On homebrew settings ...

[Username17]

I can't be the only one who gets super exited about the setting I just put the finishing touches on, only to have all that work shat on by somebody who intentionally left all of his fucks at home.

Certainly not. But you also seem to be mixing up setting with game. Consider a well established setting like Shadowrun. Here are two actual covers of different books from that setting:





While those are from the same exact setting, the two give a very different "feel." The Cyberpirates cover is, to be honest, goofy. The picture denotes "hijinx" that are ongoing. The Shadowtech cover is more grim, more "serious." You are pretty sure that nothing the guy whose head insides have been replaced with metal bits is going to do would have a studio audience laugh. That is not a thing that is going to happen.

So while it's all well and good to give some nested information about the setting, the fact remains that every setting has a whole lot of different types of games you could run with it. A Vampire game might be a bunch of people wangsting and trying to be romantic, or it might be a world hopping treasure hunt, or it might be secret super heroes fighting super crime at night. And no amount of information you can let players read about the setting is going to nail down which of those things you are actually doing. Because all of those things have a place in the setting.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

And yet, here I am, a relative unknown quantity, and I respond to you, despite knowing that you're generally full of shit. Willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, admittedly naïve enough to take you seriously. I take your post and respond not with bullshit, or even with vitriol, but with what I feel is an honest reply, best summarized with an xkcd strip.

...and you throw a fucking gasket over it.

I thought it was interesting that he brought those cards up at all. The suggestion wasn't to print up cards with all of the campaign information, but rather to keep the information 'short and punchy, like on a Magic: The Gathering Card'.

So he was on an aside, anyway. I have a whole bunch of those cards (still). I would have liked more consistent art direction - particularly with the magical items. But many of the characters (despite different styles) are cool. Or at least, they were to my 10-year-old self.

But there's no reason that you should be familiar with them. They didn't last long, and they weren't a required element of the game. That's like demanding that you're familiar with SnarfQuest - sure, a lot of people who were into gaming like it, but unless you were a subscriber to Dragon you probably wouldn't have come across it. The trading cards were strictly ancillary.

I don't ignore Shadzar - but I usually just skim his posts. Some of the most magical moments I've enjoyed on this site came from interactions with him. Like the time he accused me of using diamond-studded toilet paper.

[ACOS]

Certainly not. But you also seem to be mixing up setting with game.
[...]
So while it's all well and good to give some nested information about the setting, the fact remains that every setting has a whole lot of different types of games you could run with it.

I certainly can't say that you're wrong here.

So, am I misguided in thinking that the specific type of game I want to run can be imbedded into the setting information?

Also, how far is "too far" when it comes to guiding players in to the kind of game you want run?
If I say "premise: you guys are all part of an already-established adventuring party; you need to have an explanation for why the group's composition makes sense"; is it okay for me to say "no game" if they all show up with characters that don't even know each other?
Similarly, "here's a specific setting element that you need to incorporate in to your character"; how strong is my footing when I tell the player to get bent when all he does is write "<setting element>" in a corner on the back of his character sheet?

---

Yes, I've definitely experienced some burnout, both as a player and as a GM.
But I'm basically beyond that now, and am ready to get back in to full swing; but I'm in the process of doing all I can to make sure that my side of the street is completely clean, so that my conscious is completely clear when I start slamming down boundaries.

[virgil]

I don't ignore Shadzar - but I usually just skim his posts. Some of the most magical moments I've enjoyed on this site came from interactions with him. Like the time he accused me of using diamond-studded toilet paper.

Wasn't that accusation because you had friends?

[RobbyPants]

I'm starting up a PbP game now. I made up a map for an area primarily containing two countries. In one post, I put that map, and described each country/area of interest with exactly two sentences. I also added a one paragraph description of the war that is going on, and why there are so many murder-hobos in the area looking for loot.

Then, in the second post, I elaborated on the first post in about two (paper) pages of content. I figured lazy players can get what they need from the first post, and they can read the second one if they want more info. If they're too lazy to read that first one, they're probably too lazy to read the actual game thread or to make posts in it.

[shadzar]

So, am I misguided in thinking that the specific type of game I want to run can be imbedded into the setting information?

Yes, because if the players don't read it or pay attention to it, or even use that information because they don't care, then your type of game will be ignored. being subtle in the setting info will do no good, you jsut need to say it outright what type of game you are going to be running to the player.

-intrigue and mystery
-hack n slash
-political

just tell the players what you like to run and if the game doesnt work, then they were the wrong players for you.

secret: not all DMs and players have to like the same things contrary to WotC propaganda.

[deaddmwalking]

Also, how far is "too far" when it comes to guiding players in to the kind of game you want run?
If I say "premise: you guys are all part of an already-established adventuring party; you need to have an explanation for why the group's composition makes sense"; is it okay for me to say "no game" if they all show up with characters that don't even know each other?

Absolutely you can do that. If you're running the game, the premise has to be something interesting to you. It's a lot of work, and the surest way to make sure it fizzles is to try to do something that isn't fun for you.

But ideally, you and the players can discuss the premise and come up with something that is fun for everyone. There's going to be some people that just CAN'T get on the same page, and ultimately, the game is going to be better if you play without them. That doesn't mean you can't like them or be friends with them, but if you have 4-5 players that 'get it' and 1 that causes disruption, everyone will have more fun without the 'problem player'.

With the type of premise 'you already exist and you all know each other', that can be a little difficult to work out for a player in a vacuum. You'll need to feed the players some type of information to help them bring those characters together. If this is a 'face-to-face' game, it shouldn't be too difficult to build the characters together. One thing my group likes to do is roll communal stats; ie, everyone rolls a 4d6 for STR (including the GM), then DEX, etc. At the end we toss out the lowest score in each cateogry (ie, if there are 4 players and they all roll along with the GM, we'll have 5 stats for Strength). Then we draft ability scores. The guy who wants to play a Wizard takes the highest INT, etc. As the GM I help with the draft. If we get to the point that all of the scores that are left are the same, I'll just assign them to the remaining characters and take them out of the draft. By working on attributes and character concepts cooperatively, it's usually pretty easy to get the players thinking about how they know each other.

I don't ignore Shadzar - but I usually just skim his posts. Some of the most magical moments I've enjoyed on this site came from interactions with him. Like the time he accused me of using diamond-studded toilet paper.

Wasn't that accusation because you had friends?

I found it. http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=336912
I think he was partially responding to my suggestion that businesses should release product, because if people wanted them, they would spend money and the business could, you know, continue to be in business. But he was also responding to some imagined slight about living outside of 'the real world'. For the record, I live in Eastern Tennessee, which likes to think of itself as the 'buckle of the bible belt'. If there aren't more churches here per capita than anywhere else in the United States, I'd be surprised.

[Stubbazubba]

So, am I misguided in thinking that the specific type of game I want to run can be imbedded into the setting information?

To a degree, yes. In the Star Wars universe, for instance, you could run all kinds of games, ranging from Imperial assassins monitoring and taking out public figures suspected of collaborating with the rebellion, to a lighter game about cocky smugglers living fast and loose in the Outer Rim, to the traditional game about a plucky band of rebel heroes opposing the evil empire. And that's just in one time period.

Yes, the setting elements are all the same, but the tone of the game will vary a lot; the assassins game will likely be darker, more serious and cynical, the smugglers game will probably err on the side of wish fulfillment and hijinks (sort of what Guardians of the Galaxy looks like from the trailers), and the old standby game plays more like a traditional tale of good triumphing over evil.

On the edges you can kind of hint at your genre. Star Wars has a magical Force and laser swords and hyper space that no one tries to explain; these are just givens for a space opera/space fantasy setting, not a hard sci-fi setting. So the setting details matter; they determine what is or is not acceptable in the setting. But within the setting, the specific game is its own construct, like the three different Star Wars games above. There's a big circle that includes the setting, and within that circle are smaller circles that make up games. Each specific game will have things that are acceptable or not acceptable which are above and beyond the baseline setting guidelines.

Also, how far is "too far" when it comes to guiding players in to the kind of game you want run?
If I say "premise: you guys are all part of an already-established adventuring party; you need to have an explanation for why the group's composition makes sense"; is it okay for me to say "no game" if they all show up with characters that don't even know each other?
Similarly, "here's a specific setting element that you need to incorporate in to your character"; how strong is my footing when I tell the player to get bent when all he does is write "<setting element>" in a corner on the back of his character sheet?

This has little or nothing to do with what kind of game you want to run. These are individual requirements that don't amount to anything without a bigger picture they're supporting.

In your first scenario, if the game is "You're all veteran adventurers that have been together for years rescuing princesses, defeating Orc hordes and slaying dragons, but now the tyrannical prince has risen to power over the land where your HQ is and makes you an offer you can't refuse," and then say, "To make this feel right, I want all of you to think up either why your guy joined the group in the first place or the adventure with the group that left the biggest impression on him; either way, this should explain why he's stuck around this long," or something, then that's OK, because you've established a direction for the game to go in, and then made a chargen requirement that furthers that direction. It hooks the players and points their thoughts forward, not just arbitrarily backwards or in the present. The game hints at political intrigue; are we going to lead a revolution against the prince? Or become his lieutenants? Will we work against him from the inside? Does he just have it out for us, and if so, why? These are good questions of the type that your game prompt should be triggering in your players' minds; you want them to immediately start thinking about what they will be doing in the first session, not guessing.

Your setting is one thing, now the game pitch carves out a niche within that setting, gives the players a tease, a hint of what kind of action to expect, and whets their appetites for it.

This is assuming you can gauge what they'd be interested in well. If you're unsure, talk about it with them. Nail down the basic genre (sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, horror?), then maybe a sub-genre (hard sci-fi vs. space fantasy? Epic fantasy vs. dark fantasy? Future mystery vs. historical vs. modern?). Ask them would they be interested in playing black-hearted pirates (or gold-hearted pirates?), or a party of explorers, or members of a knightly order protecting a VIP on a perilous journey across the empire to meet the czar of your former enemies (whom you don't quite trust fully). Just spitball some ideas and see what gets them going. Just the basics, then take it and mold it into a full campaign idea. That way they're invested, they had some input (and feel free to take ideas for specifics, as well, most players appreciate that), and they know what to expect and expect to have fun. That's pretty much the definition of buy-in, right?

[Username17]

So, am I misguided in thinking that the specific type of game I want to run can be imbedded into the setting information?

Yes.

Let's look at some plausible setting information. First, let's give the two sentence pitch:

Most of the world was conquered by an alliance of Dark Lords and ruled harshly for hundreds of years. Now an alliance of peoples has liberated their lands and an age of exploration, adventure, conquest, and liberation has begun.

You hand the players that pitch, and they are intrigued. They want to know more. You give them the one-page writeup of the setting's backstory that looks like this:

The troubles began when Orcus banded a group of powerful lords of evil into an alliance called the Pact, for the explicit purpose of conquering and dividing the world. To a first approximation, they succeeded. Cults of the demon lords had existed for as long as records, but before the Pact, they were but a minor social problem for any of the kingdoms or tribes of mortals. Demons and monsters who owe fealty to the evil ones had been too disorganized to do much more than terrorize small regions. But with the Pact forcing them to put their differences aside and work together, the disorganized resistance proved woefully inadequate on most of the planet.

The evil ones have many titles and come from several different nightmare worlds. Some are called “archdevils” or “demon lords,” while others have more exotic titles like “altraloth” or “archomental.” Almost all of them have many titles besides their imperial one. For example: Mammon is “Archdevil, King of Greed, King of Minauros, Lord of the Third, The Eye of Gold, Duke of Hiter, Duke of the Duergar,” And that's before we get to his Margrave and lower titles, of which he has many. However, like all the other members of the Pact, most refer to him by the title of “Dark Lord.” The Dark Lords divided the known portions of the planet between them, and for nearly two hundred years they ruled in relative harmony, following Orcus' overall plan for the most part and focusing their various depravities on the poor subjects in their realm.

In each province, the Pact put the Dark Lord on top, with fiends in the middle and the conquered mortals on the bottom. However, to facilitate the tyranny of the dominion, certain favored mortals would be granted powers by the Dark Lord and allowed to marry fiends, creating what became known as the High and Low Demon Houses. Members of the High Demon Houses were essentially fiends themselves (often half or more fiend by blood and invested with evil powers beyond), while the members of the Low Demon Houses were invested with substantially less fiendish power (and fewer half fiends in their dynasty), but both were given power and privilege far beyond what mortals could aspire to. But within a few centuries, the system broke down. The Dark Lords fell to intrigue and even overt warfare against each other. But a more serious threat to their rule came from below: for a group of mortals from many different races had formed an alliance of their own. The Accord of Free Peoples.

The initial aims of the Accord was to wipe out every trace of the Dark Lords' presence and slay every fiend and collaborator. This proved difficult and surprisingly unpopular, as it turned out that after centuries of occupation, lots of people had some amount of fiend blood or knew someone who did. Almost everyone had at some time been made to do something horrible by the Pact, and most people feared a just reckoning almost as much as they feared the Dark Lords. After decades of trials and setbacks, the Accord moderated their stance and promised a general amnesty for everyone liberated from the Pact. The new, merciful Accord gained converts from all levels of the Dark Empire. As they grew in strength, the allure of the Accord shone greater still and the ranks of the revolution swelled. Even some of the Demon Houses threw their lot in with the Accord, joining the revolution in exchange for promises of amnesty when the revolution had succeeded. More contentiously, Lolth and The Shining One broke ranks with the Pact and pledged their forces for the Accord. After agreeing to respect certain rights of Accord races, that pledge was grudgingly accepted.

Over the last hundred years, the Accord has been at least locally successful. While there are still fortresses and regions under the sway of followers of the Dark Lords', the Pact has for the most part lost control of the entire continent where the Accord was founded. And while the Accord continues to push on the remaining Pact forces in their home region, it has also been deemed time to turn attention to the rest of the world. To explore the distant continents, to liberate the inhabitants from their Dark Lords and colonize those places that the misrule of the Dark Lords has depopulated. Now is a time of adventure and of conquest.

OK. They read that, and they decide that they want to know more. They want to know something about the Accord factions, or maybe they want to know about the Dwarves in your setting. And so you give them more setting information that they want. Or maybe you just give them the book and they read whatever sections interest them.

But when it comes to the game, the setting information will not in fact narrow the play space to the kind of game you want to run. It just won't. It will narrow the playspace to things that fit in that setting, but it won't guaranty a specific playstyle or narrative theme.

So in our example setting, if someone announced that they wanted to play a jetpack space ranger with a blaster pistol, you could say honestly that there were no such characters in the setting and couldn't be played. If someone wanted to play a Duergar, you could rightly point out that the Duergar are slaves to Mammon and are not part of the Accord and weren't on the table for player characters. But if someone wanted to play Oregon Trail with Elves and Halflings, or do a game of intrigue among the Demon Houses of the Drow, or adventure in Gnollish lands with the hope of ultimately conquering them, or explore the strange sorcery-free continent with its Azurin and Thri-Kreen, or any of a thousand other things that actually could plausibly be a thing that happens in that setting... the setting information will very definitely not exclude that.

Really, the only thing you can do is have a discussion with the players about what they want from the game and what you want from the game and get everyone on the same page. Once everyone agrees that you're going to be doing an expedition to the Caverns of Stillness to go do conquistador stuff to the thralls of Laogzed, Baazebul, Pyremius, and Klagg, players can put together characters that fit that projected story arc and you can start the story in the colonial outpost of Swordreach.

But here's the horrible fact: RPG players are fickle, fickle creatures. And even though you get everyone on board and psyched up for the campaign, sometimes it'll just fall apart. Sometime between when they agreed that the projected campaign would be cool to do and "now," one or more of the players might simply decide that they want to do something else. Like the time everyone agreed to do a vampire political game in Italy and then some of the players played Assassin's Creed and decided that what they should really do is scrap all the background of every player and the storyteller, commandeer a boat and sail it to the Americas so they could be Caribbean pirates.

That shit fucking happens sometimes. And when it does, you can either roll with it and do the best you can or just fold up the game and let someone else DM for a while. I'm not going to say that either response is wrong, it's a pretty fucked position for a DM to be in and there are no really great answers.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

As for achieving player buy-in the best way I have found to do that is to give the players authorship of the campaign's major villains in a setup session before chargen. This requires a relatively stable playergroup to work, it makes setupchargen sessions twice as long, it requires the MC to have prep time between the setup session and the first adventure and it does prevent the MC from keeping as many secrets as traditional world-building, but it tends to make players more interested in the world if they get to write parts of it.


Generally my schpeel for this type of thing is something like:

This game takes place in the setting of ____, where <insert two sentence description>.

Before we start this game, each of you is going to come up with either an archvillan (single character/monster who is exceedingly powerful: example: Ancev the archLich), a rival team (roughly equal in power and number to PCs. example: the Band of Blood adventuring company) or an evil organization (group with very large number of members who are lower power than the PCs. Example: cultists of Tarjan). I need names, goals, usual methods, and a little bit of history for each of these. You can do stats if you want, but that's not necessary.

Now, once everybody has come up with an antagonist, I want each of you to tie your PC in some way to someone else's antagonist. Maybe your Paladin has vowed to rid the world of the Cultists of Tarjan; maybe the Band of Blood killed someone important to your duelist, maybe the Archlich stole the crown that rightfully belongs to your family so he could look totally bitchin'.

[fectin]

Contrarian and antagonistic might be a sign of success. If that means your players are engaged, great. If they just want to kick over your anthill, still great. If they are simply resistant to any plot hooks, have NPCs be assholes until they go after those NPCs.

The only real problem is apathy.

[TheFlatline]

That is what TSR did in the 90s with wizard spells, preist spells, psionic spells cards, decks of encounters, magic item cards and "trading" cards.

I was four when that linked box set came out, so I am not surprised I am unfamiliar with that.

With modern gamers, the excuse of age in relation to D&D has worn thin as an excuse, since most take only WotC word as gospel as if they created D&D and RPGs. Also the vast amount of knowledge online in modern gamers lifetimes and ease of access means there is less excuse really.

I've been gaming for most of my life now (Jesus has it really been over 20 years?) and I'll be damned if I go download old esoteric D&D products to read unless I'm playing that version of D&D or specifically minding for something I already know exists.

For one, I have better things to do with my time. For two, PDFs of those products generally have to be actual full page images instead of electronic documents and 400 meg PDFs of 800 full sized color photographs that I can't search through and are a pain in the ass to read due to technology limitations hardly qualifies as "ease of access".

[radthemad4]

I remember this one time I was having trouble engaging my players. The session devolved into PvP amongst themselves. Apparently they really enjoyed that. It's hard to tell what players are in the mood for sometimes.

[TheFlatline]

I can't be the only one who gets super exited about the setting I just put the finishing touches on, only to have all that work shat on by somebody who intentionally left all of his fucks at home.

Certainly not. But you also seem to be mixing up setting with game. Consider a well established setting like Shadowrun. Here are two actual covers of different books from that setting:





While those are from the same exact setting, the two give a very different "feel." The Cyberpirates cover is, to be honest, goofy. The picture denotes "hijinx" that are ongoing. The Shadowtech cover is more grim, more "serious." You are pretty sure that nothing the guy whose head insides have been replaced with metal bits is going to do would have a studio audience laugh. That is not a thing that is going to happen.

So while it's all well and good to give some nested information about the setting, the fact remains that every setting has a whole lot of different types of games you could run with it. A Vampire game might be a bunch of people wangsting and trying to be romantic, or it might be a world hopping treasure hunt, or it might be secret super heroes fighting super crime at night. And no amount of information you can let players read about the setting is going to nail down which of those things you are actually doing. Because all of those things have a place in the setting.

-Username17

Actually this is an awesome insight into homebrew.

It's the same as bringing new players into a world that they have little to no experience with. I experienced this with Dark Heresy a few years back bringing 3 of the 5 PCs into the setting for the first time.

On a lark I decided to stick with mood and themes. Grimdark, massive bureaucracy beyond imagining, cheap human life, and the ends justifying the means. I also assigned homework to read Eisenhorn or at least the first few chapters but in the end the tone and themes provided more than enough framework and we pained in the gaps as we went. As long as what I was describing fit with the feeling of the setting the players ate up everything that I described.

I'm sure *my* warhammer 40k Imperium looks nothing like most of GW's Warhammer 40k Imperium, they feel pretty similar.

[shadzar]

I've been gaming for most of my life now (Jesus has it really been over 20 years?) and I'll be damned if I go download old esoteric D&D products to read

are kids these days really fucking stupid or what? Do they not know what it means to google something? is there some magic piracy thing they have invented that lets them download things from places like the one i linked too to show the item in question? (Board Game Geek)

are you just both so stupid and lack the faculties to communicate you just infer what the fuck ever you want into something that was never said, in a psot that was NEVER changed because you are too incompetent to read about 20 words?

with the attention span of modern gamers then i think a 3x5 index card as i initially mentioned would be way too much for them to handle. better go with MtG flavor text about the length of Magma Mine.

[Josh_Kablack]

are kids these days really fucking stupid or what?

Well, compared to me, YOU are a kid.....so that's pretty strong evidence. Get offa my lawn, ya whippersnapper.

[deaddmwalking]

are kids these days really fucking stupid or what?

I don't know. Are you a kid?

Someone said (roughly) 'the flavor text on a Magic: The Gathering card is what you should aim for'.

You said (roughly) 'just like the TSR collectible trading cards from yesteryear'.

Someone asked about that and you've been snippy as all hell, which is really weird because it's a total non-sequitur...

Card pulled at Random: Human Rogue (green border - 281 of 495) description reads: mini-series: create-your-own.

The one opposite of that in the card sleeve is Marissa Octavia Tanced (green border - 269-495). The description includes class/level, race, armor class, THAC0, Movement, Hit Points, Equipment (only one piece described - ring of animal friendship, and then the Background which is the only thing that I think you could be talking about. Background reads: Mari is a shy 8-year-old Psychokineticist who is friendly with animals but with an air of mystery. She conceals her powers, using them to help those she cares for and acting surprised by the 'magic' when it occurs.

For comparison, I googled 'magic card' on an image search. The first image returned was Reya Dawnbringer (Legendary Creature - Angel) Flying, At the beginning of your upkeep you may return target creature from your graveyard to play. You have not died until I consent.

By and large, this conveys a lot more information in a much more condensed format. First of all, it has very few game terms (certainly not the table with six fields for every character) - and it implies a lot more about the setting than a psychokineticist... Right from the beginning, I know that in the 'Magic' setting, people come back from the dead. I don't even know what the TSR person can do except speak with animals (using a magic ring).

[shadzar]

Someone said (roughly) 'the flavor text on a Magic: The Gathering card is what you should aim for'.

You said (roughly) 'just like the TSR collectible trading cards from yesteryear'.

Someone asked about that and you've been snippy as all hell, which is really weird because it's a total non-sequitur...

Card pulled at Random: Human Rogue (green border - 281 of 495) description reads: mini-series: create-your-own.

the problem is nothing was asked by the gnome. it was like an epiphany in a post. thus why i mentioned ALL the cards TSR printed and gave a link to a site showing that there are mostly edition neutral on many of them. sure you might need to change some shit for 4th like XP or GP values, but magic items don't give much from the fantasy cards. the town cards have sparse info. it is the whole "phenomenal cosmic info in a teeny-tiny printed space" concept.

not to mention i even hate the place i linked to, but others here seem to love it, and THEY decided the cards would fit with 3.x and OGL games as well as 4th.

it was all about the context of information size.

the response then was not a question to my list of card types printed but a comic saying "god damn these old people think we are dumb kids". so i returned in kind with what obviously was wanted.

just another brat getting pissed off cause they think they know everything and someone jsut giving them some information and getting pissed off because they are shown up or some shit like usual of modern gamers who have to be some center of attention.

green cards i am assuming is 1993 set and they were a bit off and lacking, thus a shorter series of cards. have m3 3 sets in notebooks where MtG cards used to reside (tempest notebook holds the 1991 set even) so i wouldnt use them for random drawing. IF you are using the cards, your best best would to be read them for entertainment then pick out one that you want to use. the other cards are for players to use. the deck of encounters is pretty much a Deck of Many Things. sure you can randomly draw from it, and that is how it works best, but death is not the worst thing that could come from drawing from them.

maybe you should read the thread of posts better and you tell me WHERE my post was questioned at all? it wasn't it was jsut another TGD post of stupid with no content or context.

but anyway, i have given info on the cards here several times and they have been brought up by other people in other threads on their merits and uses before. anyone wanting to find it can use the search here or google the things.

this thread is similar to the problems that caused it. people not paying attention to what is going on and fucking shit up. thus why a setting cannot be created in full because people half-assing or just fucking around instead of actually communicating.

ergo, see my first post in this thread. KISS should be applied.

[momothefiddler]

I don't even know what the TSR person can do except speak with animals (using a magic ring).

Does a ring of animal friendship let you speak with animals? I sort of assumed that, but it's not at all clear. From the description it could be nothing but "natural beasts will not attack you without provocation" or something.

[hogarth]

I can't be the only one who gets super exited about the setting I just put the finishing touches on, only to have all that work shat on by somebody who intentionally left all of his fucks at home.

Getting excited by some D&D fan fiction you wrote is understandable and laudable. Expecting a random stranger* to be excited by your D&D fan fiction is probably too much to expect.


*I assume you're not playing in a regular group of campaign-shitters. If you are, then find a new regular group.

[Chamomile]

Theme is more important than setting. Because theme is more important than everything and everything should tie back into theme, including your main characters, which means if you want to have a coherent story at the end of the day, you need your players to be willing to work with you. Especially since you're doing improv, and making a coherent story is therefore harder in the first place. You really can't afford to have a shaky foundation here.

Since a TTRPG is an interactive medium, the theme should be a question rather than a statement. It can be something like "is freedom a good unto itself, or is it only good because it prevents powerful people from abusing their authority?" And then you can have the setting involve a perfectly benevolent tyrant who is turning his subjects into a telepathic hivemind, absorbing and then eroding their personalities to eliminate all selfishness. And then you turn to your players and you tell them that their characters need to have some kind of opinion on this. They don't have to be firmly committed to it (and in fact, they should not be so firmly committed to it that they can't work with people who disagree), but they have to run a character who interacts with the themes at all.

I PUG a lot. The increase in player and character quality when I only let in people who give relevant answers to questions central to the campaign theme has been dramatic. In particular I'm thinking of one game, where the theme was a bunch of factions with various political philosophies and all of them must either learn to get along or destroy one another. Just recently, I started asking prospective players to answer a couple of questions in addition to providing a character backstory and sheet, and the questions are so much more useful than the backstory and sheet that I might remove those from the application entirely to condense it. And the questions are simple things like "why is your character joining a band of wandering mercenaries instead of getting a civilian job or working for a regular government" and especially "which faction does your character most support and why?" Answering these questions usually takes all of two or three sentences, it's an opportunity for players to tell you about their character instead of you telling them about your setting, and it guarantees that people will make characters who are relevant to the theme of the campaign (so long as you're willing to tell people that any kind of answer that sidesteps the question is wrong - I have had a number of people write in that their character didn't have any reason to care about the political factions at all, which made me wonder why on Earth they wanted to play in a game about them in the first place, but rejecting this kind of thing might be harder when you're dealing with a specific group and not recruiting from a large population).

[Username17]

Theme is more important than setting. Because theme is more important than everything and everything should tie back into theme, including your main characters, which means if you want to have a coherent story at the end of the day, you need your players to be willing to work with you. Especially since you're doing improv, and making a coherent story is therefore harder in the first place. You really can't afford to have a shaky foundation here.

Since a TTRPG is an interactive medium, the theme should be a question rather than a statement. It can be something like "is freedom a good unto itself, or is it only good because it prevents powerful people from abusing their authority?"

Nope.

The thing you're missing is that TTRPGs are generally speaking serial in addition to being improv. So they will naturally and necessarily go through and discard several different themes. Some sort of "theme first" question-based scenario is fine for a one-shot, but when we're talking about the "further adventures" of established characters that isn't going to fly. Sometimes players will be in the mood for something darker, sometimes they'll be in the mood for something lighter.

Consider the property which mostly closely fits your model: Star Trek. Obviously, each planet is played rather broadly and defined thematically rather than numerically. Each mission is centered around a core dilemma, and the resolution of that dilemma is the soul of the table discussion for the entire evening. But the core dilemma changes every evening. Some evenings are played for laughs, others are tragedies, only the characters and setting remain the same. When you're playing table top Star Trek, you don't stick to a single theme or a single question night after night. Each evening, you get a different contrivance and discuss a different issue in the meeting room.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

The thing you're missing is that TTRPGs are generally speaking serial in addition to being improv.

Generally speaking, yes. But this is much harder to work with than structuring the entire story around a single theme. It might be the archetypal D&D structure, but it's not a good end of the pool to throw GMs asking for advice on party coherence into.

Now, if the story is going to last longer than a few adventures, you need to be able to either introduce new themes or have a theme that is complex enough to include multiple sub-themes which are essentially other questions raised by the debate over the main question. But as a general rule, if a GM is really interested in the theme, they can find a lot of different angles to come at it. The plot will be less serial than is typical, but since this is how most video games work that will hardly come as a surprise to the modern gamer.

In fact, it would not surprise me if the serial style is dying out due to the rising influence of video games and modern television, both of which posit a single very long narrative over the serial narratives of older television. It also wouldn't surprise me if the serial narrative is not dying out, because while it isn't particularly likely to be any more popular on the tabletop than in television, it is easier for the GM to only prepare one session at a time and not worry about the whole campaign.

[radthemad4]

The two aren't mutually exclusive. You could have a single very long background narrative with the occasional long sidequest. The sidequests could even affect the main plot in different ways, e.g. a Gondor calls for aid scenario where all the random NPCs you helped out in sidequests help you fight the BBEG.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

My handouts would be way less TL;DR if there weren't some annoyingly persistent cliches included in the concept of "fantasy RPG" that, if you excise them, you have very large gaps you have to try to fill in with your own lore. Tolkien races, Dying Earth magic, and adventurers being cynical hobos are a lot harder to get rid of than simply banning them.