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View Full Version : Roleplaying Rant: Why do people always want real world equivalence in their fantasy?



Spore
2016-07-03, 10:47 AM
The week has often 7 days, sometimes 10, the months are either exactly like Gregorian calendar or 30 days a piece. A year - i.e. revolution around its central star - is roughly 360 days, the planet has only one sun, and if we are REALLY fancy we have more than one moon.

Why is it that authors look for this much similarity in their worlds? You have the ability to conjure up any number of interesting things, creatures and happenings. Yet you default to a somewhat off version of our world, with humans with pointy ears. You can create sentient species with three and a half legs, you can make ravaging half-animals but what do you do? Beardy small human, thin agile pointy eared human, big green monster human, small human, small human in the flavors of earth spirit or fey.

I get that a big point is accessability, having heroes and creatures relatable. Star Wars gets away with gigantic space snail mobster bosses and even if your villain is a dragon, he is most likely capable of transforming into a human? Come on, you can do better. Why do we even bother to play fantasy games anymore when we default to such a boring level of beginner's fantasy? I get part of it. I saw the Warcraft movie with the Orcs, the Draenei captives and the occasional dwarf and their presence felt awkward, to the point of me mumbling about uncalley valley (because dear lord the WoW cut scene orcs are more convincing that this CGI weirdness). But still you don't have to create outlandish weird horrors with fifteen legs, that talk with their belly buttons and eat with their behinds.

Something as simple as a year having 9 months, a change between winter and summer being non-existant because the angle of the planet does not change, or ages of frost and cold followed by heat and dryness because the planet is either caught to the side of one sun or is getting grilled between two suns. What about a world which does not have an equivalent of christmas (or midwinter) because you don't celebrate having darkness. Or the beautiful thing about Dark Souls: What about a universe where time is not linear. You can let the king live and proceed into a realm where the king has been slain anyway, showing you: "What if?" A world where you can stop your past selves from killing the king because it was a bad idea, all without epic magics, just because you can.

I know there is a game and world for my every taste - and if it needs to be created BY me, but I have asked this and similar questions myself.

Why not dare more?

Malimar
2016-07-03, 10:57 AM
Because the more different from Earth you make the world in the fiddly little details, the more fiddly little details you (and sometimes your players, if they care enough) need to keep track of. If those details are relative irrelevancies like the length and number of months or whatever, you're spending worldbuilding capital on things that don't matter and that players don't care about when you could be spending it on interesting things like races and countries.


EDIT: Rereading your post, I realize I skimmed it and missed your real actual point. Which is actually a good point!

There is an answer, though: the weirder you make the setting in things that matter, the less point of reference the players have for what's going on. If the players are adrift in a completely weird setting with no familiar points of reference, they're likely to lose track of what's going on.

THAT SAID, you're right that standard fantasy could stand to be a fair bit weirder than it tends to be before that happens.

Draconium
2016-07-03, 11:01 AM
Because we're too lazy to do otherwise. :smalltongue:

But seriously. Why waste time on small, fiddly details that will have little to no impact on the game itself, and you'd be lucky if the players half-remember? You can do so if your wish, but it's so much easier just to assume the real-world equivalence and be done with it.

SilverLeaf167
2016-07-03, 12:07 PM
There is an answer, though: the weirder you make the setting in things that matter, the less point of reference the players have for what's going on. If the players are adrift in a completely weird setting with no familiar points of reference, they're likely to lose track of what's going on.

This is definitely big part of it. The more details you change, the more the players have to second-guess everything they do. Something as simple as changing some units of time can totally throw them off and create communication problems - when there's talk of "months", the DM and the players have entirely different impressions of what that means, even if this is discussed before-hand, as it can be hard to remember changes to something you're used to assuming like that. When you keep most things recognizable and mainly change things that "matter", it's easier for the players to focus on what's actually relevant.


Because we're too lazy to do otherwise. :smalltongue:

But seriously. Why waste time on small, fiddly details that will have little to no impact on the game itself, and you'd be lucky if the players half-remember? You can do so if your wish, but it's so much easier just to assume the real-world equivalence and be done with it.

Another good point, which brings me to another: what is the purpose of these fiddly changes?
Being intentionally strange? Okay, works in some settings. Makes the world more alien, for better or worse.
Actual plot relevance? Well, good, but if you don't want to build the plot around these details, they end up kind of meaningless.
Changes for the sake of changes? Just no.

There's also the fact that most published settings have to be at least a bit generic in order to attract a wider audience. The harder to approach a setting is, the fewer people will be interested in it. There are games set in strange worlds or centered around unusual concepts, and guess what? They're inevitably more obscure than the "normal" stuff, even if they manage to stand out due to their gimmicks.

I definitely agree there's space for more creativity. It just has to be wielded carefully, lest the little details pile up and form a big blob of indistinguishable weirdness, and tabletop RPGs aren't necessarily the best place for "too much" innovation all at once. If you want to give these oddities a big role in your game, great, it can be a fun experience, but they can easily be more trouble than they're worth.

Mastikator
2016-07-03, 12:52 PM
The harder it is to relate to the harder it is to roleplay.

Honest Tiefling
2016-07-03, 01:07 PM
Because busy work. If I make a year be 500 days long, I have to recalculate ages and make sure the players are aware of the difference, else people are wondering why that spry 28 eight year old is being talked about as if he should really consider refraining from hard physical labor all day long. Or trying to work out plant harvests to work perfectly with the new year, unless their life cycle gets changed, and oh screw it.

That's simply too much work for me to handle, and it is VERY hard to get the players to accept things like that in my experience. They just won't remember it, because it doesn't interest everyone and is difficult and doesn't have as much impact on the story as say, who the heck that NPC was who stole from them. Maybe someone with better organization can do it, but I think I'll rely on horned people running around to inform people that this might not be earth...

nedz
2016-07-03, 01:08 PM
The closer you keep a fantasy setting to reality the easier the verisimilitude.

Also rationalisations are useful: In the Ancien Regime in France they had, reputedly, 1000 systems of weights and measures. But in a game where players can't be bothered tracking their encumbrance: why would you want to do this ?

Slipperychicken
2016-07-03, 01:12 PM
I don't want to use my limited time and effort to learn a whole new calendar system for a game where the day of the year typically doesn't even matter to the story, and when I'll be playing said game maybe 2 to 3 times a month. I just don't see the kind of benefit that would make such an expenditure worthwhile.

As for other weirder fantasy elements in my games, I'd be okay with them if they serve some kind of purpose for the story or gameplay. Otherwise I don't really see the point in having four suns unless the GM is really good at describing quadruple-sunsets.

Telok
2016-07-03, 01:16 PM
One itme I was playing in a game, the world setting included the fact that the sun never set or moved in the sky. Bunches of fairly obvious side effects were handwaved of course. Unfortunately this fact was disclosed to the group while I was taking a bathroom break and nobody though to tell me afterwards.

So we made up characters, wrote a few sentences of backstory and started playing. Half way through the first session we hit a roadblock and start enacting a stealth plan. The part when I said "well now we just wait untill nightfall to start" was when I found out that both my character and backstory were inappropriate to the setting. Having moon/nighttime abilities is a waste when the sun never sets.

Then there was the time in a D&D game where I changed how the planes of existence worked as a plot/setting point. I gave out a half page explanation of everything with an attached planar map. Two characters (same player) died that campaign by shifting to the adjacent plane in places where there was solid matter or a huge fall.

Basically it's more work. If you're doing it be sure that the extra work and aggrivation is worth it. Then communicate it, over and over and over again.

Frozen_Feet
2016-07-03, 01:33 PM
All concepts are not equally interesting. Human minds are naturally drawn to certain sort of patterns but not others. Some tastes are more prevalent. Consider: which has more viewers, daytime soap operas or fantasy series? As far as I can tell, the former is more popular pretty much everywhere, and the one widely popular fantasy show (Game of Thrones)? It has heavy soap opera elements.

So what do soap operas typically focus on? Which are their prime sources of drama? Human interactions. Who is in bed with who, who is cheating on who, who commands authority, who resents who etc..

People who are interested in distinctly inhuman interactions are a minority. This is why fictional races end up being "humans with pointy ears".

Similarly, human concepts of what is beautiful, how things work etc. is grounded in a set of intuitive assumptions of Earthly origin. Get too far away from everyday experience of your players and their imagination starts failing them, they can no longer make informed decisions nor figure what's going on. Highly sophisticated fictional worlds are doomed to obscurity because they need an especially intelligent and imaginative audience to be understood. Compare how well something like Harry Potter does compared to, say, Ringworld. The former draws heavily on folklore, creatures and concepts which have been popular for centuries, and combines them with familiar elements of human daily life, namely the realities of British boarding schools. The latter is full of freaky "creative" aliens and invokes high-flying hard-scifi concepts which are all but unknown to people who aren't familiar with astrophysics.

Takewo
2016-07-03, 03:07 PM
Because busy work. If I make a year be 500 days long, I have to recalculate ages and make sure the players are aware of the difference, else people are wondering why that spry 28 eight year old is being talked about as if he should really consider refraining from hard physical labor all day long. Or trying to work out plant harvests to work perfectly with the new year, unless their life cycle gets changed, and oh screw it.

That's simply too much work for me to handle, and it is VERY hard to get the players to accept things like that in my experience. They just won't remember it, because it doesn't interest everyone and is difficult and doesn't have as much impact on the story as say, who the heck that NPC was who stole from them. Maybe someone with better organization can do it, but I think I'll rely on horned people running around to inform people that this might not be earth...

I completely agree with this (and many other things that have been said in this thread.

Some people, like me, tend to think about the effects of changing certain things. For example, about changing moons, do you know how that would affect the ocean? You'd have to come with a system for high and low tides. Length of days would be different, nightlight would be different, the axial tilt of the planet would be different... Just a few things that people like me would have to consider if we made these sort of changes. Why? Well, I like my worlds to be consistent, even if there are dragons in them. When you hang out with people who know about physics and such stuff, there's loads of things that you learn to consider.

I'm not saying it's not something cool to do, making a world with a central sun and a sun orbiting around the central sun outside of the planet's orbit is an idea that I've thought about, and I like it. But, at the end of the day, I don't think it's worth for roleplaying games. It'd be cool in a novel, but keeping track of that stuff? There's already too many things to keep track of in a roleplaying game, in my opinion.

And I know that you don't have to think about all the consequences (or even the general effects) that a small change in the nature of the world would have. It is not something that I have to do, it is something that I do naturally, and if worlds are not consistent, it annoys me, because then there is no way to know how my character's interactions with it will turn out.


Basically it's more work. If you're doing it be sure that the extra work and aggrivation is worth it. Then communicate it, over and over and over again.

Exactly. It's normally work that players don't really care about and that belongs in the imagination of the game master rather than the collective story.

Clistenes
2016-07-03, 03:10 PM
It would be interesting at the beginning, but once it stops being a novelty it would become just annoying. Players would have to constantly calculate characters' ages or how much time passes.

Yora
2016-07-03, 04:14 PM
Everything that is unusual and unexpected needs to be explained. Because of this it's generally a good idea to keep the number of unusual elements limited and concentrating on just a few that really matter. Calendars, measurement systems, and astronomy have only minimal impact on what's actually happening in an adventure or a story, so it's generally best not to bother with those things at all. When you make changes, do things that have a lot and far reaching consequences.
This is basically Sanderson's Third Law of Magic (the least popular of them): Expand on what you have before you add new things.

My own setting tends clearly more to the unusual side than the generic, but there's not really a lot of elements that are truly unique. The biggest differences are the absence of traditional kingdoms and empires, and the lack of humans, the most common European animals like horses, dogs, bears, and cows, and demons. Without having created something new yet, it's already quite different from a Standard Fantasy Setting. And it requires really very little explanation. All the setting does is focusing on things that are already familar but usually paid little attention. Simply exploring what a world might look like that only has the common elements that are still left over is already providing a pretty decent basis for a new and different world of fantasy.

Jormengand
2016-07-03, 04:27 PM
In A Song of Ice and Fire, the seasons are a pretty massive, consistent theme, especially if you're House Stark.

SilverLeaf167
2016-07-03, 04:36 PM
In A Song of Ice and Fire, the seasons are a pretty massive, consistent theme, especially if you're House Stark.

Yeah, and they're given zero explanation (or details on weekdays, months or even year length). :smalltongue: It works well because it's a book, but in an RPG both the DM and the players generally need at least some basic idea of how... well, time works. I love ASOIAF's concept of long summers and winters, though, and it's simple enough that it wouldn't be an issue with just a bit more info.

Weird how this thread ended up overlapping pretty hard with the one about fantasy calendars (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?493583-Fantasy-Calendars) I started today. Given the timing of both threads, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there was some connection, but it might be better not to derail this discussion too much (even if OP was the one to use them as an example).

Efrate
2016-07-03, 07:34 PM
I think its mostly do to familiarity sells because of appeal for most produced stuff. And most of what you are describing OP is more Science Fiction than Fantasy. I do not know nor care how having XYZ changes effects daily life. I don't care that there are 50 moons in a 200 year extended orbit and the consequences thereof. Because I love fantasy and the reason? Magic. That's it. I feel I am in the minority here. If its interesting and it makes the world more unique, that's all I need to know. I don't want to have to involve physics and chemisty and other sciences in my Wizards and Knights fighting simulator TM.

Rant

I also highly dislike ANY of that in games I run. I don't care if physics says you can disarm a trap with a careful application of force in a specific way to ruin the mechanism. Did you make your disable device check? Game world problems should have 2 solution types. Roleplaying for most interaction with other sentient things, rolls and game rules for game rule specific stuff. I don't care if in the real world you could apply this knowledge of science you have to solve a game problem. In fact, I'd call you out if you did. That's metagaming. Your character in a high fantasy setting doesn't have that knowledge. They did not major in physics as a rogue living by their quick wits. No where in the school of hard knocks does engineering and practical physics come into your realm of knowledge. I don't care if you are an engineer in real life, that doesn't belong in my high fantasy game.

Now I run Dnd 3.5 almost exclusively, so for my games it never comes into play, or it does once and I re-explain how that doesn't work. And that's it. Consequences of your actions should be handled by in game knowledge and rulings, not how that would effect a real world scenario. If you alter the weather patterns to flood an enemy town your consequences are that town is wet. Not how the monsoon in that area of the world hundred of miles away now doesn't happen and whatnot. That's not a fantasy game. That's more sci-fi. You used magic. It worked cause magic, and each instance is a distinct magical occurrence that exists in a momentary vacuum unless the spell/power/whatever specifically says otherwise. You must except that, else the entire system more or less falls apart and becomes unplayable and to me unfun. If you want something modelling more realistic interactions, play a separate system.

I have no problems with a drastically different setting as long as the purpose of the game isn't exploration and figuring out how things work. That tends to fall flat to me. Just tell me that it works and get on with it, you are the DM I'll trust you until you make me do otherwise. I also feel tragically sorry for people who have to willingly make an effort to suspend disbelief if something differs from reality/"the norm" almost at all. You are escaping, just escape and relax.

I think it was David and Leigh Eddings in the Riven Codex who said the difference between fantasy and sci-fi is a sci-fi story will go into detail on how a watch works, what forces are in play, how the gear interact, how its powered, and all that. A fantasy tells you what time it is and gets on with the story.

veti
2016-07-03, 07:41 PM
Exactly. It's normally work that players don't really care about and that belongs in the imagination of the game master rather than the collective story.

I agree with this.

And I'd add - because it's so much work to do (if you want to take this kind of stuff at all seriously), when there are major differences of this sort, they tend to become the major focal point of the story/campaign/underlying plot/theme/whatever.

Like, imagine a world with no summer and winter. The DM then has to spend days figuring out how "farming" works in their world. In the process, they'll come up with all kinds of bright ideas, and if they're really lucky, these won't all boil down to "quest to tilt the planetary axis and get some frickin' seasons in here, stat!"

Milo v3
2016-07-03, 08:11 PM
Why not dare more?
As a person who "has seven foot tall psionic sentient wolfspiders with a revolving head and limbs also pointing "up" because their native environment possesses subjective gravity who create cat-sized "male" spawn as servants and represent their emotions through changing the colour of their "tron-lines" since they lack the ability of facial expression, as a playable default race for my setting, who are allied with five foot tall birds with two tails the end in a mass of tentacles and can assimilate biology to advance themselves. In a setting where it is just one giant empty void, with the planes just bouncing around and drifting without thought or direction, and merging temporaily if they bump into each other trading traits with each other and then bouncing off again into the void. A world where the weather can be raining obsidian one day, and the next you might be assaulted by a sand-storm like bone-storm, or plants made of blood-filled veins could grow out from the walls of the hospital." I feel like I can say that some do dare more. :smalltongue:

raygun goth
2016-07-03, 10:38 PM
I think it was David and Leigh Eddings in the Riven Codex who said the difference between fantasy and sci-fi is a sci-fi story will go into detail on how a watch works, what forces are in play, how the gear interact, how its powered, and all that. A fantasy tells you what time it is and gets on with the story.

Both science fiction and fantasy stories are fundamentally about how watches work.

It's just that in one of them the watch has a coat of paint on it and in the other.

Writing fantasy requires the author be even more on the ball than in science fiction. Fantasy takes fundamentally more work because it has to be consistent with junk it just made up.

My "fantasy" background also comes from a cultural background in which there is literally no difference between what a wizard does and what a car mechanic does. I had to learn that people didn't think "magic" had to have rules, or that it was some sort of "super"natural component in their lives; that it wasn't the same thing as breathing or making a sandwich or putting together a radio, and at the time I read the Riven Codex, nothing in it made a lick of sense (actually, almost nothing in D&D made sense to me, either, up until, maybe the mid 200Xs? Then it just clicked, though honestly I still don't entirely get it).

_____________________

If your fantasy settings aren't diverse or weird, I suggest reading more fantasy than whatever has a griffon or a dragon or a dagger or whatever on the cover - I know that's a wide range, but the hand we have to play with is big. Possibly looking into some of the really crazy 1930s stuff, back before artificial divisions between science fiction and fantasy didn't even exist.

There's a reason we call it "weird fantasy" now.

icefractal
2016-07-03, 10:38 PM
I agree with the title, but I think calendar systems are way down the list. The top of mine would be: ignoring the implications of huge changes in the setting.

For example - your world has multiple sapient species with independent civilizations, 1/100 or more of the populace can cast magic spells, and there are monsters that can threaten an entire town just wandering around ... and yet your society is 'pretty much like (the pop-culture idea of) medieval Europe'? Nope. Something like that is a big sign saying "none of the setting details really mean anything, it's just for aesthetics", and it shows up more often than not.

GorinichSerpant
2016-07-03, 10:50 PM
I also highly dislike ANY of that in games I run. I don't care if physics says you can disarm a trap with a careful application of force in a specific way to ruin the mechanism. Did you make your disable device check? Game world problems should have 2 solution types. Roleplaying for most interaction with other sentient things, rolls and game rules for game rule specific stuff. I don't care if in the real world you could apply this knowledge of science you have to solve a game problem. In fact, I'd call you out if you did. That's metagaming. Your character in a high fantasy setting doesn't have that knowledge. They did not major in physics as a rogue living by their quick wits. No where in the school of hard knocks does engineering and practical physics come into your realm of knowledge. I don't care if you are an engineer in real life, that doesn't belong in my high fantasy game.

I don't think this can be said in every situation but I think Disable Device is meant to represent the careful application of force used to ruin a mechanism. So in that situation you could say that their character has already tried that but it failed.


As a person who "has seven foot tall psionic sentient wolfspiders with a revolving head and limbs also pointing "up" because their native environment possesses subjective gravity who create cat-sized "male" spawn as servants and represent their emotions through changing the colour of their "tron-lines" since they lack the ability of facial expression, as a playable default race for my setting, who are allied with five foot tall birds with two tails the end in a mass of tentacles and can assimilate biology to advance themselves. In a setting where it is just one giant empty void, with the planes just bouncing around and drifting without thought or direction, and merging temporaily if they bump into each other trading traits with each other and then bouncing off again into the void. A world where the weather can be raining obsidian one day, and the next you might be assaulted by a sand-storm like bone-storm, or plants made of blood-filled veins could grow out from the walls of the hospital." I feel like I can say that some do dare more. :smalltongue:

I kind of what to join that game.

erikun
2016-07-03, 11:06 PM
You have a limited amount of time at your table. Your players won't necessarily have read a lengthy backstory and won't necessarily have memorized the correct important bits even if they did. As such, any sort of shorthands you have available will be very helpful in transmitting the information you have to the players.

This applies to reality as much as it does to well-known fantasy elements. Kingdoms are rules by kings and queens because everyone knows what a kingdom is, everyone knows what position a king and queen have there, and everyone is familiar with how it all (basically) works. If you wanted the political situation to be a collective alliance of Baronies with national rule handled by a noble-elect republic, then you should be sure that the players are familiar with governing bodies enough to be familiar with that or you risk confusing them. And it's more than just occasional confusion - your players will probably be spending their time and energy remembing this particular government arrangement, which means less focus on other aspects of the game... so I hope that it actually is important.

And this does apply to fantasy settings as much as real life. If your game is set in Middle Earth, then your players will likely expect elves to be long lived and dwarves to be greedy little fellows. Drastically changing that can cause problems, such as if you've created a brand new forest with a bunch of elves that you expect the PCs to take a particular MacGuffin to, but find that they never do or wander far off course becaue (the Middle Earth-minded) players forgot the detail of your new city. This is, in part, why elves/dwarves are so popular in fantasy. EVERYBODY is familiar with what an elf or a dwarf is. On the other hand, if you try introducing merfolk or harpies or other unusual creatures as PCs, then there runs a chance of confusion over just what is involved - one what player considers a merfolk might not be what another character thinks of one.


So, basically, the real world is used because it is an easy shorthand. Established settings are used because they are an easy shorthand. It is easier to say "The real world, but with X" or "Faerūn, but with Z" so that the players have just a few details to remember, especially when first introduced to the concept.

Yora
2016-07-04, 03:46 AM
Though there is still the justified question why people still keep mostly making very generic Standard Fantasy Settings? For a simple homebrew setting used by one GM it's justified as it lets you set a stage that has all the things you want to have in your adventures in one location. But for published campaign settings there seems to be little point. People who want Standard Fantasy Settings already have a great number to pick from. If you want to reach an audience you should do something that hasn't been done a hundred times before. I'd love to see more things like Dark Sun, Morrowind, or Yoon-Suin.
I am quite a fan of Warcraft III (especially the expansion), which starts in the Standard Fantasy Setting of the previous games for continuity but then moves the story to another continent that has completely different inhabitants and for a while another world inhabited by demons. No humans, no dwarves, no wizards, no horses. You get deserts and tropical islands, humanoid bears, armies of evil centaurs, pig men, elven druids using walking trees as siege engines, shapechanging warriors. I think it's so much more interesting than the first two of the seven campaigns.

Themrys
2016-07-04, 05:32 AM
In A Song of Ice and Fire, the seasons are a pretty massive, consistent theme, especially if you're House Stark.

... and in my opinion, ASOIAF is exactly the wrong way to do things.

I mean, is it ever plausibly explained why people don't die from lack of vitamin D? (No, winter sun does not make you produce enough of that.) What they even EAT in those years-long winters? I don't know because I never got past the first book, wherein the author made clear that, while he did away with normal seasons, he was very attacked to real-world rape culture and wanted a little girl raped. Because dark n gritty, or whatever.
However, I think it is interesting that even though I am well informed about who is tortured by whom and what the Red Wedding is, no one ever mentions that nutrition issue where I can see it.


Societal norms are way more malleable than the laws of nature. If you make your world unlike (your interpretation of) the Middle Ages by, say, getting rid of the patriarchy and rape culture, you need no explanation as to why your people don't drop dead by the thousands - if you create a planet where it rains acid and the sun burns even more than in modern-day Australia, you do need that explanation.

I get people basing their fantasy on real life 1 to 1 because they are too insecure to have major changes. What I do not get is people introducing dragons and weird seasons and undead, and then basing the whole society (that should be way different, because magic!) on a darker version of the Middle Ages.

The logical degrees of difference would be:

1: Real world
2: Real world but with different culture
3: Real world but with different culture and magic (or very different culture because of magic)
4: Wholly surreal world with or without magic and with different culture.

Yora
2016-07-04, 05:40 AM
That assumes that medieval settings are created because the writers are insecure, which I find very much without any real basis.

Jormengand
2016-07-04, 05:45 AM
That assumes that medieval settings are created because the writers are insecure, which I find very much without any real basis.

Yeah, I'm getting a very Freudian vibe from it. That, and the idea that anyone's going to listen to an explanation about Vitamin D, which isn't relevant to the plot (whereas the season shifting is) made me wonder if I should even respond, hence my roundabout way of doing so.

Spore
2016-07-04, 06:45 AM
That assumes that medieval settings are created because the writers are insecure, which I find very much without any real basis.

That assumption is false. But this is the reason why I prefer magepunk to a classical setting. If magic is a secure and easy way to make entire feudal systems obsolete then why would people continue to live like knights, peasants and farmers? Wouldn't they try and cultivate magic to ease their lifes? Of course conflict and destruction will still happen but if you imagine most sentient life on the same basis as humans (persistence hunters, omnivores, humanoid in shape) they will probably socialize and try to share their findings within a hierarchy.

It is just stupid to assume that if magic can create unlimited food that people will just ignore that. If caging elementals Eberron-style can make way to insanely quick and efficient transportation (that and golem trains that require an activation once and then just maintenance). Basically arcane and divine magic is like a perpetuum mobile. And even if it is limited in amount (like the essence thing in Faerun - where worship equals divine power which in turn is energy used to praise the gods) it can still warp the society as a whole.

You can have a recluse wizard who ignores the world for his magical studies and would rather burn his books than share his knowledge. But imagine if not every wizard behaved this way. It would change the worlds. And not only provide it magical adventuring gear.

And yes, my example of different calendars was not only missing my point but also wrongly timed and not supposed to intervene with the other thread about calendars. But if I think calendars I think time. Well, time and space. Why not have extremely long seasons? Why not have alien reocccuring astronomical events? The planet comes closer to its sun in the summer, bringing extreme drought and death. Or like the MENTAL werewolf season of Eberron where all moons are full moons.

Take a thing from Fantasy and warp it a bit to make new interesing worlds and situations. I am not talking about polite space pirates from opposite world who plant flowers and kiss cute fluffy bunnies. I am talking about twists that are unexpected but still believable.

2D8HP
2016-07-04, 06:57 AM
. I am not talking about polite space pirates from opposite world who plant flowers and kiss cute fluffy bunnies. I am talking about twists that are unexpected but still believable.Actually, bunny kissing space pirates is definitely a twist I do not expect! Believable? Well they're pretty darn cute....
But it's well known that fluffy bunnies are vicious killers! (https://www.google.com/url?q=http://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DTJP6JyQC2ik&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwixnKD_39nNAhXD8YMKHWqIAmkQtwIIYzAS&usg=AFQjCNE5veXUQuvrNY1sKmtWk6TcCtV6zw)

Mutazoia
2016-07-04, 07:06 AM
That, and the idea that anyone's going to listen to an explanation about Vitamin D, which isn't relevant to the plot (whereas the season shifting is) made me wonder if I should even respond, hence my roundabout way of doing so.

An excellent example of this is Heinlein's "For Us, the Living." One of his earlier works, he brings the entire plot to a screeching halt to devote several chapters to an economics lecture. Or again in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" where he stops in the middle of a rather tense narrative to go into several pages of ballistic lecture, all to describe why it will be hard for the main character to land a ship with out power on the moon. In neither of these instances did we really need (or in fact were even interested in) the extraneous information.

In writers terms, this is called "Diarrhea of the Pen", where the writer adds a ton of detail that doesn't help the story in any way...and usually detracts from it. It's a trap that all beginning (and some veteran) writers fall into at least once in their careers. GM's are no exception.

One of the ground rules for writing fiction is: If you make the effort to point out a gun in the first chapter, that gun must be fired by the last chapter. In other words, any detail you write into your story (or campaign world) MUST have a purpose beyond "Hey...isn't this cool because it's different?!"

If you want your days to be 60 hours long, then there HAS to be a reason beyond "I want to make my world obviously different from the real one." And it has to be a BIG reason to justify it...something that may eventually effect the plot. Otherwise you are just going to bore your players to death as they spend more time keeping track of time, than they do actually playing the game.

If you take Game of Thrones as an example: The abnormally (for us) long seasons have a VERY big roll in the plot...it was not just something that Martin tacked on to make his world "different" from ours.

And then, there's the problem of changing too much. Your story (or campaign) could start to look like the memoirs of a really freaky acid trip, and nobody will be interested because it's just TOO different....they have no point of reference to start with.

NichG
2016-07-04, 07:20 AM
When you change something familiar (as opposed to adding something new), you bring attention to it. That makes it important. So its good to make sure you change the things you want to be important. When you change things you don't want to be important, you either get fiddly irrelevant details that no one can remember or you get people fixating on mysteries that the game/story/etc wasn't supposed to be about.

But it's a very powerful tool to change deep things. The deeper the thing you change, the more a game will tend to be of epic scope, because regardless of the characters, for the players a part of the game will be to understand 'why was this different?' or 'what does it mean that this is different?'. When you change those deep things, you're committing to providing a way for players to arrive at a satisfying conclusion about that, and if you fail to provide at least something along that line then it's going to feel like a bait and switch, like the campaign was supposed to be about this weird change you made but then somehow it ended up being irrelevant.

So, lets tell a story about a world in which cause follows effect, but actually the game is really going to center on political intrigue in this one city. Of course 'cause follows effect' has an impact on this, but unless there's some kind of deep truth about why cause follows effect, the two things are sort of unrelated and it'll feel arbitrary. But make that city be the past and future site of the authoring of fate, and the political intrigue about who gets to control the book in which all fates are written, and now maybe you can connect them together into some kind of unified whole.

The corrolary to that is, when you make the really deep changes, you do somewhat limit the stories that can be told in that medium. Which isn't an issue if its just your campaign or a book you're writing, but its an issue if you want other people to run games in that setting. The 'cause follows effect' idea is something I can (and have) run, but it'd be really hard to write a book telling other people how to do that (much less how to not spoiling the mystery for players who read the setting book)

SilverLeaf167
2016-07-04, 07:44 AM
That assumption is false. But this is the reason why I prefer magepunk to a classical setting. If magic is a secure and easy way to make entire feudal systems obsolete then why would people continue to live like knights, peasants and farmers? Wouldn't they try and cultivate magic to ease their lifes? Of course conflict and destruction will still happen but if you imagine most sentient life on the same basis as humans (persistence hunters, omnivores, humanoid in shape) they will probably socialize and try to share their findings within a hierarchy.

It is just stupid to assume that if magic can create unlimited food that people will just ignore that. If caging elementals Eberron-style can make way to insanely quick and efficient transportation (that and golem trains that require an activation once and then just maintenance). Basically arcane and divine magic is like a perpetuum mobile. And even if it is limited in amount (like the essence thing in Faerun - where worship equals divine power which in turn is energy used to praise the gods) it can still warp the society as a whole.

You can have a recluse wizard who ignores the world for his magical studies and would rather burn his books than share his knowledge. But imagine if not every wizard behaved this way. It would change the worlds. And not only provide it magical adventuring gear.

And yes, my example of different calendars was not only missing my point but also wrongly timed and not supposed to intervene with the other thread about calendars. But if I think calendars I think time. Well, time and space. Why not have extremely long seasons? Why not have alien reocccuring astronomical events? The planet comes closer to its sun in the summer, bringing extreme drought and death. Or like the MENTAL werewolf season of Eberron where all moons are full moons.

I have to admit, the lack of magepunk is usually just a handwave, if anything. Sometimes it's a good handwave, sometimes it's a bad one.
However, something as simple as forbidding (or even limiting) at-will magic items and such goes a long way towards fixing the problem. After all, if you just make casters rare enough, it makes sense that there aren't enough level 5+ Clerics to feed the entire population on a daily basis, or what have you. As for Eberron-style magitech, I find it believable that such mechanisms simply require a lot of nitty details the world hasn't figured out yet. After all, several of our own technological "breakthroughs" have technically existed for millennia, and the natural laws allowing them have always been there, but it's taken far longer before they've become efficient enough for actual use, like steam power and electricity for example.

But now I'm derailing again. Just know that I agree most settings don't really give these issues enough thought, but I don't think it's too hard to fix or at least alleviate them with a little effort.

As for the calendar thing, don't worry about it. It was just a coincidence, and I was just curious whether this rant was launched by something you read there. :smallwink:


One of the ground rules for writing fiction is: If you make the effort to point out a gun in the first chapter, that gun must be fired by the last chapter. In other words, any detail you write into your story (or campaign world) MUST have a purpose beyond "Hey...isn't this cool because it's different?!"

Chekhov's Gun (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChekhovsGun) (Warning: TV Tropes!) is indeed a good principle, but it's important to keep in mind that it's still an exaggerated maxim (as you probably realize, just clarifying here). While Conservation of Detail (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheLawOfConservationOfDetail) is important, there are many ways in which they can be important. For example, let's take the basic example: there is a gun hanging on a character's wall. Let's think of some ways it can be relevant.
It will be fired later.
It tells us the setting has guns.
It tells us this character owns a gun.
It tells us about the character's personality and interests.
It elicits a reaction from another character.
Its mere presence steers the plot somehow.
It adds detail to the scene.
Yes, even that last bit is often important: a little detail for detail's sake can be good, if it helps the audience picture the situation and immerse themselves in the world. Chekhov was all about short stories filled with dialogue, but any less compact story will feel very weird if only the most critical details are given any attention. It's a fragile balance, but too little is (in my opinion) just as bad as too much. The perfect amount varies from case to case.

So yeah, I suppose I agree quite a bit with Sporeegg's point, especially now that some parts have been cleared up. :smalltongue:

hymer
2016-07-04, 08:09 AM
Let's think of some ways it can be relevant.

Sometimes you need to add some details, so that which one detail that becomes important isn't necessarily obvious from the start. If every gun hanging over a mantelpiece gets fired before the end of the show it occurs in, it comes to act as a spoiler.

goto124
2016-07-04, 08:12 AM
Try to make the detail look unimportant, a natural part of the scene. Better yet, give dual purposes to items - a gun can showcase someone's nature and also be an important item later on.

Try, of course, since payers tend to be players :smalltongue:

nrg89
2016-07-04, 09:57 AM
This touches the fundamentals of what makes one fictional work a hit, one only resonates with a certain subculture and one gets consumed by maybe five people who will never recommend it to someone else and will probably be forgotten quickly. Master artists start with broad strokes and then fill in the details.

I feel like quoting the one and only Giant right now, because his too short lived series on worldbuilding is what made me want to invest more into the world and campaigns I make myself.


Looking at some of the other successful campaign settings in existence, it's easy to see that those without a strong plotline usually have a compellingly different style. They have significantly altered the core fantasy roleplaying experience in some manner to differentiate themselves from the same old, same old. Some have wildly different climates, levels of technology, magic systems, cosmologies, etc. Without such a stylistic difference, a setting is just different for the sake of being different.

...

So I'm looking for style now. And don't confuse "style" with "gimmick." Making your world "Greyhawk, but on a giant tree" is kind of silly. Better to consider what sort of world might really evolve on a giant tree.

...

How about the physical nature of the world? This one is a bit of a trap, because it may lead to the gimmick I mentioned above. When I created my world of Illumination way back, it was a cube. I thought that was unbelievably clever when I was 15. Now, I look at it and wonder how I could confuse a cheap flashy quirk for real substance.


You can mix things up how much you want, but you need contrast for things to pop out otherwise it looks like a gimmick. If you want your tie, your haircut and nice shoes to stand out don't wear a Hawaiian shirt. What really matters in your world?

Let's say you have to convince your players to come over with an elevator pitch, that they're really interested in another world and you have to convince them to switch. Are you really going to talk about weight measurements or day cycles? Not unless they're your entire worlds fundament, no, you're not.
How would you convince your friend to read 1984 in 30 seconds? Would you start talking about the three countries or would you start talking about the mass surveillance and maybe let your friend discover the geopolitical details themselves? I know I would start with the mass surveillance because that is the fundamental difference between 1984 and the normal world I live in. I care about the geopolitical nature of 1984 because I'm interested in the world itself, but what sparked that interest was Big Brother.

Without contrast, you end up with "meh, looks pretty". I know this is a huge piece of controversy in the geek community, but one of my problems with Batman v Superman (discussed by more eloquent people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGsrMaxx8N4) than me) was that Superman is light hearted. He's supposed to crack jokes and wink behind his glasses when he walks around in plain sight and listen to moronic monologues from super villains. Sure, you can change around some things, maybe fine tune them, but you have to understand what the elevator pitch for Superman is to write about him and it's that he does the right thing and feel somewhat secure.
Batman is the opposite, he's perpetually grieving the loss of his parents and does the right thing because nobody was there when his parents were killed. Now, there have been several light hearted portrayals of Batman (especially from the 60s) but from the 80s on he's been successful and well known as Mr. Dour, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's why Batman v Superman should work! But when the move is more interested in discussing what would happen if the real world had superheroes in them (like Watchman does) but does it more half assed it doesn't work. What's the big conflict in the movie, the big contrast that sparks our interest? We were told it was Batman and Superman but they're totally the same, why are they locked in combat?

I don't believe "bigger is better", I mostly live by "less is more". I like small quirks here and there, like measurements or currency, but they have to be served in small portions. I want to understand what I'm looking at and clearly see what's of particular note. I hate clutter and I believe I'm not alone, especially when it's a clutter of gimmicks. Give me an uninteresting canvass and I will notice the interesting art you put on it.

Mutazoia
2016-07-04, 10:05 AM
Let's think of some ways it can be relevant.
It will be fired later.
It tells us the setting has guns.
It tells us this character owns a gun.
It tells us about the character's personality and interests.
It elicits a reaction from another character.
Its mere presence steers the plot somehow.
It adds detail to the scene.


All of which are more than just "hey....this is here because it's different."


Sometimes you need to add some details, so that which one detail that becomes important isn't necessarily obvious from the start. If every gun hanging over a mantelpiece gets fired before the end of the show it occurs in, it comes to act as a spoiler.

If you merely mention the guns existence, it's one thing. If you go into detail about the gun, it's another.

So if we go back to our calendar quandary....does increasing the length of the day/month/year serve a purpose other than "Oooo, it's different"? If not, then it's unimportant fluff that will get in the way of a plot (in a story) or drive players bonkers having to keep up with it (in an RPG).

If your [big thing that is different from the real world] is mentioned once, and never again, then it's purpose for existence is questionable at best.

goto124
2016-07-04, 10:16 AM
There's also another difference. The gun, when placed there, can be forgotten about easily. But if the players are constantly struggling to figure out how the months and seasons work, and the adjusted lengths and seasons aren't put into some good use in the plot, that's aggravating.

Seppo87
2016-07-04, 10:25 AM
Something as simple as a year having 9 months, a change between winter and summer being non-existant because the angle of the planet does not change, or ages of frost and cold followed by heat and dryness because the planet is either caught to the side of one sun or is getting grilled between two suns. (etc)

This stuff is common in science fiction. Science Fiction is not Future Fantasy.
Science Fiction has its focus in "how will life change when X is introduced"

Fantasy is about the feeling of being lost in an intricate, mysterious and unexplainable world, and then finding the way (of good, of greateness, of one's true self)

Koo Rehtorb
2016-07-04, 11:20 AM
However, I think it is interesting that even though I am well informed about who is tortured by whom and what the Red Wedding is, no one ever mentions that nutrition issue where I can see it.

The culture is such that everyone stockpiles vast amounts of food during the extra long summers to prepare for the extra long winters. You could ask how they preserve food for that long, but really, who cares? Presumably in that setting people have had a good reason to focus in on more easily preserved foods and improving that particular technology.

It's also a plot point in that, this time around, the longest winter in thousands of years is coming and people are busy squandering all their food reserves killing each other over a petty conflict.


explanation as to why your people don't drop dead by the thousands

People do drop dead by the thousands. There's a line where a guy goes something along the lines of "We have enough food reserves for a four year winter. More than that and we're going to start losing peasants."

Honest Tiefling
2016-07-04, 11:21 AM
... and in my opinion, ASOIAF is exactly the wrong way to do things.

I mean, is it ever plausibly explained why people don't die from lack of vitamin D? (No, winter sun does not make you produce enough of that.) What they even EAT in those years-long winters?

I always assumed they ate a lot of fish. You could justify it if there was geothermal activity in the oceans to produce plankton for the lower rungs of the ecosystem. I'm pretty sure that's not what happens in a Song of Ice and Fire, since I haven't read it all the way through, but it could work. Maybe if they also lived closer to the equator to be able to make vitamin D for longer periods of the year?

If someone were to play with sunlight/seasons, having everyone be a pale-*** person would actually be beneficial, but I really don't know how to ask my players to only make pasty people. Maybe encourage them to make only elves or something. I think I'd prefer the unrealistism rather then an awkward conversation at this point.

Jay R
2016-07-04, 11:45 AM
First of all, it's not a binary decision. It's an infinite continuum of decisions to be made. D&D assumes a certain base set of things that are like our world (shields protect you, animals can attack, clothes are what we expect them to be), and a certain set that are not (alternate planes with alternate logic, magic, monsters, etc.).

And we need to recognize the principle of parsimony. Make the smallest amount of change necessary for the story or game you're trying to produce. Each change needs to be learned and adjusted to. We have mostly adjusted to the D&D assumptions so much that they feel "normal" to us. But that only means it's easy to role-play in that universe, just as it's much easier to read a book in French if you know all the words in French, instead of looking each one up in a dictionary.

But change for the sake of change has no value. It's just an annoyance between us and the game.

I don't want to play a game in which I carry a wolf on my left arm for protection, fighting fierce underwear, while wearing a shield inside my pants. It's change, but it's meaningless change.

Yora
2016-07-04, 12:32 PM
Just out of curiosity: What good examples do we have of creators mixing things up and getting great results from it?

I think the prime example for this is always Morrowind. I don't even like the game, but the setting is fantastic. The world as a whole is pretty generic, but the region of Morrowind is probably the most unusual part of it. The first big difference to the rest of the world is that the native population aren't humans but dark elves. Humans exist, but they are foreigners. The second thing is that the wildlife is rather unique and you won't be running into any deers, pigs, goats, wolves, or bears, or anything of that kind. Instead you have various big reptiles and insects. This is a cosmetic change, but one that very effectively makes the environment feel new and it's interesting to discover what kinds of creatures you can run into.
Another thing is that the mainstream religion worships three living immortals who live in palaces within major cities. Which means there is no theological debate about the will of the gods. The gods say what they want people to do and can speak up when they are unhappy with how things go.

Another good example is Dark Sun. It's still Dungeons & Dragons, but magic is turning the planet into a dead wasteland. People are forced to live in cities even though they are run by evil despots because there are no more attractive places they could go to instead. Said despots are also wizards whose magic is killing the world which makes wizard characters super unpopular. And all remaining wildlife has heavily mutated and much of it developed supernatural powers to be able to survive. Everything you can find outside the cities is terrifying.

And there's Planescape which takes all the familar creatures from D&D and puts them into some kind of gonzo-gothic city in the center of the multiverse. Everything is familar, but nothing is as you know it.

And to beat the dead horse again: Star Wars is a fantasy setting with laser pistols and space ships. That makes it almost unrecognizable as fantasy even though under the hood everything else is still the same.

bulbaquil
2016-07-04, 01:21 PM
Why is it that authors look for this much similarity in their worlds? You have the ability to conjure up any number of interesting things, creatures and happenings. Yet you default to a somewhat off version of our world, with humans with pointy ears. You can create sentient species with three and a half legs, you can make ravaging half-animals but what do you do? Beardy small human, thin agile pointy eared human, big green monster human, small human, small human in the flavors of earth spirit or fey.

(snip)

Why not dare more?

Because I have only one brain, and it needs to store not only the relevant information from your campaign but also for any other campaigns I happen to be in, in addition to a great deal of real-life information that has - and should have - a higher priority. Even if I write the information down, or if you post it online somewhere, I'm not going to know to need to reference it unless and until it becomes relevant for my character or it actually comes up in-game.

The less deviation there is from the real world, the more I can draw on this important stock of real-world knowledge to play the game.

The less deviation there is from the standard fantasy setting, the more I can draw on a stock of standard fantasy setting information that I've been accumulating since fairy tales and Disney movies in early childhood.

If I introduce a deviation in my own setting, it is usually out of one of the following:
(1) Personal preference, either my own or a player's
(2) Justification for why something introduced in (1) doesn't break the universe or cause undesired occurrence X to happen
(3) Justification for why something in the standard fantasy setting doesn't cause undesired occurrence X to happen
(4) Justification for why something in the particular game system being used doesn't cause undesired occurrence X to happen

Arbane
2016-07-04, 02:13 PM
Just out of curiosity: What good examples do we have of creators mixing things up and getting great results from it?



Exalted? (Screw this 'orbit' stuff, Exalted's world is flat and the Sun God's palace crosses the sky once a day.)

nrg89
2016-07-04, 02:58 PM
Exalted? (Screw this 'orbit' stuff, Exalted's world is flat and the Sun God's palace crosses the sky once a day.)

And what are the results from it? What does it add to the feel of the world?

sktarq
2016-07-04, 03:39 PM
The culture is such that everyone stockpiles vast amounts of food during the extra long summers to prepare for the extra long winters. You could ask how they preserve food for that long, but really, who cares?

I care. I was so much more interested in GoT botany (perennials especially) glaciation and southern hemisphere reactions and if Dragonlords could feel the warmth of body heat that I couldn't care about these "Stark" people they kept rattling on about. Needless to say I never finished the first half of the first book and like almost all fantasy, the story was far less interesting than the setting.

Koo Rehtorb
2016-07-04, 04:06 PM
Needless to say I never finished the first half of the first book and like almost all fantasy, the story was far less interesting than the setting.

People's tastes are people's tastes. This is a bit of an odd statement, though. I think it's a little much to pass a sweeping judgement on how interesting a story is without reading more than a fraction of it.

PersonMan
2016-07-04, 04:31 PM
People's tastes are people's tastes.

Which is why there's a line to walk between 'it's not plot-relevant, ignore it' and 'trust me, they'll love the 78 pages of explanation on this culture's irrigation practices'. On one side you lose people to 'this doesn't make any sense, their society should crumble, I can't get into this', on the other you lose people to 'who thought it was a good idea to put this in a fantasy book'.


I think it's a little much to pass a sweeping judgement on how interesting a story is without reading more than a fraction of it.

On the other hand, if a story is dropped after only a fraction, it does have significant issues (at least relative to that person) - slow starts are a thing, but there's a difference between 'slow but it gets good' and 'I stopped reading because it bored me'.

sktarq
2016-07-04, 05:21 PM
If world breaking nonsense overwhelms (and thinking about it) trumps interest in "the plot" then I'm not enjoying myself...which is why I read...thus I stop reading that book and find a different one.

And part of the statement comes from frustration of "people don't care" when at least some people do-enough that handling it poorly drives us off. (which means that a change needs commitment behind it which can be a challenge in written form and a great challenge in TTRP game form)

And lastly pointing out that making a setting more interesting than the story can also be problematic and every DM description or page of writing will be having to strike a balance between the two.

dps
2016-07-04, 05:37 PM
This stuff is common in science fiction. Science Fiction is not Future Fantasy.
Science Fiction has its focus in "how will life change when X is introduced"

Fantasy is about the feeling of being lost in an intricate, mysterious and unexplainable world, and then finding the way (of good, of greateness, of one's true self)

Yeah, this. The standard fantasy RPG setting is a more-or-less a pseudo-medieval alternate Earth, so you just add magic and other intelligent beings besides humans and you have your setting. There's no real need to make things more complicated just for the sake of complexity just to be different. If a NPC gives the PCs a quest and tells them it needs to be completed in a week if they want to get paid, there's no need to make the players have to remember small setting details in order to know how many days that gives them.

Of course, if you're playing a RPG with a historical setting, such as the Old West, then of course the calendar matches the real-world calendar.

And if you have a SF RPG, then obviously having days and years of different lengths on different planets is both appropriate and increases immersion.

Arbane
2016-07-04, 06:24 PM
And what are the results from it? What does it add to the feel of the world?

Let's see... what it adds....

A certain 'feel' of mythology, reminding us that some of the gods in this setting are actively interventionist.
The distinct sense, that no, this isn't just Medieval Europe with magic and 31 flavors of elves.
5 elemental Poles which may or may not be important to any one campaign.
A floating palace that can transform into a giant mecha that knows kung-fu.
A distinct sense of "screw 'real-world' physics", which is actually a pretty important stumbling-block to get out of the way early.
A edge of the world you can walk off, to much stranger places. And strange things walk in as well.
A potential plot where one of the more apocalyptic villains tries to shoot down the sun.

2D8HP
2016-07-04, 06:37 PM
Well in the multi-genre weird setting of Torg (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torg), one of the "Cosm's was Aysle (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://onyr.free.fr/Torg/Aysle.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwikifDa79rNAhXDbiYKHYm4A1oQFggbMAA&usg=AFQjCNGRRFxpGuKiaAGGpQTjVpp4Lk4jzw)
an Earth-sized discworld with life on both sides and a hole in the center through which a small sun rises and sets, which would just be a gimmick with just the one side was a standard Fantasyland (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tough_Guide_To_Fantasyland), with underground Dwarf mines, except the otherside "of the world" past the underground, was a "land of giants". That matters to players. A new world to explore! :biggrin:
Otherwise a "donut shaped" world would have no purpose besides "different".
:wink:

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-04, 06:58 PM
Sometimes you need to add some details, so that which one detail that becomes important isn't necessarily obvious from the start. If every gun hanging over a mantelpiece gets fired before the end of the show it occurs in, it comes to act as a spoiler.


Whether it's treating Chekhov's Gun as literal or treating Campbell's works as prescriptive instead of descriptive or paint-by-numbers "scriptwriting guides"... it's slavish adherence to "writing maxims" that usually lets me guess how an episode of a TV series will turn out before the halfway point, or call out the ending of a movie 20 minutes early.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-04, 07:06 PM
Fantasy is about the feeling of being lost in an intricate, mysterious and unexplainable world, and then finding the way (of good, of greateness, of one's true self)


Maybe for you it is...

goto124
2016-07-04, 07:10 PM
Which is why there's a line to walk between 'it's not plot-relevant, ignore it' and 'trust me, they'll love the 78 pages of explanation on this culture's irrigation practices'. On one side you lose people to 'this doesn't make any sense, their society should crumble, I can't get into this', on the other you lose people to 'who thought it was a good idea to put this in a fantasy book'.

Having some detail of the world helps the players figure out their own way around the world. Hard to come up with your own solutions when you don't have a basic idea of how the world even works.

The more plot focus, the more details you give the players. If it's a political intrigue, the political system has to be detailed out and make enough sense. If the PCs are trying to help a village with a bout of famine, the village's farming practices as well as weather patterns have to receive the same treatment.

But if the PCs are spending most of their time outside the village, broad strokes work well. "The people here mostly grows potatoes", etc.


Whether it's treating Chekhov's Gun as literal or treating Campbell's works as prescriptive instead of descriptive or paint-by-numbers "scriptwriting guides"... it's slavish adherence to "writing maxims" that usually lets me guess how an episode of a TV series will turn out before the halfway point, or call out the ending of a movie 20 minutes early.

Another point, is that unless the GM is railroading the players, no one really knows where the game is going anyway. The players can decide to make something useful out of a prop the GM never thought to be useful, or even realised was there ("This is a smithy right? So there's a pair of smithing tongs in here?" "Er... yea. There is").

BayardSPSR
2016-07-04, 07:18 PM
The week has often 7 days, sometimes 10, the months are either exactly like Gregorian calendar or 30 days a piece. A year - i.e. revolution around its central star - is roughly 360 days, the planet has only one sun, and if we are REALLY fancy we have more than one moon.

Why is it that authors look for this much similarity in their worlds?

Because having a different number of days in the year isn't the kind of difference that's worth spending time thinking about.

"In a world just like our own... but where solar cycles last 4 Earth days and lunar cycles 2 Earth hours... and people use a base seven number system (etc)..." isn't an interesting start to a pitch. Literally no one has ever gone "you know what the Harry Potter franchise needed? Fewer months."

A different moon count, however, can communicate alien-ness in a single image (whether conjured by text or screen), and therefore can have some utility. 1Q84 (which is excellent) seems to be unique in implementing this in a plot-relevant way, though.




Haven't gone through the thread yet, so I apologize if someone already expressed this. Person who already expressed this, you are good and right.

Quertus
2016-07-04, 07:27 PM
Hmmm... where to start?

If you can't handle the logical consequences of these simple changes, you probably can't handle a real plot. If your players can't handle understanding and investigating these little things, they probably can't handle understanding and investigating a real plot.

So, call it the pre adventure, the qualifying round. Are you ready to sit at the big table, or do we need to keep the kiddie gloves and the sippy cups?

On a more serious note, in a rpg, it's a good way to explore expectations, and test out lines of communication. Do your players even care about fine details? Do they relegate this to the background? Do they hold that everything the GM says must be super important to the main plot? Do they care about anything beyond being murder hobos? Do they immediately find some clever way to utilize this simple modification? etc.

That having been said, a lot of fantasy worlds aren't just supposed to be approachable because they're like Earth, they're supposed to (sometimes openly, sometimes secretly) actually be Earth. In those cases, you obviously want to deviate from "reality" as little as possible.

But, when you're not secretly on Earth, making this kind of change can be good for setting the tone - you're not in Kansas anymore. Elves might have an alien mindset, not just be humans with pointy ears. Etc etc. You may need to be playing with your eyes open.

In a sandbox campaign, if you don't include things that work differently, how are the players ever going to get different things in their toolkit? Which makes changes from the norm almost a requirement for a well-stocked sandbox, IMO.


I don't want to have to involve physics and chemisty and other sciences in my Wizards and Knights fighting simulator TM.

Rant

I also highly dislike ANY of that in games I run. I don't care if physics says you can disarm a trap with a careful application of force in a specific way to ruin the mechanism. Did you make your disable device check? Game world problems should have 2 solution types. Roleplaying for most interaction with other sentient things, rolls and game rules for game rule specific stuff. I don't care if in the real world you could apply this knowledge of science you have to solve a game problem. In fact, I'd call you out if you did. That's metagaming. Your character in a high fantasy setting doesn't have that knowledge. They did not major in physics as a rogue living by their quick wits. No where in the school of hard knocks does engineering and practical physics come into your realm of knowledge. I don't care if you are an engineer in real life, that doesn't belong in my high fantasy game.

Now I run Dnd 3.5 almost exclusively, so for my games it never comes into play, or it does once and I re-explain how that doesn't work. And that's it. Consequences of your actions should be handled by in game knowledge and rulings, not how that would effect a real world scenario. If you alter the weather patterns to flood an enemy town your consequences are that town is wet. Not how the monsoon in that area of the world hundred of miles away now doesn't happen and whatnot. That's not a fantasy game. That's more sci-fi. You used magic. It worked cause magic, and each instance is a distinct magical occurrence that exists in a momentary vacuum unless the spell/power/whatever specifically says otherwise. You must except that, else the entire system more or less falls apart and becomes unplayable and to me unfun. If you want something modelling more realistic interactions, play a separate system.


If a 5-year-old can beat your trap, you might not want to set the disable device DC at 35. Just saying.

And I'd personally hazard a guess that your engineer friend knows less about traps than his rogue. The school of "ranks in disable device" and all that.

But, otherwise, I agree with where you're coming from. I'm all about rolling dice when there's an appropriate mechanic, not metagaming the problem from a modern PoV.

sktarq
2016-07-04, 07:36 PM
A 96 hour day could be neat if you think about it-esp if. Humanoids are still on a 24 hour sleep cycle.

Dawn Day
Noon Day
Dusk Day
Night Day

All sorts of aspects/prestige classes etc could be based around focusing power in one part of tthe day. Let alone spell effects.

Plus. Equipment for sleeping in daytime.

High Latitudes would have less obvious effects (people already used to waking up to the same sun)

It isn't change I dislike-its is ignoring the consequences (like "closing time" would have a different meaning in such a world)

2D8HP
2016-07-04, 08:56 PM
Hmmm... where to start?

If you can't handle the logical consequences of these simple changes, you probably can't handle a real plot. If your players can't handle understanding and investigating these little things, they probably can't handle understanding and investigating a real plot.

So, call it the pre adventure, the qualifying round. Are you ready to sit at the big table, or do we need to keep the kiddie gloves and the sippy cups?

On a more serious note, in a rpg, it's a good way to explore expectations, and test out lines of communication. Do your players even care about fine details? Do they relegate this to the background? Do they hold that everything the GM says must be super important to the main plot? Do they care about anything beyond being murder hobos? Do they immediately find some clever way to .
-
If a 5-year-old can beat your trap, you might not want to set the disable device DC at 35. Just saying.

And I'd personally hazard a guess that your engineer friend knows less about traps than his rogue. The school of "ranks in disable device" and all that.Oh yeah! This will get stolen "quoted"!
:biggrin:

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-04, 09:11 PM
If a 5-year-old can beat your trap, you might not want to set the disable device DC at 35. Just saying.


That one deserves to be put on a plaque and installed where everyone can see it.




But, otherwise, I agree with where you're coming from. I'm all about rolling dice when there's an appropriate mechanic, not metagaming the problem from a modern PoV.


If my players can figure something out with knowledge reasonably and conceivably available to their characters, I'm not going to begrudge them the solution.

Coidzor
2016-07-04, 09:24 PM
Having to remember all the birthdays of my friends and family is enough for me, I don't want to keep track of a complicated calendar every time I pick up a new setting or system or book.

Mechalich
2016-07-04, 09:28 PM
One of the reasons that shifts from an Earth baseline are rare is that the 'shorts and shirtsleeves' zone of human habitability is actually rather narrow. You can't tweak things like gravity or temperature or axial tilt very far before you render your world functionally uninhabitable to humans without significant technology or magic.

Changes can be made at the margins, of course. A world can have a larger proportion of certain biomes, or lack certain classes of lifeforms, or have a slightly longer or shorter year, but unless your story digs down deep into the worldbuilding this probably doesn't matter too much. Especially as most fantasy campaigns or novels are generally set within a single climatic zone regardless. So even if you have a world where you have temperate forests at the equator, its still going to produce cultures that are more like temperate forest cultures than otherwise. And those things will only matter at all if your world is sufficiently low-magic or low tech such that the environment has a massive effect on life. D&D is sufficiently high magic that it laughs at 'desert worlds' or 'tundra worlds,' never mind minor tweaks to Earth-like scenarios.

Quertus
2016-07-04, 10:59 PM
If a 5-year-old can beat your trap, you might not want to set the disable device DC at 35. Just saying.


Oh yeah! This will get stolen "quoted"!
:biggrin:


That one deserves to be put on a plaque and installed where everyone can see it.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. :smallbiggrin:


If my players can figure something out with knowledge reasonably and conceivably available to their characters, I'm not going to begrudge them the solution.

This one is tricky (and a bit off topic).

My signature character, Quertus, for whom this account is named, has spent more time in the underdark than most humans have been alive. But I don't know anything about subterranean lichens (for example), in the underdark or IRL.

So I rely on the DM to tell me when there is something that should be obvious to my character, but is outside my experience.

On topic, when you make a change to the world, you have to be prepared for the fact that the players aren't going to be as familiar with that difference as their characters are.

For the characters, this is just the way reality works. Its been this way all their lives. This lack of novelty gives them familiarity, and the ability to utilize and navigate this difference proficiently, yet, at the same time, this familiarity probably should make them less interested in and less likely to investigate the area where their world differs from our own.

It can be difficult to successfully roleplay your character's familiarity and comfort with the laws of reality when you are yourself only just becoming acquainted with them. Similarly, it can be difficult to correctly judge in a vacuum just what a character should and shouldn't know, should and shouldn't be able to think. Thus, I try to sidestep the issue by using game mechanics when applicable.

But I don't begrudge others for playing the game differently unless the person thinking their way through the game is preventing the person who actually spent ranks on the appropriate skills from actualizing their character / enjoying the game.

Temperjoke
2016-07-04, 11:14 PM
In the situations I've been in, frankly, we've got a limited time to play, and a lot of playing to do. Going out of your way to make your fantasy world different than the world we're familiar with is fine, if it relates to what we're doing, otherwise, I'd rather focus on the actual plot. For example, "we have until the end of winter to figure out a solution for stopping this army, but winter is 6 months long in this world, so we can travel to that dungeon across the world that holds the solution to our problem" relates a difference in the world to the story line, therefore it's important.

Now, that isn't to say that you shouldn't have differences in your world. Maybe your players are interested in studying this information between sessions, so creating a different world and sharing it is fine. I just wouldn't go out of my way to point out those differences during the game if they don't relate to the plot at hand.

Mutazoia
2016-07-04, 11:23 PM
A 96 hour day could be neat if you think about it-esp if. Humanoids are still on a 24 hour sleep cycle.

Dawn Day
Noon Day
Dusk Day
Night Day

All sorts of aspects/prestige classes etc could be based around focusing power in one part of the day. Let alone spell effects.

Plus. Equipment for sleeping in daytime.

High Latitudes would have less obvious effects (people already used to waking up to the same sun)

It isn't change I dislike-its is ignoring the consequences (like "closing time" would have a different meaning in such a world)

The problem with making your world's days 96 hours long is simply: It's still a "day" to your characters, and they would take no special notice of it, any more than you take special notice of a 24 hour day. The only people in the game that has to keep track of it is the players, and unless there is some specific need to remember that the days are 96 hours long, it's going to be forgotten almost immediately. In which case you might as well not bother with it. There will be no difference between saying "the next day" (24 hours) or "the next day" (96 hours).

"Different" does not automatically equate to "cool and useful".

Efrate
2016-07-05, 12:04 AM
If a 5-year-old can beat your trap, you might not want to set the disable device DC at 35. Just saying

I feel I need to clarify this. Its not smack it with a hammer. It analyzing materials and stress fractures and calculating the most structurally weak point and apply a super thin focused force to render it useless by destroying a triggering mechanism. And its not usually the rogue, I could almost get behind that. Fighter McGee over here whose entire life before was a soldier in a minor kingdom doesn't know how to do that.

And hey, maybe it takes a pure child who is untouched by evil to bypass the trap, killing said child but then deactivating permanently. I like making my players make choices like that.

Its more about real world vs. in game knowledge and its a major gripe of mine. I run one of my games with a 17 year old and he does this constantly despite talking to him multiple times about it, and several others have as well in other games through the years.

All world building essentially comes down to whether or not the change effects the story. Is it relevant? A political intrigue game set in a single city with limited contact from any places not also large cities with similar systems doesn't need to know about how much melatonin they lose do to 6 year winters. It provides nothing. Its not needed. Similarly a survivalist system set in a harsh frontier where all resources are scare and the same winters need to know nothing about geopolitical alliances between neighboring city states and the tensions thereof, they need to store food and find some way to live. If your story uses both in the same world, and for some reason you need to go between the two, you only need much broader details. Winters up here are long, winters are harsh, people die often, is enough. How or why isn't important, just as mineral rights on the broader betwixt city A and city B and laws regarding such are not needed.

Does your change affect the story in meaningful way, or is it window dressing? If more the later, maybe mention it once briefly at the start of the campaign and then ignore it, your players likely will.

Is your story about finding out how and why these sweeping changes happened and how things still manage to function? Go nuts with them. Doesn't sound that interesting to me but I prefer more narrative games than sandboxes. YMMV.

Does any change directly or indirectly affect your characters, their plans, and their adventures? No? Then its all not needed. Murderhobo dungeon rats (as an extreme example) don't need nor care about that, nor usually about any consequences of their actions. Kick in the door, get the loot kill the bad guys, save the girls, go home, get drunk repeat after a days shopping and rest.

2D8HP
2016-07-05, 12:11 AM
dungeon rats (as an extreme example) don't need nor care about that, nor usually about any consequences of their actions. Kick in the door, get the loot kill the bad guys, save the girls, go home, get drunk repeat after a days shopping and rest.That set-up sounds perfect! :biggrin:
Do you want another player?

sktarq
2016-07-05, 12:42 AM
The problem with making your world's days 96 hours long is simply: ... unless there is some specific need to remember that the days are 96 hours long, it's going to be forgotten almost immediately....

"Different" does not automatically equate to "cool and useful".

automatically no, but it is the kind of difference you can build into those things that do matter.

business open in multiple shifts for 70 hours and then closed for 26 would change how rogues would plan a bank or jewelry heist. Or if a culture in which a political/espionage game is being played says that the midnight "day" is for being with family at home and parties are for "dawn" days it would matter if they are trying to get the chance to charm the ambassador's son in terms of availability. or for planning battles between armies with lightsensitivity/darkvision issues. or for number of attempts for a "noon light" a prophecy gets in a period of time.

Mechalich
2016-07-05, 01:16 AM
Making the planetary rotation 96 hours instead of 24 is huge change with implications that range from freakish to outright uninhabitable, depending on how it interfaces with planetary temperature circulation, wind patterns, tidal forces, and a bunch of other stuff.

Building a planet that is otherwise Earth-like in every way except that the day is 96 hours long means rebuilding everything except the geology (and actually possibly that too because tidal forces) from the ground up. Such a prolonged day/night cycle totally changing the nature of photosynthetic organisms, of temperature patterns, of weather systems, and the cycles of higher organisms.

For a simple example: such a change makes the existence of small, high-energy expenditure endotherms - meaning pretty much any bird smaller than a crow - impossible in a temperate zone. This is a world where hummingbirds would die of starvation during the long nights.

You cannot simply tweak environmental parameters in isolation on an actual world. You can do that if you're operating in an explicitly magical environment like D&D Outer Planes or fantastical reality like Discworld, but authors who do that generally do indulge in crazy weirdness without real-world equivalence, and making a world explicitly absurd in this way tends to kill drama and promote comedy unless the creators are incredibly talented or chose to go purely for meaning in metaphor, which is what Planescape: Torment does.

PersonMan
2016-07-05, 05:21 AM
This is a perfect example of the spectrum you can get with changes like this. Some people will shrug and assume a world identical to ours except with longer days and nights, others consider the cultural implications and then a third group says "uh, actually, this breaks everything".

A reason many people stick with a fairly generic historical-ish setting is because that lets you start five paces from the finish line. You have your world, now you add a few twists and turns to make it unique, then you work on the plot. Change the day/night cycle to last 96 hours and suddenly you have three and a half miles of consequences (and domino-esque lines of "if, then" scenarios) to work through just to arrive at a world nothing like the one you'd intended to make.

Then someone comes along and says "well, I'm an expert in X, and unfortunately you forgot to consider Z, Y and F" which means you now have to either explain that away, have a hole in your setting logic (which could result in the "this makes no sense, I can't take it seriously" player response from someone who can't ignore it) or spend even more time making that work.

NichG
2016-07-05, 05:42 AM
There's a standard trick that helps here. If someone says 'wait, shouldn't X be a problem because of ...', rather than saying 'but there's Y,Z,... to fix it' or 'just ignore it', you can say: "Isn't that interesting?"

If you suggest that there's a hidden, important reason behind it then you get them thinking 'what could be making this work?' rather than 'can I figure out all the reasons this doesn't work?'. They'll use their level of expertise - whatever it may be - to come up with hypotheses to satisfy themselves.

johnbragg
2016-07-05, 06:54 AM
Though there is still the justified question why people still keep mostly making very generic Standard Fantasy Settings?

How many generic Standard Fantasy Settings have been published lately, though?
Golarion, to give the PAthfinder writers a place to put their stuff. The 4E setting (Points of Light, I think?) likewise.
Eberron, which makes a number of deviations from Standard Fantasy Setting Greyhawk/FR/Middle Earth.

For homebrewed settings, don't think of the DM as "creating a new world." Think of it as taking out the Standard Fantasy Setting whiteboard and erasing Greyhawk/FR specific material to make room for new creations in the same world-system.


That assumption is false. But this is the reason why I prefer magepunk to a classical setting. If magic is a secure and easy way to make entire feudal systems obsolete then why would people continue to live like knights, peasants and farmers? Wouldn't they try and cultivate magic to ease their lifes? Of course conflict and destruction will still happen but if you imagine most sentient life on the same basis as humans (persistence hunters, omnivores, humanoid in shape) they will probably socialize and try to share their findings within a hierarchy.

It is just stupid to assume that if magic can create unlimited food that people will just ignore that.

Agreed in concept, but I have a major quibble--most magitech settings simply ape real-world or steampunk tech, swapping out magical powersources. I say that's reverse-engineering something based on centuries of development of real-world concepts that wouldn't have existed, or wouldn't have been prominent in a universe based on magical principles.

I like to take the sort of things that classical-and-eariler civilizations built--roads, pyramids, the Library and Lighthouse of Alexandria, canal systems--and explore what Alexander or Cyrus or Ramses or Augustus or PEricles or Shi Huangdi would have done if he had hundreds or thousands of low-level wizards and/or clerics. Have magic grow up alongside civilization, and imagine what directions it would go in.

So yes, the string of obelisks along the northern frontier of the Estruvian Empire used to keep the dragons and giants at bay--until the civil war in the Estruvian Empire broke the political consensus that was its power source.

Cluedrew
2016-07-05, 07:14 AM
My default, if I am worried about people using science to poke holes in the setting, is to throw science out. I've never met anyone who didn't like Alice in Wonderland because the law of conservation of energy didn't hold. Put a different way, instead of keeping the base and changing the details, change the details and keep the aesthetics of reality (then change those as needed). Keeping most of the details the same gives the familiarity you need to jump into the setting but the change in the core allows you to change the details you want with relatively clean results.

Magitech is a good example of this. Yes it is coloured differently, but for the most part you just have the basic rules of the modern day (a few medieval aspects mixed in) coming from a very different source. So you have your default understanding of the world that comes from reality and stereo-medieval settings, but it is easy to mix in other weird details as well.

I also like exploring consequences of what if, but if those changes become too numerous (more so than significant) than it becomes harder to deal with.

Yora
2016-07-05, 09:35 AM
There's a short and interesting post on Monsters and Manuals (http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.de/2016/07/anything-works-if-its-consistent.html) today.
Basically the idea is to have a handful of iconic elements that keep appearing all the time to give a fantasy world a strong distinctive identity. If these are weird, even better.

sktarq
2016-07-05, 09:52 AM
Making the planetary rotation 96 hours instead of 24 is huge change with implications that range from freakish to outright uninhabitable, depending on how it interfaces with planetary temperature circulation, wind patterns, tidal forces, and a bunch of other stuff. . . . .

Yup. All that stuff is fascinating to me. But I don't expect it to be fascinating to my players. I quit reading Song of Fire and Ice to investigate the seed and esp seed size development of perenials and the implications for domesticatable choices.

During the investigation into wind patterns- developing group huddler hummingbirds-nocturnal beehaviors of earth diurnal birds, etc I'm looking for quirks I can build a culture/cultural event/plot hook/economical opppertunity (and use tthem as antagonists or patrons) from this the world grows more organically and that comes through in game. That's also why planscape etc does nothing for me

Jay R
2016-07-05, 11:38 AM
...t', you can say: "Isn't that interesting?"

I can't say "Isn't that interesting?" unless I find it interesting. Random change for the sake of random change isn't particularly interesting to me.

Now a major change that is crucial to the storyline and background can be extremely interesting. In Game of Thrones, summers and winters last for years, and nobody knows when the will end. Winter is a long period of time when you can't grow much food, and running out is a serious threat. The fact that winter is coming during the current wars of succession adds a huge element of risk. In the second book season, armies were burning the crops to stop their enemies, without reckoning what effect that would soon have. It's a brilliant plot element.

This is a change with immediate effect on the story. It's fascinating. But a 96 hour day has no interest for me, unless there is a clear effect on the game.

sktarq
2016-07-05, 02:48 PM
I'd call that a false comparison. On one side you have the effects of a change (interesting) to a change (not interesting). Long semi-random seasons are not inherently interesting by themselves to most people.

I'd call a change "interesting" if it has consequences that add to the game or story with lots of things to work with.

Mechalich
2016-07-05, 03:08 PM
I've never met anyone who didn't like Alice in Wonderland because the law of conservation of energy didn't hold.

Alice in Wonderland is not a game setting or even a shared world novel setting.

The thing about settings for tabletop rpgs is that they need to present consistency across the vision of different people such that one game in the setting still feels recognizable as the same setting compared to another game in the setting. Material that might be great on its own but doesn't fit with that vision will be rejected out of hand as not matching. Heck, even without a setting involved this happened with D&D 4e, which was not evaluated principally on its merits, but on the fact that it didn't feel like D&D.

The more plotholes and inconsistencies a setting has the more difficult it is for that setting to function in the cooperative storytelling that is the heart of tabletop rpg play. oWod settings often fell apart on arguments about how to play the settings the right way, because the design was so lacking in coherency two gaming groups would almost inevitably devise completely unrecognizable visions of the world.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-05, 03:21 PM
Alice in Wonderland is not a game setting or even a shared world novel setting.

The thing about settings for tabletop rpgs is that they need to present consistency across the vision of different people such that one game in the setting still feels recognizable as the same setting compared to another game in the setting. Material that might be great on its own but doesn't fit with that vision will be rejected out of hand as not matching. Heck, even without a setting involved this happened with D&D 4e, which was not evaluated principally on its merits, but on the fact that it didn't feel like D&D.

The more plotholes and inconsistencies a setting has the more difficult it is for that setting to function in the cooperative storytelling that is the heart of tabletop rpg play. oWod settings often fell apart on arguments about how to play the settings the right way, because the design was so lacking in coherency two gaming groups would almost inevitably devise completely unrecognizable visions of the world.


That "shared space" issue is important -- an RPG setting needs to function such that everyone can have the same general thing in mind without hours of exposition and discussion.

Jay R
2016-07-05, 06:36 PM
I'd call that a false comparison. On one side you have the effects of a change (interesting) to a change (not interesting). Long semi-random seasons are not inherently interesting by themselves to most people.

I'd call a change "interesting" if it has consequences that add to the game or story with lots of things to work with.

Which is exactly why I described the consequences that are adding to the story - how the wars of succession are making the coming winter more deadly.

Grinner
2016-07-05, 06:54 PM
Alice in Wonderland is not a game setting or even a shared world novel setting.

Funny thing, actually. That's not entirely true... :smallwink:

Cluedrew
2016-07-05, 07:26 PM
Alice in Wonderland is not a game setting or even a shared world novel setting.But that has more to do with its lack of consistency (as you mentioned) and not just the fact things were weird. (Ginner is there a Alice in Wonderland RPG?)

My main point still remains: Weirdness Begets Weirdness

And makes the new weirdness feel more natural because you have already (significantly) left reality behind.

Grinner
2016-07-05, 09:00 PM
But that has more to do with its lack of consistency (as you mentioned) and not just the fact things were weird. (Ginner is there a Alice in Wonderland RPG?)

Several, actually. The one I'm most familiar with, and possibly one of my favorite settings, is JAGS Wonderland. It's been described as Lewis Carroll by way of H.P. Lovecraft.

NichG
2016-07-05, 10:02 PM
I can't say "Isn't that interesting?" unless I find it interesting. Random change for the sake of random change isn't particularly interesting to me.

This is out of context. The point isn't that it's interesting. The point is that someone who says 'oh, you changed X without changing Y,Z,Q,aardvark,zebra,misfit, I caught you!' can be deflected by implying indirectly that it's intentional and for a hidden reason. The expression 'Isn't that interesting?' is used to say 'There's a reason, but I can't tell you' more indirectly. Even if there isn't actually a reason.

veti
2016-07-05, 10:28 PM
This is out of context. The point isn't that it's interesting. The point is that someone who says 'oh, you changed X without changing Y,Z,Q,aardvark,zebra,misfit, I caught you!' can be deflected by implying indirectly that it's intentional and for a hidden reason. The expression 'Isn't that interesting?' is used to say 'There's a reason, but I can't tell you' more indirectly. Even if there isn't actually a reason.

Which is a douche move, because then your player, who wasn't necessarily trying to "catch you out" but was earnestly trying to understand this half-baked world you came up with and who still honestly trusts that you're not just yanking their chain... has to devote their mental energy to trying to untie the knots that you've tied yourself into, and you don't even know that they can be untied.

Worst case, they'll come to a blindingly obvious, clear, elegant solution that's way beyond anything you'd thought of, then use it to base some plan that's so cunning and subtle that it won't even occur to them that it might be a good idea to discuss it with you before they try to spring it. And then you'll have led them wayyyyy up the garden path and wasted everyone's time, just because you couldn't be bothered to work out the details of your "exciting" worldbuilding idea.

Been there, done that. Not cool.

goto124
2016-07-05, 10:29 PM
Also, doesn't address the "forcing players to strain their brains' issue. If they spend so much effort remembering and keeping up with something that turns out to be utterly useless and meaningless for no reason other than "GM refused to speak up", that's not exactly enjoyable gameplay.

Actually, I'll defer to the post above me.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-05, 10:51 PM
This is why I have said previously that good worldbuilding is like an iceberg -- the players might not even see the majority of the details, but they're what's keeping the parts they can see afloat. Without all that "useless" stuff, the whole thing just sinks or flops over.

"Just make it up as you go" is why a show like Lost was ever so appropriately named.

Mechalich
2016-07-06, 01:34 AM
Also, doesn't address the "forcing players to strain their brains' issue. If they spend so much effort remembering and keeping up with something that turns out to be utterly useless and meaningless for no reason other than "GM refused to speak up", that's not exactly enjoyable gameplay.


Often, even in situations where there is an answer, presenting players with highly arbitrary rules variations from one place to the next is frustrating anyway. Planescape offers a good example. The original 2e Planescape rules had a whole bunch of variations of the performance of difference schools of magic and even individual spells from one plane to the next and they impacted arcane and divine spellcasters differently. Even though those rules were grounded in the weird alignment-based philosophy that governed most Planescape mechanics and were generally rather flavorful they were a gigantic pain in the petard to actually use and everybody drastically simplified and/or ignored them outright - something 3e came along and more or less canonized.

The thing is that all players, by the simple virtue of being human, intuitively understand how the rules of reality are supposed to work on a world that is functionally Earth. The more you move away from Earth traits the more effort they have to spend to learn the rules of the new reality and the implications of that world, and because energy investment is to some degree zero sum energy invested in learning to deal with those changes is energy not invested in dramatic storytelling.

Fantasy is generally much more about telling stories that express traditional tropes of romance or heroism or morality, and so forth, and not about the mechanics of strange and exotic ideas - which tends to be the ballpark of science fiction. Science fiction novels often move away from Earth base in shockingly bizarre ways because that's the point - the entire Dune universe exists as an exercise in worldbuilding, and there are award-winning novelists like Greg Egan who don't so much write stories as graft a story structure onto weird ideas about physics.

Generally, when trying to build an experience of characters that audiences will relate to and find familiar it makes sense to keep the world as familiar as possible. Game of Thrones is so effective because it is able to provide its characters with recognizable social experiences and that's because the problems are largely familiar problems and the solutions to those problems are largely - with a literally dragon-sized exception - ones familiar to human viewers. Compare that to the problems presented in high-concept science fiction or surrealist mind-benders and the problems are weird and the solutions may fit to vision presented by the author but they'll be very strange and they'll hit everyone differently.

Since TTRPGs are character-driven (at least ostensibly, if the GM can avoid power tripping and the players actually contribute to the story development), familiarity is immensely helpful. This is one of the reasons why fantasy RPGs are generally far more successful than science fiction rpgs (and Mass Effect, Star Wars and the like are still fantasies even if they have futuristic settings).

NichG
2016-07-06, 07:29 AM
Which is a douche move, because then your player, who wasn't necessarily trying to "catch you out" but was earnestly trying to understand this half-baked world you came up with and who still honestly trusts that you're not just yanking their chain... has to devote their mental energy to trying to untie the knots that you've tied yourself into, and you don't even know that they can be untied.

If someone at the table really can't get into the game because they're worried about melatonin effects due to changes in the seasonal patterns compared to Earth, they're the ones tying things into knots. You can always, always pick apart anything if you look hard enough. But some people just can't help being like that - its how their mind relates to things. And rather than punishing them for that by saying 'you're wrong to be like that, just shut up and enjoy it', you can direct that tendency in positive directions which you can then reward and encourage. If they're spending the mental energy to pick at things that closely, its better for them to spend it fixing rather than un-fixing.


Worst case, they'll come to a blindingly obvious, clear, elegant solution that's way beyond anything you'd thought of, then use it to base some plan that's so cunning and subtle that it won't even occur to them that it might be a good idea to discuss it with you before they try to spring it. And then you'll have led them wayyyyy up the garden path and wasted everyone's time, just because you couldn't be bothered to work out the details of your "exciting" worldbuilding idea.

This is the best-case scenario. When the player comes up with a blindingly obvious, clear, elegant solution, you say 'yes, you figured it out!' and immediately adopt it and let what they came up with work perfectly.

This isn't about punishing players, this is about recognizing when someone is in a mental state where they're actively working against their ability to have fun, and then knowing how to turn that around so that they actively work to increase their ability to have fun instead.

Jomo
2016-07-07, 11:05 PM
That's true. Now, the angle I would take with talking to the player would be a bit different. I would acknowledge that I didn't think through that part and ask if they'd like to think of a way to make it work.

veti
2016-07-08, 03:28 AM
This is the best-case scenario. When the player comes up with a blindingly obvious, clear, elegant solution, you say 'yes, you figured it out!' and immediately adopt it and let what they came up with work perfectly.

No, it's not. Not if the idea is so elegant, so obvious, that it never so much as occurs to the player that it has, in fact, never occurred to you. And hence that all the further implications that follow from it - don't. Then the player takes it for granted that you and they are on the same page, whereas in fact you're reading entirely different books.

It's just stupid. And lazy. And don't do it.

NichG
2016-07-08, 05:56 AM
No, it's not. Not if the idea is so elegant, so obvious, that it never so much as occurs to the player that it has, in fact, never occurred to you. And hence that all the further implications that follow from it - don't. Then the player takes it for granted that you and they are on the same page, whereas in fact you're reading entirely different books.

It's just stupid. And lazy. And don't do it.

We're just going to have to disagree then. This style of running has made for the best game experiences I've participated in on either side of the screen.

Mutazoia
2016-07-08, 06:16 AM
Well, getting back to the main topic of the post:

You really can't make a lot of major changes to a world, with out taking the effect of those consequences in to account.

The further away you get from the "real world norm", the more you have to consider longer term effects, both on the world itself as well as on your players.

Most books and/or fantasy RPG settings work, simply because the reader/player has to do less mental gymnastics to paint a picture of what's suppose to be going on. The more real world equivalence you have, the more your reader/player can concentrate on the story you are telling, rather than constantly having to picture a bunch of totally alien concepts every 2 seconds.

Changes that are merely "fluff" are fine, will probably be mentioned once, and then usually forgotten. For example, if you've read Anne McCaffery's Dragon Rider novels, you may or may not know that the native plant life on Pern is actually blue, not green. this was mentioned once, and never again, because when it came right down to it, it wasn't anything that effected the story in the slightest.

Changes that have a major purpose, such as the extended seasons in Game of Thrones, serve a very big role in the story. They can and will be brought up repeatedly.

But if you make your world have 84 suns, covered in cheeze whiz, and completely devoid of any metal harder than lead, just because you want something "different", you are going to have a hard time selling that to anybody.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-08, 06:23 AM
No, it's not. Not if the idea is so elegant, so obvious, that it never so much as occurs to the player that it has, in fact, never occurred to you. And hence that all the further implications that follow from it - don't. Then the player takes it for granted that you and they are on the same page, whereas in fact you're reading entirely different books.

It's just stupid. And lazy. And don't do it.


I think he's saying "and then the GM runs with the player's idea, because it's awesome".

To me, though, that's like building a house without a foundation.

I've been burned by vague, unclear GMs who presume everyone has the same vision of what's going on that they do based on sparse details, or who put the burden on the player to ask questions the answers to which would be blatantly obvious to the characters actually there in the scene and in the setting of the game.

NichG
2016-07-08, 06:36 AM
I think he's saying "and then the GM runs with the player's idea, because it's awesome".

Yes.


To me, though, that's like building a house without a foundation.

I've been burned by vague, unclear GMs who presume everyone has the same vision of what's going on that they do based on sparse details, or who put the burden on the player to ask questions the answers to which would be blatantly obvious to the characters actually there in the scene and in the setting of the game.

I guess what I'm saying is, when you notice that a player has a different vision of what's going on than you do, you shouldn't say 'I'm the GM, so my vision is the correct one', you should say 'okay, lets listen to what the player thinks should happen and even if thats not what I would have come up with, maybe that's what should happen'. You can to some extent run the game that's in the player's head, rather than running the game that's in your head.

That way, the player doesn't get 'burned' by sudden gotchas or misalignments - if there's a misalignment, you can just resolve it in the player's favor rather than insisting 'I'm the GM, my vision is the correct one here'. You can't, or shouldn't, always do that - there should be surprises, things that have their own inertia and presence, but often this kind of misalignment isn't about something really critical but is actually about a detail that the player themselves wanted to raise to relevancy. And in that case, why not?

It's related to the kind of attitude to encourage and enable good stunting. If a player says 'I want to swing on this chandelier' and you hadn't described the light fixtures, you could say 'well actually this room doesn't have a chandelier, I had decided that it has wall-mounted torch brackets but I just hadn't mentioned it' or you can say 'okay, I guess there's a chandelier, sure, give it a shot!'.

Cluedrew
2016-07-08, 08:31 AM
Changes that are merely "fluff" are fine, will probably be mentioned once, and then usually forgotten. For example, if you've read Anne McCaffery's Dragon Rider novels, you may or may not know that the native plant life on Pern is actually blue, not green. this was mentioned once, and never again, because when it came right down to it, it wasn't anything that effected the story in the slightest.

Changes that have a major purpose, such as the extended seasons in Game of Thrones, serve a very big role in the story. They can and will be brought up repeatedly.This is for me the critical trigger, if a change you make to the world has no effect on the story you tell in the world then don't bother. I have seen some very weird settings in my readings, but it the story in intertwined with the setting, then the details become more memorable as they interlock and are repeated. Also I tend to find the 'what if' changes more interesting as opposed to the 'new coat of paint' ones. Of course even arbitrary changes can have interesting fallout if you examine them, so there isn't a hard line between them.

But still changing the colour of the grass or the sky... usually doesn't mean anything beyond flavour text. I remember reading a book with world hopping where I once found myself wondering if this particular world had a blue or purple sky. Because it was mentioned once in a paragraph when they first entered the world and that was it. Then again the world that was the sleeping form a giant and its surface was shaped by its subconscious, I remember that one because that came up in a lot.

On Changing the GM's model: I'll do this sometime just because it is faster to make a slight change to something that hasn't come up yet in my head than to explain why not out load. Plus sometimes you get additive ideas out of this (as opposed to modifying ideas) which gives you a little bit of extra world building for free.

LibraryOgre
2016-07-08, 11:41 AM
The Dragaeran Empire uses a system that follows base 17, resulting in a roughly year-long year and an hour-long hour, but a much longer day and weird weeks.

http://dragaera.wikia.com/wiki/Time

Jomo
2016-07-08, 06:33 PM
We're just going to have to disagree then. This style of running has made for the best game experiences I've participated in on either side of the screen.

Have you tried a version of this where you're up front and honest about what you're doing? Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying?

NichG
2016-07-09, 01:35 AM
Have you tried a version of this where you're up front and honest about what you're doing? Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying?

In the groups I've been in where this was in play, I'd call it an 'open secret'. That is to say, its openly discussed that the GM will take cool player ideas and run with them. But for any given thing in game, the GM doesn't reveal if it was something they had planned out before, or if they just in that very moment decided that one of the players' ideas was cool. I think this is better than drawing attention to it by talking about it whenever it happens, because the entire point of this technique is to help players sustain their immersion.

I've been in and run games where it was a specific mechanic that players could employ (do dramatic editing to change the world), but it really is just not the same. It doesn't achieve the same ends at all.

goto124
2016-07-09, 02:12 AM
I've been in and run games where it was a specific mechanic that players could employ (do dramatic editing to change the world), but it really is just not the same. It doesn't achieve the same ends at all.

Do explain, I'm curious. After all, if the ideas originated from the players, would they not realise it was their idea?

johnbragg
2016-07-09, 07:36 AM
Do explain, I'm curious. After all, if the ideas originated from the players, would they not realise it was their idea?

Because the player is trying to *figure out* what the answer is. It's very hard for the player to know that the answer was a Schrodinger's Cat, and only became true when the PC asked if it was true.

NichG
2016-07-09, 09:57 AM
Do explain, I'm curious. After all, if the ideas originated from the players, would they not realise it was their idea?

In the case of dramatic editing powers, yes, they know its their idea. And personally I find it doesn't help at all with immersion when you do it this way (even breaking immersion because you explicitly know that whatever you figure out in-character can be vetoed by another player who decides to spend more points than you).

In the case of games where the GM chooses what ideas to adopt, the key point is that the player believes they figured out something real about the world. So, assuming they actually believe what they're saying, the GM should behave the same whether or not what the player thinks they just now figured out had already been planned or not. The player says 'I think X is true, so I try Y'. The GM says 'Y works'. So there's no signal as to whether or not X was just always the case, or just became the case when the GM heard the idea.

nedz
2016-07-09, 10:14 AM
Do explain, I'm curious. After all, if the ideas originated from the players, would they not realise it was their idea?

It depends upon how you do it. If the player's know the DM well enough then they may not cotton on - though you should always change some detail perhaps.

Or, and this is a trick I employed recently, I allowed the players to specify where they come from in the world - their originating locale - as part of their backstory. This was then played through as they travelled which allowed for increased character development (non-mechanical). So they got to draw the maps for a village, castle, etc. The purpose of a backstory after all is to integrate the PCs with the setting.

Beleriphon
2016-07-09, 12:29 PM
And what are the results from it? What does it add to the feel of the world?

A great deal, the world is crazy and you can eventually reach the edge and there's bad stuff past the edge. In a setting where the PCs are fantasty styled superheroes that rival 1960s Superman in shear goofiness/power levels that's saying something.