When you show up to my table with your samsaran necromancer ready to roll - you must be trying to kill it for everyone else. As I've said - I've never had the problem that severe because we all understand that the GM dictates the setting and the PCs should fit that setting.
There's a reason I generally don't let the player show up at the table with a character ready to go. I usually plan for the first session to be about character generation, background setting, and Q&A about the campaign. Then everyone makes up their characters together, they get to plan builds and backgrounds together, we get to make sure we're all on the same page, and no fool brings Bugs Bunny to the Ravenloft game.
Everyone in the group appreciates the role of the GM to define the campaign world and for the players to develop characters which are appropriate to that world.
(shrug) Matter of taste, then. Personally, I dislike being the DM if the players are always on tenterhooks trying to make sure they don't step outside of the box. My favorite players are the ones who aren't afraid to push the boundaries, short-circuit "pat" adventures, change the game world, and otherwise keep me on my toes. In that sense of what people call "entitled," it's one of the things I prefer when selecting players. For the other sense, that of "disruptive jerk" -- again, I just don't invite them. But the two things are not inextricably intertwined.
God...I come back to there being 4 more pages...I can't keep up with my own thread anymore lol
This is pretty much my reaction every time I leave for an hour. On the upside, you have the new hot topic! On the downside, it might have turned into a horrible monster. YMMV.
Fantasy geniuses are smarter than your normal geniuses. To be fair, they aren't very real. or real at all really.
If a GM says no guns and you asy "Well I can invent them" that's cool. If he says "Yeah I'll work with you" that's cool. If he says "No, I really don't want guns." and you say "too bad!" your probably getting kicked out of the table. I don't think anyone was suggesting the 3rd one.
I used to be totally on the side of player entitlement, but as I thought about it more I started realizing there are some kinds of things that I cant stand either... Like kender, spelljammer, dark sun, warforged... I just developed my philosophy from chasing down how to handle the irreconcilable irony that my strong sense of player entitlement was tempered by at least 4 things that as a gm I say 'no thats crap too'...
The 'free to say no' is the only thing that works no matter which side of the gm screen you're on, and when i examined how our table handles it, in trying hard to avoid a lack of consensus table wide, we'd just gotten into the habit of not running anything that we all couldnt agree on. We kinda happened on it accidentally.
edit: and why can't you just change your setting to fit my character? What makes your setting and the GM so important over ME!?
I'm curious, just who is saying that this is a thing?
It was said pages ago that its easier for a Dm to change his setting than a character to change his concept. Also its been brought up several times as to why the DM gets his way and is 'more important' than the player.
I'm sorry but I need quotes, I must have missed that entirely. I haven't seen it. I've seen "Its okay to move a little" or "reflavoring can make things fit much easier" and I've seen "asking why makes you a entitled! Sometimes you don't get a why and you have to live with it!"
There's a reason I generally don't let the player show up at the table with a character ready to go. I usually plan for the first session to be about character generation, background setting, and Q&A about the campaign.
Hard to do if your group likes one-shot adventures.
Personally, I dislike being the DM if the players are always on tenterhooks trying to make sure they don't step outside of the box. My favorite players are the ones who aren't afraid to push the boundaries, short-circuit "pat" adventures, change the game world, and otherwise keep me on my toes.
I suspect that describes most of the GMs here, including the ones who are firmly anti-entitlement.
Don't confuse "not being able to demand your own way" with "not being able to step outside of the box." In the grand scheme of things, being told at character creation that "you can't play a tengu" any worse than trying to jump to a balcony and being told that it's out of your reach, or asking a shopkeeper for a potion of Command Undead and told that he doesn't have any in stock.
Sure, this might be the rails of the plot you've just spotted; maybe the GM has an undead encounter planned for the party in the next stage and doesn't want you to get the keys to bypass the encounter. And, sure, there are rules suggesting that even in a fairly small village, you should be able to find a low-level potion like that.
But the thing to do in either case is to figure out an alternative way of accomplishing the overall goal. And, ideally, doing it without playing a kender-tengu hybrid multiclass Jedi/Gunslinger.
Cyborg Pirate Ninja Jesus?
As the DM, I'd swap out "core" Dark Sun races for whatever races the players end up choosing, and refluff some of the class descriptives to match the setting, and we all get to play.But then you aren't playing Dark Sun. You are playing 'Dark Sun as determined by committee'.
Is this a problem?
Everyone in the group appreciates the role of the GM to define the campaign world and for the players to develop characters which are appropriate to that world.(shrug) Matter of taste, then. Personally, I dislike being the DM if the players are always on tenterhooks trying to make sure they don't step outside of the box. My favorite players are the ones who aren't afraid to push the boundaries, short-circuit "pat" adventures, change the game world, and otherwise keep me on my toes. In that sense of what people call "entitled," it's one of the things I prefer when selecting players. For the other sense, that of "disruptive jerk" -- again, I just don't invite them. But the two things are not inextricably intertwined.
This, oh so very much ^^
You're viewing this from a modern viewpoint where communications are ridiculsy easy compared to what they were even a century ago, much less a couple of centuries prior to that. Also remember that there is no such thing as a general level of education, so inventions don't spread as easy. In many cases, inventions will be invented more than once as the original society falls before passing on it's knowledge to others.So that means that secrets CAN and WILL be hoarded as long as possible maybe even generations before they get leaked out.
Case in point: Damascus steel. While not the godslaying material the katana fetishists like to make it out to be, it was still a fairly closely guarded secret among Arab swordsmiths for centuries. It was a well-enough kept secret that, although we can make better steels today, we still don't know how it was made. Everyone in Europe knew how awesome the stuff was (and by the standards of European metallurgy, it was pretty awesome), but no one knew how to make it or work it.
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And with that experience, you want to tell me that my gaming group is elitist because we let the GM decide what is allowed in the game we agreed to let them run.
Because you know better than we do. With your 7 games of experience, 3 of which involving a table you had to leave.
But I am elitist.
Interesting.
My level of experience is not what I draw upon when I said you sounded elitist with your claims.
Again, it is what you specifically claimed about the kind of campaigns I happen to like what provoked this response.
Could you go and read again what you wrote? I am pretty sure you are able to see why I am not amused by it if you think about it.
You call it crammed in to a niche, we call it creating a world that makes sense so that we can all actually play what we created rather than constantly having to throw up deus machina to create excuses and reasons that a random group of PC's would stick together to do things.What I see here is "Your world is a jumbled and lazily executed mess of excuses and Deus Ex Machina that somehow holds on the rails by a miracle".
Are you saying this is NOT what you said?
I did say that. You claimed that what most of use call a normal campaign is a "niche" and I corrected you.
Now you may want to read what I wrote. I find it is the best way to understand things.
I said that "we" (implyng myself and people I play with, as well as people who play like we do) don't feel we are, as you put it "crammed in a niche".
Rather we think it is helpful to be able to play what we described, as we described it. And we find it helpful that in the pregame the GM can select characters that actually would want to participate in the setting, and with each other, rather than just have a GM have to come up with reasons a random group of characters created without GM guidance would work together.
That is what I said. I know, I know, it is hard to argue against things I actually say, and so you prefer to make up things I say...but I would prefer you didn't.
As to the rest, the fact that you have only played in 7 games, 3 of which were with a GM you "ragequit", and you have only GMed one time, yet you are here on the messageboard calling my preferred playstyle "niche"
And in your mind I am the elitist....
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My group must be the odd group out here. We don't create our charcters in a vacuum, then hold the character sheets like we're playing Texas Hold 'Em, daring the GM to find a way to get us to work together.
We share our concepts with each other and the GM, and we work to find a scenario that makes sense we would be adventuring together.
We don;t want to be a burden on our GM, we know that making things a pain for him lessens his fun, and thereby lessens ours.Then that makes two of us. How else would we know when a Paladin isn't okay to make?
Maybe we should inform our fellow player that the group is leaning to Chaotic Neutral as a whole!
This is almost literally what I described.
It is official, you don't read what I post. You just assume what you want to read...
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This implies that all PCs essentially require approval of all the other players - is that accurate?This is totally accurate. If anyone at all at the table doesnt like your concept, its no good.
So in effect, anyone can say your concept is dumb and no you can't play that, rather than just one person having that power.
Which again, glad it works for you, sounds dreadful to me, but additionally that is hilarious to the people who think it is elitist for one person at the table to have veto when you allow the power to everyone :)
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I used to be totally on the side of player entitlement, but as I thought about it more I started realizing there are some kinds of things that I cant stand either... Like kender, spelljammer, dark sun, warforged... I just developed my philosophy from chasing down how to handle the irreconcilable irony that my strong sense of player entitlement was tempered by at least 4 things that as a gm I say 'no thats crap too'...
The 'free to say no' is the only thing that works no matter which side of the gm screen you're on, and when i examined how our table handles it, in trying hard to avoid a lack of consensus table wide, we'd just gotten into the habit of not running anything that we all couldnt agree on. We kinda happened on it accidentally.
I don't think it was an accident.
You have gamed for a long time, you've found a group that shares your philosophy on how the game should be run, and...that is awesome.
That is the goal.
Like I said, I would hate your game, you would hate mine, it's cool we don't need to play together.
My objection in this whole discussion, as stated many, many times, is anyone, player or GM saying something MUST be allowed.
Your group has more veto power distribution than mine. In mine, only the GM can veto (although if a player said they didn't want to game with another concept, most GMs would anyway...)
What I am saying is, players can't tell a GM to run any concept the GM doesn't want to run. And no GM can make a player play something they don't want to play.
What your group does is say no player should be forced to game with any concept they don't want to play with.
We are basically saying the same thing.
This implies that all PCs essentially require approval of all the other players - is that accurate?This is totally accurate. If anyone at all at the table doesnt like your concept, its no good.
So in effect, anyone can say your concept is dumb and no you can't play that, rather than just one person having that power.
Which again, glad it works for you, sounds dreadful to me, but additionally that is hilarious to the people who think it is elitist for one person at the table to have veto when you allow the power to everyone :)
I don't think anyone ever said they had the right to tell someone they were dumb or stupid or insult them, except you just now. Can we find a new word?
Edit: I also don't think its that problematic. It gets rid of most of the issues that come along when a GM is overly strict with world building, and creates more talking it out.
@Ciretose
If everyone is basically saying the same things as you said, why is there an argument in the first place?
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If the only concept you can come up with is a Kitsune Ninja, you might want to be more creative.
So we agree then? Any stalemate of this manner is both parties being stubborn jackasses.
But I do appreciate this post, as when others come back and say "No one is saying you have to accomodate any concept" I can add this to the furry, luchadore, and custom race example.
Go ahead? I'm still not seeing how having a different race "derails your campaign". The fact that a Kitsune is in the party doesn't change your story any. If you've got 4 humans trying to stop the evil Emperor Zurg, going through many trials and triumphs to do so, it's absolutely no different if 3 humans and a Kitsune do the same.
And part of that higher standard involves always making sure that any setting, story or campaign is so open and generic that it works with any character concept?
You're conflating open with generic, and restrictive with unique.
They are not the same thing.
You can have niche worlds that are generic in every other regard quite easily. If humans are the only player race in your world, that does not stop the rest of the world from being a generic fantasy world with fantasy things.
You can have open worlds that are unique and flavorful. Having every published race open for play (and then some, possibly) does not stop you from having a unique world with certain twists in it.
If a Kitsune Ninja automatically throws your campaign off the rails you might want to think about getting better rails, just my 2 cents.If my rock breaks your window, obviously it's your fault for having bad windows.
Wrong.
If your rails are made of papier mache that you've hung up outside, you shouldn't be surprised when a stiff breeze or a light drizzle breaks them.
A lot of comments in this thread simply confuse me - if I tell you 'we are playing a 1920's cloak/dagger game using the Savage Worlds ruleset' and you come to the table with a Pathfinder half-golem dragon mage and say 'I'm ready to go!' - I just don't see how that makes sense.
And this has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion whatsoever.
Bringing in things from a different game is quite different than bringing in something developed FOR that game.
I'd like to think if JK Rowlings publisher read her stuff and said 'It's good... But it needs more zombies" that she'd be like. uhhhh. Okay. And get to work on it.
She did. Look at book 6.
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Maybe in your campaigns, PC's are just things that pop out of the air ex nihilo. But if someone runs a Kitsune in such a campaign if I were running it, that means the Kitsune has to come from somewhere. PC's in my game have a background, and no I won't allow the "dimensional traveler" dodge either.
He comes from the Kitsune homeland. He probably traveled by boat.
Now if they don't exist in your world, he's not gonna be there. But I already covered that.
Even if he was the Kitsune With No Name and had no background, how does that derail your ongoing campaign?
I don't know, I think all three of those settings could handle the rare kitsune. GoT would be the hardest to pull off, but the Belgariad and Mallorean had plenty of fantastic races.Not sure which Eddings books you were reading, but pretty much everything in that world was either Human or Monster. And the only folks who got to be kickass sorcerers were the ones made by the Gods themselves, in particular, Aldur. Sounds to me like a very restrictive setting unless you wanted to throw versimilitude straight out the window.
Not entirely correct.
Sure a Kitsune might be considred a 'Monster' in the world...but in the novels so were Dryads...but were not really all the montrous.
Also you are wrong in the novel there were witches(people who got magic through nature), heck the entire Kell race made a study of magic though other means besides Aldur.
They was also discovered a spontaneous sorcerer in the seris and thorized why there are not common, but does happen.
It offends my sense of campaign aesthetic, the "traveled by boat" excuse is just another variation of the Dimensional Traveler dodge. Reskinning t doesn't change it for what it is.
It offends you sense of campaign aesthetic that people can travel? Especially traveling in one of the most common long distance travel methods?
Your games must be pretty uniform what with there being no foreigners of any sort.
It offends my sense of campaign aesthetic, the "traveled by boat" excuse is just another variation of the Dimensional Traveler dodge. Reskinning t doesn't change it for what it is.Maybe in your campaigns, PC's are just things that pop out of the air ex nihilo. But if someone runs a Kitsune in such a campaign if I were running it, that means the Kitsune has to come from somewhere. PC's in my game have a background, and no I won't allow the "dimensional traveler" dodge either.He comes from the Kitsune homeland. He probably traveled by boat.
Now if they don't exist in your world, he's not gonna be there. But I already covered that.
Even if he was the Kitsune With No Name and had no background, how does that derail your ongoing campaign?
The man from the far east, or the foreigner, are both classic tropes. Coming over from boat or through a dark pass few know, are also tropes. I am rarely offended by such things myself. They both are however, far different than a traveler from another dimension in that they are both much more believable and common. Relative to fantasy anyway.
Yes however, I do think its a bit weird though to try and shoehorn it in. Best talk about it. If the Kitsune really has no place in the world, then it shouldn't. I think Rynjin was trying to say it probably doesn't kill most fantasy campaigns to have, for example, a Kitsune.
I'm not sure how I feel about GMs saying that they have a vision of who the party is, so they have to be what he says. Most likely if I don't fit the game wasn't for me and I'd wouldn't join in. That's for a particular kind of game though, one that is very likely railroaded and about the GMs vision.
So we agree, the GM can shut down any concept that he doesn't want.
How do you avoid the 'special snowflakes'?Any objection from anyone at the table would shut it down.
Oh definitely. The veto power simply doesnt sit solely in the hands of the gm. That same veto power rests in the hands of the single player against a gm's setting or another player's build that they don't like.
At the first stage it simply helps everyone get used to everyone else's playstyle. Maybe after a few episodes in the trenches you realize that maybe bobby's gunslinger wouldnt be so bad. He sounds like he knows what he's doing... Maybe after a few days in the trenches you realize bobby is a PTB with his gunslinger and its ruinging your fun and immersion, once the fun stops, the game stops and there are plenty of other things to play than something thats ruining the fun of any gm or player at the table. One side says why should i have to run something I dont want to run, and I agree. The other side says why should I play something I dont want to play... And the answer on both counts is 'you shouldnt'... Ever. And that policy has never stopped our table from coming up with something interesting and unique and fun to play.
Imagine if you will, a space opera... Vast in its political intriques, nuanced in its development, classically styled, rich and flavorful, in which a handful of noble peaceful space samurai are sent to overthrow a corrupt militant political regime...
Along the way they will discover unlikely friendships,
family ties they never knew they had...
both good and bad...
and have to decide which is safer for the galaxy, doing whats right, taking care of family, or dare I say maybe even finding a way to do both!
Now someone shows up and says "I want to make a 7 foot barbarian teddy bear that cant speak english...'
One table says screw this lets pick something else.
Another table says "Lets call him a wookie"... Game on!
The way our table works sometimes we're one, sometimes we're the other. And both times it's ok. As long as whatever you do play is fun for everyone at the table. GM and player alike.
Our table has a tendency to be the second table if for no other reason than the hopes that one day the emotional connections produced by that grunting giant teddy bear barbarian made during the campaign may one day be talked about fondly on an episode of Jimmy Kimmel (small, oddly specific aspirations, its true)... YMMV.
A 7 foot tall hairy beast called a Wookie? That'll never catch on. We should use a fish with a funny accent. The kids will love it!