the characters and make things interesting and exciting if the actual adventure they're doing is interesting and exciting. IMO, the opposite just isn't true. No amount of interesting character choices on start up is going to make up for a boring and overly predictable (or overly random!) campaign. I'm pretty sure I could start a campaign by handing out a half dozen vritually identical characters to the players, and have every single one of them totally invested in the characters, and enjoying their growth and adventures as they play.

Yeah, I'd agree with this. And how to make an interesting campaign is a very interesting topic (there's multiple ways to do it, for starters).


I don't know if it's quite that direct (although I suppose it could be for some people). I really do think that some people do believe that variety is dependent on being "different" but maybe can't create those difference themselves, so they fall to pre-defined differences instead. It's a lot easier to point to some obscure class and say "that is different, so my character will be different if I run that". It's a lot harder to look at a more standard class and say "what differences can I make to this character?" Also, many players are looking more at stats on sheets than personalities inside their own head. So more "rollplaying" versus "roleplaying". Which can be where dependence on race/class differences comes into play.

This gets to my point 1 - it's just not a skill that most RPGs really help you with, so a lot of players never really figure out how to do that. So they grab for what's available.


I would also argue, strongly, that firm limits on "what is here" is vitally important if you want to actually build a long lasting game setting that can last through multiple campaigns, with multiple different PC parties running through different adventures over time. That's not to say you can't have a lot of variation, but game settings tend to blow up if you don't keep at least some geographical stuff consistent. I've tried to run "kitchen sink" campaigns, and while they are fun in the short term, it's nearly impossible to make them work long term.

I've found that it's very hard to make a consistent, believable world if you have a truly kitchen-sink type setting. And while I've taken a fairly extreme position here (all humans, no special abilities), in reality I'm generally not going to go that far for any kind of genre where that's not really expected. Though, you know, Game of Thrones came realllllly close.


Ironically, having limits based on "what is in the area", allows for you to create variation by moving the location within the setting. If my players want to run with a set of different characters, we can start up some in a different part of the same game world, where there are different races living there, and different cultures, social structures, religions, magic availability, etc. Heck. Some can be different tech levels too. We once decided to run some characters on a particular far off isolated island in the game world, with pretty primative folks living on it. We're talking stone axes and simple shamanistic magic. It was a blast. Sure. These characters were never going to rise to "world spanning" power levels, but it didn't change that relative to what we were dealing with, we still had tons of fun.

As a video game developer, there was a game called Hellgate: London. It was made by some ex-Diablo devs. It didn't do great, and there were reasons for it.

One of the most common criticisms of it was that it had no variety to the locales. However, in actuality, there were as many different tilesets as D2 had (and D2 didn't get those criticisms).

Where HG:L failed with that was that their design was such that you entered all of those tilesets very quickly, and the entire game cycled rapidly through them. Meanwhile, D2 had distinct areas, each of which had a much more limited set of tilesets available to it. But changing which ones they dealt with (along with which critters) gave a feeling of progression and change and variety even though the actual variety was the same between the two games.

IOW, people seem to view variety not based on actual variety, but on transitions. Adding more things to the general background doesn't really add variety - going from one set of things to the others does.

There was another comment that you made that I can't find, about backstory and expecting the GM to write for it. I think that's mostly just a play structure/culture of play issue - see this article: https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html . There are some issues with that article, but it's a good starting point. (Specifically, the description of classic is pretty off, and I think that it overly-conflates storygames and narrative games, which are pretty different)

Expecting a GM to kind of tailor the adventure to your character (but still basically write it and have you go through it) is the OC/neotrad style of game, while you're probably more of the narrative or classic style.

[Quertus]

IOW, people seem to view variety not based on actual variety, but on transitions. Adding more things to the general background doesn't really add variety - going from one set of things to the others does.

It's almost like you're saying that variety is created from limiting options: That the Wizard and the Fighter are different, and promote variety, because the Fighter can't cast spells, and the Wizard can't swing a sword to save his life.

And, sure, different things (classes, areas, whatever) having (and, thereby, lacking) different features (abilities, tile sets, etc) really helps promote the variety of a difference in feel between the things.

But I'm not sure that justifies calling "The acceptable characters are [Druid, Ranger, Warforged, Necropolitan] - pick one" "variety".

[Satinavian]

In Star Wars, Han was pretty much the most interesting character.Eh. I found him the most boring of the main cast. Even in the first one, Luke and Obi-Wan had the force which was somewhat mysterious most of the film (though never well resolved), Leia had all the politics in the background (though never properly explored), Chewie had his people, even the druids, their abilities and limitations and their role in the society were interesting (also not properly explored).
But Han was just some smuggler indebted to the mob. Nothing special. Everyone else was somehow linked to elements where you wanted to learn more about the setting. But Han could have easily be transplanted into other settings without much change. That is why he was the least interesting one.

[gbaji]

That said, if this is meant to show how flexible and unique the PCs in your game are, it really falls flat. So you have basically a thief character with some healing powers she is not particularly invested in and the classical "I cut bonds with my family and go on a different path in my life than my parent", which is just backstory and so common that it is pretty much clichee.

Those are utterly bog standard characters. Nothing wrong with them, but i wouldn't be surprised if some people find them too boring.

I'm curious what you consider "interesting" then. I don't want to project here, but it seems as though it's all about having some special/unique powers/abilities. And I get that. But here's the problem: If the race/class combination that gives these powers/abilities is "available where you start", then that's something that a lot of other people have too (including potentially thousands of NPCs right there in your starting area). So that's not actually "special" or "unique". If you really want the character and only that one character to have that ability/power/whatever, then that enters into a whole different area I call "wish fulfillment fantasy", that I'm not terribly interested as a GM in running.

I've also found that while players (especially newer/younger players) often really want to play these kinds of things, they're often the first characters abandoned quickly once the novelty wears off. Then they want me to allow them to play something else "special". Then another. And another. Each one straining the credulity of the campaign, while adding pretty much nothing. Sorry. Been there. Done that. As Akbar says: "it's a trap!". And it's absoultely being used by the player as a crutch.

If you mean something else by not "bog standard" and "boring", then please elaborate.



Nope. Settings being too narrow happens all the time even for players that generally would play a lot of different characters.

An example would be a group wanting to start a V:tM campaign and a player saying "Nah, i don't like vampires. I'll sit out this one." That is obviously too narrow a focus for this player. And stuff like this happens all the time.

That's a game system, not a game setting. And sure, the thread is just about "limiting options", so that qualifies, I guess. But if we're playing V:tM, then that's the game we agreed on playing. That's a decision made prior to what the setting is (location, available classes/races, etc). I'm speaking specifically about playing a game in which there is the potential for <list of races/classes/whatever> within the game rules, but the GM sets up a starting area where <subset of that list> are available to actually play, and examining whether that's actually "stiffling" to the players. Going directly to a game system where the only rules that exist assume players are playing vampires is a bit off that subject.


Yes. Or quit if the player thinks that would not help. Of course if you have a campaign with a happy GM and four happy players you keep that one running. But don't expect that just because 4 people enjoy it, the fifth one will eventually change their opinion and enjoy it as well. Tastes are different.

Sure. If we're playing a high fantasy game and the player really wants to play dark gritty sci-fi, or steampunk, or something. I guess. Again, that's not really in the scope of what I'm talking about here. And yeah. I do think that's more about the player having limited scope than the game. I'm not going to adjust my sci-fi cyberpunk game to allow someone to play a half dragon wizard, just because that's what they really want to do. Can we assume that we're sticking to character options that at least fit the theme itself in some way?

And if not, then those are really really bizarre requirements by the player (and frankly extremely selfish and petty ones), not some problem with the GM and their setting.


When you are pitching the campaign, you can't rely on the adventures to make it interesting. You basically have to convince with the setting here. And during character creation, you can't rely on the actual play either, the players must find something they think would be fun to play in your character options.

When the actual play starts, players are already committed and characters made. That is too late to show off how that whole campaign might be fun.

I think this is a bit circular though. If your starting assumption is that "my character must be interesting and unique from roll up", then you're already in the mindset that this must be the case. And you will find the absense of this limiting. But you're also limiting the "growth" that character could experience in the game itself. I prefer to start characters from *before* the point in their lives where "interesting and unque" things happen to them, and then actually play that stuff out.

I'm also not sure how "interesting character startups" make the "setting" more interesting. I'm pitching the setting, not a collection of stat blocks the players can play. Teling the players "you can play <whole bunch of interesting stuff> in this game, may appeal to the "kid in the candy store" part of all of us, but it's not going to keep the players attentions for very long. Telling them a bit about the game world, what is there, what background they know, what events are going on, and otherwise providing lots of hooks for characters to use to motivate them into being PCs in the first place, is far far more interesting.

Better yet, having that basic background, and then launching them into a plot/hook which sets them off on a series of adventures, with twists and turns, and lots of abiltiy to interact with and change the world around them, is always going to be more interesting then a series of "how can I use my special powers this week" encounters. But focus on characters on roll up leads one to the latter. Which I actually find very tropish and boring.


Obviously classless games tend to be less restrictive in the first place so it is more likely that a player can make a character they like.
However even those games tend to be as limited if not more limited when it comes to species and the important question is always what kind of abilities are even available.

It's interesting to me, because you keep mentioning abilities. Why abilities? Why abilities that are some innate racial thing? That's not actually going to make the game more interesting at all. That's not to say that different races in games I run don't have some differences in terms of stats and often senses, but rarely actual "special abilities". I just find that boring. I'd rather that characters have abilities based on there actual... um... abilities. Skills, items, spells, and yes, the occassional rare special gift/ability or whatnot, obtained along the way. IME, players enjoy that sort of stuff way more than being handed something on rollup.

Having a character that can breathe fire because it's a racial ability that they picked on roll up is nice, but not really going to be about the character. Having a character gain the ability to breathe fire after fighting through the "tomb of doom(tm)" and picking up a strange glowing amulet which turned out to be a piece of a long dead fire god is far far far more "interesting" and "fun" for the player. And it's something that is gained by the character as part of their adventuring career that they feel they earned, and is truely "unique" due to how they obtained it.

And this is not limited to mechanical abilities either. I've had characters gain titles, reputations, power, wealth, etc along the way of adventuring. Some become well known (or notorious). Some hide in the shadows. Some become mighty wizards. Some legendary warriors. Some settle down and become innkeepers. But it's about playing the character. What you started out as? Nice for initial motivation stuff, but not really important in the long run.


1) If you consider all the possible starting locations, why choose a particularly boring and generic first as you seem to suggest ? Why not start at an interesting place from the get go even if the other interesting places are beyond the horizon for a while ?

Why assume the starting location is "boring", just because it's not unlimited? Every other place is also limited, but in different ways. Some areas may have powerful wizard guilds there. Some may have none. Some may have listA of temples/gods there, others listB, or listC. Some will be tribal. Some highly advanced civilizations. Many in between. And a lot of that is going to be based on the culture of the area. Some places will have orcs and humans living together side by side. Others, one or the other will be killed on sight. Maybe it's mountainous, and lots of mining in the area means lots of rare metals and materials are there. Other areas are flatlands, where perhaps a wider variety of intesting riding animals are availble. Another area may be forested with more medicinal herbs. Another is on the coast and has trade with other far off lands. Each location will influence what is there, the culture, weapons, magic, perhaps races, perhaps trade, etc, etc, etc.

All are "different", but all are also "limited". This makes the world feel large. As you travel you run into new areas and new things that aren't present where you came from. This doesn't make other areas more "interesting", or "powerful" or anything. Just "different". But as the players experience more of the world, the entire thing becomes broader. If you start out on day one with "everything in the game is available in your starting city" you lose the ability to have that sense of wonder as the characters find "new things" they haven't seen before. And sure, this also means that as the PCs explore more of the setting, other PC options become available, if they can rationalize them, of course. If they traveled to a far off land one time where there be lizardmen, and then came home. There aren't magically going to be lizardmen available to start in their home town now. On the other hand, if they explore deep into the mountains a few hundred miles away, and find an ancient dwarven city locked away since an ancient age, and trapped there by demons or somesuch, and in the process of an adventure, they manage to find a way to drive away the demons, seal the gate they came through, and open a route between said city and their kingdom, well... now "dwarf" become something someone could play if they wanted (and assuming it wasn't already there anyway).

See how that works? Far more "fun" for the players, and maintains longer term interest in the game.


2) You can only choose a different location if there are different locations. Which your approach of "make a starting location and maybe add something else in later when the adventurers go there" does not provide.

Again. Why would another location be "better"? And guess what? When you travel to those far off "exotic" areas, you may find that what is "normal" where you come from is actually "exotic" to the other people. It's not always about "over the next hill lies marvels". The folks over that hill will find where you come from just as marvelous.

On a recent adventure, we traveled across the sea to a subcontinent some distance away. There were lots of things there that weren't in our homelands. A whole culture who worshipped a (somewhat cruel) fire god. A strange race of toll like creatures. Powerful dragon people here and there. Weird ancient artifacts from an ancient past (before the aforementioned firegod's followers kinda stomped on things long ago). Another deity that created strange chaos construct/creatures and spewed them around occasionally for fun (and cause lots of problems). All strange and "different". Some stuff was still somewhat familiar though. One area (somewhat near the evil chaos gods area), had a group of people who worshiped a couple of the same sky/law gods that are also present in our lands. One of my characters happened to be a pretty powerful RuneLord of one of those deities (that's a very powerful kinda heroic level member of the cult), super powerful, and wielding a powerful holy anti-chaos artifact sword of her god. Basically a complete badass for her religion. Um... But she was also a centaur. A race that is common where our characters are from, but unheard of here. So, of course, these fellow cult members see this strange four legged half horse half human creature coming into their town, and think "OMG! Some hideous chaos creature. Must kill!". And yeah... hillarity ensued.

Fortunately, priests get a spell that allows them to recognize fellow members and their rank, because not much else was going to confince them that my character wasn't some sort of demon thing that needed to be destroyed. The point is that what is common in one area, may be unheard of somewhere else. Just because you travel somewhere that has things you haven't seen before doesn't also mean that things you think are normal aren't really exotic to them. And yeah. These are the kinds of settings I prefer to create. I find that they capture the imagination of the players far better than "kitchen sink world" will ever do.


1. Most RPGs don't expose this, so people don't think about it and learn how to do it.
2. A lot of RPG structures are such that your character motivations don't matter. You're playing through the adventure path, and if the adventure path doesn't care about those things, they're not gonna matter at all.

Yeah. This is why I like when players come up with motivations for "why am I a PC", but not a whole lot more. Not opposed to some reasonable backstory here, but what I don't want is the player to write up a "future history" of what they want their character story arc to be. I mean, if they do that, I'll see what I can do. But no promises at all.

Part of the problem is exactly what you just mentioned. I'm either going to have to wite the campaign around these proposed story development arcs, thus leaving very little room for anything else (remember, we may be multiplying this times X players), or I'm going to have to set that stuff aside to have the actual setting provide conflict to be resolved (adventure arc, right?). And even if I try to do the former, it's going to be pretty rare that say 5-6 players all come up with proposed arcs that happen to gel well together such that I can write a coherent set of adventures to encapsulate them all. Meaning that, someone, and probably multiple someones are getting their stuff "ignored", while others are basking in the limelinght.

It's the kind of thing you see all the time in novels, TV shows, and films, but they work because the same person who worte the setting and conflicts therein are also writing the characters and their backstories and arcs. So Luke is the son of a Jedi, and is strong with the force, because that fits into the larger story arc of "Rebels fighting against the Empire". Doesn't work well in a RPG though, because this happens:

Luke's player:"My character is the son of the smuggler king of <insert some planet here>, hidden at birth with his aunt and uncle on Tatooine, and my story arc will be me discovering my past, and deciding to follow in my fathers footsteps, finding old smugging pals of my father, and his old ship along the way, and then eventually becoming the new smuggling king myself!"

Me thinking: Um... Ok. But that's not really going to have much to do with fighting the Empire. I suppose we could wedge in some adventures where you're smuggling stuff from the Empire for the Rebellion and then contrive ways to make you a semi-hero, I guess (A Hondo type character maybe?). This will be hard...

Me: "Um... You sure you don't want to just start as a farmboy on Tatooine dreaming of getting out to the stars and having adventures and just let me fill in the stuff that happens to you along the way? Trust me. I've got a great plan for this campaign. You'll love it!"

Luke's player: "No! It's my character and I get to decide. I don't want you railroading my choices or my character arc here."

Me: <crumples up the entire Jedi/Sith concept and throw it on the floor>. Ok. Guess I'll just re-write the whole thing...


As a video game developer, there was a game called Hellgate: London. It was made by some ex-Diablo devs. It didn't do great, and there were reasons for it.

One of the most common criticisms of it was that it had no variety to the locales. However, in actuality, there were as many different tilesets as D2 had (and D2 didn't get those criticisms).

Where HG:L failed with that was that their design was such that you entered all of those tilesets very quickly, and the entire game cycled rapidly through them. Meanwhile, D2 had distinct areas, each of which had a much more limited set of tilesets available to it. But changing which ones they dealt with (along with which critters) gave a feeling of progression and change and variety even though the actual variety was the same between the two games.

IOW, people seem to view variety not based on actual variety, but on transitions. Adding more things to the general background doesn't really add variety - going from one set of things to the others does.

Yup. That was exactly what I was talking about earlier (and above in this post). Make each area "limited", but also "different". This makes the world actually feel larger to the players. May seem counter intuitive at first, but it really does work better IMO.


There was another comment that you made that I can't find, about backstory and expecting the GM to write for it. I think that's mostly just a play structure/culture of play issue - see this article: https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html . There are some issues with that article, but it's a good starting point. (Specifically, the description of classic is pretty off, and I think that it overly-conflates storygames and narrative games, which are pretty different)

Yeah. It is highly depending on play style. And I have run campaigns where I've more or less asked the players for ideas of what they wanted to do and then built from there. It can work. I've just found from experience that it often results in a jumbled mish mash of things, kinda smooshed together in one world. Doubly so if you're actually doing this in a "new setting" (which ironically is where most people expect it). There's no existing structure for the players to kinda hang off of when building their propsals, so they can really be all over the freaking place. You're lucky if you can find two that even somewhat tie together in some way, and will often have PCs with daimetrically opposed proposed story arcs.

I do find that if I've already established the setting a bit, then I'm far more able to do this, but even then usually on a one at a time basis. A player, who is already familiar with the setting, comes to me with a character idea, complete with proposed story arc? Probably more likely to "fit in" with everything else, and also more likely to not conflict with existing PC character goals in the game. I'll still likely make some changes (because I don't want the player to know blow by blow what's going to happen), but yeah. I'll go with that. Again though, it better fit the existing setting and make sense (and not be overly disruptive, unless of course that's what the game is about).


Expecting a GM to kind of tailor the adventure to your character (but still basically write it and have you go through it) is the OC/neotrad style of game, while you're probably more of the narrative or classic style.

Yeah. A fair bit. And I get that this isn't everyone's cup of tea. And I also get that there are a lot of GMs who run this way who are absolutely horrible at it (railroads abound). But I have asked many many players to "trust me. You will enjoy what I have planned for this adventure/campaign/whatever", and have never once had a player be disappointed in the results. I also absolutely allow for on the fly player input. I have a firm rule that I will never force a major unchosen character change on a PC without the player's buy in. So mechanical things may crop up that are handed out, but nothing that is actually character changing. I do want my players to have full agency with their characters. So if I have something happen to them, and the player doesn't like the direction it's going, and they tell me this, I'll find a way to back it out, or go in another direction.

I don't tend to muck with broad character defining bits anyway. Things happen in the course of adventuring, and things may change, choices are made which can affect things, but I honestly would likely not do the Luke character I wrote as an example above. I'm just not a fan of "character discovers they have some magical past that completely drives them in a specific direction". If I were running a SW game, Luke's character would run into Obi-wan and learn about the Jedi. If his player decided Luke wanted to study the Jedi ways, then he could study and become a Jedi and only *then* might we discover that "his family is strong in the force" or something (or maybe he just gradually becomes better at it like anyone else). But it would always be a choice by the player which way they want to go. I just put the options out there in front of them.

And a lot of this stems from writing sufficiently "open" settings in the first place. And yeah, ironically, this is often a lot easier if you start out "small and simple" at first. You can go in any direction. If you spend too much time really detailing and including everything you think someone might want or need, you're more likely to write yourself into a corner.

You're right though. That's just my preferred style. And I get that some players have had bad experiences with this style. But I also think that, when done properly, it's one of the most satisfying forms of gaming for all involved. And yeah. I've never had a player complain that they felt their options were stiffled in one of my games. Never had a player quit a game I was running because they didn't like it or weren't enjoying it either. Had players leave for RL reasons, of course, but never because they weren't happy with the game.

[Satinavian]

I'm curious what you consider "interesting" then. Now one of my current characters in a Splittermond-Campaign in the Not-China (with some differences that are not too relevant here) of the default setting for example started out as a bureaucrat two ranks below Mandarin with the job of investigating and solving ghost related problems in a major town in a remote province where the campaign started. Her abilities mostly focused on ghost related death magic, ghost related divination magic, arcane knowledge, legal knowledge, etiquette and politics and also perks regarding social status and rank.

The character was certainly not special in the setting as such. But as an adventurer ? How often do people play primary bureaucrats in a classical fantasy setting ? For me it was the first character to navigate pseudo-chinese palace policy and exploring the ghost theme in a setting where they are mostly used as helpful ancestor spirits was something newish as well.

It was a character that was all about involvement in the things that make this particular place different from other potential settings. And the same time someone that did not really fit any of the classical adventurer tropes. I never tried to make this character particularly special, but she certainly is compared to some thief with minor healing abilities and family issues or a thug with a gambling habit.

I don't want to project here, but it seems as though it's all about having some special/unique powers/abilities. And I get that. But here's the problem: If the race/class combination that gives these powers/abilities is "available where you start", then that's something that a lot of other people have too (including potentially thousands of NPCs right there in your starting area). So that's not actually "special" or "unique". If you really want the character and only that one character to have that ability/power/whatever, then that enters into a whole different area I call "wish fulfillment fantasy", that I'm not terribly interested as a GM in running.But it is not about being unique and special in-universe. It is about feeling so to the player. Being different enough from all the other characters played or experienced as party members.

It is basically about the "been there, done that" feeling that many players feel when presented with yet another generic pseudomedieval standard setting with mostly humans and character options that regurgitate the same adventurer clichees seen for the last 30 years.


I've also found that while players (especially newer/younger players) often really want to play these kinds of things, they're often the first characters abandoned quickly once the novelty wears off. Then they want me to allow them to play something else "special". Then another. And another. Each one straining the credulity of the campaign, while adding pretty much nothing. Sorry. Been there. Done that. As Akbar says: "it's a trap!". And it's absoultely being used by the player as a crutch.Never seen this.


I'm also not sure how "interesting character startups" make the "setting" more interesting. I'm pitching the setting, not a collection of stat blocks the players can play. Teling the players "you can play <whole bunch of interesting stuff> in this game, may appeal to the "kid in the candy store" part of all of us, but it's not going to keep the players attentions for very long. Telling them a bit about the game world, what is there, what background they know, what events are going on, and otherwise providing lots of hooks for characters to use to motivate them into being PCs in the first place, is far far more interesting.Ideally both setting and playable characters are interesting. But if need be one could settle for one of them.

I'd rather that characters have abilities based on there actual... um... abilities. Skills, items, spells, and yes, the occassional rare special gift/ability or whatnot, obtained along the way. IME, players enjoy that sort of stuff way more than being handed something on rollup.You are thinking about power again which is not what i was talking about.


Having a character that can breathe fire because it's a racial ability that they picked on roll up is nice, but not really going to be about the character. Having a character gain the ability to breathe fire after fighting through the "tomb of doom(tm)" and picking up a strange glowing amulet which turned out to be a piece of a long dead fire god is far far far more "interesting" and "fun" for the player. And it's something that is gained by the character as part of their adventuring career that they feel they earned, and is truely "unique" due to how they obtained it.What is more fun is for the player to choose. But i have seen so many special abilities picked up on the way and basically disregarded/ignored because they didn't mesh well with the players ideas that i am very sceptical about them being better than something the player choose for themself at the start and as part of the character concept.

And this is not limited to mechanical abilities either. I've had characters gain titles, reputations, power, wealth, etc along the way of adventuring. Some become well known (or notorious). Some hide in the shadows. Some become mighty wizards. Some legendary warriors. Some settle down and become innkeepers. But it's about playing the character. What you started out as? Nice for initial motivation stuff, but not really important in the long run.Sometimes that is true but i have seen many characters being about the same things their whole career until retirement.


Why assume the starting location is "boring", just because it's not unlimited? Every other place is also limited, but in different ways. Did you notice the other words behind boring ? Generic is the most important one. If the starting location reminds the players instantly of a dozen other campaign starting locations they visited prior, it becomes very boring.


Again. Why would another location be "better"? If the other locations have what makes the overall setting special and different from other settings, they are better.

[gbaji]

Ok. That works. Let's me know you are focused more on the profession/skills/backstory of the character than powers/abilities. Still a bit confused why you kept talking about variety of races and their abilities though. Are non-humans present in this "not China" setting you described? How much racial variety is there? Just odd that you really seemed to be focusing on this aspect of player options, and the abilities involved, but now don't mention it at all.

And yes, I get that for *you* that character is more interesting. For other players, maybe not. The examples I gave were what the players came up with themselves. They were able to play what they wanted to, and come up with their own combination of skills/profession/backstory to create that. The real issue is the degree to which a player in a given setting can create a character they want to play. And there's absolutely nothing in my setting that prevents a player from creating a character with every single attribute you just listed (specific titles/ranks perhaps different, but equivalent to be sure). The only reason my players would be unlikely to play a bureaucrat in my game isn't because it's not possible if they want, but because the reality of playing any character tied to some sort of "official position" in the area will make some forms of adventuring (basically anything with extended travel requirements outside of the actual duties of the profession) difficult. But yeah, some of my players have played characters with ranks/titles/positions within the government and that's not really a big deal.

Aside from cosmetic and label differences, I'm just not seeing much difference IMO. Certainly not enough to say that one character description is "generic and boring", while the other is "new and exciting". Eh... not so much. If that's what's interesting to you, then that's great. But again, what I described previously was what was interesting to someone else, so that's what they created instead. All about choices, right?


Also, I'm not sure how "not China" versus "not Europe" (or in the case of the setting I was actually describing "not not all of those") makes much difference. Certainly not in terms of how much actual variation players have when making their characters. If anything, the setting you just described is far more limiting than the one I was talking about. I specified no "generic" fantasy setting at all (though it is mostly high fantasy). My game setting has areas that are wild barbarian lands. Others that are more medieval. Others more "ancient/classic bronze age". Some areas are "primitives with stone axes". And yeah, an area that is a somewhat fusion-asian setting as well (I ran a "Big Trouble in <capital city name>" adventure that went over amazingly well, thank you very much). Each area having distinct differences in terms of culture, magic use/availability, technology, etc. And sure, all still limited somewhat to "sword and sorcery" types stuff (cause that's the theme), but within that range? Not a lot of restrictions. And hey. It's got magic, and potential for planar traveling, where there do exist things like modern/sci-fi settings for folks to tool around in if they want (though usually more for visiting than long term playing, since the rules system itself doesn't do modern stuff well). I literaly just recently ran them through an adventure where they found themseleves in a more or less alien controlled "star gate command" situation (with them being the "foothold situation"). In the same set of "planar travel" adventures, they also had the potential to travel to a ShadowRun world (but didn't, since the wore themselves out dealing with "war world", based on a mash up of like 3 different online MMORPG zones and was pretty brutal).

I absolutely love to put things I've run into across various books, films, TV shows, etc into my game worlds. But again, that doesn't mean that all that stuff is going to be mashed up in one place. It'll be "over there". Something else will be "in that other direction". And really "out there" stuff is usually... well, "really out there" (in terms of how to physically get form here to there). That sort of thing. And yeah, if the players want to play an entire campaign in asian-fusion land, there's nothing stopping us from doing that. And guess what? Some of the options for starting characters will be slightly different there than where they normally play. But always influenced by other factors (culture, magic use, technology, mainly). I've on multiple occasions run a set of characters in a new area from startup just to create variation.

And yeah. We want to play in a different game system? We just do that. But I guess my main point here is that you don't have to provide "kitchen sink" options to the players when starting a game to still provide plenty of variation and avoid "limited options becoming stiffling". And honestly, it sounds like you have pretty much the same viewpoint if your described setting and character is any indication. I wouldn't consider that an "out there" character concept at all, and certainly wouldn't veto it for any of the reasons I've listed previously. What I'm usually most opposed to is players who feel the need to play characters with special abilties (usually innnate racial ones), even in settings where those things maybe don't fit or make much sense. Outside of that restriction, you can play anything you want. I usually only limit things (in a fantasy setting) based on what magic stuff is available. And that's because that's often very key to the creation/culture/structure of the area itself.

[Telok]

Been working up characters in Polar Fudge Medieval Adventues, after about 12-15 characters it got stifling. 9 points spread among 6 stats capped at 3 per stat, then 3 points of 18 gifts, with two worth 3 pt and about 10-11 worth 1 pt.

Consensus among the RL gaming group is d&d 5e classes that aren't full casters are stupid limited in class/power choices past about 12th level. Also general our consensus that the in-combat choices for warrior classes are too limited to doing more & more damage because of eternal hp inflation. We're all talking about multiclassing out so that qualifies as stifling, although it's limited to post character creation. We also ended up agreeing the d&d 4e aedu power setup was too limiting and focused the game too much on combats.

Starfinder felt kind of stifling. Not in character choices or abilities, but the the way the numbers balanced it was always sort of a treadmill to keep up with the threat level. You felt it pretty strong if you were trying something outside the preapproved role of your class, like an even split dex/int caster focused on defense & control spells or a melee combat engineer (I believe they eventually added a subclass option to fix that last one). They got their numbers right. If you played to class strengths and always boosted your prime stat then basically every combat was right in the ideal time & threat zone. But if you went off archetype you started to struggle real fast.

Funny though. Year long games of Classic Traveller, Champions, AD&D, D&D 3.x, Dungeons the Dragoning 40k 7e, never got any of that sort of talk. And three of those have way fewer character build options than the current couple market leaders.

[icefractal]

Funny though. Year long games of Classic Traveller, Champions, AD&D, D&D 3.x, Dungeons the Dragoning 40k 7e, never got any of that sort of talk. And three of those have way fewer character build options than the current couple market leaders.What market leaders are you talking about? 5E?

Because I haven't played enough Traveller/AD&D/DtD40k7e to accurately compare them, but I'd say that 3.x and Champions both have a greater amount of build options than WotC-published 5E. If you bring in 3PP then that's a lot more options for 5E, but equally more for 3x.

[Witty Username]

As a player,
Sell me on a vibe and I am good with just about anything.

As a DM,
Do I have means to set up problems with more than one solution. Take combat, if combat is the only solution, I lose interest in the system, if combat is framed as a possible solution, with evasion and negotiation, I have something to hang my stuff on. If it has the point that I can set up a situation, and the players can apply a solution of their preference without me having to fight the system to get it going, I am happy. If I start having to hack at it to invent and rework systems, It depends on how much hacking. D&D is frustrating (no guidance, nearly at all) but it has universal mechanics like ability checks to use as starting points to put together things, after one gets the hang of it what DCs work best for the table become apparent (I like DC 11), and multiple specializations are possible, if a bit janky.

[Telok]

What market leaders are you talking about? 5E?

Because I haven't played enough Traveller/AD&D/DtD40k7e to accurately compare them,
The last two d&ds, yeah, but also the pazio games.

Classic Traveller, assuming you aren't doing something like an all merc game or all space navy game and thus using those specific char gen sets, has about 12-18 'services' to pick a career in. But chargen is random dice all the way. Sure, there's modifiers for some high stats here and there, but you have to roll to even get into your chosen service and you get a random one if you fail the roll. While random char gen isn't to everyone's taste, we did and nobody in our group ever talked about feeling limited in options. Likewise character advancement is practically non-existant, but still no complaints.

Same group of people, six months into d&d 4e, and six months into d&d 5e, and... I think maybe three or four months into Starfinder... These same people talk at the table about feeling like there's a lack of options. Not so much in character building (and like I said the complaints on that for d&d 5e only started post 12th level or trying unapproved builds in starfinder), but in the actions they can take and the stuff their characters can do.

Which is weird when you start thinking about it. Because it should look like "anything normal humans can do plus...", with Traveller being "whatever off the shelf civilian tech gadgets they can afford to buy 1500 years in the future while still paying their mortgage" and the d&ds/d&d-likes being "plus these cool powers from class, plus magic, plus being able to face tank an elephant falling a thousand feet onto you, plus etc., etc.". But the people in my group don't feel that. The GM feels constrained by d&ds/d&d-likes reliance on combat resource draining and ever inflating hp & damage numbers. The players feel constrained by things like the fights per day routine or the difference between attended items and mounts & followers that auto-die in the first fireball of the day.

So I can't say what, exactly, it is. But it isn't, for the gamers I know in real life, about the exact number of character build options, or the number of spells, or anything you can count (well except maybe those d&d 5e post 12th level things). It's more something attached to the way the rules present versus what they promote & punish during game play.

[Satinavian]

Ok. That works. Let's me know you are focused more on the profession/skills/backstory of the character than powers/abilities. Still a bit confused why you kept talking about variety of races and their abilities though. Are non-humans present in this "not China" setting you described? How much racial variety is there? Just odd that you really seemed to be focusing on this aspect of player options, and the abilities involved, but now don't mention it at all.Splittermond only has rule support for 5 different races (human, elf, dwarf, gnome, varg) and thus it doesn't really make much sense to talk about race choice in terms of normal/exotic in this system. All the build flexibility comes from skills, masteries, spells, perks and ressources.

In this particular case the character was a gnome, while gnomes make up 20% of the official settings not-China, which is around half as common as humans.
And yes, "not China" specifically. Not fusion Asia. Splittermonds official setting has around 8 other major regions that draw most of their inspiration from corresponding different parts of Asia and are all very distinct from each other. But there is always at least one major twist, they never are 1:1 copies.

And sure, other players find other characters more interesting. But you asked about what i consider interesting and i answered. Now to talk again about where i think this character differs from your two examples in meaningfull ways.

1) Your first character is a thief. Which is a standard adventurer class/archetype in fantasy RPGs since over 40 years. With minor healing abilities. With healing being a standard party role for as long. Your other character is a big tough soldier and him working as thug for local crime hardly changes the archetype. That is pretty much the classical fighting man from yore.

They both might have been fun to play and such a success. But both wield the same abilities as their primary shticks that we have all seen hundreds of times. Where we know pretty much exactly what they can be expected to do and how they fit in a standard party composition. And it is extremely likely that both will tackle problems along the old well established best practices known to everyone.

So far the mechanical side

2) Both have literally nothing to their background or motivation that is really setting and campaign specific. Ok, maybe have a god who likes/stands for fertility which is still kinda common. I even could them put into Splittermonds not-China and it would work.
My character however is deeply tied to the elements particular to this setting. Being a bureaucrat in a pseudochinese imperial bureaucracy complete with examinations etc. won't work anywhere that is not also some not-China. Nor does this heavy focus on things that are closely linked to the specific cultural treatment of ghost and all the traditions surrounding them.
Basically all the major points of the character are deeply intertwined with setting specifics. And those setting specifics including unique abilities/perks are part of the game from day one, not maybe sometimes later after introduced in an adventure.

And yes. That character is not made to left behind her home and venture somewhere else to have her adventurer career there. (It still happened occasionally but, well). Her home, her relations she started the game with, her job ... all of that remained important in some way the whole campaign. And that is what i think a proper starting setting to actually play with should provide. Not just a hub to drop the first adventure hooks and be irrelevant thereafter with characters being blank slates that form all their important characteristics and connections later and elsewhere.

Now there is a subgenre, where i do favor pretty blank slate characters with only minor ties back : The expedition/exploration one. Here the home of the characters and what they have been there is playing only a minor role by design. But that is rare, not the default.


And again, i never argued for kitchen sink. Don't particularly like that one.

[Pex]

The last two d&ds, yeah, but also the pazio games.

Classic Traveller, assuming you aren't doing something like an all merc game or all space navy game and thus using those specific char gen sets, has about 12-18 'services' to pick a career in. But chargen is random dice all the way. Sure, there's modifiers for some high stats here and there, but you have to roll to even get into your chosen service and you get a random one if you fail the roll. While random char gen isn't to everyone's taste, we did and nobody in our group ever talked about feeling limited in options. Likewise character advancement is practically non-existant, but still no complaints.

Same group of people, six months into d&d 4e, and six months into d&d 5e, and... I think maybe three or four months into Starfinder... These same people talk at the table about feeling like there's a lack of options. Not so much in character building (and like I said the complaints on that for d&d 5e only started post 12th level or trying unapproved builds in starfinder), but in the actions they can take and the stuff their characters can do.

Which is weird when you start thinking about it. Because it should look like "anything normal humans can do plus...", with Traveller being "whatever off the shelf civilian tech gadgets they can afford to buy 1500 years in the future while still paying their mortgage" and the d&ds/d&d-likes being "plus these cool powers from class, plus magic, plus being able to face tank an elephant falling a thousand feet onto you, plus etc., etc.". But the people in my group don't feel that. The GM feels constrained by d&ds/d&d-likes reliance on combat resource draining and ever inflating hp & damage numbers. The players feel constrained by things like the fights per day routine or the difference between attended items and mounts & followers that auto-die in the first fireball of the day.

So I can't say what, exactly, it is. But it isn't, for the gamers I know in real life, about the exact number of character build options, or the number of spells, or anything you can count (well except maybe those d&d 5e post 12th level things). It's more something attached to the way the rules present versus what they promote & punish during game play.

Sounds to me your fellow players want to improv everything. I won't go far as to say they want no rules at all. They're fine with rules providing for the math mechanics to avoid "I shot you" "No you didn't" playground arguments, but after that they want to do whatever they want whenever they want however they want and no words on paper can tell them no. Say what you want to do, roll dice to determine success or failure, deal with the consequence and repeat. I'm doubtful any game system will satisfy them. Every game has restrictions. Some more than others, but they exist.

[Zuras]

The last two d&ds, yeah, but also the pazio games.

Classic Traveller, assuming you aren't doing something like an all merc game or all space navy game and thus using those specific char gen sets, has about 12-18 'services' to pick a career in. But chargen is random dice all the way. Sure, there's modifiers for some high stats here and there, but you have to roll to even get into your chosen service and you get a random one if you fail the roll. While random char gen isn't to everyone's taste, we did and nobody in our group ever talked about feeling limited in options. Likewise character advancement is practically non-existant, but still no complaints.

Same group of people, six months into d&d 4e, and six months into d&d 5e, and... I think maybe three or four months into Starfinder... These same people talk at the table about feeling like there's a lack of options. Not so much in character building (and like I said the complaints on that for d&d 5e only started post 12th level or trying unapproved builds in starfinder), but in the actions they can take and the stuff their characters can do.

Which is weird when you start thinking about it. Because it should look like "anything normal humans can do plus...", with Traveller being "whatever off the shelf civilian tech gadgets they can afford to buy 1500 years in the future while still paying their mortgage" and the d&ds/d&d-likes being "plus these cool powers from class, plus magic, plus being able to face tank an elephant falling a thousand feet onto you, plus etc., etc.". But the people in my group don't feel that. The GM feels constrained by d&ds/d&d-likes reliance on combat resource draining and ever inflating hp & damage numbers. The players feel constrained by things like the fights per day routine or the difference between attended items and mounts & followers that auto-die in the first fireball of the day.

So I can't say what, exactly, it is. But it isn't, for the gamers I know in real life, about the exact number of character build options, or the number of spells, or anything you can count (well except maybe those d&d 5e post 12th level things). It's more something attached to the way the rules present versus what they promote & punish during game play.

The interaction of expectations and game system is obviously the driver here, but it’s all tied up with the psychology of gaming and doesn’t make much logical sense.

I think some of this is related to something like the uncanny valley effect. Most people will prefer a color film to a black and white one, but would strongly prefer the black and white version of a film to a badly colorized one.

I wouldn’t say it’s about what the rules promote and punish, it’s more about how you go about the problem solving side of the game, and whether the options you chose feel like they produce meaningfully different results.

Experience-wise, two clerics of different gods could have identical stats and abilities but approach problems very differently, while two DPR optimized fighters could play almost identically despite pursuing completely divergent paths to achieve their maximized DPR.

I’m not sure there’s any typical point a lack of options becomes frustrating, but my experience in 5e is that the players who value lots of options most tend to want to play the same class, or at least party role, over and over again, and like the small variations that keep things mostly the same while changing a bit of the flair. I have a player at my table who loves 5e’s subclass setup, which let him play slightly different versions of the same fighter over and over again.

[awa]

My character however is deeply tied to the elements particular to this setting.


I think this is an important aspect for me as well, when I think about what I would play in a standard d&d setting I often go weird, I feel little inspiration to be a generic race/class from Water Deep it’s kind of boring and generic. When I'm reading about L5R I don’t have that same instinct, there are enough different clans and things within it that I'm inspired to make a samurai. (Note have never actually played and don’t know how but that's less important than the fact that I want to make a character from certain clans.)

If the setting is interesting and novel just being part of it is interesting and novel, if the setting is not interesting then I at least am more likely to find a weird character to create my own novelty.

So, a more refined setting is often (but not always) a more limited one and in that case, limits can improve novelty. L5r would not be improved by one player demanding to play a dragon born wizard.

[PhoenixPhyre]

So, a more refined setting is often (but not always) a more limited one and in that case, limits can improve novelty. L5r would not be improved by one player demanding to play a dragon born wizard.

Strong agree here. The setting should be interesting. Playing something exotic relative to a boring setting is, to me, a very hollow form of novelty. Because in a boring, generic setting, especially one where "anything goes", being exotic is...normal. If everyone's weird, no one is. And if no one cares that you're weird/exotic in-setting, then are you really weird/exotic?

I also strongly agree that having characters that are tightly bound to the setting in backstory and beyond is (a) key to having engaging games for me.

[Mechalich]

Strong agree here. The setting should be interesting. Playing something exotic relative to a boring setting is, to me, a very hollow form of novelty. Because in a boring, generic setting, especially one where "anything goes", being exotic is...normal. If everyone's weird, no one is. And if no one cares that you're weird/exotic in-setting, then are you really weird/exotic?

I also strongly agree that having characters that are tightly bound to the setting in backstory and beyond is (a) key to having engaging games for me.

This is heavily dependent upon both the setting in question, the attitudes of the players, and the type of campaign being run.

First, the setting has to meet a certain verisimilitude bar in order for in depth interaction with the setting to even be possible. Otherwise, any player attempting to put hooks into the setting will either bounce off of it or crash through it like it's made of cardboard. Second, the players have to be willing to expend the time, effort, and intellectual capital to care about the setting. Many in-depth settings are extremely involved and are either impenetrable many players because they don't interface effectively with the ideas - ex. something like Eclipse Phase, which involves wrapping the brain around some highly speculative concepts - or require more reading than the players are willing to put forth - ex. something like Exalted, which involves reading hundreds of pages of backstory to properly comprehend. Third, the campaign in question has to interact with the setting in at least a quasi-open world fashion, rather than being a largely on rails adventure path or something similar.

A lot of the time some or all of these points will not hold. Many players, anticipating this, want weird/exotic options so that they can either look cool or be bad***, because they don't expect anything more in-depth to even appear.

[gbaji]

Starfinder felt kind of stifling. Not in character choices or abilities, but the the way the numbers balanced it was always sort of a treadmill to keep up with the threat level. You felt it pretty strong if you were trying something outside the preapproved role of your class, like an even split dex/int caster focused on defense & control spells or a melee combat engineer (I believe they eventually added a subclass option to fix that last one). They got their numbers right. If you played to class strengths and always boosted your prime stat then basically every combat was right in the ideal time & threat zone. But if you went off archetype you started to struggle real fast.

Funny though. Year long games of Classic Traveller, Champions, AD&D, D&D 3.x, Dungeons the Dragoning 40k 7e, never got any of that sort of talk. And three of those have way fewer character build options than the current couple market leaders.

Yeah. I think that's a potential problem of any game system with tools to "help the GM balance encounters", that depend on some sort of level or "total points" type calculation to do so. The players may feel that if they don't actually optimize their gains over time to "things that help win encounters", then they may feel they are falling behind in any such "balanced encounters" going forward.

There are ways to adjust for this, but they are very very system specific. And often require both player and GM buy in to break out of the "balanced encounters per day" dynamic as the primary "adventure balance" mechanism. Which I've also found very tough to do.


And yes, "not China" specifically. Not fusion Asia. Splittermonds official setting has around 8 other major regions that draw most of their inspiration from corresponding different parts of Asia and are all very distinct from each other. But there is always at least one major twist, they never are 1:1 copies.

Oh. But it sounds like you are agreeing with my earlier suggestion to have starting areas specific to "what is there", and that this is acceptable. What you are descrbing is even more restrictive than what I was talking about. So a starting area that is "not medevial Europe", but with another area that is "not classic greece", and another that is "not Roman empire", and another that is "not fuedal Japan", and another that is "not Chin dynasty China", and another that is "not anicent Eyypt", and another that is "not Tolkien elven forest", and another that is "not orc tribes", and another that is "not Conan barbarians", and another that is "game system specific Trolls", and another that is "game system specific dwarves", and another where we dropped Harn in there, and another where we decided that the old Judge guild Haven setting worked, and yet another with the Ranken Empire and Sanctuary works, that setting is "stiffling"? But one where there are your choice of 8 asian themed areas is perfetly open and free and will provide for superior character options for the players?

Not getting that at all. Again, at the end of the day, there's nothing wrong with having one area of a larger world be limited in terms of "what is there" and thus "what you can play starting out there". And this says nothing at all about how big the full setting is. And absolutely says nothing about how limited options are or whether this results in the players feeling "stiffled".


And sure, other players find other characters more interesting. But you asked about what i consider interesting and i answered. Now to talk again about where i think this character differs from your two examples in meaningfull ways.

1) Your first character is a thief. Which is a standard adventurer class/archetype in fantasy RPGs since over 40 years. With minor healing abilities. With healing being a standard party role for as long. Your other character is a big tough soldier and him working as thug for local crime hardly changes the archetype. That is pretty much the classical fighting man from yore.

You are working really really hard to force classic "clases" into a pair of descriptions that don't include them at all. Um... At the end of the day, in a fantasy setting, there's kinda two things: Physical stuff and Magical stuff. And within those, there's different types of physical stuff you can do, and differnet kinds of magical stuff you can do. You're free to declare anyone who has some thiefly skills to be a "thief", or anyone who can fight a "fighter", but that's simply not true. You're assuming it is, despite me telling you repeatedly that in this game system and this game setting, that is not the case.


They both might have been fun to play and such a success. But both wield the same abilities as their primary shticks that we have all seen hundreds of times. Where we know pretty much exactly what they can be expected to do and how they fit in a standard party composition. And it is extremely likely that both will tackle problems along the old well established best practices known to everyone.

Really? Ok. You kinda glossed over the key bits I mentioned for both characters in your rush to declare them "boring". Performing and Gambling. In this game system, what magic you use is a major component to your character. And depending on what kind you select, which deity you worship affects what kinds of special spells (and some abilities) you may obtain. The character you dismissed as a bog standard thief, was picked up and trained by a master of the theatre, who is a priest of the theatre deity. They use magic to influece audience members to enjoy the performances, and illusions to enhance them. That's what her character is learning to do. The whole healer/thief stuff is her backstory. That's it. It explains who she is, where she came from, what motivates here, etc.

The soldier with the gambling habit is also different. Sure. He's a big tough guy, so when he hangs out with thiefly types, he fills a role that makes sennse for him. But again, he actually worships a deity of chance. Well, there are two such deities. One of which uses luck magically. The other does not, but bends fate to achieve desired outcomes (which is who he worsihps). They're good at gambling because they adjust the odds in their favor. They get magic that allows for divining the "correct" course of action when making choices, and in combat can gain some limited precognitive abilities as well. He's actually a somewhat mediocre warrior, but uses these to his advantage (kinda lurks around waiting for just the right time to strike and then takes folks out). He folds like a cheap suit the moment he's faced with an actual highly skilled and powerful fighter type. He once spent almost an entire combat once trying to take out a priest of a war god with his precog magic up basically going "Nope, going to die. retreat. Nope. going to die this round. Retreat. Yup. He's going to paste me this round as well. retreat".

These are extremely "different" than bog standard character tropes. Certainly more unique and different than "shaman who focuses on ghostbusting and works as a paper pusher by day".



2) Both have literally nothing to their background or motivation that is really setting and campaign specific. Ok, maybe have a god who likes/stands for fertility which is still kinda common. I even could them put into Splittermonds not-China and it would work.

Er. Except for the parts where you focused on what they did on the side or in the past, and ignored what they actually chose to do.

And it's weird because it appears like you started out arguing against restricting characters to "things that fit in the campaign", but now are criticizing for chracters "not being campaign specific". Which is it?



My character however is deeply tied to the elements particular to this setting. Being a bureaucrat in a pseudochinese imperial bureaucracy complete with examinations etc. won't work anywhere that is not also some not-China. Nor does this heavy focus on things that are closely linked to the specific cultural treatment of ghost and all the traditions surrounding them.

Huh? Other than the label of "not-china", I'm not seeing it. You can be a bureaucrat anywhere. Every place has them, right? So the only thing left is that you deal with spirits, and specifically ghosts. Um... That's like a narrow subset of a whole form of magic available in the game I'm talking about. I could make a dozen variations of that exact character in the game I'm running right now. Nothing you described is "unique" at all.

Doesn't mean it's not "interesting", but it just seems like you are really judging these things with a massive bias here.


Basically all the major points of the character are deeply intertwined with setting specifics. And those setting specifics including unique abilities/perks are part of the game from day one, not maybe sometimes later after introduced in an adventure.

Well sure. The specifics of what papers you are pushing will be setting specific. And the specifics of the types of ghosts are as well. But that's the same in any game. The names of the spells/abilities/whatever that are used change is all.

I never said that the starting setting contained no abilities/spells/whatever. Just that these things were specific to "what is there". In this game system, that generally means which deities or other forms of magic are available in this area, will determine what are... well... available.

Presumably, in the game you are describing, as the game continues, you will expand things to include the other 7 regions, right? And those regions may also have different structures, abilities, etc, right? I'm not seeing the difference. Unless they don't? Then what's the point of having "not-china" and "not-japan", and "not-korea", and "not-thailand", if they are all functionally identical? I'm assuming they are not. Which is all I was talking about in my initial posts.


And yes. That character is not made to left behind her home and venture somewhere else to have her adventurer career there. (It still happened occasionally but, well). Her home, her relations she started the game with, her job ... all of that remained important in some way the whole campaign. And that is what i think a proper starting setting to actually play with should provide. Not just a hub to drop the first adventure hooks and be irrelevant thereafter with characters being blank slates that form all their important characteristics and connections later and elsewhere.

And again. I never said this. Not once. This is the second time you have suggested that I drop new characters off in one area, with limited character options, and then immediately send them off elsewhere to adventure. And I will state again that this is not remotely what I'm talking about. They start in one specific area. Gotta physically be "somewhere", right? That area will define what they start out with. They will play almost exclusively in that area. However, some advenntures may take them to other parts of the world, which will be "different" than the area they start in. Different cultures. Different resources. Different gods worshiped and magic used. But they will, in all likelihood, return home when their travels are over.

Those other areas, however, still continue to exist in the game setting. And, if at some future point the Players come to me and say "we'd like to run some characters in <some other part of the setting>", we can. They start new characters in that area. And they get to experience that area from the point of view of natives rather than traveling adventurers on their way through while on some quest or something. They don't just transplant their existing characters. I mean, they could if they want to, but generally that's not how this works in my setting.

I think you're also missing that I don't require players run one and only one character in the setting, and then run them through a stock set of adventures. The play a chacter. Then they create and play another (or may play the same one if they want). Over time, they may have 8 or 10 different semi-active characters availabe to run on any given adventure that comes along. They get to pick (usually, sometimes I have specific scenarios involving specific characters). It gives us the advantage of running a variety of different power level and scope adventures in the same setting. And yes, this means that some chracters will have never left the local area, while others have spanned across the world on adventures. Some of this is about descrbing things the players experience, but some others are about what each individual character has experienced in the setting. Those are not the same thing. But if we're talking about building a game setting for the players to play in, it's relevant to make this distinction. The players learn about the setting over time, and their characters play in the setting as well.

Which I feel makes a setting feel both "large" *and* allows for a massive amount of variation over time. But yeah. On day one, first adventure? I'm going to start small. I don't want to have to define "everything that exists in this entire setting" on day one. Because, odds are, that's actually going to limit my game setting over time. So yeah, this means that character options are going to be limited to what I've decided is in the starting area on day one. It also means that I can expand the game setting over time to include diferent things, but to make sure that they fit and aren't going to unbalance the entire game in some way. Bowing to pressure from players to include some race/class/abilities/whatever in a setting where you didn't take it into consideration already may be harmless, but sometimes it'll result in problems down the line that you simply cannot anticpate in the moment. And again, if you allow "anything the game system can allow" into your game setting, then you have no real room for expansion. You can't have "there be dragons" on your map, if dragons are right here already, right?

That's all I'm saying.

[Telok]

I wouldn’t say it’s about what the rules promote and punish, it’s more about how you go about the problem solving side of the game, and whether the options you chose feel like they produce meaningfully different results.

Maybe. I'm loathe to try psychoanalysing other people based on casual observation, much less on second hand reports and personal assumption biases. But that might be close.

Lets try it. Trav...

Eh, maybe, maybe not. I'm not interested enough, nor have the time now to dive into it. There's just something... Nah. Times up, gotta go.

[Satinavian]

Not getting that at all. Again, at the end of the day, there's nothing wrong with having one area of a larger world be limited in terms of "what is there" and thus "what you can play starting out there". And this says nothing at all about how big the full setting is. And absolutely says nothing about how limited options are or whether this results in the players feeling "stiffled".Again, i am not against that and never was.

IF you reread my point it was always "If you do that choose a region with stuff that catches the players' interest". As long as that is done, the limitation works. If not, it doesn't.


These are extremely "different" than bog standard character tropes.This description of them is really different. Especially for the gambling thug who suddenly is a fighter with precognition and fate altering magic. Which certainly is not the same as gambling.


And it's weird because it appears like you started out arguing against restricting characters to "things that fit in the campaign", but now are criticizing for chracters "not being campaign specific". Which is it?
Reread my posts again.

I never argued against "restricting characters to things that fit the campaign". I warned against designing a campaign in a way that the character space that would fit in it is so small that none of the options interest the players.


I never said that the starting setting contained no abilities/spells/whatever. Just that these things were specific to "what is there". In this game system, that generally means which deities or other forms of magic are available in this area, will determine what are... well... available.You made the impression that special abilities/spells/whatever etc were something that starting characters should not have and only aquire during adventuring. Which to me means that even the things that make the starting region special are things that PC should not have had any involvement before the game starts. And i argued the exact opposite : Starting characters should be deeply involved in whatever makes the starting area special.


Presumably, in the game you are describing, as the game continues, you will expand things to include the other 7 regions, right? This campaign is nearing the end after over 100 sessions. We visited 3 of those regions for a total of ~10 sessions so far.

The game never expanded to include them and won't do. They are mostly just there like in the beginning. In the background. Adding color mostly, popping up in conversation now and then and have a role in geopolitics, regular politics, history and trade. From session one. As i said, we use the official setting of the game system.

I don't like the slowly expanding of the world. People generally have an idea what is beyond the horizon, expecially nobles, merchants, scholars. There are always ties and connections, always influence. And of course history.



I think you're also missing that I don't require players run one and only one character in the setting, and then run them through a stock set of adventures. The play a chacter. Then they create and play another (or may play the same one if they want). Over time, they may have 8 or 10 different semi-active characters availabe to run on any given adventure that comes along. They get to pick (usually, sometimes I have specific scenarios involving specific characters). It gives us the advantage of running a variety of different power level and scope adventures in the same setting. And yes, this means that some chracters will have never left the local area, while others have spanned across the world on adventures. Some of this is about descrbing things the players experience, but some others are about what each individual character has experienced in the setting. Those are not the same thing. But if we're talking about building a game setting for the players to play in, it's relevant to make this distinction. The players learn about the setting over time, and their characters play in the setting as well.
Sure.

And that way is extremely common in groups that use official settings. They also tend to run differnt groups in them etc. The difference is the last part "players learning about the setting over time" and the character variety going up in acordance with that. That is not to my taste.

[Zuras]

Sounds to me your fellow players want to improv everything. I won't go far as to say they want no rules at all. They're fine with rules providing for the math mechanics to avoid "I shot you" "No you didn't" playground arguments, but after that they want to do whatever they want whenever they want however they want and no words on paper can tell them no. Say what you want to do, roll dice to determine success or failure, deal with the consequence and repeat. I'm doubtful any game system will satisfy them. Every game has restrictions. Some more than others, but they exist.

Games can have heavily improvisational and narrative components and still include concrete boundaries on player actions. Fate and Whitehack in particular provide tremendous flexibility and don’t devolve into a quantum fog of rules when the GM has to say no to something.


Maybe. I'm loathe to try psychoanalysing other people based on casual observation, much less on second hand reports and personal assumption biases. But that might be close.

Lets try it. Trav...

Eh, maybe, maybe not. I'm not interested enough, nor have the time now to dive into it. There's just something... Nah. Times up, gotta go.

It’s hardly psychoanalysis to note that people’s preferences aren’t the least bit rational, and people have markedly different reactions to mathematically identical situations depending on how they’re presented (studies show we dislike losing more than we like winning, for example).

I think the whole premise of the original question is very specific to a particular D&D 3e+ style of game, as well, where you choose your class at character creation and are effectively locked into your character archetype by 3rd level or so. Locking your character into an archetype before they’ve even experienced a tenth of their heroic journey also seems pretty stifling to a player who wants their character to grow with the story without becoming mechanically disadvantaged.

[Tanarii]

Games can have heavily improvisational and narrative components and still include concrete boundaries on player actions. Fate and Whitehack in particular provide tremendous flexibility and don’t devolve into a quantum fog of rules when the GM has to say no to something.
Plenty of folks seem to consider GM saying no to something not a valid "solution" to a written rule. Even if it's the written rule.

Ditto for GM fiat decision making in more general terms.

[Zuras]

Plenty of folks seem to consider GM saying no to something not a valid "solution" to a written rule. Even if it's the written rule.

Ditto for GM fiat decision making in more general terms.

Calling it “GM fiat” instead of “referee judgment call” or “GM-Player negotiation” kinda gives the game away.

[Tanarii]

Calling it “GM fiat” instead of “referee judgment call” or “GM-Player negotiation” kinda gives the game away.
Yes the favorable ness, neutral ness, or negative ness of the term does give good insight into how it's being viewed. :smallamused:

[Zuras]

Yes the favorable ness, neutral ness, or negative ness of the term does give good insight into how it's being viewed. :smallamused:

DM Fiat was actually much more respected prior to 2015, as it was identical to DM Ferrari. Since they parted ways, however, DM Fiat has been viewed in an increasingly negative light.

I have no issue with people who find narrative games in the Fate or PbtA style don’t work for them, but to say they don’t have rules or structure is just flatly false. Even Improv has rules—I have multiple books of improv games that help a lot to get people started with “making it up as you go along”.

[gbaji]

IF you reread my point it was always "If you do that choose a region with stuff that catches the players' interest". As long as that is done, the limitation works. If not, it doesn't.

Fair enough. It sounded from your earlier posts that you were arguing that any such limited starting location and options would not catch the players interest at all. I think a lot of this is based on very different approaches to settings in general though.


This description of them is really different. Especially for the gambling thug who suddenly is a fighter with precognition and fate altering magic. Which certainly is not the same as gambling.

Because I was describing the backstory, not the mechanical choices that backstory lead to. The mechanics were defined on the character sheet. Which were actually very minimal. Again, this is a game system where characters tend to start out with some skill choice variation, and probably some magic path they are setting out on (with somewhat minimal magic available). But that magic choice/path presents a lot of variation. In this case, a cult of gamblers who woship a deity of fate who grants some minor abilities to see and alter fate itself. Other's may worship deities of combat who offer spells that significantly improve combat stuff. Or deities of healing, or knowledge, or illusion, or luck, or hunting, or various elemental powers, or.... <huge list of things>.

I was trying to highlight that even with an identical mechanical choice, the actual PC backstory can vary quite a bit. Why a character chooses to follow a specific path is as important to how the character plays out as what path they chose. Not every "soldier who worships <war god>" is identical. And not every "risktaker" who worships a goddess of fate is identical. And not every "performer who worships the god of illusions" is identical. It's not all about the equivalent of "race/class" combos. Or at least, it should not be all about that.



I never argued against "restricting characters to things that fit the campaign". I warned against designing a campaign in a way that the character space that would fit in it is so small that none of the options interest the players.

I think you and I may disagree on what constitutes "so small". I view broad mechanical options as less important than broad character personality and motivation options. I also tend to think that you can fit in a heck of a lot of variation in a relatively small space if you make that space dynamic and "real". And I happen to also think that the players will feel more intune with a space that "makes sense" than one that includes a ton of different mechanical options for no reason other than "the GM didn't want to limit PC choices".

So yeah, I guess I'm cautioning in the opposite direction. Most of the time, limits on "what is there" make sense. Geographical regions tend to have something that ties the people who live there together. It can be a common culture, beliefs, whatever. I feel that it's extremely important to make that starting area (especially for a new campaign in a new setting) feel "real" to the players. They need to feel like this place they are living in has some sort of flavor to it. And yeah, a lot of time that's going to preclude the "kitchen sink" sort of options. It means saying "here are the 3 or 4 racial groups present in the area", and "here are the different professions", and "here are the various magic paths available to you", and then letting the players select from those in various combinations to create their characters.

And yeah, this does mean that as a GM you need to resist the urge to let a player who says "I really want to play <race that isn't there> and <class that doesn't fit the region> who worships <deity that doesn't fit either>". You will damage the "feel" of that location if you do that.


You made the impression that special abilities/spells/whatever etc were something that starting characters should not have and only aquire during adventuring. Which to me means that even the things that make the starting region special are things that PC should not have had any involvement before the game starts. And i argued the exact opposite : Starting characters should be deeply involved in whatever makes the starting area special.

I'm not sure how you got that impression. Quite the opposite. The whole gamut of abilities/spells/whatever are available, but based on "what is actually there". In most games, this is going to be based on the race/class/guild/religion/whatever options, and those I do limit to "what is there". So yeah, you may pick from X races, cause that's what's there. And you may pick from Y classes (including whatever magic they grant), because that's what's there. Same with other options.

Whatever magical abilities, spells, whatever that would be granted by the selection of choices in an area are available on start up. My issue is players who want to find something that isn't in the area and play that instead. In some game systems, this involves digging through sourcebooks and finding some oddball race/class combo and wanting to play that instead of the choices I've determined are present. That's all I was talking about. At no point was I suggesting that you could be a cleric of <deity> but not get any spells. Or that you could be an elf or dwarf, but get none of the natural racial abilities of those. Or you can play a wizard, but have an empty spellbook or something. Nope. You start as a wizard, but I've determined what options there are (maybe an official guild, and a handful of independent masters who maybe take on apprentices for training, each of which has maybe some structures as to what spells/schools they teach young wizards and thus what spells you may have access to initially depending on that choice).

But you always get "something". But that "something" is the stuff that is available based on class/race/whatever choices in the area on startup. Yes, over time additional "things" will be discovered. Could be additiional magical choices, or skill/class choices, or just strange magic objects, rare magical abilities granted, etc.


The game never expanded to include them and won't do. They are mostly just there like in the beginning. In the background. Adding color mostly, popping up in conversation now and then and have a role in geopolitics, regular politics, history and trade. From session one. As i said, we use the official setting of the game system.

I don't like the slowly expanding of the world. People generally have an idea what is beyond the horizon, expecially nobles, merchants, scholars. There are always ties and connections, always influence. And of course history.

Ok. But I'm not sure if "your horizon is limited at first, but expands as you learn more about the world, and even physically explore it" is going to be more limited/stiffling than "theres's this whole huge world out there that I will describe in detail, but you're never going to actually experience it at any point during play".



And that way is extremely common in groups that use official settings. They also tend to run differnt groups in them etc. The difference is the last part "players learning about the setting over time" and the character variety going up in acordance with that. That is not to my taste.

Sounds like just a difference in tastes. You are running a game in an official setting. I tend to avoid them like the plague. And yes, in an official setting it's easy to pull out the sourcebook and describe all the things that someone else wrote about "other places" that exist in the setting.

I was specifically speaking of creating your own setting. And when you do that, you start out small and then build. But the beauty is that instead of the players "reading about it", they get to actually experience it. And it has the advantage that they can't learn what is "over there" by going out and reading a sourcebook.

IME this massively increases player interest in a setting. They want to explore it. And as a GM, you can tailor different parts of the setting to what sorts of adventures you and the players want to play in. You aren't limited to what someone else wrote. And yeah, as a side bonus (and perhaps most relevant to this thread), you don't have players coming up to you and asking to play "this race/class/whatever from some other part of the setting". They literally don't know that there's some other race over there until they go there. They don't know about the fire worshipers in <some other land> until they encounter them in game. It's not just an adventure for the characters, but also for the players.

And yeah, I much much prefer running those kinds of games. It does require a lot more creativity, but IMO the benefits far outweigh those costs. And don't get me wrong, I've played a lot of games in various published settings. But honestly, usually restrict myself to a single campaign or set of adventures. I just don't find running games in someone else's sandbox all that interesting. It's very constraining. At the very least, I will modify the heck out of any stock setting that I read. Taking elemnents of it. Heck, I usually take elements from a lot of settings, make changes, modify to fit a different setting (and sometimes whole different game systems), and go from there. Which gives the players the occasional "hey, isn't this like <whatever> from <some setting>?". Yup. It is. But it's also kinda not.

[Telok]

One limited option that's pretty stifling is game systems. Every couple years I'll run a 9-12 month campaign in a different system. But for the last 20 years as a player I haven't gotten to do anything but yet another damn version of D&D. Nobody around this town can get out of the rut of running yet another damn generic kitchen sink fantasy knockoff D&D game to save yet another world of generic mud farmers and generic snotty nobles from yet another generic world ending threat, except me.

That's stifling.

[False God]

One limited option that's pretty stifling is game systems. Every couple years I'll run a 9-12 month campaign in a different system. But for the last 20 years as a player I haven't gotten to do anything but yet another damn version of D&D. Nobody around this town can get out of the rut of running yet another damn generic kitchen sink fantasy knockoff D&D game to save yet another world of generic mud farmers and generic snotty nobles from yet another generic world ending threat, except me.

That's stifling.

This, lots and lots of this.

[Easy e]

One limited option that's pretty stifling is game systems. Every couple years I'll run a 9-12 month campaign in a different system. But for the last 20 years as a player I haven't gotten to do anything but yet another damn version of D&D. Nobody around this town can get out of the rut of running yet another damn generic kitchen sink fantasy knockoff D&D game to save yet another world of generic mud farmers and generic snotty nobles from yet another generic world ending threat, except me.

That's stifling.

Preach it brother!

I am so excited I got one of my fellow DMs to run PbtA system after I am done with L5R.

I could not be happier!

[gbaji]

I *almost* got pulled into a long running Traveller game. Almost. Then I realized I really didn't have time for another regular game.

[Luccan]

I think it depends more on the choices available than the number of available choices. You could kick me down to a Feat-less, Human Totem Barbarians with the Outlander background only game in 5e and I'd still be interested because the choices between totems at each subclass level would matter even more than it normally does. But if everyone had to play the same subclass of Cleric that would be a lot less interesting to me, even if I could choose any race and background I wanted.

[Tanarii]

Is that because of impact of the choice on variation? (Given you're referencing D&D 5e, where subclass usually means a bigger deal than race of background for features variation.)