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*shrug* I admit, I'm weird in that regard. Nine times out of ten, my response to character concepts is "Play what you want. I'll make it work."And my response to that from the GM is "Can you give me something? World info? Something of what kind of game you want to run? Anything?"
I hate character creation in a void.
My players all have access to the world info already, and usually by this point we've long since pre-planned what the campaign itself will be (we've been on Kingmaker for almost 4 years now, we've already planned we'll be playing Savage Tide when it finishes, then Crimson Throne after that). So this is information everybody already has.
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It is pretty annoying when you try to make a character that you want to fit in, so since the GM says "I'll make it work", you decide on something pretty simple. Only to discover your character is beyond useless in the campaign, and apart from the one opportunity you got to fly a spaceship/gamble/make public speeches/lead people/make difficult sniper shots/whatever, the rest of the campaign deals only with bog standard level-appropriate melee combats.
It is pretty annoying when you try to make a character that you want to fit in, so since the GM says "I'll make it work", you decide on something pretty simple. Only to discover your character is beyond useless in the campaign, and apart from the one opportunity you got to fly a spaceship/gamble/make public speeches/lead people/make difficult sniper shots/whatever, the rest of the campaign deals only with bog standard level-appropriate melee combats.
Never had this problem, thankfully.
If the guy makes a pilot or ship captain, I'll add more things for him to fly/drive to the campaign if it's at all reasonable. Maybe the party finds a ship/airship/tank/something to make a long trip instead of simply walking or teleporting.
If the guy makes a diplomancer, I'll make more enemies amenable to changing sides with a good diplomacy check, and less likely to simply fight to the death.
No idea how that sniper bit would even work, as I've never once been in a campaign that forced the entire time to fight in melee with no option for ranged combat. There's usually more than ample opportunity for someone to get some sniping in.
Ditto for gambling. What game doesn't have the players stop at at least one tavern and find at least one card game going on?
If someone suggested a generic, kitchen sink campaign where they did not intend to make a coherent plotline, deal with NPCs, keep track of combat, etc, I would be solidly uninterested in playing in that game.
Just want to point out that "players play what they want" =/= "generic kitchen sink." You can play a very highly-restrictive campaign, and still have players with free choice in their characters. All you need to do is match the restrictions to the group preference.
If you had a "no dwarves!" campaign theme in mind, and two of the three players indicate they want to play dwarves (BTW, this has actually happened to me on two separate occasions), then that restriction isn't really a good one for that particular group -- but any number of others might be. If I end up with two dwarven fighters, an elf wizard, and a human cleric, the players and I can still agree to restrict the campaign to "no Small races, no Furries, no evil characters, no rogues or bards, no gunslingers, etc., etc., etc."
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Sissyl; your my favorite.
I can play a hack and slash with the best of them; but who really cares? That's just modeling the game system to produce damage; that's not role playing. The greater challenge is making your character an integral part of the game world.
So far the greatest accomplishment of my Runelords character is that I bought a house. I've killed goblins, demons, ghouls, and bugbears; survived haunts, kobolds, and swarms of goblin dogs; been pushed to the brink of death 4 or 5 times; but damn it, I have property taxes and stuff to deal with! Do you actually think I go crawling around in creepy old mansions for fun? That crap scares me senseless but I got to pay the mortgage!
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Kirth, after the fact saying that the things no one selected anyway are restricted is pointless.
But restricting things after the fact prevents it from becoming a kitchen sink setting. Because once everyone picks dwarves and elves, while one guy picks warforged, it prevents a race of catgirls from popping up midstream.
Kirth, after the fact saying that the things no one selected anyway are restricted is pointless.
Restrictions that the players agree to are pointless? Does that mean the only restrictions that have a point are the ones that prevent players from experiencing the game they want? Why???
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Kirth, after the fact saying that the things no one selected anyway are restricted is pointless.But restricting things after the fact prevents it from becoming a kitchen sink setting. Because once everyone picks dwarves and elves, while one guy picks warforged, it prevents a race of catgirls from popping up midstream.
Right up until a new player joins the group and wants to play a catgirl. Now your the bad guy again for having restrictions on what players can play. Why did everybody else get to have exactly what they wanted but the new player is screwed? No mater what, if you have restrictions somebody isn't going to like them. But you have to have boundaries or your kitchen sink.
So which is it, restricting players or kitchen skink?
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I guess I should explain my methodology for some clarity.
Step 1: Time comes for a new campaign to begin. Current game is nearing its end, or someone wants to start something new. We run all our stuff in our homebrew world, so that's usually a given; prospective GM announces (usually on our forums) what campaign they're going to run (and provides a summary/synopsis for player perusal if it's not a well-known AP or something).
2: Interested players announce their intent to participate and get back to the GM privately with ideas. GM works out kinks in backstory, provides suggestions for mechanical questions, and starts putting together the connections s/he can make at the time between PCs and with various parts of the collective plot.
3: GM spends some time working with the information s/he has regarding the PCs, seeing how s/he can fit things together, and making necessary edits to the campaign as-written to make stuff fit or to adapt it to our setting. This usually amounts mostly to deciding which part of the world it's set in, occasionally changing city/country names, and changing the races of some NPCs to bring in the more mixed, more varied world population our setting has. Other adjustments may be included if the party has something particularly unusual involved - for example, our Runelords party had two PCs who were araneas, meaning we could bypass a lot of some things via climbing and using web ropes. (We apparently skipped about half of the exterior of Thistletop via that trick.)
4: GM gets interested players together as the start date for the campaign begins and the group discusses concepts and characters together. This is usually the phase where someone changes their concept, usually because "oh our party is missing X". GM usually sets a deadline for further revisions or changes, so that we don't end up with someone switching concept at the last minute, and takes the remaining time to make any necessary further adjustments to the campaign. (For example, if the party has no arcane casters and the campaign has a bit in the middle where "if your party has no arcane caster you cannot bypass this point", either s/he'll edit that out or tweak it so the party may have more easily bypassed it with said person but with some clever thinking they can get by anyway.)
5: GM makes any last-minute adjustments necessary, confirms everyone's still on board, and begins the game on the agreed night.
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Here's a quick baker's dozen:
I have committed at least ten of these at one point or another during my nefarious DMing career, and still unswervingly swear by at least eight or nine of them.
- Occasionally fudging die rolls, and reserving the right to roll behind a screen while requiring players to roll openly
- Employing prominent NPCs/GMPCs
- Disallowing (or even placing restrictions of any kind on) full casters
- Enforcing alignment in clear and definitive fashion
- Imposing an objective morality on paladins, such as disallowing prevarication for selfish gain, torture, baby- (including baby monster) killing and casual sex as inherently evil and/or chaotic
- Not providing the "required"/desired magical paraphernalia on schedule
- Believing the DM's role is benevolent autocrat rather than either gleeful tyrant or impotent fantasy tour guide
- Refusal to permit evil (or even chaotic neutral) PCs
- Disallowing classes that violate the campaign's established and specific tone
- Laying the smack down, hard, on abusive meta-gaming
- Requiring immersive role-play rather than simple recitation of mechanics
- Taking control of PCs who refuse to role-play honestly when charmed, dominated, etc.
- Retaining control over magical weapons, cohorts, mounts, animal companions, eidolons, etc.
Which of these do you espouse? Which are at least comprehensible to you, even if they're not quite your style? Which do you find abhorrent? Which of you think I should be found, shorn, tarred, feathered and run out of town? (Note that last may have nothing to do with this thread, but feel free to make your feelings known.)
Most of those I consider signs of good campaign management by an experienced DM.
You are always welcome to run your own campaign if you disagree.
Right up until a new player joins the group and wants to play a catgirl. Now your the bad guy again for having restrictions on what players can play. Why did everybody else get to have exactly what they wanted but the new player is screwed? No mater what, if you have restrictions somebody isn't going to like them. But you have to have boundaries or your kitchen sink.Seems like that was already addressed as well.
If the players all agreed "no catpeople" in advance, and one guy rolls one up anyway, yeah, he's being a jerk. By all means kick him out.
I would not suggest that one new player gets to outvote four existing ones.
If any restrictions only exist until someone doesn't like them, then they really don't exist.
What's this "until" stuff? Remember, I don't set a campaign in stone until I've talked to the players, so your quote doesn't apply in any way to what I've been saying.
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In other words, I NEVER set a campaign in stone without consulting the players first.
That might be a reason for the disconnect. Some of us create a campaign for an existing group, and others create a campaign and then recruit a group for it. I'm more of the second, so bending over farther than I want is less attractive than just choosing a different player who fits the concept better.
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Yeah I'm definitely in the first group. My core group of players is pretty constant.
Some of us create a campaign for an existing group, and others create a campaign and then recruit a group for it. I'm more of the second...
They're both good approaches, but for the second, I'd maybe leave some things loose enough to accommodate the players I do end up recruiting, and then tighten them back up afterwards. Being overly-restrictive in advance seems like a good way to not be able to recruit enough players, or to recruit ones who won't have as good a time as they might have if you'd been willing to accept their input.
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Which comes back into different GM styles being equally valid. The GM who has a group of friends and accomodates them and the GM who pitches an idea and recruits people who fit it are both playing the game "right". They might not work well in the same gaming group, but that's okay. Different kinds of players should have different groups.
I agree to a point, but your response makes me think that I'm not being at all clear.
You can pitch an idea and recruit people, and still make sure there's room for them, and still have a highly-restricted game to run in the end. These things aren't mutually-exclusive.
Some of us create a campaign for an existing group, and others create a campaign and then recruit a group for it. I'm more of the second...They're both good approaches, but for the second, I'd maybe leave some things loose enough to accommodate the players I do end up recruiting, and then tighten them back up afterwards. Being overly-restrictive in advance seems like a good way to not be able to recruit enough players, or to recruit ones who won't have as good a time as they might have if you'd been willing to accept their input.
I try not to be too restrictive. I don't have any Paizo classes I ban, nautical characters can fit, my setting is Fantasy Counterpart North America, which easily fits European, Asian, Latin, and American Indian character concepts, and I will look at 3PP if it isn't a large, complicated system or inappropriate to magitech (oh, how beautifully California flavor and magitech blend). The only area where I don't much bend is races, because each race has an established place in the world. Then again, we do have Kitsune, Tengu, those snake thingsfrom ARG, Catfolk (and cousin races), Skinwalkers, Angels with awesome wings that can't fly and are exiled from the Celestial Realm, Planetouched, and playable Orcs, Elves, and Dwarves, so races aren't massively restrictive.
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Most of those I consider signs of good campaign management by an experienced DM.You are always welcome to run your own campaign if you disagree.
I don't think he meant these are bad things a GM does. Sins was probably the wrong descriptor to use. It's more like Habits of Old School DMs than cardinal sins. And I agree, most of those I also considering good campaign management.
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I try not to be too restrictive. I don't have any Paizo classes I ban, nautical characters can fit, my setting is Fantasy Counterpart North America, which easily fits European, Asian, Latin, and American Indian character concepts, and I will look at 3PP if it isn't a large, complicated system or inappropriate to magitech (oh, how beautifully California flavor and magitech blend). The only area where I don't much bend is races, because each race has an established place in the world. Then again, we do have Kitsune, Tengu, those snake thingsfrom ARG, Catfolk (and cousin races), Skinwalkers, Angels with awesome wings that can't fly and are exiled from the Celestial Realm, Planetouched, and playable Orcs, Elves, and Dwarves, so races aren't massively restrictive.
OK, gotcha -- it sounds like you're more or less doing the same thing I suggest! There are an awful lot of options, and you're willing to look at others -- but that said, you can always tighten them up later around the existing characters if you want/need to, and you still maintain a coherent setting.
I know you've said before, Kirth, that you don't tend to run persistent worlds, but they really are a different animal from "resetting" worlds.
On the contrary, anything I don't reset becomes very persistent, unless and until I need it not to be. Most of the basic elements of my homebrew setting have been in place since 1982 or so. It's been expanded a bit, and some events retconned or replayed, and some PC groups swapped out, but overall the setting and history are still coherent after over 30 years.
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Persistent means "Keeping all past content"
That's your personal definition, okay. So if you forget one detail of game play from 1991, your setting no longer qualifies, either? To me, if only 80% of the play history is retained, that still puts me better off than a lot of long-running novel series or TV shows.
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I just don't get having one character concept and being totally inflexible about it. Maybe because when start up a game as a player, my toughest decision is picking one of the dozens of character concepts I generally have floating around in my head. If you tell me "No, you can't be a _____", then I'm just going to present one of my other character concepts.
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Speaking for myself, I'm usually the GM, and it's just a personal preference and policy to say "yes" as much as I can and "no" as rarely as possible.
I just don't get having one character concept and being totally inflexible about it. Maybe because when start up a game as a player, my toughest decision is picking one of the dozens of character concepts I generally have floating around in my head. If you tell me "No, you can't be a _____", then I'm just going to present one of my other character concepts.
And I don't get why a GM is soo inflexible with their campaigns. If you tell me "I want to play a _____" than I just change my campaign so it fits.
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I just don't get having one character concept and being totally inflexible about it. Maybe because when start up a game as a player, my toughest decision is picking one of the dozens of character concepts I generally have floating around in my head. If you tell me "No, you can't be a _____", then I'm just going to present one of my other character concepts.And I don't get why a GM is soo inflexible with their campaigns. If you tell me "I want to play a _____" than I just change my campaign so it fits.
Because some people's idea of "I want to play ____" is to want to play a cyborg jedi in a fantasy pathfinder game and they refuse to play anything more fitting to the genre. (Exaggeration, but you get the idea)
Because some people's idea of "I want to play ____" is to want to play a cyborg jedi in a fantasy pathfinder game and they refuse to play anything more fitting to the genre. (Exaggeration, but you get the idea)
That actually sounds like something you might find as an NPC in that AP that Paizo published... the one with stats for robots and so on...
Seriously, though, if everyone has agreed on a Three Musketeers campaign (for example), and Bob shows up with a cyborg jedi, I'd ask the other players: "You guys said you wanted a Three Musketeers thing, but here's Bob's character. Does everyone want a 'purer' setting, or do you want it to be a mishmash so that Bob can play his goofball idea?" If the other players all voted no on Bob's cyborg, I sure as hell would, too. If the other players all voted yes, I'd expand the campaign to accommodate him. If evenly split, we'd discuss some more.
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I would ask the players too, but you have to admit that there are times when a player is adamant about playing a character idea that no one else wants to see in that campaign. When that happens it does tend to get on my nerves because they refuse to cooperate. Also, it usually (from experience) means that they are going to sabotage the rest of the party at every turn.
I would ask the players too, but you have to admit that there are times when a player is adamant about playing a character idea that no one else wants to see in that campaign. When that happens it does tend to get on my nerves because they refuse to cooperate. Also, it usually (from experience) means that they are going to sabotage the rest of the party at every turn.
Totally agree.
Out of curiosity, are all of your players about in the same area of the political spectrum? One of the big reasons I could never run an intrigue game, outside my own dislike of politics, is that my group is all over the political line. Inevitably the campaign would breach that "no religion, no politics" unwritten rule that keeps our friendships from being ripped to shreds.I could never do political intrigue games. I hate real-world politics too much, bringing that sort of thing into the game would make me unhappy as a player and is something I'd never consider as a GM. The closest I'd get would be a less-combat focused rendition of something like Curse of the Crimson Throne or Council of Thieves. More The Lies of Locke Lamora than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.And I love political intrigue games! Running one right now actually and my players really enjoy it.
We don't really discuss politics, but based off some of the back and forth we've had over various somewhat related topics I would say probably. I do have another group I game with where things may get a little uglier since we have hardcore liberals, conservatives, and libertarians all in that group!
I just don't get having one character concept and being totally inflexible about it. Maybe because when start up a game as a player, my toughest decision is picking one of the dozens of character concepts I generally have floating around in my head. If you tell me "No, you can't be a _____", then I'm just going to present one of my other character concepts.And I don't get why a GM is soo inflexible with their campaigns. If you tell me "I want to play a _____" than I just change my campaign so it fits.
I want to play a Space Marine. Or Superman. Or a 9yo vampire street hooker. Or The Tarrasque.
I did a game where the Wizards are the Bad Guys. Hard to play a wizard then, eh?
I dont allow guns in my game, since it is Medieval.
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If someone suggested a generic, kitchen sink campaign where they did not intend to make a coherent plotline, deal with NPCs, keep track of combat, etc, I would be solidly uninterested in playing in that game. I would quite honestly get so much more out of playing WOW, Diablo 3, Guild Wars 2, or any computer "rpg". Sure, I would get the chance to play a psionic elf cyberninja catgirl if that was what I wanted... but what for? Rolling the dice to kill one level-appropriate encounter after the other? Watching my PECC increase in levels, so she can take on slightly tougher (but still level-appropriate) encounters? Sorry. No harsh words if anyone gets their jollies from that, but it isn't for me anymore. I want a chance to play a character who learns, interacts, has emotions and relationships to people, and so on. Stats are necessary, but need to be held from consuming all the play time.
It is not a crime to make your character fit the campaign. If you don't want to do that, well, maybe you are more comfortable settling the campaign viewpoints of a group wanting to play a human tourist, a space marine, a my little pony, a xenophobic fremen, and a flumph.
I think we need to kill this myth. Right now.
Accommodating player character concepts that you haven't previously made room for in your campaign does not require that you turn your campaign setting into a "generic, kitchen sink campaign." You do not face the daunting task of making your campaign setting so all-encompassing that any concept has a place.
I will repeat, again, because this has been said before but there are still people repeating nonsense about how boring a world that accommodates PC concepts would be.
You do not have to carve out millions of pieces of your campaign setting to accommodate the entire gamut of hypothetical PC concepts.
You have to carve out four to six. (And, in practice, maybe one or two; most of your players will probably come without particularly strong or unique concepts, and will be happy to find an existing place for the.)
If altering four to six pieces of your incredibly interesting campaign setting threatens to turn it into something so generic you would literally rather be playing Diablo, maybe your incredibly interesting campaign setting wasn't as interesting as you thought.
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I did a game where the Wizards are the Bad Guys. Hard to play a wizard then, eh?
Make.
It.
Work.
You are perfectly capable of this. No, it won't ruin your campaign. It will take probably five minutes for you to come up with a short, plausible, plot-hook-laden explanation for why the PC is who he is.
Yes, even if he's playing a wizard in a world where wizards are all bad guys.
Arguably the most famous, well-loved D&D character of all time is a drow in a setting where I can totally picture someone sitting behind the DM screen with a scowl saying, "No, you can't play a drow. All of the drow are Bad Guys."
But just go on assuming it all always the GM's fault and it's probably some deep ugly motivation behind him not letting you play whatever your latest brilliant concept is.
I don't assume that it is always the GM's fault. Did I say that I did, somewhere?
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Let's kill myths then if we are going to kill them.
You do not have to do any of this. It's nice if you do. It shows you are willing to work with other people. But there is no mandatory rule and if you don't follow it you are kicked out of the GM society.
It is perfectly plausible to work together to create a world and characters that can exist together. Not every character fits or should be fit into every game.
Let's say that again.
Not every character fits or should be fit into every game.
I imagine anyone here could find a way to do it. You could come up with a thousand ideas of how this one drow isn't really evil or that Batman fell through a gate into your world or that even though all the dwarves were destroyed in a holy plague 110,000 years ago this one managed to exist so Bob could play one because he always plays a dwarf.
But you do not have to. You really can say "Jeez Bob, we talked about this. Remember the packet of papers and pictures I gave you on character creation? Could you try to color in this lines just this once?"
Same goes for GMs. All the players said "Fred, stop running pirate games. We want to be holy crusaders that are mantis men dang it!" If Fred shows up for the game with his pirate stuff in tow, he should face a hard time with it, because people talked about it. They aren't forced to play in that scenario or world.
You are perfectly capable of bending too. And you. And even you. But no one HAS to bend. No one has to play either.