Fitting In
I don’t know that I’ve ever done one of these, but today’s rant is in response to a viral tweet. For those of you who don’t feel like clicking through, here’s the copy + paste courtesy of @itsginnydi:
Hey. D&D is a game. If I wanna build a pretty elf with no hit points and shitty spells so I can tell a story about her with my friends, I’m gonna do it. Because it’s a game. If you want to play a game where your stats are all ~maximized~ for effectiveness so you can kill monsters as quickly as possible or whatever, like… congrats? I hope that’s fun for you. Doesn’t mean that’s fun for me. I’m very very tired of sharing the littlest things about my gameplay and people responding like I’m failing a test.
This one opens up several cans of worms. We can talk about the gendered inflections of a female microcelebrity being judged for playing a ‘pretty elf.’ We can also talk about the Stormwind Fallacy, along with the implied opposition of RP and combat. Neither angle is my vector of attack in today’s comic.
What I’d really like to talk about is something we touched on back in “Community Support.” To wit, the way we respond to one another in the anonymous void of forums. (Forums not unlike this one.)
So here’s my take on the cosplayer at the heart of today’s controversy: Sure. Do what you like. But that might be a recipe for frustration if your GM isn’t on board.
From context, it’s clear to me that Ginny has a group that foregrounds social interaction and storytelling rather than tactical prowess and mechanical optimization. And given those conditions, why the crap would you judge her by the standards of your own group?
If Ginny is a guest player in your game and suddenly has a bad time because the group is combat-focused and likes to play on hard mode… then a bit of criticism is fair game. This is a group activity after all, and one person’s preference shouldn’t be paramount. But the fact is that she doesn’t play in your game. So once again, why would you start from the hypothetical situation where her character shows up to a cheese grinder?
My point is simply this: Judge playstyle based on the other guy’s context, not your own.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we practice a bit self-reflection? Imagine that an outsider heard about your group and the way you game. What kind of erroneous snap judgement might they make? Why would they be wrong? Let’s hear the results of your thought experiment down in the comments!
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I’m playing in a game where we’re all crossplaying, and it would be very easy for someone to assume that we’re doing this for pure sexy. However the fact is that it’s a complete coincidence, two of us wanted to play the story of two sisters reconnecting after was died and was resurrected, and I decided I wanted to play a magic archer, and somewhat based her off of a Fire Emblem Character.
That’s been practically normal in my group for a while… there’s one guy I don’t recall ever playing a female character, but the rest of us (guys and girls alike) crossplay often enough for it to not be remarkable. I can’t speak for the others, but for me, it’s nothing to do with sex since that’s not a significant element in our games… I just play character concepts that I like, and some of those are female.
But yes, an outsider who didn’t know us might draw some invalid conclusions.
Believe me, I know how easy it is to get in your head about that one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/courtly-dress
No one wants to look like “that guy,” you know?
First I thought it was about the famous “Your fun is wrong” quote from Will Friedle (caveat, he said that sarcastically, to sum up a somewhat similar situation ).
I’m not a great DM. I yet to learn to let my plans thwarted and my big encounters cut down in seconds with a well placed hit and a good roll, but I’m on my way there. I like to think I balance well between social interaction and combat encounters, and there are certainly times when a small hook that was planned to take half an hour becomes a full session of the characters going apeshit with role playing and bantering in front of the door they are expected to step through, but it’s fun and the players seem to come back for more. There are times when I can improvise a whole adventure based on three lines of a setup without anyone noticing it, and there are times when I feel lost without a prewritten campaign to follow. I mostly stick to released content and shy away from third party and homebrew, mainly cause I’ve been burned by them several times and I just don’t want that hassle of “well there was a class or feat or spell in that product I didn’t know about that makes the whole adventure obsolete”.
So I guess games run by me are somewhat messy, somewhat trying to stick to the rules, but with the intention of improvement and trying to keep in mind, we’re all here to have fun.
So how would we summarize this? “Inconsistent, but working hard to improve?”
That’s all of us, my dude. 🙂
Take me for example. I write this comic, get paid to write dungeons, and am a few months away from a doctorate studying tabletop games. I don’t think I’m a “great DM” either. You know what though? I’m pretty sure that “inconsistent, but working hard to improve” describes every GM I’ve ever played with. And some of them were pretty great.
In my 5e campaign, we had some social pvp that almost literally tore the party apart, with the druid tricking the paladin into helping kill an NPC that she first claimed was fully complicit in an evil act, and then later out of guilt said was fully innocent (the situation was a little more grey, but only she had figured it out, and she wasn’t communicating). This snowballed into more and more intra-party conflict… and my players loved it. The dramatic irony! The hidden rolls! The betrayals that nobody saw coming! We’d have tense conversations during watches and I’d describe the lay of the land in the morning to cries of “the dragon! we forgot there was a dragon!” because they’d been so focused on the Drama. It’s got all the trappings of an RPG Horror Story, except for the fact that everybody was having a blast (and we repeatedly checked in to make sure everybody was).
You know what? I feel like that sentiment is why I decided to write this one.
Remember “synchronized glaive team” from back here?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/very-secret-doors
I was in the room as my players were telling that story to a new friend. It was a genuine pleasure to hear my players relating this ridiculous “It was absurd and you had to be there and we must have spent an hour in game solving this stupid puzzle” type of anecdote. To my ears it was an archetypal “I love D&D” story. They drove me crazy with their silliness, and they loved it, and so did I (even if I made a show of being disgruntled).
The new guy didn’t realize I was the GM in question though. He made a snap judgement: “Yeah, that one sounds like the GM’s fault. Dude was following the adventure way too close. You can’t design a dungeon with only one solution like that.”
He’d completely missed the subtext of the story. He was unaware that the context of the dungeon was “old school, obnoxious trap dungeon” by design. It was also a completely optional bit of the megadungeon that my players had decided to defeat as a point of pride.
So that style of snap judgement is more or less what I’m talking about in today’s comic. I may not love PVP, but if everyone at your table dug the intrigue and there were no hurt feelings, the betrayals were a good thing. Go figure. 🙂
My One Ring campaign includes a Slayer Hobbit, a Hadradrim-Spear-slinging Elf and a Red Wizard NPC, which may sound like we’re taking the lore out behind the hobbit hole and shooting it.
But we are still trying to keep to the spirit of the setting. The Hobbit only picked up a blade because a great Warg was picking off Bree-folk, with none of the Sheriffs being bold enough to track down the beast. The Elf lost her husband, and went East because she couldn’t bear to stay but if she went West she would have had to leave her children behind in Middle Earth. And the Red Wizard isn’t really a Wizard, just a Northman charlatan who learnt a magic song from Radagast and everything else is slight-of-hand tricks.
Well now I need to know what the magic song does. 😀
Also as a general principle, Handbook-World is a safe space for lore-mangling.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/hypertellurians-part-1-3-science-fiction
I don’t have much to add ’cause I’m not playing in any games atm, but I would like to mention that Ginny also practiced self-reflection and no discussion sparked by this two-and-a-half-year-old tweet would be complete without the now-half-year-old follow-up video: https://youtu.be/lT9d7Z1o1mk
Hey, good on ‘er! I think this bit is more or less the same theme I was going for:
https://youtu.be/lT9d7Z1o1mk?t=537
Funny that I didn’t realize how well-known this biz was. I saw the Tweet in question as a Facebook post on one of my meme groups. First time I’d ever heard of Ginny Di. Then a buddy mentioned her last night after I’d written the blog and before I’d told him about it.
“How big a deal is this lady?” I asked myself.
And to paraphrase the lady in question: What I didn’t realize at the time was that by making this blog post I was unknowingly entering a battle that the D&D community had been waging for many, many years. 😛
I saw that one too, and would have posted the link myself but I had to manually search through my comment history to find it.
It’s always great to see what a year or so of experience can do for a person.
“It turns out; playing a character who can really fuck shit up with a greataxe is very VERY satisfying.”
– Ginni Di, the girl who grew
I think this moment of growth happens when RP-centered folk realize that (to some extent) optimization = increased agency.
If you’re better at things, your capacity to shape the fictional world increases. And that is a thing that theater kids like.
>So once again, why would you start from the hypothetical situation where her character shows up to a cheese grinder?
Because people tend to apply the conditions they’re used to to other people’s experiences. Not on purpose mind you, it’s just that if I’m used to playing D&D as a dungeon crawling, monster slaying simulation, then if someone says they play D&D my mind is immediately going to go “dungeon crawling monster slaying simulation”. I have to remember to take a step back to realize that they might play differently. That complicates discussion.
… also, people like being “right” and correcting others on the internet, sadly.
Anyway, as to the question : currently I play in a high powered 5e game. We mess around with powerful builds (I, for example, play the infamous Paladin/Sorcerer combo), and an outsider might assume we’re being dicks to our DM for that, because it’s hard to balance for. But he’s fully aware and on board. I always tell him what I’m going to take each level up, and what exactly it’ll entail, and he has full veto power if he thinks it’s something he won’t be able to deal with fairly. Hell, there’s even the understanding that if he okayed something and it turns out he underestimated it and it’s too much to handle, then I’ll rollback and do something else.
Really, whatever you do in your group, it comes down to everyone **understanding all the implications** (no “but the DM agreed!” when you “forgot” to mention a particularly broken combo the class combination you just took has access to) and agreeing to it.
That’s the advantage in playing with long-term friends… that kind of communication comes fairly naturally when you’ve spent years (decades, in some cases) building up the kind of rapport where everyone can be relied on to be reasonable people.
I wonder how much the “D&D horror stories” we read has a “mean world” effect?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome
Do we tend to assume the worst of our fellow nerds when we first sit down to game?
That moment of reflection is what today’s comic aims to engender. Well bloody said!
An outsider would (would? What’m I saying? HAS) assumed that I’m a terrible GM on several fronts: allowing pretty much any homebrew regardless of all but the most egregious balance, ignoring rules as is convenient yet simultaneously being very harsh on “rule of cool” style party-empowerment, and murdering my pcs with callous abandon whilst allowing them virtually no victories.
In reality, I love my players and their character, I just tend to rub a very grim and gritty world where success is hard-won and hard-kept, and I like having frameworks yo do things within but don’t care too much about those frameworks making everyone equal. I once ran a very large campaign setting where the highest levelled participant PC was epic level and the lowest was a commoner with a few powerful magic items. Everybody had fun, and though those games aren’t for everyone I’ve fit people of Ginny’s tendencies in as often as strict power gamers.
Methinks you’re phrasing this in a way that makes you sound like a tyrant.
Sticking with the other phrasing (“I run a grim and gritty world where success is hard-won and hard-kept”) might cut down on the snap judgements.
It does make me wonder if this goes both ways? To what extent are we GMs responsible for those “snap judgements” when we describe our games and preferences?
To be clear, I’ve never described my game like that to anybody outside of the context of discussing how it might be misinterpreted 🙂 I’m just explaining what I’ve had people *assume* I do when they hear stories about my setting.
Not going to lie, with the description you used, I’d be concerned. “Ignoring rules as is convenient” and “murdering PC’s” sounds like “You can do whatever you want, because you’re gonna die anyhow”.
Whatever floats your boat, of course. Everyone plays their own way… but if I walked into a game matching my perception of what you said unwarned, I’d be quite vexed when my story driven character died after the DM looked at the rules and said “Nah, son, yer dead”.
TBC – I don’t do this! It’s just what an outsider might think if they were to hear me and my friends discussing a session, as per the prompt.
Why play D&D at all if you are going to ignore the stats? Just play a freestyle game with D&D flavor. Or a different system better suited for narrative creation.
But if you are rolling dice for success or failure of actions, your stats are going to have an impact on the story, for better or for worse.
I see that sentiment often in certain communities. I think the answer might have something to do with this post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/10rztmf/the_osr_lonely_fun_and_why_i_believe_many_dd/
Crunchy systems are “toyetic” in a way that diffuse systems tend to lack. You get more “props” to play with and imagine against. So even if you aren’t committed to the crunch as a system of rules, it’s still useful as a thing to noodle with and inspire.
As I reflect, it may be an interested design project to take on a “toyetic system” that *isn’t* crunchy. I wonder what that would even look like?
>As I reflect, it may be an interested design project to take on a “toyetic system” that *isn’t* crunchy. I wonder what that would even look like?
Well, you could take the descriptions of things from DnD, and ignore the mechanics. E.g.: “Meteor Swarm: Blazing orbs of fire plummet to the ground at several different points you can see within range.” That’s it, nothing about saving throws and damage dice. Meteor Swarm is now simply a prop for your imagination.
But you will be throwing away the whole “a chessboard with classes, spells and monsters” aspect of DnD. Some people really like it.
That’s the thing… If it’s “just” a toy for imagination, it seems to lose conceptual teeth.
It’s almost as if interlocking mechanics give ideas more “weight” in the fiction. I suspect that I’m talking myself into a legitimately interesting point here, which makes me suspect that someone has already written on this somewhere…. :/
“Excuse me, HOW loose are you with the rules? What do you mean you forget to set your monster’s to-hit bonuses? Your party has ONE character that’s good in a fight?”
I play a homebrew mess of an OSR GLOG system, and I much prefer to focus on dungeon crawling as puzzle and exploration over combat and diplomacy. Heck, last session I was genuinely surprised that my players fought the biggest monster in the dungeon and survived, but also impressed at the cunning involved (they used concentrated vis, which is basically mana potion that dissolves metal) to tank its AC and resists before fighting it in a narrow corridor it could barley fit through. I love it when my players get cunning and devious, and I include all kinds of tricks and monsters that a straight-up fight can’t solve.
Not to be a shameless self-promoter, but I’ve got a fun one coming up from AAW Games called “Floor Is Spiders.” Not sure when it’s going to get out of editing, but you might dig it.
“Wait… it’s all gay shipping?” “Always has been.”
I wrote out like three paragraphs of rebuttal to that tweet before realizing why it got under my skin so much: It’s a veiled insult. She doesn’t want to be criticized for how she plays DnD, yet in the same breath and in her replies she implies that *I’m* playing the game wrong by caring about the mechanical aspect. What a toxic attitude.
No, she’s telling people that the way they play applies to them. She was annoyed at people telling her how to play. At no point did she tell anyone how to play.
To be fair to you, I can see that.
That does read as incendiary. My reading is that the sentiment is a knee-jerk reaction to experiencing exactly the same thing. It’s a “hurt people hurt people” sort of situation.
But to be fair to her though, she does phrase it in the form of, “Have fun your way (even though I don’t like it). Just stop criticizing mine.” And I do think that’s a fair cop from her side.
I am a freelance writer, who uses my games to playtest content that I have written. But many outsiders when they hear 3rd Party content might immediately jump to the conclusion of something like:
“Oh, so the game is going to be world set in the D&D Wiki (with a surplus of broken feats, spells, races, classes, encounters, magic items, etc).”
Which is unfair, both to D&D Wiki, and to 3rd Party publishing in general. I mean, I don’t personally allow D&D Wiki content in my games, but I also don’t allow 3rd Party content from publishers I am not currently playtesting for.
Sure, occasionally, a player may discover an unforseen combination that RAW is broken (either overpowered, or makes it so that it doesn’t function as intended), but that is kind of the point. When that happens, I make a temporary ruling for that session, and then by next session, I give them an updated copy of the rules regarding that mechanic.
The players know that they are playtesting content, and so are aware that their builds may be slightly changed time to time. They also know that occasionally, they will have to set aside one of their favorite characters to play a different one for a couple sessions; with the benefit that this new temporary character will end up being a contact/sidekick for the old character afterwards; or if they really enjoy the new character, they can A) make the new character their main.
In case you want to talk shop about third party in general, my stance is over here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unbalanced
My son (and his friends) play campaigns that are both optimized and heavy RP: he and his best friend have been gaming since elementary school and help the newbies catch up. Collectively the group is the core of their high school’s drama classes, so much *drama*. They also feel things very deeply and are dedicated to playing Good and benevolently Neutral characters. Years ago, when my son first began playing, he asked about a mission he was in if it were possible to rescue the NPCs. I likened the situation to a bakery fire where it wasn’t guaranteed that you could get out, but that if you did you might be able to save a cupcake or two on your way out the door.
Years later he finished a major adventure arc and proudly declared “I did it. I saved all the cupcakes.” –He and his friends are dedicated to saving all the cupcakes and mourn when their characters have strife or miss a cupcake or two.
I’ve run sessions with pickup groups that were more about having a good time as goofy fantasy characters than actually fighting anything or investigating a dungeon. Everyone there was on the same page, so it worked.
My regular game night crew has, post Covid, become even more murderous murder-hobos than they were before. Their characters for the new campaign are dirty, mean, and mighty unclean. I think one of our newer players might actually be okay in a “nicer” campaign, and I worry that learning to play D&D with this bunch will lead him to think that “This is how you play.” I was wracking my brain to choose a 2nd or 3rd adventure for them, but I realized that a) the players have played much of my older material, and b) the newer material is too *nice* for the likes of them. It would be like dropping Hannibal Lecter into a My Little Pony episode. In the end, I decided to just create new “5-Room Dungeons” for them to destroy in an evening. I enjoy running these sessions for my friends, but it’s not a campaign I would want to play in (nor will I be inviting my son to come roll up a character and join). With this same group of players I *do* hope to someday continue one or two other (less dark) campaigns (that I would invite my son back to Game Night for).
TLDR: 1) My son’s Ravenloft campaign is Optimize/RP, but a grimdark player might make them all quit the campaign. The DM already has to apologize when the plot goes too far.
2) The pickup games locally have worked because–fortunately–everyone who showed up was there for friendly RP and dice-stacking. One sour note might have derailed everything.
3) My Game Night friends have taken a decidedly dark (and cheesy) turn with their newest characters. Anyone visiting the new campaign (and unfamiliar with the previous vibe at our table) might think that bloodshed, gore, and sadism were the norm and wonder about our respective childhoods.
That’s an interesting line. Are we talking about “low role distance” here?
https://www.sociologyguide.com/basic-concepts/role-distance.php
It’s such a good idea, I figured that it had to exist:
https://derpicdn.net/img/2016/11/2/1286963/medium.jpg
Not sure if you’re aware, but my buddies at AAW Games are currently Kickstarting this thing in Pathfinder 2e (it’s already out in 5e and Pathfinder):
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adventureaweek/mini-dungeon-tome-for-pathfinder-2e
No doubt you enjoy coming up with your own mini-dungeons, but it’s been nice for me to have a fallback when I’m feeling uninspired on game night. (Also, I have a few dungeons in there myself.)
The rude comment I’d expect based on the way I run games: “…you have no idea what you’re doing? Where the @#$% are your notes?”
I have straight up admitted to at least one group of players that I have basically no plans beyond “what I want to do for this (two hour) session”. Any semblance of plot is purely because of the players driving the vehicle, not me.
Man… I worry about the opposite.
“Throw out the notes! Learn to improvise a little!”
I feel like railroad vs. improv is the RPG equivalent of “I am simultaneously too fat and too skinny.”
…maybe I should poke you about dungeon design.
I get ragged on all the time when I post, because of the way I run games. I freely admit I’m a VERY controlling DM. I don’t allow the players to do many, many things in the name of game balance and EVERYONE having opportunities to shine. This seems to trigger a certain subset of players and I always get that my games can’t be any fun because of the way I run them. Yet I’ve had several long term games with same players that lasted years. And they, *gasp*, had FUN!
Add into that that I’m a female who has been DMing for over 40 years and married to a man I met while playing, which triggers a whole separate subset, and the comments can get…unpleasant. Which doesn’t bother me at all, I’m an old junkyard dog and survivor of many an IRC flamewar :).
As a player, I won’t play in a game where the DM or other players are dismissive, where the DM gives in to the players all the time (1/2 dragon, vampire, mage/cleric/assassin? Sure!) and game balance is never even though of. Those type games aren’t fun for me.
I would never tell someone that they “CAN’T PLAY LIKE THAT”, or “YOUR PLAY STYLE IS WRONG”. If that is fun for the group, then more power to them. Just don’t expect everyone else to want the same thing.
But, if the group is actively misogynist, homophobic, racist, ablest, then I’m going to say something. I don’t accept that in real life and I’m sure as hell not going to accept that in my games.
Sorry for the rant, this is one of my many soapboxes.
I feel you would enjoy my one-shot idea.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/special-snowflake
I feel like “to each their own” stops on contact with hate speech. Assume that there’s an unstated “unless the other guy is a Nazi” in my principle of “judge playstyle based on the other guy’s context.”
I LOVE that one-shot and am stealing it for inflicting it on players sometime in the future.
The whole Beastmaster things was right in my prime playing/DMing years. As in I have actual tables for ferret/kender “acquiring” things randomly during play. Have had a LOT of players that had ferret “pets” and of course kender just tend to pick up anything that catches their eye and is small enough to fit in a pouch 🙂
It’s your job to be of similar optimization level to your table. If everyone else is some HexSorcadin SCAGtrip abomination, and you’re a normal, functional character then you’re the asshole. If everyone else is a normal functional character and you’re a HexSorcadin SCAGtrip abomination then you’re the asshole. If everyone else is a relatively normal character and you’re some non-functional meme build then you’re the asshole.
Also Elves are freakishly skinny, cartoonishly androgynous, and have too many bones in their face. “Pretty Elf” is an oxymoron. If you want hot characters, that’s what Dwarves, Halflings, Gnomes, Dragonborn, Tieflings, and the occasional human are for.
You suffer from a mighty dwarven inferiority complex.
That would require Dwarves to be inferior to another group, but no such group exists. It must be hard to be an Elf: Knowing that literally every group ever is superior to you.
My group is quite variable in optimisation — but even those with power-gamer tendencies will always build a functional character around their unholy stat blocks. There’s no fun in playing a mechanical monstrosity that just doesn’t fit the campaign.
We actually have a relatively combat-light party for our current campaign… (mostly) not incompetent in a fight, but definitely favouring social solutions to problem, heavy on the roleplaying. Quite a contrast from the previous campaign, where the GM ended up treating us as one level higher for the purposes of planning combat encounters… that party had some real hard-hitters.
Teen Fighter look adorable and future murder-hobo 😀
Didn’t knew he went to magic school 🙂
As for the comment, there is something i noticed not only on RPG but in any other game involving maths and numbers. That is the powergamer obsession with maximizing stuff. To give an example, Stellaris, it’s a pc grand strategy sci-fi game. In it you have your planets and you need populations, pops, to work and produce. So pop growth is seen as the only valuable thing and anything that doesn’t gives an edge on that is seen as broken and unplayable. Same way those powergamers would be all too glad to explain why mathematically your character while cool isn’t optimized to do this or that specific combat. They may have, or not, a point, my problem with that kind of argument is a very simple one, they turn game into homework. DOn’t know about many of you but playing D&D, or other games, is a good way to not do homework and then these people as nice as they can be turn the game into the very thing you evade by playing. HERESY!!! i say to that. There is no wrong way to play the game, there is plenty of wrong ways to make people play the game as you say they should. As Fighter itself once said: “Don’t tell me how to play my character” 🙂
I didn’t either. When I wrote this one I assumed it would be adult Fighter. Laurel had other ideas. 😀
As for powergaming, I’ve fallen down that rabbit hole a time or two myself. It’s more fun as a thought exercise than a real character though. (IMHO, YMMV, etc. etc.)
Laurel got a good idea. It’s fun to see characters at different ages and milestones of their life. To see how they change but also how the author can keep them consistent or not between those phases 🙂
Heh. I wonder who aside from Wizard had a goth phase?
Thief seems the usual suspect, but Paladin would be fun and great. Cleric just would never have one 😀
Nah, a goth phase for a tiefling thief is just too cliché. She was probably a princess as a child…
I always thought it odd that sci-fi 4x games like Stellaris tie production so heavily to population. I mean I get it in ancient and modern settings, but in a sci-fi setting it feels like its ignoring the effects if automation
“Imagine that an outsider heard about your group and the way you game. What kind of erroneous snap judgement might they make? Why would they be wrong?”
Why should I care? The only people whose opinions matter are those in my group.
The sooner other people figure this out and apply this rubric to how they behave (both in ignoring how others play and in how others judge them) the happier the world will be.
That’s a fine point of view… assuming you never interact with anyone other than the members of your group. I’ll note that you participate in forum discussions though. And at some level, those are about comparing experiences.
And comparing experiences are fine. We do so here “frequently”* and I try to remain respectful of people who enjoy the objectively inferior game system that is D&D (:wink:)…
But if someone starts telling me I’m having badwrongfun… unless they’re explaining how the rules //should// be working, I’m usually just going to put them on Manual Ignore.*
.* Manual Ignore is a personal thing, I just ignore them hence forth. I don’t block them, or put them on Ignore, or anything that would interfere with me seeing their posts (aside from the fact that I just skip past them //manually//) and I’d //never// interfere with someone being able to receive my wisdom and superior roleplaying sensibilities. (:stickingouttongue: :wink:)
Now, if I’m on a message board where having fights is permissible and the mods don;t interfere or ban over mere //words// (I vastly prefer those platforms) I might just take off the kid gloves, roll up my sleeves, and get down to some gud olde fashioned troll fighting.
By ZOD I miss Nutkinland.
.* “Frequently” or some variant definition of the term.
Personally, I try to optimize my characters so that they: 1 – not die. And 2 – be able to contribute. But I will happily take a substandard option if it seems fun or fitting to my character’s theme. For example, my nature-based cleric summons animals and plant monsters. So I gave him some feats to get stronger summons. But I also took the feats Thicket Channel and Wild Growth Channel. They are not very useful. But they are thematic.
Another example. I gave my Forgepriest the feats Catch-Off Guard and Shikigami Style. These let her use improvised weapons. But I’m not giving her any more feats to make improvised weapons any better. The rest of her feats are crafting feats and feats to make her warhammer stronger. Would she be more optimized if I dropped those two feats and focused more on the warhammer? Yes. But I did it due to the thought that she can use her crafting tools to fight with if she needs to. And she has needed to a couple of times, but she mostly just uses the warhammer.
I think we’ve talked about this before, but I design my characters to contribute in three pillars of play: Social, Combat, and Downtime. That tends to ensure that I get to contribute during most phases of play.
After three years (going into four this year) with the same group (the longest I have been a part of a single game in this hobby), I would say that our group is very diverse on many levels, both character concepts, play styles, and how invested each of us are in the different aspects of our character development (I personally tie my development around a concept that is mechanics first, but try to infuse roleplay to make the concept work, while I know one of our other players makes the character and figures out how the mechanics would fit later, etc).
After three years together, one thing is true (confirmed by having a discussion about this together before I posted this), we are a “tactical” group. We often try to use stealth (dice are a bitch sometimes tho), we always make plans when we can before just jumping into a situation (tho again, dice… ), and we do a lot of cross talk at the table (virtually, since we are all from different parts of the country, and one from another country entirely), and between session planning as well.
I think to others, this might come across a particular way, but to us, we are just having fun in a way that makes sense to us and I wouldn’t have it any other way 🙂
The cross talk thing is an interesting note. I’ve begun thinking about it again just recently after listening to Matt Mercer say, “Please minimize the corss talk,” during an episode of Critical Role. It’s not something I could picture at the Glass Cannon Podcast (or in my own games for that matter).
“Judge playstyle based on the other guy’s context, not your own.”
Why judge at all? (*) Gamers have been judging each other for badwrongfun since I started playing these games in the 1980s. (I hate to break it to poor Ginny, but people saying “my way of playing is the only correct way” isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, ever though it’s as pointless then (something that I told people then) as it is now.
That said, I find that people, especially younger people – say Ginny’s age range – tend to dump on me for treating gaming as a puzzle to be solved and my characters as disposable playing pieces. In the same way that we don’t expect actors to become personally invested in whether their characters “win” the movie or play that they’re performing in, I’m after an interesting story, overall, not how glorious my character’s part in it is. So having them do something that I know will have them be seriously injured or killed because it enhances the story of the game as I see it? Sign me up. There’s always more where the last one came from.
So, as far as I’m concerned, other people’s judgements aren’t worth engaging with, unless they’re offering cash (and a lot of it) for compliance. It’s just a way of people telling others “be like me.” And I’m too old to be bothered with that.
(*) Outside of the fact that one of the ways in which people seek meaning is to view themselves as superior to others.
“Fourth, people want a sense of _positive self-worth_. They seek ways of establishing that they are individuals with desirable traits. Finding some way of believing oneself to be better than other people seems to be a common form of this need for meaning.”
Alone and Without Purpose: Life Loses Meaning Following Social Exclusion
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2717555/
Remember the context of the question. We’re talking about forums where people describe their playstyles and experiences, then ask for advice. Judgement for its own sake is as questionable as you say. But when we’re talking about improving our mutual craft, it suddenly becomes a necessary part of criticism and feedback.
Ah. I see. You and I are working from different definitions of “judge.” For me, “Hey, Ginny, I don’t think that Elliwyn is a good character for a ‘Murderhobos ‘R’ Us’ Campaign,” isn’t a judgement. Offering critique, or even criticism (let alone advice), is not the same as judging, at least as I normally use the terms. Advice that comes across as judgmental is poorly given, in my book. So I don’t really judge playstyles, in the “people responding like [someone’s] failing a test” sense.
She right away comes across as snobby and as someone who played a non-D&D game that more than half of the group left over (including the DM) from differences in play, I am right away hostile to her because she has near the exactly response and attitude as those people. Drama was the bread and butter and it was tiring and discouraging to deal with.
I’ll concede that there’s different style of play and hers isn’t to my enjoyment. But if posting about your character and game is garnering broad dislike then maybe there’s a reason, like you being a That Guy.
If they want to play the game that way then fine; I’m not playing it, I’ve got my own games. But D&D is a combat focused game and trying to play it into something else is going to have it run janky. It feels more she’s playing it for the brand and not for mechanics that would allow her play a different game that would suit her and her group’s sensibilities more.
This is something I’ve commented on here before. There are lots of types of fun, as we’ve discussed, and optimising is not fun for me. However, there is also no choice of game group where I live, so when your friends want to play that way, it’s an issue.
We never have got around that issue of optimising meaning that anyone not doing that gets left behind and left out, but fortunately we tend to play short campaigns and I’ve gravitated more towards DMing. Since I have no interest in CRs and balancing encounters, my players’ feedback is that the resulting “guess whether you can cope” is quite a thrill and often gets them looking for options other than rushing in and trying to fight everything.
The top mistake would be assuming we’re all playing to the meta.
Two of our players don’t even know how to go about that level of optimization. One bounces between optimizing about as hard as he can one game then switches to doing something goofy. One of our players just likes beeg numbers. One of our players likes to be The Tank. And me, I just like to experiment in a mechanically aware way.
I also feel this is a session 0 issue too. The GM needs to set the ground floor. There’s a solid chance that the zero hp elf doesn’t have a place in a given campaign-or at least, not for long when that dodecahedron decides It Is Time.
This reminds me of one of my players. When he was still in his TTRPG infancy the first character they made was an Idyllkin Aasimar oracle who’s resources were almost entire dedicated to being a pop-star idol. Skills were put in to various Performances and Artistry, feats set mostly on boosting skills, spells mostly for spectacle.
I run more combat heavy games, so there was obviously a bit of a disconnect, and eventually the other party members convinced him to add a few buff spells to their selection, but there was still a bit of tension in the group as levels went up and so did challenge ratings.
The answer we arrived at was… Leadership. The other aspect of our fox-girl pop-star was leaning hard in to was devotion to Shelyn, genuinely just wanted to make people happy with her music rather than chasing fame or fortune. So we wound up discussing the idea of a more martial minded Devotee of Shelyn at her side to keep her safe. The player liked the idea and could continue their characters personal goals, the other party members were happy to have another combat capable body when things got rough. In the end, the pop-star’s traveling Art Commune has become a persistent background piece in our Golarion based games
The player in question has since matured in to a munchkin. I would not make the same deal with him again.