Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea

[gbaji]

That’s… odd. I mean, IME, those who lack connections by virtue of being “not from around here” tend to be the ones most likely to be trying to connect to / forge connections with the setting.

I mean, if you have 4 people, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, and the stranger in town, wouldn’t you expect the stranger to be the one spending the most time and effort of the 4 on “forging connections”?

I assume Anymage was talking about constructing some additional backstory to explain *why* this character, that is perhaps not of a class/race native to the setting, came to be there in the first place. Or what they're doing now that they're there. What motivates them? What are their goals? Are they trying to "get home"? A wanderer? Fell through a portal? On a mission from some extra-dimensional deity? Some players will just look at the setting and say "i want to play <something that isn't normally in that setting", and they'll give lots of reasons why they want to play that particular type of character (usually more focused on class/race abilities than RP), but if/when you allow it, spend virtually zero on those other things. It's just played as though it's perfectly normal for that character to be there.

And this puts the onus on the GM to provide that detail. And then explain why there aren't more of whatever it is in the setting, or add it in, even if there was no intention to in the first place. Sometimes, this can spur some ideas in the GMs head (Your Kung Fu Panda is an orphan and there is a distant land in this world where your kind come from that no one around here knows about). Sometimes, that's just not as easy or possible though.

[Mechalich]

I assume Anymage was talking about constructing some additional backstory to explain *why* this character, that is perhaps not of a class/race native to the setting, came to be there in the first place. Or what they're doing now that they're there. What motivates them? What are their goals? Are they trying to "get home"? A wanderer? Fell through a portal? On a mission from some extra-dimensional deity? Some players will just look at the setting and say "i want to play <something that isn't normally in that setting", and they'll give lots of reasons why they want to play that particular type of character (usually more focused on class/race abilities than RP), but if/when you allow it, spend virtually zero on those other things. It's just played as though it's perfectly normal for that character to be there.

And this puts the onus on the GM to provide that detail. And then explain why there aren't more of whatever it is in the setting, or add it in, even if there was no intention to in the first place. Sometimes, this can spur some ideas in the GMs head (Your Kung Fu Panda is an orphan and there is a distant land in this world where your kind come from that no one around here knows about). Sometimes, that's just not as easy or possible though.

At the end of the day, bad roleplaying is bad roleplaying. This kind of move, taking a thing that doesn't belong in a given setting, dropping it in for a single case, and then ignoring implications of the new arrival purely to seize some kind of mechanical advantage, is regrettably common. In tabletop is tends to specifically brush against certain gaming conceits, such as the absence of linguistic barriers or a universal built environment (ex. when people operate under the assumption that a six-legged arthopoid can move around in a human-designed starship without any problems). However, this is mostly a matter of GM responsibility, it's one of the points in a session zero where the GM has to be willing to say 'nope that's not going to work in this setting.'

Admittedly, this gets harder when official rulebooks throw out character options that are presumed to exist in a given setting that don't actually play well with the setting as a whole, like some of the more exotic 'race' options including construct races, plant-people, flying species, and so forth. This is a general problem with the kitchen sink approach to game and setting design, kitchen sinks are terrible settings. In some sense travel restrictions are actually an attempt to limit this problem, but they are a much weaker option than outright bans. 'X doesn't exist,' is much more solid than 'X is only found far away.'

[gbaji]

Hah! Yeah. I've run into players who absolutely refuse to play anything that isn't some variation of construct, or some other "weird" thing (usually in some obscure setting resource book). And yeah, it's almost always for some specific racial feature advantage that they think is essential and just absolutely can't live without. It's like, er... can't you just play a human, or a elf, or a dwarf. And you know, just a normal human, elf, or dwarf? Just once?

It always feels like I'm the oddball if I play a pickup table/online/whatever and I'm listening to everyone describe all these bizarro characters in the party, and my side of the conversation goes something like "Oh. My characters a human fighter. Yup. Nope. He's just a farmer's kid. Got bored working the fields. Nope. He's from right outside of <town we're starting from>. Er... Nope. He's not an orphan with potential to be the long lost heir to <wherever>. Um... No. He doesn't have half <something else> blood that gives him special powers. Nope. No divine calling/destiny involved. Just a normal guy who's decided to try adventuring for a living instead of farming. Just a fighter. Yes. A normal fighter. You know, right out of the book. What's wrong with that?". It's like I've grown two heads or something.

That actually *should* be something like 99% of all PC backgrounds (with parent profession and chosen class varying of course). Yet, oddly, its closer to 1%.

[Anymage]

I do have to say that one of my favorite sci-fi short stories, which I cannot remember the title or author (it was in one of the old Analog magazines my older brother had that I read as a kid)...

"The Road Not Taken", by Harry Turtledove. Because there's a good chance someone reading this isn't familiar with Turtledove and would enjoy becoming so.

There can definitely be characters who are ill-fitting to a given campaign, but IME that's only semi-correlated to whether they're from the appropriate setting books.

If they're in setting books someone put some thought into integrating them with the rest of the setting. If not, someone has to do that work. Otherwise the character is just kind of there adrift ("I'm a changeling, just roll with it"), a distracting fish out of water ("I fell through portal from Eberron"), or at worst tries to use their unprecedented status to argue that countermeasures against them shouldn't be present.

If the player is willing to do the work to make the character feel like a natural fit for the world around them, I'm happy to work with them. If it's going to create friction points and/or more work for me as GM, I'm going to be less well disposed. My experiences have been that it's relatively rare for a player to think things through beyond what character they want to bring.

[Fiery Diamond]

I've been purposefully avoiding the phrase 'tell the story' though because it strongly implies that e.g. certain outcomes or actions are mandated, and that's not what this is about.

Out of those three, I'd say the last one is closest to what I mean, except I'd phrase it:

"I wanted to ask a question about what people will do when the last resources run out and there is no way to get more, and I picked the scenario of a city under seige to explore that. Unfortunately I picked a system to run it in in which Create Food and Water is a low level, easily accessible spell. Now my scenario doesn't ask the question I thought it did, because I failed to understand the properties of the setting that I actually ended up creating. Gee, maybe I should have known better."

I could be wrong, but I think Quertus is saying that all three of those are essentially the exact same issue, and your insistence on seeing one as a problem but not another is baffling.

[NichG]

I could be wrong, but I think Quertus is saying that all three of those are essentially the exact same issue, and your insistence on seeing one as a problem but not another is baffling.

In the three examples Quertus gave, they're all framed as DM vs player.

In the version I gave, it's a DM self own.

In all of these posts I have not argued 'you should not permit multiverse characters '. I've only argued 'yes, there being a multiverse changes things about campaign focus, understand that before you include it'

Somehow 'it makes a difference' is getting translated to 'you don't want to let players play what they want'.

Which honestly suggests an insecurity to me that 'if a DM thinks it makes a difference, they're going to ban my character concept'. But the right way to deal with that is to negotiate 'hey, can we play a campaign that would benefit from me having an out of context character?' rather than 'hey DM, don't think about it'

[Quertus]

I assume Anymage was talking about constructing some additional backstory to explain *why* this character, that is perhaps not of a class/race native to the setting, came to be there in the first place. Or what they're doing now that they're there. What motivates them? What are their goals? Are they trying to "get home"? A wanderer? Fell through a portal? On a mission from some extra-dimensional deity? Some players will just look at the setting and say "i want to play <something that isn't normally in that setting", and they'll give lots of reasons why they want to play that particular type of character (usually more focused on class/race abilities than RP), but if/when you allow it, spend virtually zero on those other things. It's just played as though it's perfectly normal for that character to be there.

And this puts the onus on the GM to provide that detail. And then explain why there aren't more of whatever it is in the setting, or add it in, even if there was no intention to in the first place. Sometimes, this can spur some ideas in the GMs head (Your Kung Fu Panda is an orphan and there is a distant land in this world where your kind come from that no one around here knows about). Sometimes, that's just not as easy or possible though.

First things first: that part I bolded? Absolutely not! That’s the answer to the thread question, that’s the value of the “restricted” multiverse, that the GM doesn’t have to do that.

As to the rest, well, again, my experience goes in the opposite direction, that those who care what they play tend to have more in the way of background and motivations. Shrug.

"The Road Not Taken", by Harry Turtledove. Because there's a good chance someone reading this isn't familiar with Turtledove and would enjoy becoming so.

Thanks. I’ll have to investigate that.

at worst tries to use their unprecedented status to argue that countermeasures against them shouldn't be present.

Um… given the whole “multiverse” and “there are no X native to this world, there’s probably shouldn’t be countermeasures to X in the world without X. If your world doesn’t have Dragons, but does have something that explicitly interacts with my half-Dragon whose father was from another universe, that’d better be a major Plot point in my character understanding their strange skin condition / learning disability.

And it likely opens the multiverse up as “a thing” that the party can care about now.

I could be wrong, but I think Quertus is saying that all three of those are essentially the exact same issue, and your insistence on seeing one as a problem but not another is baffling.

Well, yes. Or, rather, “I see those all as instances of the same issue”, which isn’t exactly the same thing. That NichG sees them as having different “matches what NichG is talking about” ratings is potentially valuable information.

I've been purposefully avoiding the phrase 'tell the story' though because it strongly implies that e.g. certain outcomes or actions are mandated, and that's not what this is about.

Out of those three, I'd say the last one is closest to what I mean, except I'd phrase it:

"I wanted to ask a question about what people will do when the last resources run out and there is no way to get more, and I picked the scenario of a city under seige to explore that. Unfortunately I picked a system to run it in in which Create Food and Water is a low level, easily accessible spell. Now my scenario doesn't ask the question I thought it did, because I failed to understand the properties of the setting that I actually ended up creating. Gee, maybe I should have known better."

You picked the scenario of the city under siege… to Explore the question of what people will do when food runs out. Great.

Maybe the party goes all Soylent Green. Maybe they make rooftop gardens before it gets to that point. Maybe they turn the town (or just themselves) Undead. Maybe they make a pact with the fey, or demons, or Tzeentch, for a different Fate. Maybe they surrender or switch sides before it gets to that point. Maybe they die before it gets to that point.

I still see this as, “if the characters have personality, and you give them agency, and don’t have player buy-in on getting to that question, you aren’t guaranteed (or even likely, at least at most tables I’ve known) to get to that question.” Further, afaict, “personality” matters much more than “which splatbook the character or their <tech> came from” wrt the odds of getting to ask your question.

Also, my “tell the story” is equal parts “intent” and “after the fact framing”. You intended to tell the story of “food shortage during a siege”. I intended to tell the story of “Guy who traded places with his brother”. Instead, on a terrible fumble, we told the story of, “that time the PCs killed themselves and the town they were trying to defend when they destroyed the dam”. Which may or may not have anything to do with either of our intended stories (maybe it was part of a desperate plan to break the siege or get the surfing army to leave food unattended; maybe the disaster was caused by my character being an imposter and not having been trained. Or maybe it happened independent of either of those.).

[Quertus]

In the three examples Quertus gave, they're all framed as DM vs player.

In the version I gave, it's a DM self own.

In all of these posts I have not argued 'you should not permit multiverse characters '. I've only argued 'yes, there being a multiverse changes things about campaign focus, understand that before you include it'

Somehow 'it makes a difference' is getting translated to 'you don't want to let players play what they want'.

Which honestly suggests an insecurity to me that 'if a DM thinks it makes a difference, they're going to ban my character concept'. But the right way to deal with that is to negotiate 'hey, can we play a campaign that would benefit from me having an out of context character?' rather than 'hey DM, don't think about it'

Maybe I’m backwards here. So, when you allow a character who can build a Create Food and Water trap into your “finite food town siege” scenario, do you… realize that you are no longer asking a “finite food” question… and are instead asking… a “single point of failure” question? A “hero of the people” question? A “my friends eat, and the rest of you starve” question? A “finite arrows” question? A “they blocked the outgoing sewers” question? A “when is Gandalf coming back” question?

What are you suggesting that the GM in that scenario is now asking? Or, to flip that, why should the GM be asking any question in the first place, instead of simply providing an interesting scenario (“a city under siege”), and playing to find out what questions and answers arise from the PCs that the players bring?

[NichG]

You picked the scenario of the city under siege… to Explore the question of what people will do when food runs out. Great.

Maybe the party goes all Soylent Green. Maybe they make rooftop gardens before it gets to that point. Maybe they turn the town (or just themselves) Undead. Maybe they make a pact with the fey, or demons, or Tzeentch, for a different Fate. Maybe they surrender or switch sides before it gets to that point. Maybe they die before it gets to that point.

Yeah that's all fine, though if 'rooftop gardens, duh' resolves the situation then I also messed up with setting up the scenario.

I said resource instead of food specifically to suggest also that it doesn't have to be food. If creating food is easy, maybe I should instead have made it an afterlife running out of space. Or a living dream where the dreamer's attention is shifting and causality has become a measured resource.

I can get the question asked if I understand why the magic system made it meaningless and change my plans to ask a version that would actually be meaningful to those characters. But if I don't understand that interaction it's likely that what I'm running will flop.

I still see this as, “if the characters have personality, and you give them agency, and don’t have player buy-in on getting to that question, you aren’t guaranteed (or even likely, at least at most tables I’ve known) to get to that question.” Further, afaict, “personality” matters much more than “which splatbook the character or their <tech> came from” wrt the odds of getting to ask your question.

You aren't guaranteed to get it asked even with buy in. You can make bad choices about how you go about asking where, sure, the players might humor you and go through the motions but it won't change that the game sucked.

That's again why I don't use 'tell the story'. Because succeeding in getting the story told doesn't mean it will have impact or be enjoyed. Better to fail to tell the story but keep the impact than vice versa.

In general I would say you should never try to tell a story, as GM or player, you should only try to create experiences and in turn experience things (for both roles). But that gets to my own philosophy rather than the things I think every table should be aware of.

What are you suggesting that the GM in that scenario is now asking? Or, to flip that, why should the GM be asking any question in the first place, instead of simply providing an interesting scenario (“a city under siege”), and playing to find out what questions and answers arise from the PCs that the players bring?

Because going new places successfully requires effort and intent. You can't get everywhere it's possible to go by just acting thoughtlessly.

It's like, you're describing an endless fruit sorbet display - add your favorite fruit juice, sugar, and churn. It's great and all, but if someone wants to experience dairy ice cream you aren't going to get a good result just throwing in milk. You might instead have to prepare a custard carefully, let it stabilize, boil the fruit juice into concentrate then gradually add it to get the fruit flavor without curdling the mixture.

E.g. you have to know (or at least gradually discover) what you're about, and go for it with intent.

[Telok]

This is all just pretty much modern D&D problems right? Because fer Paranoia, Champions, Traveller, Starfinder, DtD40k7e, AD&D, Call of Cthulhu, Rifts, VtM, etc., for 30+ years I've never seen weirdo characters from another dimension being a problem. Either the game engine & setting & adventures are fine with it or the GM drops a "nope" that's perfectly understandable & reasonable.

[NichG]

This is all just pretty much modern D&D problems right? Because fer Paranoia, Champions, Traveller, Starfinder, DtD40k7e, AD&D, Call of Cthulhu, Rifts, VtM, etc., for 30+ years I've never seen weirdo characters from another dimension being a problem. Either the game engine & setting & adventures are fine with it or the GM drops a "nope" that's perfectly understandable & reasonable.

VtM would feel very different than, say, a VtM/Exalted crossover with the Exalt showing up in the modern world.

Whether its a problem or not depends on what people are trying to achieve.

[Mechalich]

VtM would feel very different than, say, a VtM/Exalted crossover with the Exalt showing up in the modern world.

Whether its a problem or not depends on what people are trying to achieve.

VtM has, entirely on its own, a whole menagerie of obscure bloodlines that tend to make a giant mess of a campaign if allowed into play and not handled carefully. If some player tries to play a Baali, or a Gargoyle, or a Nagaraja, or something similar, that character's very existence has the potential to hijack the whole blasted campaign.

This can happen even when there's no intent by the player to be disruptive, because many settings do not handle rare, out-of-place stuff very well. VtM, which is supposed to be a tightly wound enterprise with highly political storytelling (in practice this was rarely the case) was notably vulnerable to exactly this kind of disruption. By contrast something like RIFTS, which is already in the realm of gonzo insanity, can tolerate pretty much anything without blinking. D&D is somewhere in the middle with certain settings, like FR, tolerant of all sorts of bizarre diversity, extraplanar exiles, and weird origins, while others like Dragonlance or Ravenloft are considerably more constrained.

[RandomPeasant]

Uh, no. Both things interrupt my worldbuilding. But postulating that there are some weirdos out there who do things differently is a far cry from saying there are alternate realities and other worlds and planets created by super-wizards entirely out of metal and clockwork that then became flesh thanks to an ancient virus created by a dead god on another another world.

Really? Please explain to me how you forsee "there is a place you will never go and will never interact with except perhaps through war stories your friend tells around the campfire" is more disruptive to your worldbuilding, or even as disruptive to your worldbuilding, than "there is a group of guys who could all show up and start **** if they decided to go on an ocean voyage that's, like, three months long".

You DO see the rather substantial scale and scope of the differences being introduced right? Where one I include a little village of earth-benders who got jiggy with some elementals and another where I include a multiverse?

Did the existence of the MCU multiverse impact in any way the story of Hawkeye? Did they suddenly have to refigure all the alliances in the criminal underworld of New York City to account for the fact that somewhere out there there's a timeline where people go on red? Your worldbuilding doesn't have to account for anything the campaign doesn't touch, and what the restricted multiverse does is provide you with a ready-made excuse for why things don't touch. You need to spend exactly zero words figuring out why the psuedo-Norse of Kaldhiem or the psuedo-Egyptians of Amonkhet or the Harry Potter ripoffs of Strixhaven don't show up in your psuedo-Mesoamerican Ixalan campaign, because them not showing up is the default.

There are ways to do it without being a planeswalker, and namely the Phyrexians know how.

Oh, wow, such a horrifyingly hard problem to solve. Wait, no, it's fine, we can just declare that this campaign is happening after Karn goes to New Phyrexia, shouts "it's Sylexin' time" and Sylexes all over them. Or in an alternate timeline where New Phyrexia lost and Karn is free to galivant around the multiverse and that's why he's on Ixalan in the first place. Or you could stop getting so caught up in the example I picked off the top of my head and engage with the general principle of "planar travel being hard means you don't have to introduce elements from other planes". Pretend we were talking about, like, some Kithkin planeswalker showing up without needing to go into whatever the hell is happening with Lorwyn's aura right now.

Pot, kettle. You've written up an awful lot about how it's a bad DM decision to say "this is what I want to do, and will not accept anything outside of it" but seem to also write an awful lot about how it's totally fine and dandy for a player to say "this is what I want to do, and will not accept anything outside of it".

The character is the only thing the player controls. Of course they have proportionately more influence over it than the DM has over any particular element of worldbuilding. But, no, I don't believe the player should get to do whatever they want. "I have this weird race and this weird class" is simply not all that intrusive to world-building. It just isn't. But if someone says something like "I want to play a Dragonmarked Heir of House Cannith, and by that I mean I want to play a guy who gets a significant amount of his power by calling in favors from House Cannith", I would in fact say that is an unreasonable ask, because it can't be accommodated easily (though maybe instead of just shouting "no", you point that guy to some of the politics established in your setting and see if he can play a version of his concept that's compatible with what's already been laid down). But you actually can allow the guy who wants to play a Vulshok Geomancer to play a Vulshok Geomancer without re-writing your notes on the power dynamics of early colonial Ixalan, so you should just do that if someone asks you.

There can definitely be characters who are ill-fitting to a given campaign, but IME that's only semi-correlated to whether they're from the appropriate setting books.

This is very true. It's also worth pointing out that it's much easier to get people to buy in on the important stuff if you don't act tyrannical about the little stuff. A character is something the player brings to the table. If you let them bring the one they want, they will naturally care more about the story and the rest of their character's interactions with it.

Once someone from one culture sees something that exists, they know it's possible to do, and will return to their own culture with that knowledge.

Well, sure. But we're still talking about "once", so we don't have any problem explaining why the Federation hasn't started doing magic on its own (you can shift it up to "why haven't they encountered other magic users yet", but "we found this new and different form of Weird Space ****" is like 50% of stories about the Federation). And even when you do get that contact, stuff only transfers if there's a sufficient level of baseline knowledge. Europeans started making their own hammocks, but (AFAIK) Native Americans didn't start manufacturing their own firearms.

You will literally blow up a game setting over time if you don't put some sort of restrictions, not just on travel, but also on "what works where".

I am much more concerned over blowing up a game right now when I tell the players "by the way, those characters you lovingly crafted work differently now in arbitrary ways". A game that has been running for 40 years is an extreme outlier, and if those are the guys a decision makes work harder, I am totally comfortable making them do some extra work for the greater good.

kitchen sinks are terrible settings.

I am begging people to just not play D&D. The core Monster Manual has things from like four different mythologies, and that's without counting "Lovecraftian" as one or squinting real hard at where those element-flavored Giants are coming from. You can have a game that has a really narrowly-defined set of things in it. That game is not D&D, and D&D does not need to make any particular sacrifices to facilitate you having an easier time running it on the same rules engine as the rest of D&D.

It's like, er... can't you just play a human, or a elf, or a dwarf. And you know, just a normal human, elf, or dwarf? Just once?

Why do you care so much how they have fun? Are they being actively disruptive because they choose to play a Warforged or a Dryad? Do they try to force you to play a Gensai instead of a Human?

That actually *should* be something like 99% of all PC backgrounds (with parent profession and chosen class varying of course). Yet, oddly, its closer to 1%.

No it shouldn't! Characters should be the specific cool things players are interested in. Go crack open a fantasy novel sometime. How many of those guys are "just a regular dude with nothing going on who decided to go on an adventure"?

VtM would feel very different than, say, a VtM/Exalted crossover with the Exalt showing up in the modern world.

But is that because the Exalt's being angsty superhumans is somehow conceptually incompatible with the way VtM vampires are angsty superhumans, or just because Exalt's power level blows VtM's (and, to be fair, most games) out of the water? If I show up in a 3rd level Eberron game with a 20th level character from Dragonlance, the problematic part of what I'm doing is "20th level", not "Dragonlance".

[False God]

Hah! Yeah. I've run into players who absolutely refuse to play anything that isn't some variation of construct, or some other "weird" thing (usually in some obscure setting resource book). And yeah, it's almost always for some specific racial feature advantage that they think is essential and just absolutely can't live without. It's like, er... can't you just play a human, or a elf, or a dwarf. And you know, just a normal human, elf, or dwarf? Just once?

It always feels like I'm the oddball if I play a pickup table/online/whatever and I'm listening to everyone describe all these bizarro characters in the party, and my side of the conversation goes something like "Oh. My characters a human fighter. Yup. Nope. He's just a farmer's kid. Got bored working the fields. Nope. He's from right outside of <town we're starting from>. Er... Nope. He's not an orphan with potential to be the long lost heir to <wherever>. Um... No. He doesn't have half <something else> blood that gives him special powers. Nope. No divine calling/destiny involved. Just a normal guy who's decided to try adventuring for a living instead of farming. Just a fighter. Yes. A normal fighter. You know, right out of the book. What's wrong with that?". It's like I've grown two heads or something.

That actually *should* be something like 99% of all PC backgrounds (with parent profession and chosen class varying of course). Yet, oddly, its closer to 1%.

And it's not terribly difficult to add a little spice to an otherwise normal background by either using a race that most people don't normally associate with "normal" lives (such as some form of planetouched) or add a twist to the "farmer background" that they loved growing crops so much they went to live in the woods and became a druid. No murdered parents, no orphan looking for revenge, heck, you can even be the half-vampire secret love-child of the Black King but other than that your days are spent like any other person in town.

Like cooking, I think a lot of people forget that simplicity and the base ingredients themselves can make for an excellent meal, and often resort to overseasoning and overcomplicating the meal in some misguided attempt at "totally super unique".

[NichG]

But is that because the Exalt's being angsty superhumans is somehow conceptually incompatible with the way VtM vampires are angsty superhumans, or just because Exalt's power level blows VtM's (and, to be fair, most games) out of the water? If I show up in a 3rd level Eberron game with a 20th level character from Dragonlance, the problematic part of what I'm doing is "20th level", not "Dragonlance".

Well again, and I am kind of getting irritated in having to repeat it so much: just because something is different does not mean that it is a problem. It is only a problem if the difference moves you in a direction you don't want to go in.

What does adding Exalted to VtM do? Well, lots of things - you're worried about the armageddon and critical existence failure of the setting? The Exalt is cosmologically a lot closer to that sort of thing than even a second or third generation vampire, and those concerns are going to be closer to the surface and more relevant and addressable via the Exalt's presence. But okay, lets say its an Exalt who just likes having superpowers - the fact that the primary pressures that shaped them are missing from the modern world is going to change the experience of play. And the fact that the pressures that do exist for vampires are different - the need to feed, social pressures surrounding the masquerade, relationships with vampire generational hierarchy, etc - means that you're adding an element to the game that is simply not under the same forces as everyone else. Without saying 'this is good' or 'this is bad', again, 'this is different'. Different dynamic. Some things get easier, others get harder.

If I wanted to run WoD: Against the Apocalypse'? Bring on the exalt! They'd help de-emphasize the usual petty politics aspects and pull the focus more naturally towards epic 'actually we can determine the fate of the world' thinking. The WoD kitchen sink I played in ended up being 'lets help the Wyrd beat down the Weaver and the Wyrm', with a party of mixed, even multi-type supernaturals. Those things worked well together. It was utterly different than the sort of stuff the dedicated local Vampire LARP got up to though.

[Telok]

VtM has, entirely on its own, a whole menagerie of obscure bloodlines that tend to make a giant mess of a campaign if allowed into play and not handled carefully. If some player tries to

We never had that issue when the weird bloodlines showed up. Tho in all fairness we did play like most people, using it for dark supers style stuff rath than angst or politics. Then again it was still early-ish edition and we were pretty rough & loose with stuff back then, the mid 90s being what they were.

Did get to do the AD&D/Gamma World cross though. Great fun. Nuke reactor control electronics don't hold up to the Heat Metal spell very well. Brought shotguns back with us and had great fun until the ammo ran out. "Bigger barrels are bigger booms! Dibs on the double barrel one!"

[Anymage]

Um… given the whole “multiverse” and “there are no X native to this world, there’s probably shouldn’t be countermeasures to X in the world without X. If your world doesn’t have Dragons, but does have something that explicitly interacts with my half-Dragon whose father was from another universe, that’d better be a major Plot point in my character understanding their strange skin condition / learning disability.

And it likely opens the multiverse up as “a thing” that the party can care about now.

If the other players - including the DM, who has to do more work if things go spontaneously sideways - aren't enthused about a multiverse, one player trying to make it a thing is just that much extra hassle.

Similarly, I'll just say that I've rarely seen a player who insisted that the locals shouldn't be prepared against them turn around and play similarly clueless about local threats. I may be paranoid that this is just someone trying to establish information asymmetry, but I'm paranoid due to experiences.

VtM would feel very different than, say, a VtM/Exalted crossover with the Exalt showing up in the modern world.

Whether its a problem or not depends on what people are trying to achieve.

Even aside from vampire/exalt, just vampire/werewolf was an easy thing to throw together (they are mechanically compatible) while also being a thematic minefield. When one player character can not only be active while another is in mortal peril if they step outside, but can also enter a whole parallel world entirely, you do risk a major threat to party cohesion. This being a very good case where it helps to have a session zero, and to enforce consensus decisions if need be.

Iam much more concerned over blowing up a game right now when I tell the players "by the way, those characters you lovingly crafted work differently now in arbitrary ways". A game that has been running for 40 years is an extreme outlier, and if those are the guys a decision makes work harder, I am totally comfortable making them do some extra work for the greater good.

This right here is the problem. Your lovingly crafted character is entirely meaningless without context, and trying to force them into any proximate campaign sounds like those old stories about someone wanting to join a new group with their existing character. You're going to get some friction trying to squeeze them in. Discuss the character you want ahead of time, and ideally how they can naturally fit into the world, and you'll be much more likely to get something that can work constructively with what everybody else wants.

[Quertus]

Yeah that's all fine, though if 'rooftop gardens, duh' resolves the situation then I also messed up with setting up the scenario.

I said resource instead of food specifically to suggest also that it doesn't have to be food. If creating food is easy, maybe I should instead have made it an afterlife running out of space. Or a living dream where the dreamer's attention is shifting and causality has become a measured resource.

I can get the question asked if I understand why the magic system made it meaningless and change my plans to ask a version that would actually be meaningful to those characters. But if I don't understand that interaction it's likely that what I'm running will flop.



You aren't guaranteed to get it asked even with buy in. You can make bad choices about how you go about asking where, sure, the players might humor you and go through the motions but it won't change that the game sucked.

That's again why I don't use 'tell the story'. Because succeeding in getting the story told doesn't mean it will have impact or be enjoyed. Better to fail to tell the story but keep the impact than vice versa.

In general I would say you should never try to tell a story, as GM or player, you should only try to create experiences and in turn experience things (for both roles). But that gets to my own philosophy rather than the things I think every table should be aware of.

If you make a good “town under siege” scenario, you may not get “finite food” answered, but that doesn’t mean that people will remember “the game was bad” - quite the opposite, usually.

Then you can move on to your “hell is full” scenario… which the PCs might also subvert. And likely have a great game in the process.

D&D is somewhere in the middle with certain settings, like FR, tolerant of all sorts of bizarre diversity, extraplanar exiles, and weird origins, while others like Dragonlance or Ravenloft are considerably more constrained.

I thought part of the… if not “point”, at least “lore” of Ravenloft was that it “eats” pieces of many worlds, and is inherently a crossover setting. No?

[NichG]

If you make a good “town under siege” scenario, you may not get “finite food” answered, but that doesn’t mean that people will remember “the game was bad” - quite the opposite, usually.

Then you can move on to your “hell is full” scenario… which the PCs might also subvert. And likely have a great game in the process.

Well again, its not about preventing players from subverting things. That's about actions and outcomes, which I've now said, what, three times? Is not the point.

It's like the difference in feel between 'Hm, tricky, but I think I can solve that!' and "Why haven't these idiots solved that on their own already when its so easy to fix?" Like all the adults in Harry Potter being conspicuously incompetent.

If something is nonsensical and players are legitimately trying to engage, it'll be more like "Um, I guess this is a thing we could intervene in, but why should we care? Actually do we even want to do anything anymore?"

It's very much related to, for example, knowing when and how to end a campaign. If you just run 'whatever the players feel like doing today' until everyone runs out of gas, you get this sort of unsatisfying tail-off. Instead you have to start to end things when people are still excited and driven.

[Mechalich]

I thought part of the… if not “point”, at least “lore” of Ravenloft was that it “eats” pieces of many worlds, and is inherently a crossover setting. No?

The Dark Powers were remarkably selective about what they ate, and the result was that the Demiplane of Dread was significantly less diverse than garden-variety D&D in terms of the sorts of things it permitted to be present. Humanoid diversity, in particular, was much, much lower. Additionally, by being functionally cut off from the rest of the multiverse, the Demiplane forbid the presence of essentially all extraplanar monsters and it's truly amazing how much the MM shrinks if you go through and systematically eliminate all the Outsiders. The setting was also simply physically small, with most of the individual realms being functionally equivalent in size to small HRE micro-states (the entire setting is roughly the size of modern Germany). That makes it impossible for there to be anyone from 'strange faraway lands' because no such lands existed.

[Satinavian]

Hah! Yeah. I've run into players who absolutely refuse to play anything that isn't some variation of construct, or some other "weird" thing (usually in some obscure setting resource book). And yeah, it's almost always for some specific racial feature advantage that they think is essential and just absolutely can't live without. It's like, er... can't you just play a human, or a elf, or a dwarf. And you know, just a normal human, elf, or dwarf? Just once?

Probably because they already did it once. Or twice or likely even more often. Why should they do it again and again when they have long explored those options and lost interest ?

I have no problem with people who prefer to play something different and exotic. It is really understandable. And the more often settings have overlapping standard stuff (mostly medieval humans) and only differ in their fringe and exotic options, the more people who find the standard stuff stale, use exclusively the finge and exotic options.

However, playing something exotic that is an established part of the setting is very different and much more acceptable than wanting to play something that does not exist in the setting (yet). The more fleshed out the setting is, the more inappropriate is the latter desire.

[Satinavian]

This is all just pretty much modern D&D problems right? Because fer Paranoia, Champions, Traveller, Starfinder, DtD40k7e, AD&D, Call of Cthulhu, Rifts, VtM, etc., for 30+ years I've never seen weirdo characters from another dimension being a problem. Either the game engine & setting & adventures are fine with it or the GM drops a "nope" that's perfectly understandable & reasonable.

Yes, it it pretty much a D&D problem.

But mostly because the latter part, that "nope" is seen as reasonable and often even as default (except maybe DtD40k7e which might have a kitchen sink default).
Most games don't give you the expectation that you can port characters from whereever and they also don't make it mechanically easy. And players know that and rarely ask for it.

The most common thing i see in other systems is "I want to play a character like/inspired by X" and the DM saying "Sure, let's see how we get this to work" (or even the player being able to realize his vision in the game framework just fine anyway). But those are only similar characters, they never are supposed to be the original. Any of the baggage that doesn't fit the seting is cut off or replaced.



But D&D wants not only to have DMs introducing their very own settings for their campaigns, it also wants all those settings to be barely different and interlinked. It really doesn't want custom settings to feel important or meaningfull. And that leads to players who don't spare any consideration for setting compatibility and are surprised when a DM has different ideas.

[Mechalich]

However, playing something exotic that is an established part of the setting is very different and much more acceptable than wanting to play something that does not exist in the setting (yet). The more fleshed out the setting is, the more inappropriate is the latter desire.

Well, only if the setting is actually well-designed. There are plenty of settings that include things that a both a. entirely canonical and b. horribly disruptive when brought to a game. This is especially common in licensed settings that were not originally intended to be games, but is found in game-first settings too. Badly designed official fluff and crunch is everywhere and it is perfectly possible for someone's homebrew idea to work be both better mechanically balanced and make more sense according to the norms and themes of a setting than a huge chunk of the stuff that's actually in published books. This is especially true of 'shovelware' type gaming output that is produced by poorly paid freelancers who are engaged in limited coordination with the overall design team and that exists primarily get produce moving out the door rather than fulfill any sort of design purpose. This sort of content is common to late-cycle material in popular games where at some point the main team moves on to designing the new edition and oversight lapses (this seems to happen to D&D like clockwork) or in scavenged games that represent an IP acquired a much smaller publisher than the original one without the ability to conduct the quality control necessary for such a large project (Onyx Path is notorious for this sort of thing but is hardly alone).

In many ways I find bad and/or insufficiently tested official material to be more problematic than homebrew because homebrew demands are easily rejected while a player who says 'but it's in book X' may be completely unaware of how problematic any given element is likely to be and therefore extremely difficult to appease in a tactful manner (and that's in the case where the GM is actually aware of how problematic the element is liable to become rather than simply being blindsided halfway through the campaign, which is regrettably common in big game systems with many rules).

[Quertus]

The Dark Powers were remarkably selective about what they ate, and the result was that the Demiplane of Dread was significantly less diverse than garden-variety D&D in terms of the sorts of things it permitted to be present. Humanoid diversity, in particular, was much, much lower. Additionally, by being functionally cut off from the rest of the multiverse, the Demiplane forbid the presence of essentially all extraplanar monsters and it's truly amazing how much the MM shrinks if you go through and systematically eliminate all the Outsiders. The setting was also simply physically small, with most of the individual realms being functionally equivalent in size to small HRE micro-states (the entire setting is roughly the size of modern Germany). That makes it impossible for there to be anyone from 'strange faraway lands' because no such lands existed.

Rephrase: Today, Ravenloft has no... Elan, say. But wouldn't it match the "physics" of Ravenloft for, tomorrow, the mists to grab an Elan, and, thus, for a new PC to be an Elan, newly-arrived in Ravenloft?

Isn't "There aren't any X in Ravenloft" kinda... antithetical to the mechanics of Ravenloft - at least for values of X that Ravenloft doesn't "intentionally" avoid (Outsiders?)?

(Also, as this isn't the 3e or even 5e forum, IIRC, in 2e Ravenloft, Outsiders could be summoned to the demiplane of dread... they just didn't return home afterwards. So, assuming I'm not just misremembering, Ravenloft should actually have an abnormally high concentration of outsiders.)

[Satinavian]

Rephrase: Today, Ravenloft has no... Elan, say. But wouldn't it match the "physics" of Ravenloft for, tomorrow, the mists to grab an Elan, and, thus, for a new PC to be an Elan, newly-arrived in Ravenloft?

If Ravenloft is a setting in the D&D multiverse where the mists grab people to trap and torture them, then yes.

If Ravenlost is a setting of cheesy classical horror fun, where normal people are faced with horrible, unnerving and spooky things like witches, vampires and werewolves, then no, the exotic races are not welcome and the mists are very selective.


I have never personally run Ravenloft. But it is a setting where i probably would be pretty open about any balanced D&D character entering. But i am not very invested in recreating the intended atmosphere.

[RandomPeasant]

And the fact that the pressures that do exist for vampires are different - the need to feed, social pressures surrounding the masquerade, relationships with vampire generational hierarchy, etc - means that you're adding an element to the game that is simply not under the same forces as everyone else.

But that's true of werewolves too (except the Masquerade bit), which quite explicitly exist in the same setting as vampires do.

If the other players - including the DM, who has to do more work if things go spontaneously sideways - aren't enthused about a multiverse, one player trying to make it a thing is just that much extra hassle.

The player who says "I would like to play this weird thing from this weird setting" is not trying to "make the multiverse a thing". They are trying to make a specific element a thing, and the multiverse is very explicitly a reaction to minimize the blast radius of that. It is explicitly a way to say "no, the rest of these guys are not going to show up" and stop worrying about it.

Similarly, I'll just say that I've rarely seen a player who insisted that the locals shouldn't be prepared against them turn around and play similarly clueless about local threats.

How often have you seen players effectively play clueless voluntarily?

When one player character can not only be active while another is in mortal peril if they step outside

The way VtM handled vampire weaknesses was a problem for VtM. It certainly made crossovers even harder, but they ramped up the vampire weaknesses far enough that they made just playing vampires really awkward (and it hit they real hard when they tried to do old-timey games because of how specific they were).

Your lovingly crafted character is entirely meaningless without context,

That depends entirely on what the parts of the character you are invested in are.

Discuss the character you want ahead of time, and ideally how they can naturally fit into the world, and you'll be much more likely to get something that can work constructively with what everybody else wants.

Sure. But you'll note this is much closer to "let players play what they want" than "you can exclude whatever stuff you want freely as DM".

The Dark Powers were remarkably selective about what they ate

Except, you know, the PCs, the eating of whom is the whole thing that a Ravenclaw campaign is supposed to be about. What the Dark Powers do is explain how your weirdo party of a plant guy, a robot guy, a demon ghost, and an elf can all show up and have the same adventure in gothic land.

Yes, it it pretty much a D&D problem.

It's the opposite of a "D&D problem". It's a problem people have with D&D, but D&D is very much intended to be a kitchen sink setting where you can encounter all kinds of weird crap and that's fine. The Monster Manual (at least the 3e one I have easily to hand) has angels, sphinxes, centaurs, naga, genies, and lammasu. The strongest through line there is that "none of those are from New World mythology", but that might just be because I don't recognize those influences. D&D has as many types of fish person in its core rules than Shadowrun has major types of metahuman (and that's without counting implicit sorts of fish person, like were-dolphins or awakened sharks).

[Telok]

. This is especially true of 'shovelware' type gaming output that is produced by poorly paid freelancers who are engaged in limited coordination with the overall design team and that exists primarily get produce moving out the door

Diablo d20 FTW! That crap made for a great Lets Read thread but, fooof, would not want to try to play that jank straight.

Heh, pun-pun, coffee-lock, and no-save forcecage+damage zone are all official wotc product results. Much more potential for screwing up a canned adventure than any edgelord cross-dimensional import that ends up mechanically as a decently meta-played armored wizard with a healing spell. The people are the problems, a sloppy rules/settings game just makes it easier.

[Anymage]

How often have you seen players effectively play clueless voluntarily?

That was specifically in response to the idea of a player requesting that the rest of the world not being prepared for their character's shtick, because their character is a newcomer from elsewhere in the multiverse. The general case of player knowledge/character knowledge divide is a separate topic, but it's relevant when someone wants to play an outsider and doubly so when they insist that the world be unprepared for their outsider shenanigans.

That depends entirely on what the parts of the character you are invested in are.

If my character concept is a god-blooded epic hero out of myth and the rest of the group wants to play a gritty E6 game, that's going to be a tonal mismatch. Similarly if I want to play a character based on Rick Sanchez without understanding the differences between a primary protagonist and a member of an ensemble.

Ultimately it boils down to D&D being a team game and trying to make it easier for everybody else - including the DM - instead of just bringing your individually dreamed up character and expecting to be catered to.

Sure. But you'll note this is much closer to "let players play what they want" than "you can exclude whatever stuff you want freely as DM".

This is about acknowledging that it takes work to make a character integrate with both a setting and a campaign world, and realizing that it's a big ask to dump all that at the DM's feet. If a player is willing to put forth the effort to integrate their character with the rest of the party, the theme of the campaign, and find a plausible way to integrate them into the setting, I'm more than happy to meet them in the middle.

[NichG]

But that's true of werewolves too (except the Masquerade bit), which quite explicitly exist in the same setting as vampires do.

And you don't think a game with mixed vampires and werewolves in the player group would feel different than an all-vampire or all-werewolf group? Or for that matter, a game about internal vampire politics as opposed to a vampires vs werewolves game?

[icefractal]

In all of these posts I have not argued 'you should not permit multiverse characters '. I've only argued 'yes, there being a multiverse changes things about campaign focus, understand that before you include it'

Somehow 'it makes a difference' is getting translated to 'you don't want to let players play what they want'.

I think it's because in the OP you refer to the idea of a non-Rifts-style multiverse very negatively:

The mixed, "restricted multiverse" model gets neither side. You get the forced similarity of a single shared cosmology, but all the value of the weird-and-wacky variation is lost. Instead you just have the intrusion of incongruous elements (hey look, there's a walking robot man in my classically-medieval setting!) at random intervals. All of the downsides (as a DM/player), none of the upsides. While guaranteeing bland, homogenous "lore" (because it has to fit any possible setting).

It doesn't really read is "understand that before you include it", it reads as "don't include it, unless you want Rifts".


Also, kind of a nitpick, but -
I have never been in a D&D game that could accurately be described as "classically-medieval". Nor have I seen any first-party D&D material that would support that. There is a (third party) supplement called "Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe" that might do such, but I haven't yet read it.

And I'm not just talking about magic and monsters - every aspect, from technology to society to religion to culture, is an anachronistic jumble of stuff.