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2022-12-01, 05:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2022
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.
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2022-12-01, 05:58 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2015
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.'
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2022-12-01, 06:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2022
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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%.
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2022-12-01, 07:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2017
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
"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.
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.
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2022-12-01, 07:12 PM (ISO 8601)
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2022-12-01, 07:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2010
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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'
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2022-12-01, 08:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2011
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.
Thanks. I’ll have to investigate that.
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.
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.
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.).
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2022-12-01, 08:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2011
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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?
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2022-12-01, 08:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2010
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.
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.
Originally Posted by Quertus
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.Last edited by NichG; 2022-12-01 at 08:22 PM.
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2022-12-01, 08:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.
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2022-12-01, 08:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2010
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2022-12-01, 09:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2015
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.
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2022-12-01, 09:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2021
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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?
There are ways to do it without being a planeswalker, and namely the Phyrexians know how.
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".
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.
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 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.
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%.
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".Last edited by RandomPeasant; 2022-12-01 at 09:28 PM.
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2022-12-01, 09:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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".Last edited by False God; 2022-12-01 at 09:41 PM.
Knowledge brings the sting of disillusionment, but the pain teaches perspective.
"You know it's all fake right?"
"...yeah, but it makes me feel better."
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2022-12-01, 09:40 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2010
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.Last edited by NichG; 2022-12-01 at 09:46 PM.
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2022-12-01, 09:52 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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!"
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2022-12-01, 10:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2017
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.
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.
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.
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2022-12-01, 10:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2011
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.
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?
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2022-12-01, 11:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2010
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.Last edited by NichG; 2022-12-02 at 12:09 AM.
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2022-12-02, 01:13 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2015
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.
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2022-12-02, 03:21 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2015
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.
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2022-12-02, 04:21 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2015
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.
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2022-12-02, 06:33 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2015
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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).
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2022-12-02, 07:35 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2011
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.)
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2022-12-02, 08:26 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2015
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.
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2022-12-02, 10:48 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2021
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
But that's true of werewolves too (except the Masquerade bit), which quite explicitly exist in the same setting as vampires do.
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.
When one player character can not only be active while another is in mortal peril if they step outside
Your lovingly crafted character is entirely meaningless without context,
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.
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.
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).
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2022-12-02, 11:05 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.
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2022-12-02, 12:06 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2017
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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.
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".
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2022-12-02, 01:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2010
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
Last edited by NichG; 2022-12-02 at 01:01 PM.
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2022-12-02, 05:27 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2007
Re: Sell me on the "restricted" multiverse idea
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).
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.Last edited by icefractal; 2022-12-02 at 05:34 PM.