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View Full Version : DM Help Making the world feel huge and wild / Points of Light



Yora
2016-07-19, 05:33 AM
I am always a fan of fantasy books and movies that create the feeling that the world in which they take place is huge and the people who live in it small and widely scattered. I would also like to run a campaign that feels that way, but all the games I played in and settings that I've read don't really feel like that to me. It always feels very cluttered and crowded with everything being wel mapped and charted and all the settlements connected.

Could possibly be just my personal perception, but I think it could have something to do with how games are usually run and settings presented. Any ideas why that might be and what could be done about it?

Comet
2016-07-19, 07:07 AM
I would probably set it up so that the players only ever interact with a very small portion of the world, say a single village and its environs. Everything else would be rumours, sporadic visitors from afar and incomplete political maps that give context to what's happening right here and now. I think that would give the players a sense of isolation and claustrophobia, which is one way of making your world feel big and scary.

ExLibrisMortis
2016-07-19, 07:29 AM
There has to be more to the world than the plot of your characters. You have to suggest more information than you can provide. However, I think it's hard to do in a game format, because it will slow down the game. It's more practical to write that sort of stuff into the setting background, and get people to read it at their leisure.

For example, you can tell a story: "This port city A has an ore harbour, where mithral from City B and adamantine from City C are shipped across the channel (guarded by city D) to the forges of cities E, F and G. No, the capital is city Z, we're not there yet. Now, tax from the ore harbour is taken to City H and I across land, on account of the Treaty of City J, (which is actually an elven city), and there are many in City B and I who want to send all taxation through I, and C and H the same for H, but Cities K, L and M, who provide most of the food for the whole F-N region, do not want to provide too much power to either of them. Oh, and the vowels are a different clan".

But this story has to be somewhat relevant, and I don't really see much of a place to insert it in a running game, unless this exact thing is your plot (in which case, it's not suggesting a huge world, as per the first sentence of this post). Maybe you can tell it as start of session zero, and keep referring to city politics by preparing town crier messages and tavern gossip.

Garimeth
2016-07-19, 08:02 AM
I've actually spent some time thinking about that myself. here are some of my thoughts:

- Travel must be difficult and/or dangerous, to the extent that it just isn't worth it for most people. Everybody settling in an area tends to congregate to the most secure and built up area. There could be some type of "easier" travel by sea or magic perhaps, but the easier overland travel is, the less threatening the setting is, and therefore easier to tame and settle.

- City-states. Most villages are too small to be entirely self sufficient, which means they need to trade with others to get what they want. City-states might have this problem a little less. The city state provides for the common defense of whatever farms surround it to feed its population.

- Village coalitions: small villages all band together, kind of like the towns in the north in The Halfling's Gem.


For this to be the natural way things develop, you have to have a solid explanation of the first point, I.E. "why" travel is so long or difficult. The obvious reason is that there are monsters or whatever. So why don't the monsters conquer these nice areas that the humans are living in? Well, maybe they don't like the terrain or environment, or perhaps they are opportunity predators and not intelligent. Maybe the human societies ARE constantly fighting against these things.

So for example we could have rampaging orcs that for some reason can't stand the salinity of being near the ocean. So they let the humans live near the ocean because they don't want that land anyway, and its too much work to try and siege a city they don't even want, but they mercilessly crush any human attempt to expand inland. Now I'd ask: how did the humans get built up enough to have cities in the first place? We can have the whole divine creation thing, or maybe they settled here from somewhere else. Perhaps the orcs are the new comers and they have driven humanity back to the coast, and the countryside is full of the wreckage of a great human kingdom. This happened everywhere though and now humanity is not quite on its last rope, but only because the orcs are content to let them have their corner.

Now you could substitute orcs with a lot of things, and you could change the preferred terrain to whatever to create the setting and culture you want, but the big key is that travel has to be hard, their has to be a reason why its impossible/difficult to expand, and it has to be mostly consistent across the setting.

Vegan Squirrel
2016-07-19, 09:54 AM
Another option is to set up a world with very difficult terrain that takes up large amounts of space and is not really settled. I'm talking hot deserts and high mountains, or swamps that aren't worth trying to live on, jungles in difficult climates. Not so much forests you can simply cut down, but maybe forests with enchanted/fey elements that people tend to avoid.

Consequently, cities will be scattered to the coasts and favorable land. Powerful nations might have distant colonies, as Europe colonized parts of other continents, but those colonies are distant and exotic.

Another version of that is a large area that is uninhabitable due to recent wars.. nuclear/arcane winter, minefields, that sort of thing. I'm using the lingering undead from an undead apocalypse to cover half of a continent in my campaign world.

Another possibility: a continent that doesn't have very much landmass at its center, but has a large number of large peninsulas that are settled. Almost like a pinwheel shape, but of course it should be made to look more natural. Mountain ridges rose up these long peninsulas with arcs of islands.

Just a few scattered thoughts.

Also, technology level is important here.

sktarq
2016-07-19, 10:34 AM
Very incomplete maps. Sure your players know that a great mountain range exists far to the west and can see it on the butcher paper map but when their weeks march through 3 different biomes and several challenging encounters only moves them a couple inches on that map they will gain a respect for the scale of the "here be dragons" white spaces on the map.

Have events that are bigger than what the party could have access to be visable. Not that they need too be part of the event but the sense that the world is operating on a grander scale than them. Ex1: find the path/road they were following through the mountains cut off by a rockslide where the roocks are 30' boulders and the edge is 60-7' higher that the paths. As a sight of an encounter with the agitated rock and mountain spirits it becomes important. EX2: the PC's find the remains of a battlefield - it quickly becomes obvious that each armies losses are larger than most city-states entire population.

Compare things to. Their home village a lot. A building that is the size of a villager's whole property (including veg garden, fence, yard, etc) gives the player a sense of norm vs this and thus puts the idea of playing differently in their heads.

Pplay up the logistic challenges of space and time. Have players miss festivals, family events, harvests, etc to enforce the idea of how much of their lives must be spent on the phrase "we visit the oracle for information" or the like. And if each PC is two assistants and five mules just to carry enough food to get to their destination (as finding other people to buy from could be unreliable and the trip may need to re-up even with such a large provision tank) gives PC's a sense of travel is not easy and world is larger than what they handle alone no matter how great a sword swinger they are. For extra fun give them a quick NPC sheet for each porter-with name, dreams, family history etc on it so they don't forget about them and can see what effect their actions are having on the lives of others (the sheets also help in when they are part of the pile to enforce the NPC's personhood and of course don't have to be complete as the DM has the master copies (the ones with the secrets)) Also makes the lone traveler with only an oversized purse (a-la Dr Jones) seem like the mysterious badass that he is.

VoxRationis
2016-07-19, 10:45 AM
Keep a "DM map," showing what is actually in what spaces, separate from a "player map," showing what the "viewpoint culture" knows about geography. That way you can have all the information you need about the world without making the world seem cluttered.

Yora
2016-07-19, 11:04 AM
I think it's probably best to keep adventures local, with the PCs and NPCs being limited to whatever allies and resources they have nearby. NPCs should have very limited "power projection". They can only control what is directly outside their stronghold or camp. Multinational organizations with a centralized headquarter make the world feel closer together. Time of travel is not really a factor in a campaign or in fiction as you can always skip ahead days or months until something important happens again. When no side can call backup from another region each locale feels more isolated. Travelling to another major town means moving on to a different adventure and whatever unfinished business you left behind won't be waiting for you if you come back later.

Garimeth
2016-07-19, 12:11 PM
I think it's probably best to keep adventures local, with the PCs and NPCs being limited to whatever allies and resources they have nearby. NPCs should have very limited "power projection". They can only control what is directly outside their stronghold or camp. Multinational organizations with a centralized headquarter make the world feel closer together. Time of travel is not really a factor in a campaign or in fiction as you can always skip ahead days or months until something important happens again. When no side can call backup from another region each locale feels more isolated. Travelling to another major town means moving on to a different adventure and whatever unfinished business you left behind won't be waiting for you if you come back later.

So I both agree and disagree. Travel time may not matter to the PLAYERS, but it certainly matters to the NPCs. Travel time can absolutely make a region isolated. The EVIL attacks in a fortnight, but it will take three months to get a messenger to the nearest kingdom and request aid. Or that the king's champion going to help the party means that his champion is going to be gone for years, means the king will deny the request. Combine the distance, with difficult terrain (as mentioned by sktarq and Vegan Squirrel), and then add in a monster/disease/life threat, and now you have a plausible reason for WHY its a points of light setting.

What your above post addresses is the "what and how" what the other things address is the "why", you need both for compelling fiction, or a compelling setting.

TheYell
2016-07-19, 12:40 PM
Have the party take ship for a short coastal hop to a known port. A great storm lasting three days blows the ship out to sea and rolls the masts out of her. She's leaking steadily. The crew abandons in the middle of the night with most of the food and water. On the fourteenth day of drifting she runs aground. Where the party is, how far to the nearest settlement, in what direction, how organized it is, what language it speaks, are things they have to find out.

Jay R
2016-07-19, 01:17 PM
The best tools for creating a wild and dangerous world:

1. Get rid of huge cities.
2. There can be some civilized lands of farmers, but there should be large expanses of wilderness.
3. The borders of the wilderness should be places where people expect occasional orc raids or monster incursions.
4. Reduce the number of magic items, and magic item shops should be nearly non-existent (for the same reasons that you would get rid of high technology).


I prefer to assume a great civilization has been destroyed by natural disasters, long-term wars, and/or barbaric raids in the last century or two. This gives reason to believe that there will be unfound treasure in the ruins found in the wilderness.

Hoosigander
2016-07-19, 01:22 PM
Keep a "DM map," showing what is actually in what spaces, separate from a "player map," showing what the "viewpoint culture" knows about geography. That way you can have all the information you need about the world without making the world seem cluttered.

I second this. Indeed, I would keep in mind that medieval maps are not as precise and accurate as modern ones. Depending on your world you might not even want to have maps and have the only source of geographical information be directions given by the locals (When I say no maps I don't mean quick sketches on a dry erase graph of the area the PCs can physically see, I mean world, regional, and city maps). Most Medieval travel writing takes the form of itineraries, e.g. it's 10 miles from A to B, from there its twenty miles to C. This sort of thing could facilitate a "points of light" feel, where only the settlements are detailed and the places in between are trackless wastes beyond the roads connecting the towns. I guess the general point is, instead of having any absolute point of reference for Geography the PCs should only know what the NPCs in the surrounding community could know (and whatever they've picked up in their travels).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Beatus_map.jpg
11th Century map from the Abbey of Saint-Sever in France.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a1/TabulaRogeriana_upside-down.jpg/1280px-TabulaRogeriana_upside-down.jpg Produced in the 12th century by Muhammad al-Idrisi for King Roger II of Sicily, this picture has the north on top, but the map is actually oriented towards the South.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Hereford_Mappa_Mundi_1300.jpg
14th century English map. Oriented East.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Britannienkarte_des_Matthew_Paris.jpgMatthew of Paris' map of Great Britain.

thirdkingdom
2016-07-19, 05:04 PM
I second this. Indeed, I would keep in mind that medieval maps are not as precise and accurate as modern ones. Depending on your world you might not even want to have maps and have the only source of geographical information be directions given by the locals (When I say no maps I don't mean quick sketches on a dry erase graph of the area the PCs can physically see, I mean world, regional, and city maps). Most Medieval travel writing takes the form of itineraries, e.g. it's 10 miles from A to B, from there its twenty miles to C. This sort of thing could facilitate a "points of light" feel, where only the settlements are detailed and the places in between are trackless wastes beyond the roads connecting the towns. I guess the general point is, instead of having any absolute point of reference for Geography the PCs should only know what the NPCs in the surrounding community could know (and whatever they've picked up in their travels).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Beatus_map.jpg
11th Century map from the Abbey of Saint-Sever in France.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a1/TabulaRogeriana_upside-down.jpg/1280px-TabulaRogeriana_upside-down.jpg Produced in the 12th century by Muhammad al-Idrisi for King Roger II of Sicily, this picture has the north on top, but the map is actually oriented towards the South.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Hereford_Mappa_Mundi_1300.jpg
14th century English map. Oriented East.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Britannienkarte_des_Matthew_Paris.jpgMatthew of Paris' map of Great Britain.


Here's the map I gave my players at the start of our game:

Each hex is 18 miles.
https://wiki.rpg.net/images/5/58/Player%27s_Map_8.29.15.png

Here's what they've explored thus far:

Each hex is 6 miles. The PCs have basically only explored on the east side of the river Sarn, down to the ruined Keep they wrested from a family of trolls, christened Wolf Keep and have been gradually repairing.
https://wiki.rpg.net/images/2/2d/Player%27s_Map_Detail_5.19.16.png

5a Violista
2016-07-19, 06:36 PM
A handful of books I've read are points-of-light...I can't remember their names, but I liked them very much. One time, I made a setting based on them. The unifying theme between these stories seemed to be that nature itself was against the humans: there existed bloodthirsty versions of every wild animal with the power to control weak-minded animals and humans in one book and cruel feylike beings and magical monsters and caustic oceans in the other book. At least, that's what I remembered them to be like at the time.
I think if I search through the library catalogue, I'll find their names: oh, yes. One was called Fire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_(Cashore_novel)) by Kristin Cashore ("In the land of the Dells, there are 'monsters.' Impossibly beautiful animals of unnatural colors, that can entrance people with their appearance and control them with their minds.") and the "Monster blood Tattoo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Blood_Tattoo_Series)" series ("The book's action takes place entirely on the Half-Continent, a Dickensian world run by arcane science and alchemy, and plagued with deadly (and not-so-deadly) monsters.") ((so, not exactly what I remembered them as, but close enough))

Trying to follow this theme of "nature actively fights against civilization" and drawing inspiration from these books and others, this is what the setting I created was like:
One of the most useful sea route's waters were incredibly caustic and filled with mindless sea monsters (that could be led to cause destruction on land if led there) that could take out ships if not careful. More sea monsters appeared in other oceans, but weren't as cruel but just as deadly. A handful of deserts with very little water; a wasteland whose only water all have lead poisoning; a wasteland where mindless undead spontaneously are created and advance on bordering cities; areas that frequently are swamped by volcanoes; a virus that makes beasts go wild and attack everything; an entire forest filled with man-eating plants; an area with unnatural perpetual darkness; entire countries that can't be passed without extensive climbing gear and skill; volcanic areas with frequent eruptions; greedy fey beasts (and also magical pirates) that prey on traveling merchants; periodic astrology-related rituals that cause devastation; a practical inability to travel east-to-west around the world except by sea due to the placement of mountain ranges, legendary beasts, and wastelands; every sea voyage is extremely dangerous due to an unlimited number of reasons; etc; etc: these are some of the instances where nature itself was fighting against civilization. Obviously, that's probably too much. It was largely an exercise to see how dangerous I could make the wilderness. However, this list contains several things you can do to make nature fight against civilization.

If you can make it so the only groups who can survive travel are logistically sound armies, wandering survivalists ("adventurers"), and merchants accompanied by several mercenaries, then the setting begins to feel very point-of-light. If nature sometimes comes to attack the cities themselves, even better. It leaves a lot of adventure in the city itself as well as journeying between cities. Of note in "Monster Blood Tattoo", there are roadways between cities but even the roadways are dangerous (basically, an army of "Lamplighters" have to patrol the roadways to keep them safe from monsters especially) and sometimes to get from one city to another you have to take a detour through another larger city.

I guess, in conclusion, the way I would make a Points-of-Light setting would be by making nature hostile.

Freelance GM
2016-07-19, 10:31 PM
I am always a fan of fantasy books and movies that create the feeling that the world in which they take place is huge and the people who live in it small and widely scattered. I would also like to run a campaign that feels that way, but all the games I played in and settings that I've read don't really feel like that to me. It always feels very cluttered and crowded with everything being wel mapped and charted and all the settlements connected.

Could possibly be just my personal perception, but I think it could have something to do with how games are usually run and settings presented. Any ideas why that might be and what could be done about it?

You've given me a ton of great advice, hopefully I can return the favor.

I'm going to try and keep this as concise as possible, and try not to rant... We'll see how it goes...


Not about critical information, but leave them largely ignorant of any history or lore from outside the region the campaign is set in. It's D&D. There's no internet, public education, or anything really to inform the players about the rest of the world. This leaves you free to reference (or make up) stories or events the players (and their characters) have no knowledge of.

It doesn't have to be plot-relevant, in fact, it's almost best as throw-away lines.
"Ever read the Ballad of Berestan? No...? Well, it's a little hard to explain, but it's a bit like the part where he serenades a flock of harpies."

I find that the best and most grounding references are allusions to other D&D campaigns you've run in the same setting. If it's the same group of players, the fanservice makes the world feel larger and persistent. If it's a new group, then they feel like the world has history.


Random encounters, random encounters, random encounters. I can't stress random encounters enough.

Carve up your region map into "zones," and make a random encounter table for each one. My last campaign had 10 tables for an area the size of Ohio. The important part is to build them based on what would logically be there, and not the party's level.

The backstory of my region said a Red, White, and Silver dragon once had a melee a trois in the region. The Silver and the White died, and the Red disappeared for a few hundred years. I had a pair of young white dragons (children of the dead White) on every random encounter table, because the whole campaign area is their hunting ground. They weren't really plot relevant, but they were there. As the players got closer to the northern mountains, the chances of the dragons appearing climbed from 5% to 15%. This was mostly a low-level campaign, and knowing that two dragons could swoop by at any moment kept the party on their toes.

It made the region feel dangerous, hostile, and unforgiving. The world was not made for their level, and they would inevitably get into fights they would have no choice but to flee from. So long as the players know out-of-character that it's an exploration game and they can wander into higher-level areas, it's not bad or evil GM'ing, and these random encounters can create some of the most memorable moments of the campaign.

"Hey, remember that time we took a long rest by that lake and got ambushed by a hydra?"
"Oh yeah. Next time we camp by a large body of water, I'm setting up my tent 35 feet from the water's edge."

Mechalich
2016-07-19, 11:17 PM
I think in order to make points of light function, you have to stress the general hostility of the land between the points.

Your average pre-industrial world is going to have basically four land types: urban areas; settled farmland; un-settled but regularly utilized territory like forests, seasonal pastures, and fishing streams; and true wilderness. Generally roads and known paths of any kind whatsoever travel only between urban areas through settled farmland (with occasional diversions over mountain passes and the like, but even highly remote passes will often have a village every few days). People who leave the roads can end up in un-settled territory very rapidly, within a day or so of steady walking in most cases, even in major civilizations. Most early civilizations aren't really points of light, but more like a network of interconnected towns and recognized roads/rivers/trails surrounded by agricultural land that people and goods can use, but it's a very thin network surrounded primarily by empty space.

Travel should only be sedate along the roads - and roads don't go everywhere, like across borders or over mountains or deserts. Once characters leave the path, then they are engaged in wilderness adventuring. In the wilderness you have nothing to rely upon but what you brought with you. Resource management becomes critical. There may be no local forage, water shortages or non-potable water are major issues, a relatively minor injury such as a sprained ankle or pulled muscle becomes challenging.

Humans are actually shockingly well-adapted to long distance overland travel, quite possibly better than any other animal on Earth and can accomplish astounding feats (ever see the movie The Way Back) but such journeys come with a price, and being able to travel with combat gear and the expectation of actually fighting at any point makes matters exponentially harder. So characters who dare the wilderness either need to travel with great preparation and large, expensive caravans - which are vulnerable to banditry, monster attacks, and the like, or cut it down to the bone in a small party and face constant food insecurity, exhaustion, and peril.

In order to do this, I would stress significant numbers of travel encounters, probably one a day or more, but avoid making most of them monsters. The wilderness should instead primarily produce natural obstacles: storms, deadfalls, washed out bridges, locust swarms, etc. These slow progress and deplete resources, potentially forcing characters to make difficult choices about whether to turn around or risk starvation when they press on, and making getting lost a life-threatening danger.

The problem is, very simply, that natural dangers are only really problematic at low levels of magical power. And I mean really low. D&D bypasses many of them using 0-level spells. Purify Food and Water, Create Water, Mending, and others make travel so much easier (Dark Sun tries to cheat by just banning all the helpful spells and powers, but it's a very brute force solution that really hurts verisimilitude). In order to make the world huge and the people small the people actually have to be small in power and not just numbers.

Vitruviansquid
2016-07-20, 12:23 AM
It strikes me that the settings I find to communicate "Points of Light"-ness do so not because of any actual largeness of the setting or the existence of dangerous elements. They exist because of the mystery in the settings.

The reason it is difficult to make such a setting in RPGs is because it is difficult to do the requisite amount of UNDER-explaining that such a setting requires. For example, Mad Max has an exciting setting, probably one of the most iconic ones in modern culture. But imagine if you had written this setting as a tabletop RPG's GM and you were trying to run Road Warrior.

Your players would be all "where do the bandits get food? Wouldn't the few remaining places where agriculture is possible also be full of wealthy and powerful dudes and their underlings so that it's impossible to take food from them? Wouldn't all the pre-apocalyptic canned dog food have been eaten by now?"

In a Points of Light setting where there's hugeness and wildness, the answer would be something like "oh, they can still find food here and there and get by, from a combination of robbing people, hunting, and scavenging." The idea that you don't know where your else meal comes from, but you'll somehow make do is what lends the wildness to the setting. Wildness is composed of danger and not knowing. But players are often not satisfied with that answer. They believe that just because getting food as a bandit would be difficult, it must therefore be impossible. They also believe that just because getting food as a bandit is difficult, nobody would want to be a bandit, and thus nobody would be a bandit. There is an attitude among RPG players (particularly players of 3.5/PF, I feel) that wants everything explained, de-mystified, and thus made tame. In trying to create a good setting of your description, the real battle is getting the players to buy it.

Yora
2016-07-20, 04:10 AM
I think food and water are probably bad examples. They are the most basic things around which society revolves (along with energy, usually in the form of fuel) and you immediately run into major trouble if there is a shortage of every kind. If these things don't work, the community immediately collapses. Since this is both something that can happen to PCs and their allies, and something the PCs can do to their enemies, I think this is one aspect that really needs to be solid and work. Everything else you can handwave, but food, water, and fuel are probably the three major things that can easily collapse the believability of the setting.
Other than that, I agree. It's neither necessary nor desirable to go into too much detail with the economy and technology of the setting.


I second this. Indeed, I would keep in mind that medieval maps are not as precise and accurate as modern ones. Depending on your world you might not even want to have maps and have the only source of geographical information be directions given by the locals (When I say no maps I don't mean quick sketches on a dry erase graph of the area the PCs can physically see, I mean world, regional, and city maps). Most Medieval travel writing takes the form of itineraries, e.g. it's 10 miles from A to B, from there its twenty miles to C. This sort of thing could facilitate a "points of light" feel, where only the settlements are detailed and the places in between are trackless wastes beyond the roads connecting the towns. I guess the general point is, instead of having any absolute point of reference for Geography the PCs should only know what the NPCs in the surrounding community could know (and whatever they've picked up in their travels).
I once saw a huge map of the Roman road system and it looked pretty much like a bus or subway map. Distances and directions where completely off to make it fit on a long scroll and you simply had the information which roads connect which cities.

I very much prefer point maps (http://hillcantons.blogspot.de/2012/01/crawling-without-hexes-pointcrawl.html) over hex maps. These much more reflect how things look at the ground and how they are known to the PCs. Even with a 30 mile resolution, the detail and accuracy of a hex map would require very elaborate and extremely labor intensive work and precision surveying equipment that probably didn't exist until the 19th century. Something like the original Lord of the Rings maps are probably the best kind of player maps to get the players into the mindset of their characters when it comes to geography.

I also don't like grid maps for dungeons for the very same reason. They look like architectual blueprints and once you start to think about it you generally find that there is no plumbing and ventilation and that a castle has no pantries or whatever. I prefer to go with zones instead of grids, as all the toilets and so on can just be assumed to be somewhere, you just don't mention them specifically.


The problem is, very simply, that natural dangers are only really problematic at low levels of magical power. And I mean really low. D&D bypasses many of them using 0-level spells. Purify Food and Water, Create Water, Mending, and others make travel so much easier (Dark Sun tries to cheat by just banning all the helpful spells and powers, but it's a very brute force solution that really hurts verisimilitude)

It's not cheating. It's adapting the rules to fit the setting. And a very good policy. There are few perfect out of the box systems for settings, unless you have the rules made specifically to fit the setting like The One Ring, or the setting made to match the system like Eberron. If you want to play in other settings you have to customize the rules to match. It's a very elegant solution that makes the world feel much more believable.

bulbaquil
2016-07-20, 05:48 AM
1. Play a system that doesn't have nice and easy "No food/water? There's a low-level spell for that" solutions.
2. Even if there is a spell for that, it's only an option for mages and those who travel with them. And there simply aren't enough mages for everyone who wants to travel to go with them. (And even if there are, would all mages really want to drop everything and travel with some random stranger at a moment's notice, even if getting paid appropriately? Even at levels where they have teleport, they'd have to spend another teleport to get back home.)
3. Roads, even when they do exist, are not made of nice paved asphalt that makes travel smooth. They're gravel or even dirt, and are prone to being washed out, flooded over, etc.
4. Keep the scale in mind. 24 miles is a day's travel in medieval times; it could be a daily commute today. And for armies - such as the king's army trying to flush out the bandits - it's more like 3 days' travel becaues of logistics issues.
5. Those environmental and survival rules? Use and enforce them, even if they're tedious. Track encumbrance. Count arrows and waterskins.
6. DON'T answer your players' "But how?" questions, at least not directly. By this I mean things like "where are the bandits getting their food?", "why has the local king not sent his forces to dispatch the bandits?", "why hasn't such and such technology been invented?". If they're really interested, make them investigate in-character.

Satinavian
2016-07-20, 06:10 AM
The best way is to skip the idea of a pseudomedieval setting.

The European middle ages had most of the continent densely settled and you coudn't walk 4 hours on any road or track without finding a village. The whole concept of feudality and society organization revolves aroud land ownership which means land is a big deal and a very limited ressourse.

If you want societies of relatively small groups of humans and vast untamed wilderness, it would be better far to look at central eurasian steppe cultures or go really far back to stone age cultures.

Overall :

- Land ownership is either no big deal or even not existing in a modern sense. There may be ownership of certain sites and there may be tribal territories, but no more

- There should be no roads that are build and maintained. That would need far to much manpower when there are so few travellers anyway. There might be people who regularly travel to certain other settlements and know the way, but there should be no roads or channels.

- national states should not exist


Maybe you want to combine this with getting rid of the "humans are the dominant species pretty much everywhere" assumption that D&D still makes.

Yora
2016-07-20, 10:25 AM
It could help with establishing the fact that there are no nations. Elven tree towns or dwarf mountain cities are much more readily perceived as being truly independent. When you have your standard human farm village it tends to come with the unspoken assumption that it also has the standard fantasy human infrastructure.

If communities are fully autonomous they also have to feel that way. I think most settlements would have to have some kind of central stronghold where the local military commander rules. A village of all farmers couldn't really survive in a world of raiders and monsters.

To go really fully Points of Light, I think every settlement should actually have some kinds of fortifications.

Traziremus
2016-07-20, 11:14 AM
Maps make people think they know the place whom's map they have and it seams small to them. Not showing them a real and correct map makes they believe the world is big. Make a map consisted of landmarks, and make NPC's tell directions in those landmarks. Once they get to the landmark they should find the place they are looking for with a good roll on Navigation check, if they fail make some random encounter rolls and tell them they found what they where looking for after hours of walking and searching.

Hoosigander
2016-07-20, 11:25 AM
Here's the map I gave my players at the start of our game:

Each hex is 18 miles.
https://wiki.rpg.net/images/5/58/Player%27s_Map_8.29.15.png

Here's what they've explored thus far:

Each hex is 6 miles. The PCs have basically only explored on the east side of the river Sarn, down to the ruined Keep they wrested from a family of trolls, christened Wolf Keep and have been gradually repairing.
https://wiki.rpg.net/images/2/2d/Player%27s_Map_Detail_5.19.16.png

Very Cool.

I once saw a huge map of the Roman road system and it looked pretty much like a bus or subway map. Distances and directions where completely off to make it fit on a long scroll and you simply had the information which roads connect which cities.

Sounds like the Tabula Peutingeriana,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_Peutingeriana.


The best way is to skip the idea of a pseudomedieval setting.

The European middle ages had most of the continent densely settled and you coudn't walk 4 hours on any road or track without finding a village. The whole concept of feudality and society organization revolves aroud land ownership which means land is a big deal and a very limited ressourse..

I agree with Satinavian, in order to have a wilderness feel you would have to go back before ancient and medieval times in Europe. Even forests in the Middle Ages were heavily exploited; e.g. coppiced, hunted, and used to fatten up pigs.

Yora
2016-07-20, 11:50 AM
It depends. In the period of 500 to 1500 there are many regions which would have been effectively wild. But for the places and period most people think of when hearing Middle Ages (England, France, Germany 1300ish) it's indeed a very different picture. And indeed, even Bronze Age farmers can clear a lot of forest pretty quickly.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-20, 01:08 PM
The best way is to skip the idea of a pseudomedieval setting.

The European middle ages had most of the continent densely settled and you coudn't walk 4 hours on any road or track without finding a village. The whole concept of feudality and society organization revolves aroud land ownership which means land is a big deal and a very limited ressourse.

If you want societies of relatively small groups of humans and vast untamed wilderness, it would be better far to look at central eurasian steppe cultures or go really far back to stone age cultures.

Overall :

- Land ownership is either no big deal or even not existing in a modern sense. There may be ownership of certain sites and there may be tribal territories, but no more

- There should be no roads that are build and maintained. That would need far to much manpower when there are so few travellers anyway. There might be people who regularly travel to certain other settlements and know the way, but there should be no roads or channels.

- national states should not exist


Maybe you want to combine this with getting rid of the "humans are the dominant species pretty much everywhere" assumption that D&D still makes.

This is part of why the setting I'm working on is based on something more like city-states, in a more "iron-agey" setting.

There's more open space between settlements. Hamlets, villages, and towns tend to form a network within a few days travel of each major city. Roads are maintained but exist mainly for the farmland to feed the city, with only a few "trade roads" maintained.

Remote areas and hinterlands are the habitation of often-hostile "barbarian" human tribes, "Wilder" (vaguely sorta kinda wild elves, the only "elves" in the setting), "beast-people", "reptile-people", "the faceless", and worse...

LibraryOgre
2016-07-20, 01:30 PM
Don't give them a map except for one they make themselves or one that has a lot of blank space in it.

Limit roads... there will be some between important settlements, of course, but make sure they're more "trails" and less part of a network of roads.

VoxRationis
2016-07-20, 01:47 PM
I think food and water are probably bad examples. They are the most basic things around which society revolves (along with energy, usually in the form of fuel) and you immediately run into major trouble if there is a shortage of every kind. If these things don't work, the community immediately collapses. Since this is both something that can happen to PCs and their allies, and something the PCs can do to their enemies, I think this is one aspect that really needs to be solid and work. Everything else you can handwave, but food, water, and fuel are probably the three major things that can easily collapse the believability of the setting.
Other than that, I agree. It's neither necessary nor desirable to go into too much detail with the economy and technology of the setting.




I also don't like grid maps for dungeons for the very same reason. They look like architectual blueprints and once you start to think about it you generally find that there is no plumbing and ventilation and that a castle has no pantries or whatever. I prefer to go with zones instead of grids, as all the toilets and so on can just be assumed to be somewhere, you just don't mention them specifically.
You don't put toilets, pantries, and kitchens in your dungeons? I think your monsters should file claims against you—you're an awful landlord.




It's not cheating. It's adapting the rules to fit the setting. And a very good policy. There are few perfect out of the box systems for settings, unless you have the rules made specifically to fit the setting like The One Ring, or the setting made to match the system like Eberron. If you want to play in other settings you have to customize the rules to match. It's a very elegant solution that makes the world feel much more believable.
I'm glad you see it that way. I was wondering about whether I should alter magic systems (in particular spell lists) for a particular setting I'm developing. It's nice to know there's support for that kind of editing.

2D8HP
2016-07-20, 03:23 PM
You don't put toilets, pantries, and kitchens in your dungeons? I think your monsters should file claims against you—you're an awful land.I'm surely not the only one who thought of

this, (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0086.html) and

this. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0087.html)

:wink:

Yora
2016-07-21, 12:29 AM
There's more open space between settlements. Hamlets, villages, and towns tend to form a network within a few days travel of each major city. Roads are maintained but exist mainly for the farmland to feed the city, with only a few "trade roads" maintained.

I like to use water travel a lot. Not only is it historically accurate (all old major cities have sea or river access), it also mirrors space opera where it generally takes space travel to get from one place to another.

VoxRationis
2016-07-21, 12:33 AM
I like to use water travel a lot. Not only is it historically accurate (all old major cities have sea or river access), it also mirrors space opera where it generally takes space travel to get from one place to another.

In addition to forcing vehicular travel, having societies that spread via water travel (like the Phoenicians or the early colonial periods of the settling of North America) also helps establish a hostile wilderness. If other "civilized" locales are reached by ship, then by land you must be heading into someplace wild and rugged. I'm developing a 2e setting right now where the main culture exists wholly along major rivers in a tropical rainforest, and a major concept in it is that people are terrified of travel inland.

Mechalich
2016-07-21, 01:50 AM
There's a lot of things you have to make sure aren't a part of your setting (or at least are only available in extraordinary circumstances) in order to make dangerous wilderness matter and to enforce things like water travel as something the PCs care about.

Flight and teleportation are obvious examples. In d20, flight comes on-line at level 5-7 (and not just through spells, the druid gets it via wildshape and rangers and paladins start acquiring winged mounts). At that point overland travel considers become, from a PC perspective, totally irrelevant, and travel distance balloons to a scale such that it is generally possible to travel between several points of light - even ones that are horribly distant - in a single day. Other systems can actually be worse. Flight comes on-line for the whole party at chargen in Exalted (since terrestrial circle sorcery provides several means for the party sorcerer to transport the whole party) making the entire points-of-light aspect of that setting - one that is stressed heavily in some sourcebooks - utterly irrelevant. Teleportation is even worse, since flying generally takes at least some time and allows distance to be meaningful (the Wheel of Time is instructive here, once people started Travelling all over the place the structure of storytelling in that world was irrevocably altered).

Once you've managed to prevent characters from winging it across the map like eagles you still have to make travel something less than a pleasure cruise. That means limiting magic than can produce food and water, block elemental effects, ward off natural predators, or even function as automated sentries. All of these things are possible with very low level D&D spells or cheap items. Even an extremely low-powered use of magic can make a journey effectively stress free: in Joe Abercrombie's the First Law - which is brutally low fantasy - in order have the group undergo a major world-crossing journey that pushed them to the limit, Abercrombie had to smack Bayaz around to prevent him from draining away the tension.

Then there's communications technology. Even if travel is difficult, the world won't feel big and isolated if people are able to talk to each other all the time. Anything above the level of communication provided by the ravens of ASOIAF is probably more than can be allowed to properly sustain a points of light feel.

Those ravens are actually useful in illustrating how points of light may only exist for certain types of people in a world. In ASOIAF anyone who has sustained access to ravens has a reasonable understanding of what is happening across Westeros and can at least monitor events, as Jon Snow does despite his physical isolation at the Wall, while characters without access to ravens haven't the slightest idea of what's going on and regularly get blindsided by changes in the situation, which happens to Arya several times. Since PCs inevitably get access to the cool powers, that means you have to expect them to be among the most mobile and most effectively informed people in a setting when planning your limitations to maintain the feel of vastness.

Garimeth
2016-07-21, 10:27 AM
Cool discussion!

Like Yora, I also really like water travel. Outside of only a handful of settlements everything in my setting is by some body of water. Conversely the ocean is too rough and full of storms and monsters to be traversed with the current level of tech. If they try to expand east, that's where the orc hordes are. To the south are the centaurs. There are people that have settled to the north, but its hard living and difficult to get there. It gives the setting this feeling of being isolated, which it is.

I also have to give a big second to Mechalich's post. Fast travel, fast communication, and things that allow automation are what is going to make your setting not be wild. After you establish why this is the case for the setting, you have to figure out how to make it that way for players. I haven't run my setting in D&D yet, but when I do I am going to restrict or ban a lot of spells because of this.

Yora
2016-07-21, 03:06 PM
I think removing the remaining teleportation spells was the first thing after capping level advancement at 10th level.

Just got another idea from reading adventure reviews on tenfootpole. Part of making the world feel big and mysterious is to fill it with things that the players don't completely understand. Any time the players encounter something they didn't know could exist they will wonder what else might be waiting out there for them yet. Any time you want to make a monster more interesting by letting it act differently than normal, don't give it a magic item. Give it a special ability! It can even be functionally the same effect. The only gameplay difference is that the players won't get the magic item if they win. (Which can be an upside if it would be a really funky ability.) A giant werebat that shots lasers from its eyes is spectacular. A giant werebat with a wand of magic missiles is not.

You don't have to use the standard rules for players to get unusual effects for monsters. In some settings it would probably annoy me if a creature suddenly shows new powers I know it shouldn't have. But for a wilderness mystery setting I think this can easily be established as a regular fact: Sometimes magical creatures have strange unusual extra powers. Dark Sun did this, and presumably quite well. Though it used psionics for that, which I wonder how many people always ignored.

kyoryu
2016-07-21, 03:12 PM
I think there's a few things:

1) Remove easy/cheap/safe fast transportation.
2) "Number of changes" is often a good metric for how people view distance.
3) Number of things that happen is another good metric.

Basically, no matter how loudly you tell the players "it's so far between Heresville and Thereton!" if it's glossed over with "You travel over the plains for <time>" it's going to feel close.

Things have to happen. Ideally, terrain changes as well. So you get either "Oh, yeah, on the trip these ten things happened!" or "Jeeze, there's like five different areas between here and there!", or ideally some combination of the above.

"You're still going through the plains" works well in the real world (try driving through Texas), but unless you're literally willing to bore your players to convey a sense of distance, it's not super workable in games.

LibraryOgre
2016-07-21, 03:20 PM
Another thought: Language. Part of what makes worlds feel small is communication, and part of that is language. You might have a small area dominated by a single ethnic group with closely related languages (Greece, Italy for the most part, etc.), but going beyond that, you have an entirely different language and way of living. You stayed in public houses throughout Italy? Here, you guest with someone every night. You're expected to bring a gift equal to their station, which you'll understand once you learn their language. You have been terribly rude for months because you're an idiot. Move a couple weeks west and you're staying in the "guest lodge", and offered local wives while you live there. Oh, "wives" is just the closest approximation the translator knows in your language; they're pretty much slaves, and the tribe is hoping you'll take them away and make them no longer a burden on society. They consider outlander women to be transsexuals because they don't act like "real" women. Did you go south a bit? New language, new customs. Maybe one of your slave women knows a bit of the language?

sktarq
2016-07-21, 04:24 PM
I think it's probably best to keep adventures local, with the PCs and NPCs being limited to whatever allies and resources they have nearby....Travelling to another major town means moving on to a different adventure and whatever unfinished business you left behind won't be waiting for you if you come back later.
If you are making the setting to only play in yourself then doing that fiat is fine but if others will be running it too then getting other people to focus on local adventures is going to be something you will have to build into the setting. By focusing on logistics and time and how much that takes then it makes long distance adventuring troublesome and thus games are incentivized to stay local. Especially in sandbox style play incentives vs proclamations are important for shaping gamestyle. Also if connections and trade between to locations are spotty and rare then those taking those few trips basically are the locals adventurers.



It strikes me that the settings I find to communicate "Points of Light"-ness do so not because of any actual largeness of the setting or the existence of dangerous elements. They exist because of the mystery in the settings.

The reason it is difficult to make such a setting in RPGs is because it is difficult to do the requisite amount of UNDER-explaining that such a setting requires. For example, Mad Max has an exciting setting, probably one of the most iconic ones in modern culture. But imagine if you had written this setting as a tabletop RPG's GM and you were trying to run Road Warrior.

Your players would be all "where do the bandits get food? Wouldn't the few remaining places where agriculture is possible also be full of wealthy and powerful dudes and their underlings so that it's impossible to take food from them? Wouldn't all the pre-apocalyptic canned dog food have been eaten by now?"

In a Points of Light setting where there's hugeness and wildness, the answer would be something like "oh, they can still find food here and there and get by, from a combination of robbing people, hunting, and scavenging." The idea that you don't know where your else meal comes from, but you'll somehow make do is what lends the wildness to the setting. Wildness is composed of danger and not knowing. But players are often not satisfied with that answer. They believe that just because getting food as a bandit would be difficult, it must therefore be impossible. They also believe that just because getting food as a bandit is difficult, nobody would want to be a bandit, and thus nobody would be a bandit. There is an attitude among RPG players (particularly players of 3.5/PF, I feel) that wants everything explained, de-mystified, and thus made tame. In trying to create a good setting of your description, the real battle is getting the players to buy it.
Yup which is why I can't watch the Mad Max setting-it is so stupid. From driving style, rubber supply issues, to the wastes of resources in a world defined by resource scarcity. Just drains any story of everything. . .
So focus on why things are where they are. Bandits in your world? Full time banditry needs lots of stuff moving through so that losses due to the bandits do not shut the tradeflow down due to a loss of profits. But if the bandits are only seasonal because the spring crops can be left until harvest (like the intra-maori musket wars of new zealand) and that season also is the best weather window to trade through the area it would explain high banditry-but there are also other ways.

Quickquote
bulbaquil
6. DON'T answer your players' "But how?" questions, at least not directly. By this I mean things like "where are the bandits getting their food?", "why has the local king not sent his forces to dispatch the bandits?", "why hasn't such and such technology been invented?". If they're really interested, make them investigate in-character.

Related to the above and to an extent I agree with this. Except have those answers for yourself worked out because when the PC's do investigate they will want a good answer after putting in that much more effort.

Quickquote
Yora
I also don't like grid maps for dungeons for the very same reason. They look like architectual blueprints and once you start to think about it you generally find that there is no plumbing and ventilation and that a castle has no pantries or whatever. I prefer to go with zones instead of grids, as all the toilets and so on can just be assumed to be somewhere, you just don't mention them specifically.

Really? because I would find that such a choice drains so much from the game. It seems to drain the game of so humour, fun plans, etc. Probably because so many of plans require knowing where the bathroom, a spare closet, 2 story spaces, are. This is true for both NPCs (as a DM) or as a PC.

Also with language-don't make it easy to learn foreign tongues-it may well be a miniadventure to find a teacher if you are not in a different place and trying to learn the local language.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-21, 04:41 PM
Another thought: Language. Part of what makes worlds feel small is communication, and part of that is language. You might have a small area dominated by a single ethnic group with closely related languages (Greece, Italy for the most part, etc.), but going beyond that, you have an entirely different language and way of living. You stayed in public houses throughout Italy? Here, you guest with someone every night. You're expected to bring a gift equal to their station, which you'll understand once you learn their language. You have been terribly rude for months because you're an idiot. Move a couple weeks west and you're staying in the "guest lodge", and offered local wives while you live there. Oh, "wives" is just the closest approximation the translator knows in your language; they're pretty much slaves, and the tribe is hoping you'll take them away and make them no longer a burden on society. They consider outlander women to be transsexuals because they don't act like "real" women. Did you go south a bit? New language, new customs. Maybe one of your slave women knows a bit of the language?

On the subject of language, I've been reading that before the era of mass media or widespread dictionaries with "standard pronunciation", even dialects and accents of the same language in the same country could be almost mutually unintelligible -- so that for example in 1300 CE, putting people together in a room from various parts of France would have resulted in more frustration than communication.

Mechalich
2016-07-21, 04:54 PM
Language barriers are both a great way to make a world feel huge and varied and at the same time, a giant pain in the butt for storytelling purposes and doubly so for actual tabletop play. The problem is that without the ability to communicate, a character lacks the ability to participate. Specific factors for tabletop include the problem of having one character translate for the rest of the party - which works reasonably well in a prose narrative but generally collapses with a group of players and a GM, and the problem of communicating without a shared langauge. You can get a surprising amount across through gestures, tone, and a handful of recognizable words, but it depends heavily on context and having physical props that aren't available in the abstraction of tabletop. For example, getting a group to 'stop here' is relatively easy to signal through gestures when you're actually walking down a road or trail, but troubling to convey in the tabletop environment.

I would love to see a game develop a good system to handle the challenges of language variation across cultures and polities because I think it opens up a great many possibilities, but I've yet to see it be done effectively. Most games that have language barriers simply impose a point or resource tax on the party and nothing more.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-21, 05:03 PM
Language barriers are both a great way to make a world feel huge and varied and at the same time, a giant pain in the butt for storytelling purposes and doubly so for actual tabletop play. The problem is that without the ability to communicate, a character lacks the ability to participate. Specific factors for tabletop include the problem of having one character translate for the rest of the party - which works reasonably well in a prose narrative but generally collapses with a group of players and a GM, and the problem of communicating without a shared langauge. You can get a surprising amount across through gestures, tone, and a handful of recognizable words, but it depends heavily on context and having physical props that aren't available in the abstraction of tabletop. For example, getting a group to 'stop here' is relatively equal to signal through gestures when you're actually walking down a road or trail, but troubling to convey in the tabletop environment.

I would love to see a game develop a good system to handle the challenges of language variation across cultures and polities because I think it opens up a great many possibilities, but I've yet to see it be done effectively. Most games that have language barriers simply impose a point or resource tax on the party and nothing more.


True.

All this worldbuilding is fun, and it's so very tempting to get lost in all the details and build up a whole system of languages and dialects and accents and questions about literacy and all the ways that can affect characters... but at the end of the day, when worldbuilding for an RPG, the setting has to actually be fun to play in, and not a PITA.

2D8HP
2016-07-21, 05:10 PM
On the subject of language, I've been reading that before the era of mass media or widespread dictionaries with "standard pronunciation", even dialects and accents of the same language in the same country could be almost mutually unintelligible -- so that for example in 1300 CE, putting people together in a room from various parts of France would have resulted in more frustration than communication.Still true to some extent. I had a Welding instructor who came from the U.S. state of Georgia, and to this Californian was much, much harder to understand than most immigrants (including a Romanian welding teacher) Similarly, while most of what I hear from British movies and television is intelligible to my, for some of it (Broad Scots for example) I need subtitles.

BTW I read that Finnish children watch a lot of English language programs with Finnish subtitles, and they do very well academically. So when my son started watching cartoons, I kept the volume low, and I had the captions feature on. It worked great!
I didn't have a television till I was seven, and I learned to read much older than my son did!
Don't believe that nonsense about TV being bad. PBS with subtitles is great learning tool.

Vitruviansquid
2016-07-21, 05:45 PM
Yup which is why I can't watch the Mad Max setting-it is so stupid. From driving style, rubber supply issues, to the wastes of resources in a world defined by resource scarcity. Just drains any story of everything. . .
So focus on why things are where they are. Bandits in your world? Full time banditry needs lots of stuff moving through so that losses due to the bandits do not shut the tradeflow down due to a loss of profits. But if the bandits are only seasonal because the spring crops can be left until harvest (like the intra-maori musket wars of new zealand) and that season also is the best weather window to trade through the area it would explain high banditry-but there are also other ways.


Once again, things are de-mystified thanks to the thinking that things which are improbable or foolish are impossible.

LibraryOgre
2016-07-21, 05:51 PM
Still true to some extent. I had a Welding instructor who came from the U.S. state of Georgia, and to this Californian was much, much harder to understand than most immigrants (including a Romanian welding teacher) Similarly, while most of what I hear from British movies and television is intelligible to my, for some of it (Broad Scots for example) I need subtitles.

Our captain has a handicap, sad to tell
He's from Georgia, so he doesn't speak the language very well!
-Tom Lehrer, It Makes a Fellow Proud to be a Soldier

However, things like this are where we get back to systems. For example, in a recent supplement I wrote for a game that uses percentile-ranked skills, with different percentiles indicating different tiers of ability (so someone with with a 25% only has a slight difference from someone with a 24%, but a 26% is a new tier, and thus represents much more ability), I ruled that for three groups, there was a 5% penalty translating between their closely related dialects, but if they tried to speak with a certain 4th group, there was an entire tier's penalty... someone with top-level skills would still be pretty good, but someone with absolutely basic skills wouldn't be able to communicate at all.

That's a bit harder to model in d20, which has binary language skills... you either speak a language or you do not.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-21, 05:59 PM
Once again, things are de-mystified thanks to the thinking that things which are improbable or foolish are impossible.

A setting based on a pileup of the improbable and foolish probably needs a good de-mystifying.

Vitruviansquid
2016-07-21, 06:31 PM
It's more unbelievable to imagine the sterilized world where nobody does anything foolish and the improbable never happens.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-21, 06:48 PM
It's more unbelievable to imagine the sterilized world where nobody does anything foolish and the improbable never happens.


That's a bit of a false dichotomy you're leaning on there.


The choice is not binary, between "massive pileup of coincidences, improbabilities, and foolishness" - or - "nothing unexpected ever happens at all, no one ever beats the odds, and everyone takes the most logical choice every time".

Vitruviansquid
2016-07-21, 06:52 PM
All I've done was put full-time bandits into a world where they might have an difficult and inefficient time finding food to sustain their banditry. That is our instance of improbability and foolishness.

You want to disallow the *only* instance of improbability and foolishness I've put on the table and I'm the one making this false dichotomy?

sktarq
2016-07-21, 07:23 PM
Once again, things are de-mystified thanks to the thinking that things which are improbable or foolish are impossible.

There is improbably and there is stupid and there is flat out counterproductive and self contradictory. And it is the last that I can't deal with.

Statement-there is a shortage of fuel. . . this is taken as important fact in the Mad Max world.

So what are some logical consequences of this statement.
Vehicles that are more efficient will have an advantage to those that are wasteful.
Driving in a fuel efficient manner would have larger relative advantage than in our world.
Uses of fuel that do not advantage the group would be avoided except as a show of status.

Now just look at a mad max style convoy. They drive in a way that is massively wasteful. All the funky looking add ons to the cars make them heavier, with a higher drag and need significant resources in terms of labour, materials, and welding equipment. This is exactly the wrong thing to do for short, medium, or long term survival.

The conflict between the statement and shown actions mean that the first part isn't true or that the world isn't held together well enough for me to care.

I could go on about rubber (known degradation in storage, water/other creation needs, wear usage), water usage, food, the whole bandits need people to steal from to survive (by definition) and there is a statement that there are no people/no reason for there to be people, etc. but it is this sort of stupid that I can't let slide. That's not De-mystifing that is looking at the in world givens and the incentives produced. The conflict between the statement and the shown result increases the mystifying.

Its why I said that even if you don't tell your PC's how something works (which is probably a good thing in many Points of Light situations), as the world builder you need to know because when the PC's go looking there better be something for them to find.

Also I in general let a lot of the small stuff slide. A world with no deserts has resources that only come from a desert? That stuff regularly happens but I ignore it most of the time. But if these conflicts are a significant part of the setting I call fowl. And if you add improbability to another improbability to another I also call BS.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-21, 07:28 PM
All I've done was put full-time bandits into a world where they might have an difficult and inefficient time finding food to sustain their banditry. That is our instance of improbability and foolishness.

You want to disallow the *only* instance of improbability and foolishness I've put on the table and I'm the one making this false dichotomy?


I thought the context was the contrivance-pileup nature of a setting of the sort Mad Max is set in...




Yup which is why I can't watch the Mad Max setting-it is so stupid. From driving style, rubber supply issues, to the wastes of resources in a world defined by resource scarcity. Just drains any story of everything. . .
So focus on why things are where they are. Bandits in your world? Full time banditry needs lots of stuff moving through so that losses due to the bandits do not shut the tradeflow down due to a loss of profits. But if the bandits are only seasonal because the spring crops can be left until harvest (like the intra-maori musket wars of new zealand) and that season also is the best weather window to trade through the area it would explain high banditry-but there are also other ways.


Which is built on a giant stack of the improbable, the foolish, etc.




There is improbably and there is stupid and there is flat out counterproductive and self contradictory. And it is the last that I can't deal with.

Statement-there is a shortage of fuel. . . this is taken as important fact in the Mad Max world.

So what are some logical consequences of this statement.
Vehicles that are more efficient will have an advantage to those that are wasteful.
Driving in a fuel efficient manner would have larger relative advantage than in our world.
Uses of fuel that do not advantage the group would be avoided except as a show of status.

Now just look at a mad max style convoy. They drive in a way that is massively wasteful. All the funky looking add ons to the cars make them heavier, with a higher drag and need significant resources in terms of labour, materials, and welding equipment. This is exactly the wrong thing to do for short, medium, or long term survival.

The conflict between the statement and shown actions mean that the first part isn't true or that the world isn't held together well enough for me to care.

I could go on about rubber (known degradation in storage, water/other creation needs, wear usage), water usage, food, the whole bandits need people to steal from to survive (by definition) and there is a statement that there are no people/no reason for there to be people, etc. but it is this sort of stupid that I can't let slide. That's not De-mystifing that is looking at the in world givens and the incentives produced. The conflict between the statement and the shown result increases the mystifying.

Its why I said that even if you don't tell your PC's how something works (which is probably a good thing in many Points of Light situations), as the world builder you need to know because when the PC's go looking there better be something for them to find.

Also I in general let a lot of the small stuff slide. A world with no deserts has resources that only come from a desert? That stuff regularly happens but I ignore it most of the time. But if these conflicts are a significant part of the setting I call fowl. And if you add improbability to another improbability to another I also call BS.


Exactly.


"Points of light" is not an excuse for a setting that isn't internally coherent and consistent, or for "flash over substance" worldbuilding.

.

Vitruviansquid
2016-07-21, 08:20 PM
There is improbably and there is stupid and there is flat out counterproductive and self contradictory. And it is the last that I can't deal with.

Statement-there is a shortage of fuel. . . this is taken as important fact in the Mad Max world.

So what are some logical consequences of this statement.
Vehicles that are more efficient will have an advantage to those that are wasteful.
Driving in a fuel efficient manner would have larger relative advantage than in our world.
Uses of fuel that do not advantage the group would be avoided except as a show of status.

Now just look at a mad max style convoy. They drive in a way that is massively wasteful. All the funky looking add ons to the cars make them heavier, with a higher drag and need significant resources in terms of labour, materials, and welding equipment. This is exactly the wrong thing to do for short, medium, or long term survival.

The conflict between the statement and shown actions mean that the first part isn't true or that the world isn't held together well enough for me to care.

I could go on about rubber (known degradation in storage, water/other creation needs, wear usage), water usage, food, the whole bandits need people to steal from to survive (by definition) and there is a statement that there are no people/no reason for there to be people, etc. but it is this sort of stupid that I can't let slide. That's not De-mystifing that is looking at the in world givens and the incentives produced. The conflict between the statement and the shown result increases the mystifying.

Its why I said that even if you don't tell your PC's how something works (which is probably a good thing in many Points of Light situations), as the world builder you need to know because when the PC's go looking there better be something for them to find.

Also I in general let a lot of the small stuff slide. A world with no deserts has resources that only come from a desert? That stuff regularly happens but I ignore it most of the time. But if these conflicts are a significant part of the setting I call fowl. And if you add improbability to another improbability to another I also call BS.

See, this is what I'm talking about in this paragraph:



In a Points of Light setting where there's hugeness and wildness, the answer would be something like "oh, they can still find food here and there and get by, from a combination of robbing people, hunting, and scavenging." The idea that you don't know where your else meal comes from, but you'll somehow make do is what lends the wildness to the setting. Wildness is composed of danger and not knowing. But players are often not satisfied with that answer. They believe that just because getting food as a bandit would be difficult, it must therefore be impossible. They also believe that just because getting food as a bandit is difficult, nobody would want to be a bandit, and thus nobody would be a bandit. There is an attitude among RPG players (particularly players of 3.5/PF, I feel) that wants everything explained, de-mystified, and thus made tame. In trying to create a good setting of your description, the real battle is getting the players to buy it.

You don't know how bandits are driving around in the Mad Max world. You have actually already given the advice that you shouldn't tell people how things work in your points of light setting. Except you, the giver of this advice, did not buy the setting if the creator hasn't explained to you why the bandits work.

Now, explanations *have* already appeared as to how the bandits work. In fact, you have already posited one - that it is a sign of status to drive a huge, inefficient vehicle in an obnoxious, inefficient way.

We may posit some other explanations. The bandits could be foolish, as anarchic hoodlums with a live-fast-die-young approach to life may be. The bandits could receive more fuel by their show of wealth and status and intimidating the fuel from normal people than they would save by trading in their spiky cars for fuel-efficient sedans. There may simply not be very many surviving fuel-efficient cars that can handle the routes they drive. There are any number of other explanations out there, or, hell, we can even just assume that the storyteller knows and it's something we haven't thought of yet, and it is actually perfectly internally consistent, and we don't question it because that would be asking the storyteller to ruin his Points of Light setting.

But instead of allowing these plausible (if not probable) explanations, you would no-sell the world because you expect some particular explanation, that all people act on principles of efficiency and advantage, that the world refuses to give.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-21, 08:25 PM
See, this is what I'm talking about in this paragraph:



You don't know how bandits are driving around in the Mad Max world. You have actually already given the advice that you shouldn't tell people how things work in your points of light setting. Except you, the giver of this advice, did not buy the setting if the creator hasn't explained to you why the bandits work.

Now, explanations *have* already appeared as to how the bandits work. In fact, you have already posited one - that it is a sign of status to drive a huge, inefficient vehicle in an obnoxious, inefficient way.

We may posit some other explanations. The bandits could be foolish, as anarchic hoodlums with a live-fast-die-young approach to life may be. The bandits could receive more fuel by their show of wealth and status and intimidating the fuel from normal people than they would save by trading in their spiky cars for fuel-efficient sedans. There may simply not be very many surviving fuel-efficient cars that can handle the routes they drive. There are any number of other explanations out there, or, hell, we can even just assume that the storyteller knows and it's something we haven't thought of yet, and it is actually perfectly internally consistent, and we don't question it because that would be asking the storyteller to ruin his Points of Light setting.

But instead of allowing these plausible (if not probable) explanations, you would no-sell the world because you expect some particular explanation, that all people act on principles of efficiency and advantage, that the world refuses to give.


Except that as he keeps pointing out, it's not just the "fuel usage" implausibility -- that alone wouldn't topple the setting.

It's the entire stack of implausibilities upon which the setting is teetering precariously. Fuel use, food sources, rubber for tires, general issues with out some of the people behave, etc.

Vitruviansquid
2016-07-21, 10:38 PM
Why would I talk about these other implausibilities? I'm trying to demonstrate why it is difficult to make the world "feel huge and wild" in an RPG. I think we have adequately demonstrated the mechanisms by which RPG players leech the mystery out of settings, and the same mechanisms would be at work if we started talking about tire deterioration and such.

You would say how tire deterioration should work, and because the setting doesn't match your expectations, the setting is incoherent.

I would say that we don't need to know, we just need to be able to think of a few possibilities.

You would say those possibilities are too far-fetched, and besides, there are plenty more things that you can't imagine working in the setting.

And repeat.

sktarq
2016-07-21, 11:06 PM
"Think of plausible" is just BS to me if you call that part of the finished setting. It is key

We don't need to know doesn't cut it. Why? Because when I go to clear those bandits I'm not looking for their throats I'm looking for their petrol supplies or the salt licks for their horses to cripple them before mopping up stragglers.

The plausibles of the rubber issues exist (perhaps) but they will be visible. They will be vulnerable to attack on that front.

The players don't need to know how it works until they go look but lots of obvious self contradiction doesn't add mystery it it says "there is no mystery. Just a whatever from the DM" You are creating a Wizard of Oz instead of a Merlin.

"mystery" should never cover for lazy. Only when Players know there is stuff working behind the curtain will they respect it. Because then what they see and do matter, what they see are the clues to the mysteries.

A clever player sees that most bandit vehicles are built light with coasting wheels and minimal crew (to keep supply kits down) and the leader has a huge smoker with spikes etc can figure out that fuel is their limiting factor. And now knows what convoy vehicle to defend, how to lure them, and how to cripple them.

And if the world does hang together from all the behind the scenes strings and DM/ST prework events later in game will seem to happen naturally. Spider master villains when revealed will make sense and the parts that don't will be seen as opportunities, instead of mistakes if the PC's trust that the world will make sense if they get the info.

If the world hangs together everything you see is a clue to a thousand mysteries you haven't asked yet and one or may be critically important.

Thrudd
2016-07-21, 11:26 PM
I think removing the remaining teleportation spells was the first thing after capping level advancement at 10th level.

Just got another idea from reading adventure reviews on tenfootpole. Part of making the world feel big and mysterious is to fill it with things that the players don't completely understand. Any time the players encounter something they didn't know could exist they will wonder what else might be waiting out there for them yet. Any time you want to make a monster more interesting by letting it act differently than normal, don't give it a magic item. Give it a special ability! It can even be functionally the same effect. The only gameplay difference is that the players won't get the magic item if they win. (Which can be an upside if it would be a really funky ability.) A giant werebat that shots lasers from its eyes is spectacular. A giant werebat with a wand of magic missiles is not.

You don't have to use the standard rules for players to get unusual effects for monsters. In some settings it would probably annoy me if a creature suddenly shows new powers I know it shouldn't have. But for a wilderness mystery setting I think this can easily be established as a regular fact: Sometimes magical creatures have strange unusual extra powers. Dark Sun did this, and presumably quite well. Though it used psionics for that, which I wonder how many people always ignored.

Yes, this is important. The players should not know what to expect when their characters leave home. The characters should not know what is out there. Use custom monsters, or monsters your players haven't heard of and aren't familiar with. Make sure anything that might be familiar to them is different enough that they can't recognize it. Only those races and creatures that are a part of the normal "point of light" society should be known to the characters and players. Cultures encountered "out there" should be strange and different.

Vitruviansquid
2016-07-22, 12:39 AM
So what happens when you ask about where the bandits get their petrol so you can attack their source? The movie has basically already told you - they intimidate people for it, find some in the ruins of civilization, probably have a bit stored in a base or a cache somewhere. But what is the response?

Nope, implausible. I can't handle this setting.

Want to ask where the bandits get their rubber? George Miller might tell you if you asked him, there's just no guarantee the answer will fit your views.

There has been nothing lazy about the setting unless you count that it's not tailored to your particular view on how the world *should* work. That is the reason why worlds that feel huge and wild are difficult to make in RPG. People keep demanding that the answers be their answers.

Perhaps I should clarify: When I say that you should accept a few possibilities rather than The Answer, I am telling you how to behave as an audience member, not as a setting writer. Of course you don't shrug and go "Idunno" if you are GM of a campaign and your players ask you where the petrol comes from.

Satinavian
2016-07-22, 12:51 AM
@Thrudd
I don't think that is a good idea. The characters are from the setting and thus should know the setting. Especcially if fast travel options are cut, they will operate in the surroundings of their home base which means they should encounter things known in their home base.

Completely new monsters everywhere would not really fit into a points of light-scenario. It would fit and even be vital in a real discovery scenario, where PCs are explorers/conquistadors going to strange new land without any previous contact.

I would not change monsters in a points of lights campaign more than i would do in any other campaign.

goto124
2016-07-22, 06:49 AM
The GM could ensure the characters are not much more knowledgeable than the players, to give the mystery required in a points of light setting. After all, it's supposed to have a lot of unexplored and unknown ground, and having familiar monsters the players/characters have already heard of and know about will not help in that regard.

Yora
2016-07-22, 07:13 AM
I think it's probably a good idea to go with a good mix of plenty of ordinary creatures that the PCs are very familiar with and rare strange magical creatures.

Garimeth
2016-07-22, 07:55 AM
@Thrudd
I don't think that is a good idea. The characters are from the setting and thus should know the setting. Especcially if fast travel options are cut, they will operate in the surroundings of their home base which means they should encounter things known in their home base.

Completely new monsters everywhere would not really fit into a points of light-scenario. It would fit and even be vital in a real discovery scenario, where PCs are explorers/conquistadors going to strange new land without any previous contact.

I would not change monsters in a points of lights campaign more than i would do in any other campaign.


I think it's probably a good idea to go with a good mix of plenty of ordinary creatures that the PCs are very familiar with and rare strange magical creatures.

I think that you can do what Yora and Thrudd are saying without conflicting Satinavian. Everything immediately nearby the home base should be familiar, but as soon as you venture into the unknown, which is absolutely a theme with PoL, then things should be alien and strange. I personally use the Feywild for how I explain those types of things, but that may not work in all settings. Really though you don't need an explanation, unless the PCs investigate the explanation.

FOR EXAMPLE:
So not to wade into the Mad Max conversation much, but imagine if the only problem that certain people had with the setting was the fuel scarcity/waste inconsistency. When a PC comments on it the DM could respond "Yeah, this doesn't make any sense to your character, you've never seen waste like this before." So now maybe the PCs decide to investigate. Plot! This is good. You just have to make sure that YOU know, or can quickly invent, how they have fuel.

This is easily translated to many other "inconsistencies" and I do this very frequently in my games. I actually drop what I feel are an excessive amounts of detail/hints/foreshadowing, because somehow my players never pick up what I'm dropping.

A NOTE ON LANGUAGE:
I think the way you abstract the gestures method of communication is by just letting the player say what they do. "Kilroy is going to point at the NPC then the ground and make a small stomping motion. If when I start to move again the NPC does also I'm going to sharply hold up my hand, and point emphatically back at the ground." That works just fine without props. I'm also fine with "I'm going to motion for him to give me the object". Unless the difficulty of communication is specifically what you are trying to convey, and you just want a lack of SPECIFIC information or communication, then just assume some mutual understanding. This has worked fine for me both in DMing, and in real life travel. I also let my players have an unspecified hand and arm signals. We've never identified what they are and we don't need to. they've been questing together for like 3 years in game time and they are almost all prior military. We just say that at some point they sat down and agreed on some signals. I don't wait for "I hold out my right arm and punch the air to my right three times, quickly" I let them say "I signal there is a group to the right we're going to attack"

Now when we are talking about the problem of only one person speaking the language, the easiest thing is to just let people talk, and assume the player is translating everything unless they state otherwise. The only time I don't use this is if there are two translators involved. Its really not much different than using a translator in real life, the only real difference is you don't need to pause as often.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-22, 08:13 AM
So what happens when you ask about where the bandits get their petrol so you can attack their source? The movie has basically already told you - they intimidate people for it, find some in the ruins of civilization, probably have a bit stored in a base or a cache somewhere. But what is the response?

Nope, implausible. I can't handle this setting.

Want to ask where the bandits get their rubber? George Miller might tell you if you asked him, there's just no guarantee the answer will fit your views.

There has been nothing lazy about the setting unless you count that it's not tailored to your particular view on how the world *should* work. That is the reason why worlds that feel huge and wild are difficult to make in RPG. People keep demanding that the answers be their answers.

Perhaps I should clarify: When I say that you should accept a few possibilities rather than The Answer, I am telling you how to behave as an audience member, not as a setting writer. Of course you don't shrug and go "Idunno" if you are GM of a campaign and your players ask you where the petrol comes from.

Oh, yes, how dare an audience member, or player for that matter, ever ask questions.

They should be turning their higher brain functions off and feeling, not thinking.

:smallconfused:

See signature.

goto124
2016-07-22, 08:16 AM
Your players can ask questions. You can get those players to roll Knowledge checks and/or tell them what their characters would know. You can let the players/PCs investigate.

As long as you set up your world to actually be self-consistent and have the real explanations on hand, such that investigation doesn't turn up "well it really is illogical".

Satinavian
2016-07-22, 08:24 AM
I think that you can do what Yora and Thrudd are saying without conflicting Satinavian. Everything immediately nearby the home base should be familiar, but as soon as you venture into the unknown, which is absolutely a theme with PoL, then things should be alien and strange. I personally use the Feywild for how I explain those types of things, but that may not work in all settings. Really though you don't need an explanation, unless the PCs investigate the explanation.As soon as they are really far enough away from their homebase they can' go back easily. And most of the problems and questhooks from home don't reach that far either. Any enemies that threaten the home base must be near enough to do it. I don't think it is that common to go that far away. At least, when the Players decide they will act on thigs, their PCs know about which will nearly always be things near home.

So not to wade into the Mad Max conversation much, but imagine if the only problem that certain people had with the setting was the fuel scarcity/waste inconsistency. When a PC comments on it the DM could respond "Yeah, this doesn't make any sense to your character, you've never seen waste like this before." So now maybe the PCs decide to investigate. Plot! That only works if you actually have a good reason when the time comes and when those strange inconsistencies are rare enough to be special and worth investigating. Also the players need to assume that there is something to discover otherwise they will sooner go out of their way to avoid an obvious plothole.

I would advise to make an effort to avoid inconsistencies instead of a mindset of "when it comes up, i'll just wing it". That makes for a more believable, better world. The mysteries with real justification will fit in fine anyway.

sktarq
2016-07-22, 09:30 AM
Your players can ask questions. You can get those players to roll Knowledge checks and/or tell them what their characters would know. You can let the players/PCs investigate.

As long as you set up your world to actually be self-consistent and have the real explanations on hand, such that investigation doesn't turn up "well it really is illogical".

This. Because winging it later generally doesn't hold up. Those bandits get their fuel from intimidating other people-fine as long as those people exist aand have fuel to raid (still somehow). But those people will have a bigger and more visible impact on the world than the bandits. Thus creating them only after investigation has begun shows the lack of internal consistency I'm talking about. Calling the prey people as peaceful and isolated and not setting them up to defend themselves would be improbable and would need explanation. The explanation of those questions will have consequences - and those consequences need to be part of the setting when the players show up.

Bandits without prey is not improbable - that's impossible because of the definition of bandit. Hell, Waterworld made more sense.

Stan
2016-07-22, 09:31 AM
One cool thing that Traveller did was put out info from the fictional Traveller's Aid Society. News from distant systems would make it to the local system. Some of it would be hard to interpret or explain, like a mysterious outbreak of fandom on a high population world. Only bits of it would be relevant to whatever adventure they players were in but it gave a sense that there was more to the world than the current adventure. I tend to use quite a bit of electronic communication between sessions, to discuss mundane things like treasure division and character builds so there's more time to play in sessions. But it's also a good way for info dumps. Rather than everyone sit there listening to my poor oration skills, they can read (or not) when they feel like it. I can give them lots of potential plot hooks (though sketchy at that point, even to me) and let them know weird things are everywhere. Things like a crab migration route switched for unknown reasons and now the village of Oops no longer exists. Big Harry is now a big business leader thanks to the success of his dire shrimp sales. There were no gnoll raids this year that anyone has heard about. Later, players might hear inaccurate accounts of their own adventures.

For points of light, there are two setups that I've used for a plausible excuse. The first is post apocalyptic. Something big went down and everything changed. Only a few places survived and there hasn't been time to gather info on everywhere yet. This leaves many blanks on the map or knowledge only of what once was. The second setup is exploration/colonization. There might be millions of people in well settled area but there a long ways off. Locally, there are a handful of small ports and a largely unknown interior. There are probably intelligent species and monsters that no one has never even heard of.

Garimeth
2016-07-22, 11:02 AM
I would advise to make an effort to avoid inconsistencies instead of a mindset of "when it comes up, i'll just wing it". That makes for a more believable, better world. The mysteries with real justification will fit in fine anyway.

I couldn't agree more!

LibraryOgre
2016-07-22, 11:30 AM
On the "bandits with no prey" problem, it somewhat depends on your definition of bandit.

Take, for example, Vikings. For the most part, even those who went viking were farmers. They had lands and herds and crops. But, come summer, they'd let their wives take care of all of that with the help of some hired hands and go out and kill people and take their stuff.

In Yora's proposed setting, the "bandits" might be subsistence farmers whose cash crop is the corpses of rich people who come by. You come back through and you're just going to find farmers, until you notice they're using captured equipment in novel ways.

sktarq
2016-07-22, 11:57 AM
Totally agree about the bandits as part time farmers-brought it up with seasonal issues and the New Zealand Musket Wars reference but it was as a "this is a problem-solutions must be found" and well that form of banditry is a solution. But only if the region is at least marginal for agriculture and can't be described as totally unspoiled wilderness going in. The solution has consequences.

One of the reasons I stuck with Mad Max stuff was because in that with the partiial exception of the first one avoids this.

Frankly I find working through the consequences drives far more plot hook options than any other meathod. It turns one idea and generates whole complexes of adventure seeds.

Also there are other options too but those also have consequences. Another power is providing logistical support so that banditry levels are high enough to cause the abandonment of that trade route. A group of people found a magical food source which can sustain them but their settlement can not produce anything close to needs of the residents so they go raiding for them but they don't find much and are thus always short of stuff-why don't they integrate? Becomes a question but various taboos, criminal history or other plot hook thick answers exist for that problem.

By looking at plot holes as challenges to fix instead of avoided you get plot hooks.

Yora
2016-07-22, 12:03 PM
Basically there's seasonal raiders and highwaymen. Both are very different in their makeup and behavior. Raiders can work in very large groups of hundreds, in which they work even better, while highwaymen are probably limited to one or two dozen people, including wives and children. There's only so much stuff you can rob from travelers and you have to stay either hidden or mobile. In either case your group needs to be small.
Raiders just appear from nowhere with either ships or horses to grab anything they can and carry it back to their home which might be hundreds of miles away where they don't have to worry about being pursued.

You could also says there's a third type in form of the warlord who extorts tribute from the other local settlements in the absence of any other stronger military forces in the area.

sktarq
2016-07-22, 12:30 PM
Raiders don't actually need horses even. See the easter Germanic and Celtic raiders of the Roman Empire. Or a fair amount of the Bronze age middle east.

But Horses do help if a retaliatory force is nearby thus making it harder to defend against. I'm not sure that in a points of light system where outside help is slow to arrive that horse would be that much a bonus.

J-H
2016-07-22, 12:47 PM
Horses eat a lot. If you have a magical food supply, a horse is still worth 5-10 men. If you don't have a magical food supply, you need pasture. If you're in an area that gets heavy snow, you'll either need breeds that can browse through the snow (Mongol ponies), or you'll need to harvest and store up a lot of hay.

If you're not using the horses at least 5 days a week much of the year, they aren't worth having, either as a farmer or as a bandit.

Thrudd
2016-07-22, 03:47 PM
@Thrudd
I don't think that is a good idea. The characters are from the setting and thus should know the setting. Especcially if fast travel options are cut, they will operate in the surroundings of their home base which means they should encounter things known in their home base.

Completely new monsters everywhere would not really fit into a points of light-scenario. It would fit and even be vital in a real discovery scenario, where PCs are explorers/conquistadors going to strange new land without any previous contact.

I would not change monsters in a points of lights campaign more than i would do in any other campaign.
That's the whole point of the game, isn't it? Exploring new places. Yes, they know mostly what to expect in their home area, but they don't stay there most of the time. They go on long journeys into the wilderness and experience that big, unknown world. "Points of light" doesn't mean you always stay at the point of light. There's no adventure in that.

Vitruviansquid
2016-07-22, 05:01 PM
@Max_Killjoy: Why not give another shot at figuring out why I want players to "be happy with a few possibilities" before bringing suspension of disbelief into this?

I can explain it to you again if you don't figure it out.



That only works if you actually have a good reason when the time comes and when those strange inconsistencies are rare enough to be special and worth investigating. Also the players need to assume that there is something to discover otherwise they will sooner go out of their way to avoid an obvious plothole.

I would advise to make an effort to avoid inconsistencies instead of a mindset of "when it comes up, i'll just wing it". That makes for a more believable, better world. The mysteries with real justification will fit in fine anyway.

Poor George Miller has taken so much abuse in this thread.

He has already told you who the bandits are robbing. The entire plot of the movie revolves around an example. This is not a plot hole, there has been no inconsistency. You have merely decided, based on the very limited information you have received in this movie that you did not like the answer. There are clearly either enough people for the bandits to rob because they are mobile and going from settlement to settlement for their extortion, or the bandits aren't finding enough people to rob but it just so happens that the story takes place in a time before they've run out of fuel and other resources.

Yet you stick to accusing him of "winging it" while making his setting, which would be impossible given his setting is in a movie.

Then we have this huge string of posts that boil down to "I don't like the idea of Mad Max bandits, how do I change them so I like them?" And what's the prevailing pattern among these posts? Make them more sedentary. Make Humungus take off his gimp mask at the end of every raiding season and go back to his family farm so he can put food on the table for his wife and kids. Make them more like the bandits we have in the real world so we don't have the imagine the possibility of a setting not like the real world.

edit:

If we want to apply the same half-assed hate we are now expressing toward George Miller toward a setting that is actually in RPG's:

How come there are no summon food/water services perpetually being provided for the poor to allay problems like starvation and crime?

Takewo
2016-07-22, 08:47 PM
If we want to apply the same half-assed hate we are now expressing toward George Miller toward a setting that is actually in RPG's:

How come there are no summon food/water services perpetually being provided for the poor to allay problems like starvation and crime?

For the same reason that the West wastes every year enough resources to end up starvation in the world while many people suffer hunger: because there's a lot of the people on the top who exploit others to gain power/money/whatever, a lot of people in the middle who don't care and only few people who actually cares.

Seriously, I don't think that your analogy is at the same level. I haven't seen the film that you guys are talking about, but it seems that the problem is about bandits wasting scarce resources in a really stupid way that can significantly decrease their probability to survive. Your example, on the other hand, is more like "why don't the vast majority of people with means to help other people do it?"

Vitruviansquid
2016-07-22, 10:27 PM
For the same reason that the West wastes every year enough resources to end up starvation in the world while many people suffer hunger: because there's a lot of the people on the top who exploit others to gain power/money/whatever, a lot of people in the middle who don't care and only few people who actually cares.

Seriously, I don't think that your analogy is at the same level. I haven't seen the film that you guys are talking about, but it seems that the problem is about bandits wasting scarce resources in a really stupid way that can significantly decrease their probability to survive. Your example, on the other hand, is more like "why don't the vast majority of people with means to help other people do it?"

No no, it simply doesn't make any sense. It only takes one wizard to make infinite food and water for everybody. In the real world, you might argue that not enough people care about starvation in order to put in the necessary work and resources to solve that problem. But with a wizards making food, you really need one wizard-run soup kitchen. So you would tell me that out of all the wizards, there is not a single wizard who wants to solve hunger? That is highly implausible.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-22, 10:39 PM
{{scrubbed}}

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-22, 10:45 PM
@Max_Killjoy: Why not give another shot at figuring out why I want players to "be happy with a few possibilities" before bringing suspension of disbelief into this?

I can explain it to you again if you don't figure it out.


I understand what you're trying to say -- I simply don't agree with it. That actually does happen.





so we don't have the imagine the possibility of a setting not like the real world.


Things are as they are in the real world for actual reasons. Bandits were how they were in real life not "just because that's how they were", but for a whole complicated and interwoven set of reasons.

If things are markedly different in your fictional setting, then there needs to be some sort of reasoning behind that, even if it's never explicitly spelled out.

In a movie like Mad Max, in most movies in fact, the real reason sadly comes down to "it looks cooler on the bid screen" in the opinion of the film makers.




If we want to apply the same half-assed hate



Perhaps you'd get farther in this if you didn't insist on dismissing opinions that don't match yours as "half-assed hate". :smalltongue:

Vitruviansquid
2016-07-22, 11:27 PM
I understand what you're trying to say -- I simply don't agree with it. That actually does happen.





Things are as they are in the real world for actual reasons. Bandits were how they were in real life not "just because that's how they were", but for a whole complicated and interwoven set of reasons.

If things are markedly different in your fictional setting, then there needs to be some sort of reasoning behind that, even if it's never explicitly spelled out.

In a movie like Mad Max, in most movies in fact, the real reason sadly comes down to "it looks cooler on the bid screen" in the opinion of the film makers.





Perhaps you'd get farther in this if you didn't insist on dismissing opinions that don't match yours as "half-assed hate". :smalltongue:

Ok, then if you've got omniscience, you should go start solving some real world problems, right? Like terrorism, starvation, etc?

Because you must realize that in order to acknowledge the point I was making AND still have the problem you have with settings, you would have to be omniscient, right?

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-22, 11:29 PM
Ok, then if you've got omniscience, you should go start solving some real world problems, right? Like terrorism, starvation, etc?


Non sequitur much? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_(logic))

Vitruviansquid
2016-07-22, 11:41 PM
{{Scrubbed}}

Satinavian
2016-07-22, 11:58 PM
Poor George Miller has taken so much abuse in this thread.Because with movies like RPGs i want to dive into the story/setting and enjoy it. That can only happen with internal consistancy and versimilitude. And yes, i don't like Mad Max and many other postapocalyptic settings for that exact same reason. It's more often used as an excuse to introduce shrill characters, bad living conditions, unchecked violence and remote conclaves with really strange cultures while still having access to whatever technology is useful for the plot and special effects. Rarely if ever is such a setting actually explored in any depth.


If we want to apply the same half-assed hate we are now expressing toward George Miller toward a setting that is actually in RPG's:

How come there are no summon food/water services perpetually being provided for the poor to allay problems like starvation and crime?Most of the RPG systems i play don't let wizards/priests/whatever conjure enough food to make that better than agriculture. If a setting allows it (which does happen more often with water than food), it will actually be used this way.

If you mean especcially D&D and derivatives, well, that is horrible for economy simulation. Or for simulation of a working fantasy society. Or actually for anything beside traditional dungeon delving and monster slaying.

That's the whole point of the game, isn't it? Exploring new places. Yes, they know mostly what to expect in their home area, but they don't stay there most of the time. They go on long journeys into the wilderness and experience that big, unknown world. "Points of light" doesn't mean you always stay at the point of light. There's no adventure in that.Well, not necessarily. You can have your whole campaign revolve around tackling the problems of your personal point of light, defend it, build it up, meddle in internal politics, do diplomacy with the neighbors and so on. There is rarely a reason to go deep into unexplored wilderness because, well, no one knows what is there which means there is no known benefit for getting there. Sure, you can always make something up, but that doesn't come naturely. Unknown, dangerous, hard to reach regions are not enticing by themself and then there is always the additional problem of leaving the homebase undefended for a long time, as soon as the PCs become powerful.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-23, 12:08 AM
{{Scrubbed}}



Because with movies like RPGs i want to dive into the story/setting and enjoy it. That can only happen with internal consistancy and versimilitude. And yes, i don't like Mad Max and many other postapocalyptic settings for that exact same reason. It's more often used as an excuse to introduce shrill characters, bad living conditions, unchecked violence and remote conclaves with really strange cultures while still having access to whatever technology is useful for the plot and special effects. Rarely if ever is such a setting actually explored in any depth.


Well said -- the setting isn't built from the bottom up to be solid as a setting, it's built from the top down to allow the things the movie-makers want to show on the screen.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-23, 12:22 AM
@Thrudd
I don't think that is a good idea. The characters are from the setting and thus should know the setting. Especcially if fast travel options are cut, they will operate in the surroundings of their home base which means they should encounter things known in their home base.

Completely new monsters everywhere would not really fit into a points of light-scenario. It would fit and even be vital in a real discovery scenario, where PCs are explorers/conquistadors going to strange new land without any previous contact.

I would not change monsters in a points of lights campaign more than i would do in any other campaign.





That's the whole point of the game, isn't it? Exploring new places. Yes, they know mostly what to expect in their home area, but they don't stay there most of the time. They go on long journeys into the wilderness and experience that big, unknown world. "Points of light" doesn't mean you always stay at the point of light. There's no adventure in that.



I'd base it more on the commonality and actions of the various beasties, than on any one-size rule.

It always bugged me way back when, when a DM would insist that none of the characters knew what a goblin was, or would have to roll to recognize one, despite their home village having a history of conflict with goblins from the nearby mountains...

Vitruviansquid
2016-07-23, 12:30 AM
Because with movies like RPGs i want to dive into the story/setting and enjoy it. That can only happen with internal consistancy and versimilitude. And yes, i don't like Mad Max and many other postapocalyptic settings for that exact same reason. It's more often used as an excuse to introduce shrill characters, bad living conditions, unchecked violence and remote conclaves with really strange cultures while still having access to whatever technology is useful for the plot and special effects. Rarely if ever is such a setting actually explored in any depth.

Most of the RPG systems i play don't let wizards/priests/whatever conjure enough food to make that better than agriculture. If a setting allows it (which does happen more often with water than food), it will actually be used this way.

If you mean especcially D&D and derivatives, well, that is horrible for economy simulation. Or for simulation of a working fantasy society. Or actually for anything beside traditional dungeon delving and monster slaying.

Okay, since you're modifying the DnD world, let's just put our cards on the table.

Besides changing conjure food/water, what else have you changed?

Vitruviansquid
2016-07-23, 12:41 AM
{{Scrubbed}}

Thrudd
2016-07-23, 12:47 AM
Well, not necessarily. You can have your whole campaign revolve around tackling the problems of your personal point of light, defend it, build it up, meddle in internal politics, do diplomacy with the neighbors and so on. There is rarely a reason to go deep into unexplored wilderness because, well, no one knows what is there which means there is no known benefit for getting there. Sure, you can always make something up, but that doesn't come naturely. Unknown, dangerous, hard to reach regions are not enticing by themself and then there is always the additional problem of leaving the homebase undefended for a long time, as soon as the PCs become powerful.

That would not be the kind of game I think Yora is meaning by "points of light". The point of having a big unknown and unexplored world is for the players to explore it. If the game is restricted to an area where everything is known and well developed with connected settlements, that is the opposite of what we're trying to establish.

The game does and should provide the reasons to go deep into the unexplored wilderness. Hunting for treasure, looking for the ruins of lost civilizations, seeking magic, following rumors and tales, even just to explore and expand territory. It is the job of the DM to establish a setting where the characters have reasons to engage in the game's premise, and the players job to make sure their characters are appropriate for that setting.

The feeling I would want in this type of game, what I think Yora's looking for, is a sort of episodic swords & sorcery feel. Howard's Conan stories, Barsoom, Dying Earth. Every story, the characters encounter some new culture, or a creature they've never seen before, strange magic and weird stuff. It should be exciting, mysterious, a little scary, weird and surprising.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-23, 12:51 AM
{{Scrubbed}}

Satinavian
2016-07-23, 12:53 AM
Okay, since you're modifying the DnD world, let's just put our cards on the table.

Besides changing conjure food/water, what else have you changed? I didn't say "modify D&D world", i did say "most of the systems i play are not D&D and don't introduce such an ability.". Designers of D&D think introducing a spell to conjure food is a way to get rid of boring ration management. Designers of other systems tend to think about how it changes agriculture in the society and the role of spellasters in the culture. It is not wrong to fokus on what your system is meant for but that always means the rules get stupid when applied outside of that context.

If i actually play D&D i use it as tactical dungeon combat system and don't try to use the rules for world simulation purposes. For every campaign, where things outside of dungeon delving are actually important, i use another system. We have hundreds of systems. Use the right tools for the right job.
Maybe ten years ago i might have tried to make some sence out of item pricing, economies, NPC classes, levels, skills, effects of fabrication magic, monsters and their habitat/living conditions and so on. But today i know that is a lot of work resulting in a system that is still bad at simulation (although better) but is now also worse in the one thing it can do well (dungeon delving simulation). It is really not worth the effort. But if i actually did it, i certainly would get rid of all "magic produces infinite amount if X" in the whole system. I probably would aim for some Ebberron like setting, where utility magic is really common and not for a tippyverse where nothing aside from spellcasting matters anymore and even that is dominated by a couple of utterly broken abilities. There is some temptation to ditch/rewrite most of the spellcanon anyway because there is an overabundance of combat related spells and very little for non combat applications and we have many many broken/useless or redundand spells. But that would probably be far too much work.


@ Thrudd
Well, that would be a working type of game. But then your homebase/point of light is nearly irrelevant because the PCs are pretty much never there. It is not even in reach nearly all of the time, to go back would be a mayor journey.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-23, 12:57 AM
@ Thrudd
Well, that would be a working type of game. But then your homebase/point of light is nearly irrelevant because the PCs are pretty much never there. It is not even in reach nearly all of the time, to go back would be a mayor journey.


Perhaps it's a terminology gap.

Do the PC's need to have a specific "point of light" as a home base, for it to be a "points of light" setting and campaign?

Vitruviansquid
2016-07-23, 01:05 AM
{{scrubbed}}

Thrudd
2016-07-23, 02:03 AM
@ Thrudd
Well, that would be a working type of game. But then your homebase/point of light is nearly irrelevant because the PCs are pretty much never there. It is not even in reach nearly all of the time, to go back would be a mayor journey.

Usually you go back to the home town in between adventures, to level up and resupply. But yes, the home base is not the point of the game, the point is the vast unexplored wilderness. I think that is what is meant by "points of light", perhaps misleadingly. It means there are few safe civilized places and a lot of unknown wilderness. Obviously most adventure is going to happen in the wilderness, not in the safe/known places.

Yora
2016-07-23, 04:34 AM
It's really nice to see so many posts, but I really don't care about Mad Max and oil or D&D food production. If that's really that important to you, you might make another threat just for that.
It might kill this thread, but right now there doesn't seem any room for the actual topic anyway.

Interesting idea to treat Points of Light as "stay at home and deal with internal stuff". I was indeed thinking entirely of settings for campaigns about exploring a big unknown world, with all the population and infrastructure being coralled into small safe zones. Looking for treasure when there are no opportunities to spend it or exploring when there is nobody who is interested in the discovery would be rather pointless. Unless you do a stone age hunters campaign, you need some places of civilizations to justify why you have adventurers, military equipment, treasure, and magic items. But by going with a Points of Light approach instead of big nation states you can also justify having fantastic beasts and unexplored ruins with treasure just a walk outside the base town.

Satinavian
2016-07-23, 05:07 AM
That sound like an ideal condition for an explorer/conquestador-setting. A new big unknown world full of riches to be shipped home, small colonial towns where the adventurers can resupply and get rid of their treasures...

That everything is pretty much unknown is justified by having established contact only recently and somewhere is a homenation with the industry and infrastructure to produce all those goods of civilisation the adventurers might want to buy when they come back to town.

Yora
2016-07-23, 05:41 AM
That raises an intersting point. Not every civilized settlement has to be a Point of Light to the PCs. It might be a big city to the locals, but doesn't necessarily have to provide any shelter or access to supplies for the heroes.
That goes bit into the Foreigners are Monsters territory, but it's certainly something to consider. With an orc fortress or goblin town it would be very clear that the PCs are in great danger trying to walk down the streets.

2D8HP
2016-07-23, 06:09 AM
The feeling I would want in this type of game, what I think Yora's looking for, is a sort of episodic swords & sorcery feel. Howard's Conan stories, Barsoom, Dying Earth. Every story, the characters encounter some new culture, or a creature they've never seen before, strange magic and weird stuff. It should be exciting, mysterious, a little scary, weird and surprising.Man does that ever sound AWESOME!
I want to play in that setting RIGHT NOW!
:biggrin:

Yora
2016-07-23, 06:42 AM
Seriously? What else have you been playing the whole time? That sounds like bog standard oldschool to me.

Takewo
2016-07-23, 07:43 AM
{{scrubbed}}

2D8HP
2016-07-23, 08:02 AM
Seriously? What else have you been playing the whole time? That sounds like bog standard oldschool to me. Sadly for me, after glorious times in the 1970's and early 80's, by the early 1990's, while I could find tables that played in not fun RPG settings (Cyberpunk, Vampire etc), no "bog standard old-school" Sword and Sorcery games remained, only cherished memories, so I left the hobby for decades. (I have no time or wish to DM especially when I would need to recruit converts, but to play again the games of yore? Lord how I miss it.

Yora,.you always has interesting settings detailed in this Forum and his blog, and this "Points of Lights" scenario is starting to remind me of Colonial North America, which is sparking some ideas.
In classic D&D 1970's/early 80's "Greyhawk" style settings there are abandoned ruins to be explored.
And while I like some of the Adventures set there, in contrast to what are to me more interesting settings of "Eberron" and "Dark Suns", I just don't have much enthusiasm for the "Forgotten overly detailed Realms", that is the current default setting for D&D.
If I recall my history right, most of what became the United States was very much depopulated by epidemics of European diseases that most the inhabitants fell victim to.

Imagine a Continent with an "Eberron" or "Tippyverse" magi-tech like setting, and then, perhaps wasted away in a cataclysmic war, magic stops working ala Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away".
What was once a great civilization becomes first a wasteland, and then a wilderness. Except for a few remote forests, mountain tops, and in underground shelters (ala "Beneath The Planet of the Apes"), without the spark of Magic the inhabitants descend into savagery (Orcs etc.), and settlers from a non-Magic based civilization (humans?) plant towns on the coasts and rivers.

Then after centuries of slumber, first slowly, then like a shock, Magic returns.

Long ignored books of lore of interest only to antiquarians prove to have working spells and Wizardry returns. A generation comes of age that for the first time in living memory has Sorcerers. Magical constructs and undead come alive. Long slumbering Dragons awaken. Monsters of every sort are reborn. Artifacts long forgotten in the ruins pulse with Magic again. Expeditions of Adventurers are chartered to explore and exploit an unknown land made uncanny with reborn Magic.

LibraryOgre
2016-07-23, 08:33 AM
The Mod Wonder: I would suggest leaving off the discussion of modern-day political issues.

Yora
2016-07-23, 09:02 AM
Yora,.you always has interesting settings detailed in this Forum and his blog, and this "Points of Lights" scenario is starting to remind me of Colonial North America, which is sparking some ideas.
In classic D&D 1970's/early 80's "Greyhawk" style settings there are abandoned ruins to be explored.
And while I like some of the Adventures set there, in contrast to what are to me more interesting settings of "Eberron" and "Dark Suns", I just don't have much enthusiasm for the "Forgotten overly detailed Realms", that is the current default setting for D&D.
If I recall my history right, most of what became the United States was very much depopulated by epidemics of European diseases that most the inhabitants fell victim to.

Some people have made very goods and elaborate arguments that Grayhawk is a post-apocalyptic setting, based on its very sparse population, rule by warlords, frequency of military patrols, and abundance of ruins to loot. Whatever civilization exists appears to be the remnants of previously much larger states.

Colonial America is indeed a pretty close match, which I am sure Gygax was entirely aware of. The colonists of the Mayflower didn't actually build Plymouth, they took over a depopulated village and survived on scavenged food that was left behind. And the whole business with Indians stealing women and children wasn't about taking slaves. It was primarily about "Repopulating the Earth" and rebuilding civilization. (And then you also got people taking high tech weapons from defeated enemies and riding their alien war beasts.) I suspect that's the reason why post-apocalyptic is such a popular genre in America. That's basically how American society was created.
The epidemics really were devastating. Most estimates are around 95% dead. America had a small population before, but after that it was virtually empty, which made it very easy to move in and take over. European technology provided enough of an advantage to conquer Africa only in the 19th century, which I think would have been a very even challenge with America in 1500. It really was entirely the complete collapse of civilization that made colonisation possible at such an early point.

LibraryOgre
2016-07-23, 09:06 AM
Imagine a Continent with an "Eberron" or "Tippyverse" magi-tech like setting, and then, perhaps wasted away in a cataclysmic war, magic stops working ala Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away".
What was once a great civilization becomes first a wasteland, and then a wilderness. Except for a few remote forests, mountain tops, and in underground shelters (ala "Beneath The Planet of the Apes"), without the spark of Magic the inhabitants descend into savagery (Orcs etc.), and settlers from a non-Magic based civilization (humans?) plant towns on the coasts and rivers.


This is something like the situation in the Emberverse novels by S.M. Stirling. One day, in 1998, electricity and high-pressure chemistry (i.e. fuel-engines and firearms) stops working for no reason known. Planes fall out of the sky, lights stop working, and SCA geeks take over the world. While a LOT of people die for various reasons (violence only being one of them; imagine being a diabetic in a world with no refrigeration and no artificial insulin), others form communities and survive, with some even thriving.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-23, 09:17 AM
{{scrubbed}}

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-23, 09:19 AM
This is something like the situation in the Emberverse novels by S.M. Stirling. One day, in 1998, electricity and high-pressure chemistry (i.e. fuel-engines and firearms) stops working for no reason known. Planes fall out of the sky, lights stop working, and SCA geeks take over the world. While a LOT of people die for various reasons (violence only being one of them; imagine being a diabetic in a world with no refrigeration and no artificial insulin), others form communities and survive, with some even thriving.


If electricity and chemistry stop working, the entire universe dies. Instantly.

VoxRationis
2016-07-23, 10:14 AM
Imagine a Continent with an "Eberron" or "Tippyverse" magi-tech like setting, and then, perhaps wasted away in a cataclysmic war, magic stops working ala Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away".
What was once a great civilization becomes first a wasteland, and then a wilderness. Except for a few remote forests, mountain tops, and in underground shelters (ala "Beneath The Planet of the Apes"), without the spark of Magic the inhabitants descend into savagery (Orcs etc.), and settlers from a non-Magic based civilization (humans?) plant towns on the coasts and rivers.

Then after centuries of slumber, first slowly, then like a shock, Magic returns.

Long ignored books of lore of interest only to antiquarians prove to have working spells and Wizardry returns. A generation comes of age that for the first time in living memory has Sorcerers. Magical constructs and undead come alive. Long slumbering Dragons awaken. Monsters of every sort are reborn. Artifacts long forgotten in the ruins pulse with Magic again. Expeditions of Adventurers are chartered to explore and exploit an unknown land made uncanny with reborn Magic.

I'm actually developing an AD&D setting currently with a very similar premise to this, partly as an explanation for how a primarily non-magical society develops in a setting where we also have wizards and clerics running around.


Some people have made very goods and elaborate arguments that Grayhawk is a post-apocalyptic setting, based on its very sparse population, rule by warlords, frequency of military patrols, and abundance of ruins to loot. Whatever civilization exists appears to be the remnants of previously much larger states.
Truthfully, this is true of most of the D&D genre, given how much time large amounts of bullion are to be found in ancient ruins. Part of this is because it's often based on either the classical period (which was living in the wake of the Bronze Age Collapse) or the medieval period (which in Europe was living in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire).


European technology provided enough of an advantage to conquer Africa only in the 19th century, which I think would have been a very even challenge with America in 1500. It really was entirely the complete collapse of civilization that made colonisation possible at such an early point.
Well, Africa was also a much different climate from that of Europe; North America had a few quirks of seasonal patterns that threw early colonists for a loop but was otherwise much more tolerable by Europeans. Central and South America ended up being conquered more than colonized, truthfully, with large portions of the native population remaining under a foreign elite. (This is akin to the difference between the Saxon arrival in Britain and the Norman arrival.)

LibraryOgre
2016-07-23, 02:11 PM
If electricity and chemistry stop working, the entire universe dies. Instantly.

And yet, it did not, which greatly confuses several people who survived it.

Max_Killjoy
2016-07-23, 02:23 PM
And yet, it did not, which greatly confuses several people who survived it.


I returned the first book to the library unfinished. I have a very limited tolerance for faerie tale magic in my science fiction.

LibraryOgre
2016-07-23, 03:00 PM
I returned the first book to the library unfinished. I have a very limited tolerance for faerie tale magic in my science fiction.

*shrug* Got nothing for you, then. The parallel was there to the suggested "World run by magic which went away, and now is slowly coming back." If modern technology stopped working suddenly, lots of folks would die, but some would live... assuming the laws of the universe as it stood let them live.

2D8HP
2016-07-23, 04:05 PM
This is something like the situation in the Emberverse novels by S.M. Stirling
I read "Dies the Fire", and a couple of the sequels. It starts out as a very grim setting indeed!
Amusingly, some of the survivors children take Tolkien as their guide and found a "Rangers" organization, and the BBEG is s former academic/SCA participant who establishes a "Norman" aristocracy, and has Sauron's "Eye" as his banner!

Yora
2016-07-23, 05:43 PM
Does it have a huge and wild world?

2D8HP
2016-07-23, 08:38 PM
Does it have a huge and wild world?IIRC the early books take place around Oregon and the earliest threats are starvation and cannibal's. Latter parts briefly detail an England conquered by Icelanders (with Prince Charles as a Vortigern (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortigern) like figure.
After the initial die off, the world is mostly empty of people with those remaining fighting for survival, latter things settle down with survivors learning pre-industrial techniques with some modifications such as making swords out of the automobiles that liter the land, rather than mining and smelting iron ore.
I only read the first few books but I believe later the series does explore a wider world through the eyes of the survivors descendents.
While the series kept my interest for a bit it didn't hold it. For a classic science fiction take on a post apocalypse setting, I would recommend: Earth Abides (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides) by Stewart.

For classic Sword & Sorcery Adventures I would recommend
Swords Against Death (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_Against_Death) by Leiber
and
The War Hound and the World's Pain (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Hound_and_the_World's_Pain) by Moorcock.

For a newer Fantasy Adventure novel I suggest:
A Darker Shade of Magic (https://www.amazon.com/Darker-Shade-Magic-Novel/dp/0765376458) by Schwab.

Yora
2016-07-24, 04:01 AM
Purely by coincidence I just came upon this post about worldbuilding for multi-story/serial fiction (http://mythcreants.com/blog/how-to-build-a-world-for-anthology-stories/#). It covers many of exactly the same things weve been talking about here.