Ahdok @ ahdok @ttrpg.network Posts 123Comments 824Joined 2 yr. ago
The EOS-LRP system in the UK was planned to be a 10-year project, and it died within 4 events because of this exact problem.
The designers created a game that was largely factionalized by race(1) - elves, orcs, goblins, humans, undead, and a few other player options. The idea was to build a dark, gritty "survival" setting where different factions would compete over limited resources, and the game story would be mostly driven by player-vs-player conflict. They kept prices for attendance low by running an extremely small crew.
This has been a successful strategy for many larp systems over the years, player-driven conflict is extremely valuable in keeping your players engaged, because NPC-driven conflict is expensive to run... if all of your game content is being delivered by your crew, you need a large crew in order to be able to keep the players interested and engaged, and this means high prices. If your game content largely stems from player-vs-player conflict, then you can potentially run a game with thousands of players using a crew of 20-50. I've been involved in several of these in the past.
So what happened with EOS? Well, the costume requirements for playing anything other than a human were extreme (this is a common requirement in larp systems that want a high quality immersive experience.) - we're talking full-head makeup, prosthetics, masks, etc etc. 80% of the players in the first event rocked up as humans, and because they were allied, they managed to wipe out the other factions completely. Some of those players went home, some of them rolled new characters, and got wiped out again, and went home.
By the third event, 100% of the playerbase were humans, and allied to each other. The game crew was six people, and they were unable to create any credible threat to the players. Because everyone was part of one monolithic faction, there was no conflict, and the players rapidly became bored, with nothing to do.
The designers tried to fix this by first banning players from rolling more human characters, and second introducing some overwhelmingly powerful hunter monsters to pick off isolated players. When characters died, the game admins told them they had to roll non-humans if they wanted to continue playing, and in response those players quit. Their friends followed quickly, and the game collapsed.
EOS had an interesting setting, with a lot of good design ideas, and some really cool handles for roleplay and conflict. They talked a big game, and promised an exciting, fast-paced, dangerous competitive game. Players were drawn to the events because of what the design brief promised, but in choosing to all play the same race, everything promising from the design brief was undermined, and the game died.
(1) There is, of course, a second, highly problematic issue with drawing your lines of conflict purely on "race" grounds, which is an uncomfortable issue all by itself. Modern fantasy gaming design is moving away from this, for reasons that I hope are well-understood.
I'll try to explain it again:
If you create a setting where a core part of the setting is that there's all these different races interacting in a rich, vibrant, cultural melting pot, but all your players choose to play humans, then you have a complete mismatch between the setting you created, and the experience the players are having.
This is a problem.
It's not a problem that "players are doing what they want". The problem is that the reality of your game experience is fundamentally different to the setting design you've written. You have a setting document that says one thing, and a playerbase experiencing something different. The disconnect might seem trivial or unimportant to you, or you might not care - but the result is that your setting document is fundamentally inaccurate to the reality of play.
For a designer, this is a problem.
BG3 is a single player RPG where an individual player can make whatever decision they want and experience the game the way they want to play it. I'm not trying to claim this specific problem is an issue in BG3. The only reason I brought that game up was that they publicly released statistical data on millions of players, so it gives good data for the proportionality of player choices.
For most tabletop settings, this isn't (usually) a major issue - a character party is typically on the order of 4-6 players, if they're all humans, that's fine. It's the duty of the DM to make sure that the NPCs and the setting are accurate if that's a thing they care about. It can be a problem if your game is fundamentally about exploring these different perspectives, which some indie-RPGs are focused on.
This is mainly an issue in large-scale social play games, like MMOs and Fest-games, which can easily result in this disparity between setting design and play experience.
Alternate ending:
It's important training! don't want to get rusty.
(Real reason) - The rest of the party have a lot of credibility and renown in Waterdeep, due to having done quite a lot of very overt acts of heroism. They're recognized by the Lord Protector as heroes of the city, and they are widely known to be powerful adventurers.
Razira joined the party later and, while Konsi knows she's a big damn hero, nobody else seems to know this or view Razira as being that important. Konsi's constantly looking for opportunities to have Razira perform impressive heroic feats (like catching a falling person out of the sky) in public, so she gets a reputation that matches how awesome she is.
I think, the first casting of MMM always needs a dedicated scene where the rest of the party get to explore what the wizard has made for them. It's a massive opportunity for creativity with the players, and as a DM you can just take a load off and let the wizard player run the session for a while, explaining all the cool things they incorporated.
The first time I cast MMM in 5e, it was with my pyrophobic gnome librarian wizard, Neff. She build a special room for each member of the party to cater to their needs, and I built a map for it (we were on VTT)
Sorry for the small text size (vertical format haha) - if you click on it enough times it'll show full size.
If a creator wants players to explore their work and everything they've build, and players aren't doing that, this is viewed as a problem by the creator.
That's not misguided, their hard work is going to waste. It makes sense for them to explore ways to encourage people to try new things.
The reality of your setting is what the players actually experience, not what you wrote in the setting document.
I'm gonna expand on this, because I think it's an interesting thing to consider, and an important lesson for players and DMs alike.
If you, as a player, write a big complex backstory full of important and interesting events for your character, but keep it hidden from the other players - that backstory essentially doesn't exist to the table. Yes it can affect how you think about your character, but it's not a part of the collective story until it impacts the table. This can have negative outcomes in roleplay.
If you, as a DM, write a bunch of secret information for your NPCs, but the players never see it, it's essentially not real to them. If the knights of your city have a super cool wyvern emergency response team, but the players never see it, that detail never existed.
Let's say, for a random example, that you grew up as an orphan in a dwarf mining colony, and your parents were... not the best. you experienced abuse and discrimination, both from them and the dwarves in the colony. Eventually fled and made your own life elsewhere. You've decided to write on your sheet that your character hates dwarven culture, and mistrusts dwarves, and always views their actions in the most negative light possible. Now let's say this childhood trauma is so bad you don't want to think about it, or talk about it with your party members. You keep it secret.
Now, let's say the DM wants to bring this part of your story into the overall story, so they set you on an adventure that involves diplomacy with a local dwarven mine, or they give you a dwarven NPC to travel with the party, or some other dwarf-centric plot. If your character acts "weird" around the dwarves, constantly refusing to trust them, or speaking ill of them, or looking for malfeasance where there is none - in your head you're just playing to character, and your actions make sense. The other players don't know your history, so what they see is completely arbitrary prejudice.
To those players, your backstory isn't a part of the story they've experienced or the world until you bring it to the table. Your actions and decisions might not make sense to them, or seem out of character. Your choices might be incredibly frustrating to the rest of the table when they obstruct or interfere what they perceive to be the party goal. Without the context of why your character is like that, their experience of your character is massively different to your own.
Here's a second example: Your character used to live somewhere far away, they committed a murder, then fled their city, changed their name, and came to (wherever the campaign is set) to start over. They're ashamed of what they did, and don't want anyone finding out for fear of being tracked down and brought to justice, so they'll never tell anyone about it.
Now let's say your DM is running... Dungeon of the Mad Mage... a mega dungeon plot where the characters go into the dungeon, then fight their way through monsters until they're level 20, and never see civilization. They never have an opportunity to bring your secret to the table and make it part of the story. Or let's say they're just busy with other plots and forget.
This backstory detail might be important to you - but the other players never see it. From their perspective it never happened at all, it wasn't part of the narrative, it's not an extra dimension to your character, and it's not an event that happened in the world - they just don't know about it... so it's not real from their perspective.
Now, I'm not advocating against characters having secrets, or DMs having intrigue in their plot that drives outcomes without the players seeing it directly. If you want depth in your storytelling, it's important to have flaws and phobias and secrets, and opportunities for your character to grow and all that good stuff.
What I'm saying is, if you have an important secret that you haven't told the other characters, it can be worth thinking about what your character is doing from their perspective. What does it look like to a person who doesn't know your secret? Where are the differences between the story you're telling yourself, and the story you're telling them?
When designing "hidden content" consider what circumstances might cause your character to reveal their secret. If your intention is to keep it hidden for the whole campaign, then think about what that does to the collective story.
This lesson is especially important for DMs, because it's so easy to devote hours and hours of planning to things the players might not discover. It's often important in your story design to have things going on that the players don't know about, so they can unearth them. Mysteries need secrets... but when planning your campaigns, always consider the questions "when do the players learn this?" and "how do the players learn this?" because until they do, it's not a part of their world,
Here we go (these are current versions, many origins have legacy variants in VGtM, or are duplicated in setting books):
- Half-Orc: PHB
- Gnome: PHB
- Halfling: PHB
- Tiefling: PHB
- Goblin: MotM
- Kobold: MotM
- Tabaxi: MotM
- Harengon: MotM
- Kenku: MotM
- Genasi: MotM
- Fairy: MotM
- Warforged: Eberron: RftLW
- Dryad: Homebrew (I just reskinned a Tortle spore druid.)
I tried to explain in my post, let's go again.
Imagine you, as a designer, have put a lot of effort into making an interesting cosmopolitan setting. It's very frustrating when the bulk of your playerbase represent a different reality than the content of your setting. It's especially frustrating in mass social games (like MMOs or fest-LARPS)
When you have games that are heavily player-driven, the reality of your setting is what the players actually experience, not what you wrote in the setting document. If your intention is to build a complex rich cosmopolitan setting, but then everyone plays humans, they don't get to experience all the rest of the content you made - the result is you've put time and work into designing content that doesn't get used, and the world you end up with is "oops, all humans."
If I devote ten pages of my PHB to the culture and habits of gnomes, and then nobody plays a gnome, that's "wasted pagecount" - RPG books (Especially books like DnD) have limits on the pagecount, and you want all the content you provide to be used. Those ten pages could have been dedicated to something that impacted the table and made the game more enjoyable for everyone.
There's no issue in the individual case, but I hoped to explain why designers feel the need to encourage people to diversify.
In 5e so far, I've played:
Half-Orc, Goblin, Kobold, Gnome(3), Halfling(2), Tiefling, Tabaxi, Harengon, Kenku, Genasi, Dryad, Warforged, and Fairy.
I've yet to touch Dwarf, Elf, Half-Elf, or Human. I should probably play a Dragonborn and a Tortle.
The numbers are from Launch Weekend only, there were about 30k Gith players, the lowest of any race - about 10% of half-elf, elf, and human. Halfling was second lowest.
There is legitimately an issue in all fantasy games where designers build a rich diverse setting with many different races that have their own exciting cultures and designs and differences, but if they include "human" about 50% of players choose human. This persists through boardgames, RPGs, videogames and LARP. The exact proportions vary a bit from game to game and from playerbase to playerbase, but it's very common.
Larian revealed some stats a while back for BG3, about 50% of players chose human, elf, or half-elf (the three most "human" looking races". If you choose one of the existing characters to play as, Gale is the most common. It's an encouraging result, there's more diversity in the picks for BG3 than most other games, but it's still very "human" skewed. Halfling, Gnome and Gith were much less commonly picked.
If you've been tabletop gaming for a long time, your instinct is to think things like "but why would anyone play as a human? that's boring!" or "I play these games for escapism and I want to play as something different to myself." or the like, but the reality is that there's a very large cadre of players who want to create characters or avatars that are "like them" - they want to self-insert, or they want to pretend they are their character, and have difficulty squaring that with being a gnome or a goblin or a Dragonborn.
As such, you can get this weird disconnect between your setting writing (where there's a large variety of different, interesting races in the world) and your playerbase (majority human) which skews your design towards a human-centric viewpoint that you don't necessarily want - especially if you put work into the design of cultures of other races, and you want players to explore a variety of ideas and styles.
So what's the solution? - a common design solution is to mechanically incentivise players to choose outside of human, by giving humans disadvantages, or giving other races unique advantages that are desirable. Is this the right approach? your mileage might vary, but it's one of the easiest "patches" to encourage diversity in the playerbase, so it's a common choice.
Does 5e do this? probably not - human is very mechanically powerful, especially at low levels where the variant human feat can make a big difference... but they did make humans more "boring" than the other races, hopefully encouraging more dragonborn and gnomes and half-orcs and so on.
in 5e, variant human gets an extra feat.
These people never consider the always prepared spell list when they write this stuff. The ten spells that the subclass adds to the cleric's kit are a vital part of understanding how powerful that subclass is.
Take Trickery cleric. (A certain goblin who visits this place is a trickery cleric.) - the "I can make a silent clone of myself" feature isn't that powerful... it's sometimes helpful as a distraction, and sometimes helpful in combat to deliver touch spells, but it's concentration which makes it hard to use effectively. It's especially hard to use at higher levels when you want that concentration slot for other spells. However! Trickery cleric gets disguise self, dispel magic, blink, dimension door, polymorph, and modify memory, a whole host of useful effects that largely sit outside a cleric's normal capabilities. Trickery is quite a powerful subclass purely on the strength of the extra spells, not because of its regular features.
Oh, and they also get Pass Without Trace.
Twilight domain gets Sleep as a domain spell - that's really good at low levels, and if your DM likes to provide complex or weird situations, it's surprisingly handy. In player surveys, Twilight Domain is viewed as the most powerful cleric subclass.
Aw thanks!
That part is a mix of practice and luck :)
Aw thanks!
It's partly a product of my tools, I use pigment liners and colour pencils, rather than digital, very few people these days use those tools to put content online.
It's maybe a problem that everyone assumes fantasy religion should be based on modern Christianity...
INT is a pretty powerful stat if your DM has done a lot of work to put lore into the world and then has plots that rely on it - and it's pretty good for monster knowledge checks. At the right table INT is probably the most important stat to have!
Having said that WIS covering perception means it needs no help.
The solution to sad clerics is to just assume they know things it'd be sensible for them to know, without a check needed, and reserve Religion checks for stuff that they wouldn't know, like "the stats of a mummy" or "the rites of Azmodeus"
Right, but... while the requirement for INT supports "cleric who doesn't know anything about their religion" it also makes it significantly harder to play "cleric who does know something about their religion" - which probably should be more viable than "the wizard happens to know all this stuff randomly"