this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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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,
I get your point about creators wanting to show off and have all of their creation explored, but at the end of the day, if you are creating something for a user base, what matters is what the users are interested in.
The vast minority ever bothered to learn a single word of Sindarin, but I doubt Tolkien ever cared. You got to figure out if you what you're making is for your own interest, or others. Calling it a problem that most people prefer the playing humans seems misguided.
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.
It's misguided in the sense it's not a real problem for the target audience. BG3 does not have a problem of players not choosing the more exotic races. Maybe some game developers are annoyed about it, but it's not something that devalues the game. The option is still there for those who wants it.
If you as a creator see that your players are only interested in 20% of the world you have created, you might want you reflect on why that is, and if you're not better off focusing on those 20%. If you don't want to do that there's nothing wrong focusing on the more obscure fluff for own personal enjoyment either. And I really don't see the point of downvoting all my replies, I'm not trying to argue in bad faith.
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.
For MMOs, fair enough. I can see the problem of the believability of the setting if everyone are running around as humans.
I thought we were mainly talking about smaller/local games like tabletop rpg in which the DM or settings creator are annoyed at players mostly preferring humans in their settings.
This has literally killed games that failed to deliver the reality of their brief to their players. Promise one experience, deliver another, and people quit.
Maybe people are downvoting your replies because this is a commonly discussed and well-studied issue in design circles, but you're failing to understand the problem and dismissing it as a "misguided" concern.
Just because YOU don't think it's a problem doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
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.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by that in relation to people generally preferring to play as humans/vanilla experiences?
No, when I was writing my comments it was only the person I was talking to that was downvoting, votes are public so you could easily check. At that point, just tell me you don't want to discuss the topic and I'll stop replying.
I'm arguing it's only a problem in the mind of the creator. For the ones it actually do matter for, the audience/customers, it's not an issue.