So this is my first post on what is hopefully a semi-regular blog divided between general posts about role-playing games, ideas that have been percolating in my head for rpg campaigns, some of which are very setting specific, others far more generic and maybe only limited to a genre and third posts about the setting and intertwined rpg system I have slowly been working on.
I thought for a bit about the first topic I wanted to write about and quickly decided that it should be about a topic I think is important to successful rpg campaigns but a lot of people, especially certain groups of players think is completely anthema. Limitations. Even talking about limitations on their characters can send some potential players into tailspins of rage. Avoid those people, your campaigns will probably die in anger and sadness.
While I will probably talk more extensively about session zeros and their importance to running great campaigns, the key is mutually agreeing to the limitations. Without a common framework for the game master to plan off and players to build their characters for there will generally be a disconnect between player characters, setting and/or the storyline. No one is going to be happy when a GM wanted to run a fairly grounded medieval europe inspired fantasy campaign expecting dwarves, elves and half-orc playing fighters, rangers and wizards and the players show up with a foxgirl monk, a giant frog daemon pact warlock, a samurai and a tribal shaman. That might be an amazing party, but the disconnect from the setting and story will likely cause the game to fail or everyone to not really have fun.
But the important thing is that limitations inspire creativity and help build a coherent character party that fit into the setting and story the GM and players want to tell together. Without limitations, everything can be the ideal version of something, which is boring. RPGs and stories in general (really if we are honest, an RPG campaign is a guided collaborative story) are at their best when you are having to deal with failure and adversity. Imagine if Star Wars Episode IV was an rpg campaign, do Luke, Han, Leia and friends perfectly succeed throughout the story? Han has to shoot his way out of being captured by a bounty hunter and fails a deception check which results in a firefight with stormtroopers and ultimately they lead the empire to the rebels secret base. But these difficulties make a great story.
Limitations don’t have to be crazy and complicated, and too many limitations are as much a problem as none at all. Finding the right balance will depend on the group you game with, what is just right for one group will be too much or not enough for others.
Simple limitations may be things like, only races found in the core rulebook, “your character must have a connection to a certain NPC” (maybe a local lordling who will provide the initial quest the party travels on, or “your character works for the church of the commerce, but they don’t necessarily have to be able to cast divine spells.” These basic limitations will help bind your character to the setting and story agreed upon collectively. Maybe in the first example because members of all those races are common to the kingdom the story is centered around. In the second example this could help players create interconnected backstories, maybe one character is a younger relative of the lordling while another’s father served in a war a few decades ago with the lordling’s father. In the third case, maybe you wanted to play a fighter, now you are playing a fighter who has worked as a guard for the church, protecting tithes as they are transferred from smaller churches or travelling priests to larger central churches, this gives your character a direct link to the party’s cleric who is one of those travelling priests.
More extensive limitations can also be used, and often provide a strong theme to a campaign. Things such as only allowing players to be from a single race, or a small, related set of classes fall into this category. And while I am sure many of you think this is crazy, think of the story potential of a party entirely of dwarves or elves; many fantasy rpg stories default to being human-centric, a campaign focused on another major race can provide a different feel and really let you dive into the lore of that race. Similarly, if you said that all characters had to be barbarians or related classes, like skalds and bloodragers in pathfinder 1st edition, it will change the entire feel of the campaign, in this case it may be suitable for a norse mythology inspired campaign, perhaps centred around the crew of a longship. Likely I will eventually do a blog post or two about more specific ideas for race or class limited campaigns.
Another significant limitation I have tried was in pathfinder 1st edition limiting a cleric’s spell options to only healing spells and those of their god’s domain, any cleric spells that weren’t on that list required 2 spell slots to prepare. This massively changed how the cleric in the party and the npc clerics they encountered operated and made them feel very different from each other, the choice of your deity now had a much greater impact on the character.
Lastly it is important to note that great characters and ideas should generally trump the initial limitations imposed on a party. A norse inspired barbarian party and campaign may be more interesting if one of the party is an outsider, maybe another martial character but from a different background.
Hopefully this was helpful for you in your quest to develop the best rpg campaign possible.
I might be the type of player described at the beginning, but these range from "reasonable" (limiting races) to "gimmicky and makes me wonder why you aren't playing something made for it" (monoclass party) to "I would either drop the game or at the very least scrap the character idea" (clerics. Just... eghrh.)
ReplyDeleteThe cleric thing in particular is horribly egregious and I would absolutely feel justified in being annoyed or frustrated that you essentially decided "all clerics are healers-" not only did that massively make deity options even more of a min-max fest as opposed to roleplay, because now you're very, very badly hampered unless you pick a mechanically good deity), it severely gimps a class for no good reason other then "I wanted them to feel different." Healing spells are mostly terrible and the few domain spells you get aren't usually meant to be your mainstay. Mechanics wise Clerics are now infinitely worse at any role that isn't healing compared to every other full caster (and it doesn't matter what god you pick because having one or two good blast spells doesn't make you good when your entire list is culled), and they're still shit at healing- a Life Oracle, Pei Zing Practitioner, Oradin, or combination of those still blows your literal one role out of the water and can probably take real spells and heal while not being dead weight.
I'm sure your clerics felt different, but it's not a difference I'd like. If you had fun, good on you, but I can't say I agree with a lot of this article.
Perhaps I didn't talk about it enough in this post, but this is why session 0 or other pre-campaign discussions are important. Ideas that seem great to one person are not liked by others. The Game Master and players should have a mutually agreed upon framework that everyone is happy with. The goal is that everyone has fun, it isn't good if either the game master or one or more players are chafing at how the campaign ended up. If as the game master I suggested the cleric idea, and one of the players had significant concerns, I am not going to force it down the players throats.
DeleteMaybe the pre-campaign or session 0 discussion identifies that a player and the game master have wildly different ideas that can't be harmonized. It is better to determine that before the campaign starts, and that potential player doesn't join rather than have people suffer through something they hate.