A Refs/DMs questions for players, what matters to you?

[Admin Pete]

This thread was created by The Perilous Dreamer at the time he was the Admin.

I saw this question on a non-D&D forum and thought it was relevant and worthy of discussion here.

"As a player, what aspects of a (fantasy) game-world are you most appreciative that the GM has thought about?"

The writer then goes on to make the following statement and then ask the above question in another way.

I know that in the past I've spent a great deal of time thinking about politics, history, language, culture, coinage, gods, mythology, geography, trade, royalty, village life, city life, and on and on for my game worlds.

But I wonder: how much of any of that stuff would matter to you, if you were my player?

And perhaps more importantly, as I decide what to think about first, what would matter to you most?

So I invite all member to discuss one, two or all three questions and share what you think about. Please put on your player hat and think about it from the player side as to what you would look for in a game.

I will also be posting some things that came up in that other thread, my comments on them and then your response to those things also, letting me know if you agree or disagree with my assessment of those additional things.

[tetramorph]

Frankly, I am most appreciative when the ref allows me to explore a fantasy world that is as close to, continuous with and corresponding to the classical shared western inheritance.

I want to stake my vampires through the heart to kill them. I want my orcs to spontaneously generate out of chaos and need swift extermination. I want my elves to be fay and my dwarves to be miners. In short, I want to know where I am, without having to do a bunch of work to figure out what should really be my referee's work on his own novel!

I only need to know enough politics and history to make sound wargaming decisions. I am not interested in language or culture as I am unlikely to need those for role-play. If they would help me with the game, then I will be curios to know. I am not interested in gods or mythology unless I need to know how some evil clerics god may chase me down if I don't kill his evil cleric the right way. I only need to know the geography that will help me with my wargame. Etc.

What matters to me most is the feeling that I am playing a character in a fairly recognizable western medieval fantasy setting where he can make his life better through treasure hunting, land-clearing and war against the denizens of chaos. That makes me happy!

Hope I didn't sound like a stinker. This is from someone who spends a heck of a lot of time thinking about his own campaign world. But I know that most folks aren't very interested in my own details either. I work on that stuff for myself because it is fun to me. And, occasionally, it helps me make a judgment call as a ref because it helps me know what is more or less consistent with my "world" if I have fleshed it out.

That's about it!

[Deleted]

I like a fantasy world that makes sense and doesn't make sense, as weird as that sounds. Civilization must make sense and feel real, but the Dungeon doesn't have to and really shouldn't. Civilization should seem familiar, where as the Dungeon should be a place of discomfort and dread. If exploring ruins and underground strongholds starts to make sense, it becomes Indiana Jones sans the fun - just plain old archaeology - and not necessarily the trippy fun kind on Ancient Aliens.

I want to fight against Orcs, Goblins, Giants, the Undead - you know, the Forces of Evil - not because it's heroic or anything, but there is something more to be gained in treasure and magic items - maybe something more than that too ... notoriety, fame, fortune, wine, hot graph paper babes ... all that.

I like gritty situations and because of that I like choices galore.Players should feel like they are in control of their own destinies until I cast a geas on them for some very good reason, supported by gameplay. More choices usually means I/you get what I/you want - or close to it. New spells,different races and cultures, different character classes - it all brings a new way of playing the old game. But the honest truth is, with all the wonderful choices I provide players with, the most commonly played character type is still - beyond a shadow of a doubt - the simple Fighting Man. That said, because I like the variety of choices, I still offer up those choices ... it makes my mind happy on some level to think that Norsemen do not culturally have a cleric class in my game, but a Godar to fill the warrior holy man position, or that Celts have Druids, or whatever. that's more about civilization making sense. My dungeons might have goblins, might have mi-go, Morlocks, or Daleks. Gravity might not work the way it ought to for part of the Dungeon. Magic in civilization tends to be either predictable/substitute for technology or disruptive to civilized life. Actually with Magic in the midst of the Dungeon, all one can really do is embrace the Dungeon, because ANYTHING can happen there.

[Admin Pete]

Please continue answering the above questions as I interject more stuff as we go.

One of the responses to the above was:

I love character building, so I'm always interested in what abilities will be especially useful or not. Also, clear parameters on how I'm to equip my character. I'd be disappointed to find that my character is not not useful or that the niche I thought I was filling is also being filled by another character in the group—rendering my character less useful. Finally, every character should have proper motivations for the campaign, be it greed, vendetta, duty, what-have-you.

As to your list, I'll sort it from what I'd be most interested in to least: politics, history, gods, geography, mythology, culture, village/city life, trade, royalty, language, coinage.

I don't tell my players what equipment they should take (well I help out newbies who are learning), I leave that up to experienced players to do on their own. I do let people know up front if you run out of something you are really out of that item. I started with larger groups of 12 or more players so if having more than one of any character class spoils it for you, you need to learn how to bring life to your character and make him unique. The motivations of the character are up to the player, as the ref I don't think it is my place to tell you who your character is, play him and find out.

[Admin Pete]

Here are a few more responses, I think you can see a common theme:

mythology, history, culture, gods, trade, village life/city life, geography, politics / royalty, language, Coinage.

I also delight in character construction. It's half the game for me, really... As a result, I am always appreciative when a GM is specific about the game's parameters. It's very frustrating to write a character, only to find out later that some optional switches are in place and others are not, or that you have to go back to the drawing board (Or play a character that doesn't perform the way you thought) because of an undisclosed switch or house rule.

Having all the information possible for chargenning up front is a definite plus.

For me as a player, my list tends to go: culture, mythology, geography, village/city life, history, politics, trade, royalty, gods/religious cults, language, coinage. Politics, royalty, and trade lend themselves to plot hooks, but to truly immerse myself and make sure I'm staying "period", I want to see more of the culture and mythology than I do the byzantine backroom workings of the trade guilds, royalty, and religious cults. I'd rather be invested in the local world and its people than with its kings, queens, and uprisings.

These people are so different from the players I have had both currently and bitd. These people seem to want a book to read about the world so they can design a character, instead of creating a character and learning about the character and the world as they play. My players will barely read a half page of house rules let alone a huge treatise on the world. I wonder how these players would do going through a portal into a completely different world from the one they started in.

I, unlike my players, will read anything the ref will give me to read about the world, but not because I want to design the perfect character for the world.

[Admin Pete]

Another response which I found interesting were these:

For me? NPCs, through and through. I can take almost any premise and almost any setting so long as the people inside it are interesting to interact with. Quests are cool and fights are fun, but I'm a storyteller at heart. Give me people I can love, hate, be annoyed with, laugh with, laugh at.

My "almost" has one exception ... when the angst reaches a certain level, I politely bow out. It's why Vampire, despite having a gorgeously realized world, never really drew me as either a player or a GM.

Anything on the list you mentioned would entertain me if done well. And I'll add one more vote for sharing as much about the setting up front as possible, to help intelligent character design -- and maybe to show where additional detail could be suggested!

The presence of NPCs born gifted, analogous to how it is in the real world, and also thereby setting a precedent for PCs being able to be likewise.

This is more from a GM's perspective, so feel free to ignore, but competent NPCs is one of the most important things for me. I like to have a reasonable number who are as competent, or more competent than the PCs, though the more competent ones tend to have issues to offset their ability.

And that's an important note, NPCs shouldn't be sufficiently competent to just do the PCs work for them, or if they are, then they should have a good reason not to, or alternatively if they do the PCs should get an opportunity to demonstrate their ability pretty much immediately. And never let an NPC solve something quickly that the team has been struggling with for ages, unless the team specifically went to the NPC for help.

I had this happen to me once, I was playing a genius-style character, and we encountered a strange town that caused anyone entering it to lost their memory. This was my bread and butter, so I set about trying to solve the problem of what it was. After about a session of this, I think the GM got bored and simply walked his brick character into the middle of the town, punched the ground, and revealed an underground superscience computer. I don't think I've ever found anything quite so disheartening, it absolutely made me want to quit the campaign.

I really like this last comment above.

[Admin Pete]

My personal favorite response was this one:

For me, it's a sense of time. The passing of seasons, different agricultural activities, and rain, snow, or trade winds affecting how easy it is to get around at different times of the year really helps my immersion as a player into the game world.

Similarly, news of current events and a sense that the world is an active, living place where things are happening, regardless of whether or not they may affect the PCs, helps make the world come alive for me.

I want this guy in my game and can I clone him?!!

[tetramorph]

Oct 7, 2015 10:53:21 GMT -5 Admin Pete said:

My personal favorite response was this one:

For me, it's a sense of time. The passing of seasons, different agricultural activities, and rain, snow, or trade winds affecting how easy it is to get around at different times of the year really helps my immersion as a player into the game world.

Similarly, news of current events and a sense that the world is an active, living place where things are happening, regardless of whether or not they may affect the PCs, helps make the world come alive for me.

I want this guy in my game and can I clone him?!!

Yes, this is the best use of campaign detail: to enhance immersion.

[finarvyn]

Oct 6, 2015 14:45:45 GMT -5 tetramorph said:

I want to stake my vampires through the heart to kill them. I want my orcs to spontaneously generate out of chaos and need swift extermination. I want my elves to be fay and my dwarves to be miners. In short, I want to know where I am, without having to do a bunch of work to figure out what should really be my referee's work on his own novel!

I think your post summed up most of my thoughts on the matter, but I wanted to emphasize the part I liked best. I like things simple, sort of "Appendix N" simple. Conan doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about the politics of Aquilonia, until he decides to become king of it. Frodo doesn't spend his days listing all of the nations found on the map, even if he knows them. Elric doesn't make lists of which gods owe him favors. All of these things sort of happen during "play" when the character is adventuring and are otherwise hidden from the reader until needed.

Gaming should be like that. I like to start off a campaign by showing a map with a few interesting things marked on it and give a few vague highlights which can be fleshed out more if the players ask. Rather than list gods I tend to let the players pick ones they like (which explains why my sister always has clerics of Zeus or Apollo). My belief is that most players don't want details until they become important.

[tetramorph]

Thanks, finarvyn. That is exactly my experience with play as well. Players only want to know as much as they need to help them be successful with in-game rewards.

If they wanted a lecture on fantastical cosmologies, they would go to one! The fantasy cosmology, campaign setting, maps, etc, are all for me and so I can build a realistic world i response to their own exploration and questions.

I am learning to start with a bare minimum and watch things unfold as the players themselves inspire the direction things go.

[Admin Pete]

Oct 11, 2015 9:11:45 GMT -5 finarvyn said:

My belief is that most players don't want details until they become important.

Oct 7, 2015 15:21:54 GMT -5 tetramorph said:

Yes, this is the best use of campaign detail: to enhance immersion.

These two statements really stand out to me, and I agree with both of them. I think these statements complement each other.

[hengest]

I really liked tetramorph's and JMiskimen's replies. I can add only that I appreciate it when the DM has solid investment in their campaign world but isn't overly invested in THIS encounter going THIS way, or this villain being handled in exactly this way because of what they mean to the DM. You don't have to worry you're going to break the DM's fun just by playing the game.

[finarvyn]

One of my favorite DM tricks is to "steal" locations from popular fiction. If I tell my players that they enter "the fantasy equivalent of Mos Eisley" they have a visual image much better than what I could explain otherwise, or if I tell them "you find Helm's Deep" they expect to find horse soldiers like in Rohan. Gives lots of info without either one of us having to memorize a bunch of campaign information.

That was always the problem with playing 5E in the game store. The DM may have been really familiar with FORGOTTEN REALMS but I wasn't, and when I tried to run 5E my players knew the REALMS better than I did....

[Von]

I'll tell you with a story. The other day I played a session of 5e with a DM whose knowledge of the rules and the Forgotten Realms is impressive but who is something of a slave to the books and the sheets. (For those who are keeping score of my boring stories, his first DM was the "I see there are no clothes on your character sheet, clearly you are bollock naked in the wilderness" guy.) There was some business with a cart, a road, two dead horses full of arrows and some goblins. Our party of mostly pre-generated characters was "supposed" to have a wand of scorching rays to compensate for our lack of a wizard (not something I'd have done but neither here nor there), but it hadn't found its way onto anyone's character sheet. The encounter saw two fluke hits from goblin arrows that were enough to kill first level characters and leave our cleric all on her own.

His decision was to retcon the encounter and start over with the wand in the "correct" place (about the person of our halfling thief). A very... computer-gamey... sort of solution. (I've been replaying Baldur's Gate recently and that "save and replay until you have a favourable or at least desirable outcome" factor has been high.) I must have looked a bit grumpy because in a Skype chat afterwards (knowing me to be a man of strong opinions about DMing) he asked me what I'd have done differently.

OK. For starters, I'd have allocated that first round of borderline-TPK attacks from the goblins to the horses, which fits their previous modus operandi. Those high rolls from the goblins would therefore have had a consequence, a serious combat-altering one, because I think it's important that once a die is rolled it has some sort of impact on play.

I wouldn't have stalled out looking for hit points for horses, I'd have GM fiated the result according to Reynolds' Law: "a dead horse is cover, a live horse is a whole bundle of panic", which makes for a more dynamic combat when you have two panicky horses pulling the thing your PCs are riding in and using as cover.

And I wouldn't have retconned that Ari had the magic wand all along, but I'd have said "you've seen something that looks like a magic wand in the cargo, you can forego your attacks to make a search roll if you like".

Basically I don't like do-overs; keep going forward, incorporate the flukey rolls or the errors of memory in some way that makes the scene more dramatic without robbing rolls and decisions of their consequence.

What matters to me is that the DM has flair and imagination and that the gameplay has flow and remains engaging. This practical skill at managing a game is far more important than any feat of the imagination. All of which is my roundabout way of saying that as a player, I don't really give a toss about what the DM has thought about in building their world provided they are good at running it.

[Von]

I add, for the sake of clarity in my own soul: as a DM I find the behind-the-scenes thinking necessary in order to run my world smoothly. When caught on the hop I have a tendency to introduce elements which I later regret: not a problem in one-off games but a vexation when I intend to inhabit a game's world for a while.