LogFAQs > #905358488

shadowsword87 posted...

The point being that what people predefine as "druidic archetypes" just suck for games, and people can figure out other things to play, they just need to be creative.

I don't think the problem is a lack of creativity. I think it's more a case of most people choose to play a Druid either for mechanical reasons (in which case they don't care about the fluff/flavor as much and just default to the usual default hippie archetype, especially since Circle of the Moon is the really exploitable subclass, and that's also the one that leans most heavily into the Wiccan/hippie nonsense), or they chose that class specifically because they wanted to play that archetype (ie, Marisha on Critical Role and Amy on Acq Inc C-Team being obvious examples).

Sure, you CAN play a more complex or atypical Druid more akin to nature priests in other cultures, but that leans more into just playing a Cleric of one of the agricultural gods and taking Nature Domain or something similar. And most people aren't going to think playing a priest or druid of the god of healthy crop growth is kewl enough in a game where you storm through the world murdering everything in your path on the way to essentially becoming a god yourself.



shadowsword87 posted...

At the risk of starting another billion posts: oh, you mean Rouge One?

Well, to be fair, they lacked a 3P0 and R2, and only had one combat droid.

The rest of their party was two Rogues, a Ranger, a Monk, and a Fighter.



shadowsword87 posted...

Huh, which is probably why I wasn't as interested those podcasts as much as my podcasts.

On the flip-side, it might also be worth noting that those are some of the most popular games online at the moment, which implies most players are perfectly fine with not having that much input on the design of the world or the overall thrust of the narrative as long as they trust their DMs to tell a good story.

In other words, players being allowed to have a much stronger say in their environment might just be more a personal quirk of yours than something that would (or should) apply to a majority of games run by other DMs.



shadowsword87 posted...

Dan Repperger's Fear the Boot AP started off asking players what they wanted out of a setting

The closest I've ever come to this was asking players in advance what sort of mood/tone/genre they wanted from a game. If a majority had said "gothic horror" or something similar, I would have leaned into something like the typical Ravenloft game. If they preferred "high fantasy", something like Lord of the Rings or traditional D&D (especially in Faerun/Forgotten Realms) would have been the inspiration, while "dark fantasy" would have produced a game closer to Game of Thrones. If they wanted a game that was mostly action and combat, I would have leaned more into that, while if they were looking more for solving mysteries or political intrigue, I could lay things out more in favor of that sort of thing as well.

I also tend to make "How serious or silly do you want this game to be?" a question I ask, because I've played/run games where everything is mostly ridiculous, and games where things are much more serious, and what the players expect along those lines helps me know how I should run things.

I might also be willing to add something in if a player was insistent about something (like, "In my backstory I come from an island kingdom in the north where I lived in a palace of ice!"), but beyond that the world and the plot would be mostly my own.


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