What makes a world worth living in (or why we flee the Forgotten Realms)

[Quertus]

In threads about, "What would you do if you ended up in the Forgotten Realms", whether it was as yourself, as a 1st level character, as your current character, as a Wizard 20, whatever, there's usually multiple people creating / joining a chorus of "leave". And it's not just the Forgotten Realms - when asked about settings to live in, people seem to find it easier to say "not X" than "Y please". There's just more talk about the Forgotten Realms, so there's more examples of people wanting to flee it post haste.

To understand how to build a world people would want to live on, I figured I'd start with a conversation about why people don't want to live in certain worlds. So, as the easiest example, let's start off with discussing the Forgotten Realms. Off the top of my head, here's a few reasons why one might want to flee Toril: edition changes, medieval stasis, terrible deities, wall of shame, scale of threats, world-ending threats, OP Wizard chess.

Edition changes: What year you arrive in Toril will determine what edition it's in - what the rules of physics and magic are, among other things - what nations and deities it's absorbed or spat out, etc. I don't remember the exact timeline, and you may or may not be able to change the fact that it's gonna keep changing repeatedly - probably forever. That ever-changing ability set for everyone, from commoners to deities, is pretty daunting. But the takeaway from this seems to be pretty mundane: the world should make sense and be consistent.

Medieval stasis: There seem to be 3 different complaints here. The first is that people cannot accept things not working the same as they do on Earth. The second is that people cannot accept the world being immune to change. The third is that people consider medieval times to be inherently terrible. My summary takeaway? Don't make a world - and especially the bad parts of the world - unable to be changed/fixed.

Terrible deities: The gods are terribly meddlesome when they're not - and sometimes even when they are being - lazy and incompetent, and the world might well be better off without them. At least "killing the gods" and "ascending to godhood" are both well-established in the lore, so it's not an unsolvable problem. I'm not sure what my takeaway should be, beyond repeating "don't make bad parts of the world unable to be changed/fixed".

Wall of Shame: The Wall of the Faithless has been removed as of (part-way through) 5th edition, so hopefully this won't be a problem for the Toril of the future, only for those in the 23, 3e, 4e, and early 5e Toril. I'm not sure what my takeaway should be, beyond repeating "don't make bad parts of the world unable to be changed/fixed", or shouting "tear down that wall!", but I'll go with the snarky, don't build the Wall of the Faithless.

Scale of threats: When there isn't a CaS GM guaranteeing level-appropriate challenges, a 1st level commoner kinda gets insta-gibbed by an ancient dragon. There's a huge power scale at play on Toril, and that should be as rightly terrifying as nukes were to the Eminence in Shadow pre-Isekai. But I struggle to think of many settings that don't have dragons or gods or nukes or the sun or lightning and thunder or otherwise have things far beyond the scope of the inhabitants (except maybe one two settings where the sun is just "some dude" (although still a far more powerful dude than your average citizen)), so I'm not sure what a good takeaway here would be.

World-ending threats: not all settings need to have "the world is about to end" feel like just another Tuesday. Toril (I'm told, I'm not a FR scholar) has far too many world-ending threats in its history to make it even remotely worth consideration if history is in any way mutable. So I guess the takeaway for making a world where people would actually want to live is something like, limit the maximum scope of the threats.

OP Wizard chess: Toril is known for its OP Wizards, but only slightly less well known is this: they're all spying on one another, kept in check from actually doing anything by fear of someone / anyone / everyone else moving against them. Bleh! On the low end, it means that powerful people are likely to say "no" to perfectly reasonable requests; on the high end, it means everyone will be watching what you do (unless you're Vecna-blooded or whatever), and likely interfering in the worst ways possible. It's like the gods, and turtles - it's annoying busy-bodies all the way down! I'm not sure if "don't make your world filled with annoying busy-bodies" is actually the proper takeaway here, though.

So, my quick and silly analysis, worded less in negatives, and looking only at the Forgotten Realms, says that some good advice for making a world where people might actually want to live there would be to make a consistent world with threats of limited scope, where what's wrong with the world can be changed/fixed.

What else can we think of, for good or bad traits for a world to have, from a prospective inhabitant's point of view?

[KorvinStarmast]

What makes a world worth living in
Beer and beauty, or, less elegantly,
Ale and whores.

[Easy e]

What makes the world worth living it?

I guess it beats the alternative! Being dead!

Even in a Fantast setting, the vast majority of the population really has no alternative BUT to live in the world they were born into.

In all honesty, do you mean why do players not want to play/DM in the Forgotten Realms?

[SethoMarkus]

Edition changes: What year you arrive in Toril will determine what edition it's in - what the rules of physics and magic are, among other things - what nations and deities it's absorbed or spat out, etc. I don't remember the exact timeline, and you may or may not be able to change the fact that it's gonna keep changing repeatedly - probably forever. That ever-changing ability set for everyone, from commoners to deities, is pretty daunting. But the takeaway from this seems to be pretty mundane: the world should make sense and be consistent.

Medieval stasis: There seem to be 3 different complaints here. The first is that people cannot accept things not working the same as they do on Earth. The second is that people cannot accept the world being immune to change. The third is that people consider medieval times to be inherently terrible. My summary takeaway? Don't make a world - and especially the bad parts of the world - unable to be changed/fixed.


I'm sure this isn't the intent, but I think it's a little hilarious that the first point can be read as "the world shouldn't change", and the next point is "the world should be able to be changed". And therein lies the issue with trying to create a world that a majority of people would voice in favor of living there. More people are likely to voice an opinion of "it sucks, leave" than those who are ambivalent towards or in favor of that world.

[Anymage]

I don't see how this topic is relevant. I currently enjoy living in a world where we don't face powerful and fantastic threats on a regular basis. Yet when I play games or want to get caught up in other stories, there's a lot of draw to powerful and fantastic heroes who then need matching conflict for dramatic purposes. The world I'd want to live in isn't really relevant there.

Also, for the realms, one of the big things it has going against it is the number of times that various sourcebooks, novels, and other attached media have been written by mediocre authors who passed idiot balls around just because it was convenient for the story. So high on my list would be a setting that hadn't passed through the hands of multiple mediocre writers, but good luck making that a reality when rights holders have strong incentives to publish more content in popular settings.

[King of Nowhere]

well, your introduction pretty much sums it up. a world worth living in is one where that kind of stuff does not happen, not on a regular basis.

I'd like to point out that my own homebrew campaign world fits the bill pretty well; it's industrial level tech and slowly progressing, the likelyhood of getting a fate worse than deathTM is pretty low, the gods have very strict limits on interference, the powerful people are - thanks to some small changes to some spells - dependent on having a functional society to provide some resources for them and are therefore incentivized to create a functional society, even the evil leaders tend to be competent people who make the trains run on time, high magic means warfare is conducted by golems and high level people with little bloodshed for the general population, and there have only been two exhistential threats in the last century.

And I built it like that specifically because I am tired of all those dark tropes that are so fashionable in current "let's turn down the lights and dress everyone in black to show that this is a grimdark setting" fantasy

[PhoenixPhyre]

I don't see how this topic is relevant. I currently enjoy living in a world where we don't face powerful and fantastic threats on a regular basis. Yet when I play games or want to get caught up in other stories, there's a lot of draw to powerful and fantastic heroes who then need matching conflict for dramatic purposes. The world I'd want to live in isn't really relevant there.

Also, for the realms, one of the big things it has going against it is the number of times that various sourcebooks, novels, and other attached media have been written by mediocre authors who passed idiot balls around just because it was convenient for the story. So high on my list would be a setting that hadn't passed through the hands of multiple mediocre writers, but good luck making that a reality when rights holders have strong incentives to publish more content in popular settings.

Both of these. The quality of a setting that makes it good to have fantasy adventures in also makes it horrible to live in, at least for someone coming from a modern-western-society viewpoint.

And the realms itself has always been an incoherent mess. Ed Greenwood isn't all that great a worldbuilder, and then it's had crap-tons of meddling from all sorts of people ranging from hacks to decent writers, each of whom had their own idea of what is "good". Plus now edition-change baggage stretching back decades.

[Kish]

Wall of Shame: The Wall of the Faithless has been removed as of (part-way through) 5th edition,
It's been positively removed, or the one sentence explicitly stating it exists was removed and it hasn't been mentioned either way? (I ask hopefully, having only heard the latter.)

[TurboGhast]

World-ending threats: not all settings need to have "the world is about to end" feel like just another Tuesday. Toril (I'm told, I'm not a FR scholar) has far too many world-ending threats in its history to make it even remotely worth consideration if history is in any way mutable. So I guess the takeaway for making a world where people would actually want to live is something like, limit the maximum scope of the threats.


I'm feeling some tangential inspiration from how you phrased the sentence about the number of world-ending threats. You could have a time travel story/setting introduce how frequently time travel has been used there by telling the protagonist/players "If history was immutable, the world would have ended ten times over."

To tie this back to the original topic, being in a setting with time travel but without the ability to access it yourself would kinda suck. Your efforts might get undone, perhaps even inadvertently, and there's nothing you could do about it.

[MonochromeTiger]

I'm sure this isn't the intent, but I think it's a little hilarious that the first point can be read as "the world shouldn't change", and the next point is "the world should be able to be changed".

There's a world of difference between "it should be internally consistent and make sense" and "it shouldn't change."

One is asking that a world predicated on magic working a certain way not arbitrarily change it every five minutes because of editorial meddling or have moments of "and suddenly this group was here the whole time despite never being mentioned before."

The other is saying everything should effectively be in stasis indefinitely and the status quo should be everything.

Internal consistency is a thing that's expected as the bare minimum for decent writing or setting design. It's not something that prevents change or progress, it's something that asks change and progress to make sense with what came before instead of being completely at odds with how things are stated to work. That's not really present in Forgotten Realms.

As others have pointed out Ed Greenwood didn't exactly make the most consistent and logical setting to begin with, which is to be expected since he pieced a bunch of it together from little short stories he started way back when he was a kid. TSR and WotC definitely didn't help much with things like deciding to kill Mystra repeatedly to justify big mechanics changes but not even being consistent on what killing Mystra even does. Throw in all the different writers they've had with their own vision of what should happen and the clause of Greenwood having to be consulted for anything major and you've got a three way competition for how to handle the setting with each side grabbing whatever they can and pulling so they can have their way.

All of that makes Forgotten realms a complete disaster for internal consistency.

[Mechalich]

Both of these. The quality of a setting that makes it good to have fantasy adventures in also makes it horrible to live in, at least for someone coming from a modern-western-society viewpoint.

And the realms itself has always been an incoherent mess. Ed Greenwood isn't all that great a worldbuilder, and then it's had crap-tons of meddling from all sorts of people ranging from hacks to decent writers, each of whom had their own idea of what is "good". Plus now edition-change baggage stretching back decades.

This.

I'd add that the Realms isn't really one setting but several dozen kingdoms or regions and TSR and later WotC felt obligated to make all of them 'adventure ready' at all times. So rather than 'there's always a war somewhere' in a fashion that would probably roughly mirror historical realities, we get 'there's always war everywhere' in order to meet game demands. This is hardly unique to FR. Golarion for Pathfinder operates more or less the same way and has functionally the exact same problem.

[Telok]

Both of these. The quality of a setting that makes it good to have fantasy adventures in also makes it horrible to live in, at least for someone coming from a modern-western-society viewpoint.


Oddly enough Mystaria and Ebberon are, in fact, not hideous and terrible places of disease and horror from a modern-western-society viewpoint like FR is. And they're decent adventure settings too. The Star Wars universe is a perfectly reasonable place to live and has tons of opportunity for fantasy adventures (in spAAAce!!!).

FR, I think, suffers from accidental incoherence brought on by too many retcons & sloppy reboots trying (badly) to justify the "sell another book" of the moment that continues to this day. Settings like Xanth and original Spelljammer are intentionally incoherent which, ironically, gives them a certain internal coherence people can riff off & world build with. The Star Wars setting has retcons & constant "sell another <thing>" going on, but is generally halfway decent on writing and manage to stay generally internally coherent because prople care about not screwing it up.

So I don't believe that the aspects of a setting that make it good for adventure are at all opposed to making it a good place to live. You just have to give a **** about not massively screwing up consistency and refrain from overpopulating it with superpowered jerks, the worst Mary Sue DMNPCs, and end-of-the-world-Tuesdays.

[icefractal]

the worst Mary Sue DMNPCsAlthough that's a case where "living in the world" and "playing a TTRPG set in the world" have differing values.

Say we had a setting that was basically the modern day, but with Ultra-Superman. Like normal Superman, but more-so, with "warp reality" scale magic, and there aren't any villains that can even remotely challenge him. Also he's completely benevolent and doesn't make mistakes. So, zero need for any lesser heroes, Marty Stu can handle it all by himself, even global-scale problems.

That would be a crap setting for a superhero RPG, but as an person potentially living there? It sounds great. 10 / 10 would pick that setting over, say, the normal DC setting.

[NichG]

I'm very interested in this question. Or to touch on a few points that have been made - there's this weird tension that it seems like we struggle to imagine worlds that are simultaneously desirable to live in and interesting to live in. Yet at the face of it, it feels like it should be the opposite, for why wouldn't it be desirable for the world to be interesting? Really what we're doing is making worlds such that its interesting for us not living in those worlds to witness or imagine the stories of those who do live in those worlds. But for things like open-world RPGs and simulators and so on, when we make a larger reach for trying to convey the experience of living in the fictional world rather than observing the fictional world from outside, it'd be nice to know how to let go of that particular dramatic tradition and actually conceive of worlds that are both desirable to live in and interesting to live in.

To that extent, I want to focus on the positives rather than the negatives. The negatives I think largely arise from the pattern of creating worlds that feel like they need to change such that we have the easy ability to tell a story of 'how does the world change?' or 'how do these characters change the world?'. So if we let go of that particular trope, we should also just feel less need to make awful worlds. That does mean though that we need ideas for what could replace it, since otherwise we may end up with pleasant but boring worlds.

I do think agency is a big (positive) sense of a world that would be desirable to live in, or perhaps better put would be 'affordances given by the world'. That is to say, things which one could do or accomplish or become in that world which we could not do in reality.
- A world where you can easily repair a medical condition that has plagued you your entire life, or change aspects of yourself you either don't like, or would like to be different. Become the half-shadow-fiend half-chaos-dragon edgelord you always wanted ot be.
- A world where you don't have to fear war or death anymore because you can back yourself up or get resurrected or benefit from supernatural protections, and so now there are all sorts of dangerous things you could do or ways you could live that would be unthinkable otherwise.
- A world where you can have a job or an importance to society that you couldn't normally achieve (the core of a lot of zero-tension isekai stories - the character, by virtue of having an out of context perspective, suddenly becomes the ruler of a nation, great sage, CEO of a business, etc)
- A world where there are things you can do like 'visit other planets' or 'converse with immortals' or 'hang out with gods' that you can't do in real life which might feel innately interesting based on your current perspective
- A world where there's an opportunity for systematic things you don't like about the real world to be realized differently, or one which has the malleability to actually try to build different kinds of society you might imagine. Post-scarcity utopian sci-fi for example.

So given all of those things, the ones that tend to struggle with interestingness are the ones where whatever was nice about the world just 'gets resolved'. Okay, on this world disease isn't a thing, you isekai there and have your chronic disease cured. Now you... do what exactly? Or ones where its very passive and doesn't actually ask you to interact with it. A post-scarcity utopian world where someone has already built the utopia is one thing, but there's not much agency there; a world where you're from the utopian sci-fi post-scarcity society and you're a diplomat bringing that technology to a society that doesn't yet have it? Could be fun!

Basically, I think a big part of it is that the nice bits have to be active and not passive, they have to be 'things you want to do' or help give you new 'things you could do'. The trick is to not make it so that 'not doing the thing would be bad', but instead make it so that 'doing the thing sounds fun!'.

[Mechalich]

I'm very interested in this question. Or to touch on a few points that have been made - there's this weird tension that it seems like we struggle to imagine worlds that are simultaneously desirable to live in and interesting to live in. Yet at the face of it, it feels like it should be the opposite, for why wouldn't it be desirable for the world to be interesting? Really what we're doing is making worlds such that its interesting for us not living in those worlds to witness or imagine the stories of those who do live in those worlds. But for things like open-world RPGs and simulators and so on, when we make a larger reach for trying to convey the experience of living in the fictional world rather than observing the fictional world from outside, it'd be nice to know how to let go of that particular dramatic tradition and actually conceive of worlds that are both desirable to live in and interesting to live in.

In the context of RPGs, 'interesting' broadly translates into violence. Game characters interact with the game world primarily through the medium of violence, thus the more there is for a character to do, the more violence is implied in the setting. Take the recently released Starfield for example. It procedurally generates outposts across its planets. Sometimes those outposts are full of hostile pirates who immediately try to kill you and sometimes they are occupied by peaceful settlers. When you find the latter type, there's nothing to do there except ask the leader for a quest - a quest that inevitably involves going to some other location where the NPCs are hostile and murdering them en masse. Games are not good at offering things that are both peaceful and interesting. Even a game where you aren't shooting people all the time, like No Man's Sky, posits that the ambient environment is constantly trying to kill your character and that they must continuously scramble for survival and when players accumulate enough tech and materials that they can broadly ignore this they...stop playing because there is no longer any real impetus to do anything.

As a result, worlds that are more 'interesting' are generally worlds that are more violent, and the broader the options available to a hypothetical player - such as what proportion of factions within the setting they can represent - the more widespread that violence becomes. This is taken to the logical extreme in Warhammer 40K. Any player could bring an army of any faction to the table, and therefore every army must have a lore-supported reason to fight every other faction in the setting including their own. The result is a truly blood-soaked war of all against all that became the trope-namer for grimdark.

[King of Nowhere]

In the context of RPGs, 'interesting' broadly translates into violence. Game characters interact with the game world primarily through the medium of violence, thus the more there is for a character to do, the more violence is implied in the setting. Take the recently released Starfield for example. It procedurally generates outposts across its planets. Sometimes those outposts are full of hostile pirates who immediately try to kill you and sometimes they are occupied by peaceful settlers. When you find the latter type, there's nothing to do there except ask the leader for a quest - a quest that inevitably involves going to some other location where the NPCs are hostile and murdering them en masse. Games are not good at offering things that are both peaceful and interesting. Even a game where you aren't shooting people all the time, like No Man's Sky, posits that the ambient environment is constantly trying to kill your character and that they must continuously scramble for survival and when players accumulate enough tech and materials that they can broadly ignore this they...stop playing because there is no longer any real impetus to do anything.

As a result, worlds that are more 'interesting' are generally worlds that are more violent, and the broader the options available to a hypothetical player - such as what proportion of factions within the setting they can represent - the more widespread that violence becomes. This is taken to the logical extreme in Warhammer 40K. Any player could bring an army of any faction to the table, and therefore every army must have a lore-supported reason to fight every other faction in the setting including their own. The result is a truly blood-soaked war of all against all that became the trope-namer for grimdark.
In tabletop play, it is easier to conceive challenges that do not require violence. Harder to code them as a procedurally generated videogame.

Anyway, violence does not make a world authomatically bad to live in. It is possible that adventurers act as pest exterminators for monsters, and the general population is protected enough to be safe

[Beelzebub1111]

I definitely prefer Oerth (or specifically the Flaness) to Toril, but that's because I like geopolitical intrigue. That's pretty much what the whole world is about and your adventurers are pawns in a grander game working their way up to players.

The threat of Iuz and his empire is a great external threat to focus campaigns on or it can be in the background as a looming shadow.

That still leaves room for personal stories about war and being caught in border disputes. And one thing that helps is the way the map is drawn. There are no lines in the territories. it's very clear when natural borders are formed by rivers and mountains, and the names of places imply shared history without being overt or loredumping on your players unless they ask (The County, Dutch, and Principality of Ulek for example). A neat hex map with 12 mile hexes also lets you know about how long it will take you to get from point a to point b at a glance. It's such a convenient world that can host a lot of adventures.

[KorvinStarmast]

I don't see how this topic is relevant. Nor do I.
Also, for the realms, one of the big things it has going against it is the number of times that various sourcebooks, novels, and other attached media have been written by mediocre authors who passed idiot balls around just because it was convenient for the story. Said it better than I could have. With that said, I did enjoy the first few Drzzt stories (beginning with the Crystal Shard) and the Cleric Quintet.

To tie this back to the original topic, being in a setting with time travel but without the ability to access it yourself would kinda suck. Your efforts might get undone, perhaps even inadvertently, and there's nothing you could do about it. The true resurrection spell offers the same problem.

All of that makes Forgotten realms a complete disaster for internal consistency. Yep. But I will say that when it first came out in a box in the 1980's, I liked having it as an alternate to the World of Greyhawk if I wanted it.

So rather than 'there's always a war somewhere' in a fashion that would probably roughly mirror historical realities, we get 'there's always war everywhere' in order to meet game demands. This is hardly unique to FR. Golarion for Pathfinder operates more or less the same way and has functionally the exact same problem. So too with World of Greyhawk.

In the context of RPGs, 'interesting' broadly translates into violence. Overly broad. Most of our BitD scores have not included killing. Our Star Trek is as much problem solving as anything else. Occasional combat, mostly non combat. I could go on but I won't.

In tabletop play, it is easier to conceive challenges that do not require violence. Harder to code them as a procedurally generated videogame. Good point.

[Vahnavoi]

What makes a world worth living in is that you don't want to die and don't (didn't) get to choose. That's it. :smalltongue:

Personally I don't go out of my way to make living in my fantasy worlds desirable to anyone. Suicide is a valid character action. It can even be the correct action!

As for the long list, I don't find much use in it. I must comment though that I find inclusion of Wall of the Faithless hilarious in this context. Why? Well for first, people, get this, people usually only interact with it after they die. Second, it is one of the few mythologically compelling parts of Forgotten Realms that I might consider stealing for another setting - because this kind of nasty afterlife just makes sense for a context where gods and religions are active movers and shakers. You can nitpick the details (because the details in Forgotten Realms are invariably convoluted) but complaining about the broad concept (as many are wont to do) is just silly.

[Telok]

In the context of RPGs, 'interesting' broadly translates into violence. Game characters interact with the game world primarily through the medium of violence, thus the more there is for a character to do, the more violence is implied in the setting.

Minecraft, Frontier First Encounters (a 90s game in the Elite series), and of all things DwarfFortress can easily be played without or with a minimum of violence. On the ttrpg side Amber Diceless, Traveller, Chubbos, and a number of the BitD style games often downplay or lack violence, while even Call of Cthulhu has some no-violence scenarios that are solved by running away and casting dismissal/exorcism spells.

The D&D-style & derived rpgs often have no built-in (can always GM-fiat something by talking the GM into it like with all ttrpg) options but violence as the solution to any conflicts. But "interesting = murdering" isn't a default assumption of the roleplaying game category, only of a (admittedly large & most famous) subset.

[NichG]

I'd also like to add a mention of the Atelier series of RPGs, which in recent games has had a crafting system that you can spend 10+ hours lost in without needing to touch combat. It works by having wildcards in recipes, having ingredients transfer things when used outside of just satisfying the recipe, and having variations and upgrades be unlocked by the elemental values of the ingredients you do choose (with a maximum ingredient count so you have to stop before you've unlocked everything). So you can craft the ingredients themselves, collecting traits and elemental values and rider effects such that you can move things onto the final item you're trying for. And you could procedurally generate challenges in the form of 'get me X item with Y trait' when the Y trait is unique to an ingredient that isn't valid itself for X's recipe.

Not to mention things outside of traditional RPGs like citybuilders, which could be RPG'd.

There's also Disco Elysium, but it's not a world I'd want to live in...

Stardew Valley as well. It has the option of violence, but it's not so central to the gameplay.

There's lots of things for designers to copy when making a game about violence. Going outside of that formula requires a bit more insight and inventiveness, and a higher risk that the system won't end up deep enough to sustain play, but it's certainly possible.

[Mechalich]

I'd also like to add a mention of the Atelier series of RPGs, which in recent games has had a crafting system that you can spend 10+ hours lost in without needing to touch combat. It works by having wildcards in recipes, having ingredients transfer things when used outside of just satisfying the recipe, and having variations and upgrades be unlocked by the elemental values of the ingredients you do choose (with a maximum ingredient count so you have to stop before you've unlocked everything). So you can craft the ingredients themselves, collecting traits and elemental values and rider effects such that you can move things onto the final item you're trying for. And you could procedurally generate challenges in the form of 'get me X item with Y trait' when the Y trait is unique to an ingredient that isn't valid itself for X's recipe.

I haven't played the Atelier games, but my understanding is that the primary gameplay loop of those games, like most crafting-based RPGs, involves persistently murdering monsters for the sweet, sweet ingredients their bodies contain. Sure you can play them without hurting people, in the same way that you can play many survival games or even a game like Starfield just running around mining and building but that's not what people actually do. Instead the history of gaming is quite clear that the majority of players bend things further towards violence even when it goes against design goals and systems. Vampire: the Masquerade was supposed to be about using social interaction to maintain humanity in the face of the continual degradation inherent in being a vampire, but what people played was blood-soaked street level supers urban fantasy in the vein of Blade or Underworld. And that's the second most popular TTRPG ever made.


There's also Disco Elysium, but it's not a world I'd want to live in...

The world of Disco Elysium is in fact quite violent. The game's inciting incident is a murder investigation, and it takes place in the context of a labor dispute that has embraced naked force. There's not a lot of combat in the game, but the worldbuilding is of a place that is 'interesting' because it has degraded to the point that peace is seriously, possibly terminally, frayed.


More broadly, while there are lots of non-violent and non-threatening things to tell stories about that are interesting, RPGs tend to be bad at them. Social systems, notably, are notoriously bad. This kneecaps politics, romance, and similar sources of drama as options. And while RPGs can be highly comedic experiences this tends to happen at the expense of what is happening in-universe (often by sacrificing coherency, and while incoherent worlds can be quite funny they are rarely pleasant places to live).

[LibraryOgre]

I'd also add there's no doubt a lack of novelty... most of us have seen "vaguely European setting" a score of times, in different forms. It gets stale, after a while. But throw people into a desert wasteland or a magitech society with velociraptors, and things seem new again.

[NichG]

I haven't played the Atelier games, but my understanding is that the primary gameplay loop of those games, like most crafting-based RPGs, involves persistently murdering monsters for the sweet, sweet ingredients their bodies contain.

Ehh... There are some monster materials, but they're the vast minority, and in the most recent game you can basically run past every encounter except like 3 boss encounters and its not going to severely impede your ability to craft. You can literally fast travel and it respawns all the gathering points, and the quality of ingredients found at gathering points scale with the gathering tools you've built and your alchemy skills not the difficulty of the area you're in. Also at a certain point you gain the ability to make seeds to plant in a farm that can generate much better ingredients than you can possibly get in the world, because you can basically buff your seeds with alchemy whereas you can't buff enemy drops with alchemy.

In terms of hours of screen-time, I'd say its like 1/2 walking simulator/dialogue, 1/3 spent at the crafting screen, 1/6 in combat maybe?

It's not like it has completely escaped combat (after all, one endpoint of what the crafting can do for you is to make you even more unnecessarily OP to steamroll the already easy monsters...), but in the same way that D&D is really about the spell list because like 70% of the books are the spell lists, the Atelier games are really about the crafting system and the combat is a bit of a 'well we have to have it cause its an RPG right?' after-thought. As far as the world and plotlines, it varies by game. The most recent game had a lot of subplots being like 'get two opposing guilds to work together to make decorations for a festival' and 'design a water purifier for an island' and 'figure out a substitute energy source for a village that has been subsisting on digging batteries out of ancient ruins that are running dry' or 'make three kinds of medicines of varying quality to teach a merchant how to identify good products from bad' and such, with quests basically being 'go make this thing, then use it to get access to a place where you can find out about another thing you could make, then find a place where you can gather the special thing you need for that recipe', etc, etc. Again yes, there is combat, a final boss, and so on, but its not really going to be that large of a portion of the screen-time.

[Tiktakkat]

I am an Oerth player, not a Realms player. I have, however, considered and discussed the issues of setting design and publication for many years.
With that noted, onto these.


Edition changes: What year you arrive in Toril will determine what edition it's in - what the rules of physics and magic are, among other things - what nations and deities it's absorbed or spat out, etc. I don't remember the exact timeline, and you may or may not be able to change the fact that it's gonna keep changing repeatedly - probably forever. That ever-changing ability set for everyone, from commoners to deities, is pretty daunting. But the takeaway from this seems to be pretty mundane: the world should make sense and be consistent.

The conclusion is correct, but the lead up is not really valid.
Nothing prevents anyone from using any era of FR with any rules edition. Yes, you will have to do some conversion work, but nothing stops you from using the AD&D era setting with One era characters and classes, or One era adventures with BECMI rules. As long as you are willing to do the work you can run whatever you want whenever you want.
That said, the conclusion is absolutely true, and something publishers should keep in mind.


Medieval stasis: There seem to be 3 different complaints here. The first is that people cannot accept things not working the same as they do on Earth. The second is that people cannot accept the world being immune to change. The third is that people consider medieval times to be inherently terrible. My summary takeaway? Don't make a world - and especially the bad parts of the world - unable to be changed/fixed.

Again, yes and no.
Accepting things work differently is all well and good - up to a point. Then suspension of disbelief begins to break down.
This is different from the world changing. A medieval setting SUDDENLY! becoming a Renaissance setting because someone has to have gunpowder, then EVEN MORE SUDDENLY! becoming a Gaslight setting because someone has to have reliable repeaters and not mere matchlocks is quite another.
As for people feeling medieval times to be inherently terrible, well, perhaps that means they should just consider using another setting, rather than insisting an existing setting be modified to suit them, and never mind all the people who happen to like a medieval setting.
As for the conclusion, a world should develop and evolve, in both published materials and home use. But be aware, not everyone considers the same things to be "bad parts", or the same changes to qualify as "fixing" it.
One size does not fit all in settings, whether it be tech level, tech progress, theme, cultural basis, whatever.


Terrible deities: The gods are terribly meddlesome when they're not - and sometimes even when they are being - lazy and incompetent, and the world might well be better off without them. At least "killing the gods" and "ascending to godhood" are both well-established in the lore, so it's not an unsolvable problem. I'm not sure what my takeaway should be, beyond repeating "don't make bad parts of the world unable to be changed/fixed".

Wall of Shame: The Wall of the Faithless has been removed as of (part-way through) 5th edition, so hopefully this won't be a problem for the Toril of the future, only for those in the 23, 3e, 4e, and early 5e Toril. I'm not sure what my takeaway should be, beyond repeating "don't make bad parts of the world unable to be changed/fixed", or shouting "tear down that wall!", but I'll go with the snarky, don't build the Wall of the Faithless.

Both of these are prime examples of things that not everyone has the same standard for "bad parts" and "fixes". You may not like them, but someone did at some point in time, and while you might be happy to see them go, others will not be.
Fortunately, this is where other settings come into play, and maybe FR is just not for you, and where home rules show up to adapt things anyway.


Scale of threats: When there isn't a CaS GM guaranteeing level-appropriate challenges, a 1st level commoner kinda gets insta-gibbed by an ancient dragon. There's a huge power scale at play on Toril, and that should be as rightly terrifying as nukes were to the Eminence in Shadow pre-Isekai. But I struggle to think of many settings that don't have dragons or gods or nukes or the sun or lightning and thunder or otherwise have things far beyond the scope of the inhabitants (except maybe one two settings where the sun is just "some dude" (although still a far more powerful dude than your average citizen)), so I'm not sure what a good takeaway here would be.

The takeaway is that a DM should be aware that threats exist for PCs of all levels, and exercise discretion when selecting challenges suitable for the current level of play.
And a DM should be aware that not every product is going to be suitable for the current level of play in the campaign, and be prepared to move on to another product.
As above though, not everyone's campaign is at the same point, so do not begrudge products not perfect for your use when they may be perfect for someone else.



World-ending threats: not all settings need to have "the world is about to end" feel like just another Tuesday. Toril (I'm told, I'm not a FR scholar) has far too many world-ending threats in its history to make it even remotely worth consideration if history is in any way mutable. So I guess the takeaway for making a world where people would actually want to live is something like, limit the maximum scope of the threats.

But what if people want the challenge and payoff of saving the world?
Not for every encounter of every session, but as the climax of a year-long campaign? Or a years-long campaign?
Again, this is a personal preference issue being projected across everything.


OP Wizard chess: Toril is known for its OP Wizards, but only slightly less well known is this: they're all spying on one another, kept in check from actually doing anything by fear of someone / anyone / everyone else moving against them. Bleh! On the low end, it means that powerful people are likely to say "no" to perfectly reasonable requests; on the high end, it means everyone will be watching what you do (unless you're Vecna-blooded or whatever), and likely interfering in the worst ways possible. It's like the gods, and turtles - it's annoying busy-bodies all the way down! I'm not sure if "don't make your world filled with annoying busy-bodies" is actually the proper takeaway here, though.

Well, I certainly do not like that, but again, clearly someone does.
I would, however, phrase the takeaway differently: Let the players have agency, with the consequences that come from it.
You can still have busy-body wizards and powers and what not, but the players remain the focus, no matter the level of the PCs, with all the good and bad that comes from it. Do not undercut everything the players want to do with uber-NPCs waiting in the wings to maintain the status quo, force change, or whatever else.
Of course, players should not get to run roughshod over a DM and campaign in the name of "sandbox" as if it were some grand panacea to any and all problems either. It is not. The DM must be as interested in the setting as the players are, and if the players refuse to play a particular campaign, then perhaps one of them should volunteer to run a different campaign and see what it is like when the former DM wants to change things to fit his preference.

[warty goblin]

I'd also add there's no doubt a lack of novelty... most of us have seen "vaguely European setting" a score of times, in different forms. It gets stale, after a while. But throw people into a desert wasteland or a magitech society with velociraptors, and things seem new again.

The flip of this is that if something is familiar, you may not think about it as much. And thinking about fantasy inevitably results in finding holes in the fantasy. Everybody knows the holes in Ye Oldeschool Fantasy Realme, so if you're playing in it you've probably made your peace with them, are there for ironic silliness, or just unironically like it. But with new stuff, you're going to think and ask a lot more questions, which will inevitably lead to brand new problems as the thing comes apart at the seams.

A large part of successfully enjoying fantasy I've found is telling my mind to sit down, shut up, and enjoy the hot babes riding around on dragons. If I'm going to get all analytic, I'll save it for something like history.

[HumanFighter]

One setting I would like to live in/run tabletop games in would be Arcanum.
...
And yes, I do find Forgotten Realms to be a confusing mess at times, but it's workable, and has enough interesting stuff still in it to be worthwhile.

[Vahnavoi]

Really don't buy equating "interesting" with "violent", at least lethal violent. Sports. Building. Farming. Those are all major physical activities you can build a game around without lethal violence or lethal risks making an appearance.

Now, as for social relations, drama and romance? Those can be done on the tabletop just fine, as play-by-post just fine, as live action roleplay just fine. Been there, done that. "But muh mechanics!", you cry. Look. Social interaction doesn't need a whole lot of mechanics to it, by default you have a group of people socially interacting. You need motives and personality traits for players to act and goals for them to pursue, maybe some secret information of who wants what, and you can stage majority of all social scenarios. The idea that tabletop games would be bad for this comes from a typical hobbyists approaching it with the mindset of a socially awkward teenage boy, expecting social rules to be made in the same tradition as rules for physical warfare in wargames.

[Beelzebub1111]

I'd also add there's no doubt a lack of novelty... most of us have seen "vaguely European setting" a score of times, in different forms. It gets stale, after a while. But throw people into a desert wasteland or a magitech society with velociraptors, and things seem new again.
Eberron and Golarion respectively? I like how in golarion the deeper you go the weirder it gets. Like how the Russian equivalent nation was briefly under siege by Rasputin and is now currently ruled by Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova. Or the nation that is in a perpetual French revolution with haunted guillotines that steal people's souls. Or that you can fool the god of the dead by sending a gold effigy of yourself to hell instead of you.

[Easy e]

Perhaps what makes a place interesting is not violence, but conflict.

Conflict does not always manifest itself as violence.

[KorvinStarmast]

Social interaction doesn't need a whole lot of mechanics to it, by default you have a group of people socially interacting. You need motives and personality traits for players to act and goals for them to pursue, maybe some secret information of who wants what, and you can stage majority of all social scenarios. There is a sub school who prefer roll playing, I suppose. :smallyuk:

The idea that tabletop games would be bad for this comes from a typical hobbyists approaching it with the mindset of a socially awkward teenage boy, expecting social rules to be made in the same tradition as rules for physical warfare in wargames. This too.

Perhaps what makes a place interesting is not violence, but conflict. Conflict does not always manifest itself as violence. *applause*
Conflict and tension can also be built by trying to steal the treasure/religious icon/magic ring without waking up the sleeping dragon / golem / monsterdujour.
The other source of conlict I've seen at play that can enrich the play experience is conflict within the party: how do we approach this deadly challenge? The small group dynamics of how they arrive at a course of action takes a variety of shapes, to include conflicting goals.
(Example: one PC wants to capture the "item" and donate it to the temple, another wants to sell it, another wants to trade it for something else).

[PhoenixPhyre]

Conflict and tension can also be built by trying to steal the treasure/religious icon/magic ring without waking up the sleeping dragon / golem / monsterdujour.

Yeah. As my high school drama teacher said--"What is drama? Conflict." And that has a lot of validity. It's a simplification, to be sure, but much of what people want in games like this can be summed up as "conflict".

This isn't entirely due to the low-conflict nature of modern life--even looking back to Greek drama, you had lots of conflict. It seems fairly built in.

[NichG]

I don't think you even strictly need conflict, at least not for it to be provided by the world. A person can provide that for themselves in the stance that they take with respect to other things or the decisions that they naturally happen upon. In the act of living, that happens at a certain low density as part of even idyllic life - what do I eat today, do I go hiking or kayaking or do I work on the garden, etc? And even outside of conflict, the simple act of pursuing one's goals productively - something where you know what you need to do and doing it gets you closer to something you want to be - can itself be satisfying and time-filling.

With a tabletop game, you have the challenge that you need whatever sorts of life events you're exploring to occur at a much higher density - once every ten minutes or so, not once or twice a day. Otherwise there's a lot of just sitting around and waiting.for someone to do something interesting, especially since fictional worlds don't render themselves into our senses as players the way that the real world does for us, so you can't really make a game out of spending 30 minutes looking at nature and being wowed by it, or spending an hour at a restaurant experiencing an ongoing parade of flavors and scents and novel dishes. You can have a restaurant scene where the GM spends a few minutes describing that stuff, but then you have to be on to the next decision.

For me the interesting target for a tabletop game would be, can you make something that really is all just about pursuing goals, where all of the motivation is natural and flows from the players without the world needing to kick them into action? It's undoubtedly a harder design problem, but it seems possible.

[PhoenixPhyre]

For me the interesting target for a tabletop game would be, can you make something that really is all just about pursuing goals, where all of the motivation is natural and flows from the players without the world needing to kick them into action? It's undoubtedly a harder design problem, but it seems possible.

I think it's possible, certainly, but as you say, much more difficult. Especially in a group setting. Where conflict is on the table, there's a natural unifying factor, a need to act collectively to overcome the problem. Without that, you could get a great single-player video game, but if my motivations and your motivations don't have overlap, you end up playing a bunch of single-player games at a shared table. Which seems...sub-optimal.

There are also people for whom conflict is the motivating factor. Who thrive and enjoy being challenged. I'm not challenge-focused, but I need there to be a narrative to hook on to. Some reason to be following the actions of this person, not that other person. Creative-mode Minecraft, although it's enthralling for a lot of other people, means absolutely nothing to me. Even survival mode just doesn't grab me. Because there's no narrative. That's somewhat orthogonal to conflict, but making a good narrative without conflict is something I've never succeeded at.

[Psyren]

Don't make a world - and especially the bad parts of the world - unable to be changed/fixed.

Do you mean the printed version of a world, that's designed for mass market consumption? Or an individual instance of that world for a specific table? Because you can change and fix the latter just fine, but for obvious reasons (such as the one provided by Tiktakkat) there isn't even consensus on what would need fixing let alone what the "solutions" might be for the former.



Wall of Shame: The Wall of the Faithless has been removed as of (part-way through) 5th edition, so hopefully this won't be a problem for the Toril of the future, only for those in the 23, 3e, 4e, and early 5e Toril.

It's referenced in Baldurs Gate 3 so I wouldn't count your chickens too far just yet.



World-ending threats: not all settings need to have "the world is about to end" feel like just another Tuesday. Toril (I'm told, I'm not a FR scholar) has far too many world-ending threats in its history to make it even remotely worth consideration if history is in any way mutable. So I guess the takeaway for making a world where people would actually want to live is something like, limit the maximum scope of the threats.

FR has threats at every scale. Not every problem needs Elminster, but some do, and should.


OP Wizard chess: Toril is known for its OP Wizards, but only slightly less well known is this: they're all spying on one another, kept in check from actually doing anything by fear of someone / anyone / everyone else moving against them. Bleh! On the low end, it means that powerful people are likely to say "no" to perfectly reasonable requests; on the high end, it means everyone will be watching what you do (unless you're Vecna-blooded or whatever), and likely interfering in the worst ways possible. It's like the gods, and turtles - it's annoying busy-bodies all the way down! I'm not sure if "don't make your world filled with annoying busy-bodies" is actually the proper takeaway here, though.

Gods and archmages being able to figure out what you're up to doesn't mean they get to directly interfere. The key to making such settings work is to have the power players take sides. Using Baldurs Gate as an example again, a big part of the bad guys' plot was only possible because existing players like Shar subtly helped out, and a big part of the heroes having a fighting chance is because other good deities also helped out. That's par for the course in settings like these.

[NichG]

I think it's possible, certainly, but as you say, much more difficult. Especially in a group setting. Where conflict is on the table, there's a natural unifying factor, a need to act collectively to overcome the problem. Without that, you could get a great single-player video game, but if my motivations and your motivations don't have overlap, you end up playing a bunch of single-player games at a shared table. Which seems...sub-optimal.

There are also people for whom conflict is the motivating factor. Who thrive and enjoy being challenged. I'm not challenge-focused, but I need there to be a narrative to hook on to. Some reason to be following the actions of this person, not that other person. Creative-mode Minecraft, although it's enthralling for a lot of other people, means absolutely nothing to me. Even survival mode just doesn't grab me. Because there's no narrative. That's somewhat orthogonal to conflict, but making a good narrative without conflict is something I've never succeeded at.

As far as narrative I think it's more clear how it can be done, but it doesn't necessarily avoid the decomposition into separate single player games. I can think of a number of stories that are generally about a person discovering a broader world, that don't center on conflict with that world or within that world but are really about how the person adapts their way of thinking to it. Utopian sci-fi stuff is a bit like this, as well as some (but not all) portal fantasy. The metaphors of the narrative and how it grounds out in the reader are generally about finding a place for yourself, figuring out where and how you fit, exploring your personal value to yourself and others, things like that. Oh there's the other side too - something like Dante's Inferno also sort of does this thing.

Something like Stardew Valley kind of has this structure of the protagonist leaving one kind of culture and entering a very different culture, and then having to find out how they want to live and how they want to relate to that community. It's not a complex narrative in that case, but I do think its more than say Minecraft Creative mode.

[PhoenixPhyre]

As far as narrative I think it's more clear how it can be done, but it doesn't necessarily avoid the decomposition into separate single player games. I can think of a number of stories that are generally about a person discovering a broader world, that don't center on conflict with that world or within that world but are really about how the person adapts their way of thinking to it. Utopian sci-fi stuff is a bit like this, as well as some (but not all) portal fantasy. The metaphors of the narrative and how it grounds out in the reader are generally about finding a place for yourself, figuring out where and how you fit, exploring your personal value to yourself and others, things like that. Oh there's the other side too - something like Dante's Inferno also sort of does this thing.

Something like Stardew Valley kind of has this structure of the protagonist leaving one kind of culture and entering a very different culture, and then having to find out how they want to live and how they want to relate to that community. It's not a complex narrative in that case, but I do think its more than say Minecraft Creative mode.

And that narrative can kinda work for fiction[1], but I've yet to see it work in a game environment. Different media have different needs, I guess.

[1] I personally find it boring, but that's a matter of taste, not some objective statement.

[gbaji]

Comments on a couple bits:

Setting advancement over time. Yeah. It's logical. It makes sense. But the reality is that most games kinda want a single setting technology wise. If the players want to play in a traditional high fantasy setting, then you put them into that setting. They probably don't actually want that game to advance into musketeer level stuff anytime soon. Also, a lot of game systems, lets face it, are just designed from the ground up to best simulate a specific "range" of technology/magic/whatever and start to get very handwavy or vague or even outright unworkable if you veer too far out of that range.

Which, of course, creates problems if you actually want to have a setting with a long history, much less where the players can play different campaigns at different times in that history. At least from a "does this actually make sense" pov. Then again, if you and your players have decided on playing in FR, say, it's a good bet that they want a very specific feel/theme/style for the game they are playing. So dropping them into a city with modern rifles and aircraft will probably make them go "um... what? This isn't the game we signed up for".

Which then leads us to maybe having to contrive reasons why technology doesn't advance past a certain point in the settting. Or, we restrict ourselves to a specific time frame in that setting. It's just been my experience that most of the time, players are less interested in playing in <specific world> than "bronze age with magic", or "swords and dragons", or "midieval castles and lords", or "future setting with cyborgs", or whatever.


As to Wizard Chess. I think this is often a game balance thing within a setting (where it exists anyway). In a lot of settings, you will likely want to have a wide variety of power levels, sometimes leading "all the way up". But, if you have that, you have to have some reason why the entire world isn't just constantly at the whim of "someone else" with that level of power. Wizard Chess (or equivalent) allows for this. Yup. There are people/beings/gods who are that powerful, but they all kinda compete with eachother, and agree to keep their conflicts to specific levels of activity, and thus it allows for lower power level folks (like the PCs) to actually have some impact on things. And yeah, it's also a tool the GM can use whenever things are heading in an "out of hand" direction, to reign things in. And if the players question "why did <some powerful being> intervene here, but not there? Well... there's a lot more going on "out there" than you know, and beings of that power level have their own reasons for doing things, and you just can't possibly know what they are. /handwave

Is that a total contrivance? Yes, it absolutely is. Does it help keep a campaign setting from spinning out of balance? Yes, it absolutely does.

[Slipjig]

I think it's important to point out that worlds where life is good for the average person are generally worlds where heroes aren't needed. So, yes, life is terrible for most people in the Realms, which is exactly why they need heroes. If Gotham City wasn't a terrible place, Batman would have no reason to exist.

But, also, we don't know that things are terrible EVERYWHERE in the Realms, we just know that things are generally terrible in the places where stories need to be set. We don't play D&D (or read D&D novels) to read about people rescuing cats from trees. We expect heroes who are thwarting Red Wizards, Zhents, and demonic invasions.

[LibraryOgre]

Really don't buy equating "interesting" with "violent", at least lethal violent. Sports. Building. Farming. Those are all major physical activities you can build a game around without lethal violence or lethal risks making an appearance.

I roughed out (but haven't quite finished) a Savage Worlds game based on playing a semi-pro football league. I've got "playing football" worked out, but the league management stuff was getting bogged down.


Eberron and Golarion respectively?

Dark Sun and a DDO-centric knowledge of Eberron.

[Bohandas]

As to Wizard Chess. I think this is often a game balance thing within a setting (where it exists anyway). In a lot of settings, you will likely want to have a wide variety of power levels, sometimes leading "all the way up". But, if you have that, you have to have some reason why the entire world isn't just constantly at the whim of "someone else" with that level of power. Wizard Chess (or equivalent) allows for this. Yup. There are people/beings/gods who are that powerful, but they all kinda compete with eachother, and agree to keep their conflicts to specific levels of activity, and thus it allows for lower power level folks (like the PCs) to actually have some impact on things.

I've had an idea, which I've never actually gotten to use, for a campaign where everybody plays high level characters but the adventures are all low level and the idea is to see how many they can get through consecutively without resting to revover spells etc.

[LibraryOgre]

I've had an idea, which I've never actually gotten to use, for a campaign where everybody plays high level characters but the adventures are all low level and the idea is to see how many they can get through consecutively without resting to revover spells etc.

One day, and it has to be AD&D, I want to play a 9th level fighter who dual-classed to 1st level thief, and tackles the Caves of Chaos solo. All his 9th level HP and magic items (that will help him... can't keep using that +3 plate!), but a 1st level thief's skills, ThAC0, and saves.

[Telok]

Funny thing, my DtD setting was a perfectly nice place to live the first time around. No universe, or even planet, wrecking threats. PCs started of working security on the biggest & best luxury cruise starliner in space. Naturally there's places with local warfare, the occasional hellish dystopian colony, and some regional governments of varying quality. But overall not terrible at all.

Of couse by the end there were... counting... four potential universe destroyers, and the mind flayers had an effective east planet destroyer. All courtesy of the PCs (poke sleeping laser-bear-kaiju and run away just leaves someone else to get laser-bear-kaiju stomped). Truely about three of the universe enders can be dealt with by sufficently large military mobilizations by different empires, and three (not the same three) will come into conflict with each other. So even without PCs doing stuff the universe is probably fine, just a few thousand billion more people will die and few dozen or so stars/systems destroyed if the PCs don't get involved and find better solutions. Just half of known space destroyed ya know?

[NichG]

Eh, what do I want to say about all of this that hasn't been said...

Certainly there are a lot of easy recipes to make a game work. But those are at the meta level, and they don't justify the world being worthwhile at the level of fiction or character. That's the tension that's going on here, that when setting authors (or GMs) make those choices which help for there to be a game with momentum and pressure and opportunities for heroics and all of this stuff, certain directions of those choices which understandably work as far as the needs of the game move the world more towards being a crapsack world that doesn't actually feel worth saving. Of course from an in-character point of view you can argue 'well the characters don't get to choose the world they live in, they have to make do with it', but it definitely has a strong impact on things like whether its plausible for characters to sacrifice themselves to save the world, how much they would be invested in preserving the status quo of the world versus burning it all down, etc. And certainly from a player perspective, whether players are going to feel like investing anything in the world versus just treating it like a backdrop for their character being awesome or edgy or whatever.

When people complain 'why doesn't Elminster just fix things?' its not just a moment of fridge logic, its an indication that when they play through the plot of them fixing those things, the significance of their own actions is undermined by the fact that not only could someone else have solved it, but according to the supposed ethos of their characters it seems like they should have done so, and not doing so comes off as incompetence, negligence, hypocrisy, or apathy. If said characters furthermore do bother to intervene when the player tries to change things away from the status quo (e.g. the GM tries to keep things on track) but won't intervene when the forces of evil try to change things away from the status quo much more severely (because thats what the game is about, the PCs have to do that), those impressions become even stronger. And thereby, despite having all the right dramatic elements, a player may find that that world and its major figures become less compelling - more something to be mocked or undermined than something to be explored and taken as a source of wonder.

When there's a world such that no matter what you do you're just holding back the tide for a moment, and things fundamentally can't get better (because of the meta reason that there must be a next session, a next campaign, etc) then at some point a player will start to feel like, well, if we just lose or give up wouldn't that meta reason still be true? The only thing to lose is the character, in which case if there's some option that would let them escape the plot, it starts to feel more and more like a good option as opposed to actually seeing the plot through. Faerun is going to be destroyed due to Shar managing to take back the weave and putting out the sun? Hm, well, we could fight against it and maybe die trying, but why not just buy a set of scrolls of Planeshift and go somewhere else? What about this world makes it actually feel good to save it, versus just 'I guess we have to'?

So when there are alternatives to taking the most expedient 'for sake of the game' steps that might also turn off players from the world as a result, its worth it to think about 'how else things might be?' Can you make things about seeking positives rather than avoiding negatives, or just fill the world with so much wonder that the negatives are worth it? Can you make those things which are negative potentially fixable - do you really need them to be so static or unconquerable in practice, at your table, or is it just an abstract fear? Can you just use metagame agreements to avoid things getting out of hand rather than having in-setting overpowered forces whose only purpose is to maintain the status quo?

I think one of the difficulties is that we do so much by imitating media we've already digested. It feels like it would be really hard to describe, from first principles and abstract narrative theory, how a game like 'Stardew Valley' could even work - but if I can point to Stardew Valley, it suddenly becomes much easier to say 'yeah, just something like that'. So a lot of the 'needs' that justify making these worlds that (several of us at least) are getting tired of may just be a feeling of, well everything else seems to follow this pattern, how can I even imagine doing something else without falling back into this (and really, we see this so much in the default assumptions that lead to any kind of tabletop RPG being compared with D&D in terms of its loops, needs, and overall structure...). So breaking away from that does require not just things that will seem risky since you can't look and say 'these other games have done this, and it was okay', but also intentionally avoiding the familiar sufficiently wildly that it doesn't become a matter of habit to reintroduce those patterns we're over-familiar with.

Like, rather than starting with a 'heroes saving the world (but its a better world)' which already imports all of the needs of a world that must be saved, you could start much further away. For example a game centered entirely on office romances, with players each having hidden traits, likes, and dislikes, and everyone trying to hook up while simultaneously dealing with the need to work with each-other and be professional while the CEO sends people out on odd whims and tasks. Or as has been mentioned on this thread, a game about sports competitions. Or even something where the conflicts are real but entirely personal and the world itself isn't responsible: something where each player plays a character who has been wronged by someone and cast down from their rightful place, and now the players work together to balance their desire for vengeance with their ability to reclaim their position in society. Or a game of competing glories where each player is empowered to create and control part of the world to be a model of what they actually think a world worth living in would look like, and then those conflicting visions become tested against each-other in how fast they can grow to absorb the parts of the world yet un-shaped.

[Bohandas]

The Forgotten Realms setting has always struck me as vaguely pretentious; I can;t put my finger on exactly why but the impression is definitely there. I know that that's not the kind of watsonian issue that is the main focus of this thread, but if we're discussing issues with Forgotten Realms it has to be said.

(In fairness early Greyhawk comes off as a little pretentious too but not the later stuff)

[Easy e]

I roughed out (but haven't quite finished) a Savage Worlds game based on playing a semi-pro football league. I've got "playing football" worked out, but the league management stuff was getting bogged down.


I was working on a Quick and Dirty Blood Bowl RPG for a mini-campaign of 2-6 sessions. I was basing it on Blood Bowl mechanics though, so Block Dice for resolution.

This semi-pro football idea sounds like a super fun idea for a game.

[woweedd]

I think it's important to point out that worlds where life is good for the average person are generally worlds where heroes aren't needed. So, yes, life is terrible for most people in the Realms, which is exactly why they need heroes. If Gotham City wasn't a terrible place, Batman would have no reason to exist.

But, also, we don't know that things are terrible EVERYWHERE in the Realms, we just know that things are generally terrible in the places where stories need to be set. We don't play D&D (or read D&D novels) to read about people rescuing cats from trees. We expect heroes who are thwarting Red Wizards, Zhents, and demonic invasions.

I'm reminded of a quote from the creators of Pathfinder when someone pointed out how Golarion kinda sucks to live in, which was basically "wow, sounds like that world could really use some heroic adventures to help things". Fact is, there aren't many fictional universes I would choose to live in over our own reality. Say what you will about our Earth, but, with the near-universal formal education, exceptionally well-maintained infrastructure, self-propelled vehicles for lots of people not to mention public transport, an astounding variety of goods and services available, ubiquitous technological devices for the entire populace, wilderness that is clean, safe, and not filled with monsters, ETC we're already well above pretty much every D&D setting.

[Telok]

Say what you will about our Earth, but, with the near-universal formal education, exceptionally well-maintained infrastructure, self-propelled vehicles for lots of people not to mention public transport, an astounding variety of goods and services available, ubiquitous technological devices for the entire populace, wilderness that is clean, safe, and not filled with monsters, ETC we're already well above pretty much every D&D setting.

Well there's also a bunch of writers not doing any basic research into actual Medieval stuff too. They like to run off bad Victorian un-history depictions where everyone not in the top 1% of wealth is an illiterate turnip farmer covered in filth. Houses with running water and heated floors? Actual medicine and state maintained infrastructure? Nope! Ancient Rome, Egypt, and China 2000 years ago are too technologically advanced for our plate armored knights on dragons fighting airship pirates with semi-auto crossbows.

[NichG]

I'm reminded of a quote from the creators of Pathfinder when someone pointed out how Golarion kinda sucks to live in, which was basically "wow, sounds like that world could really use some heroic adventures to help things". Fact is, there aren't many fictional universes I would choose to live in over our own reality. Say what you will about our Earth, but, with the near-universal formal education, exceptionally well-maintained infrastructure, self-propelled vehicles for lots of people not to mention public transport, an astounding variety of goods and services available, ubiquitous technological devices for the entire populace, wilderness that is clean, safe, and not filled with monsters, ETC we're already well above pretty much every D&D setting.


D&D can compete with this quite well, it has things like:
- Absolute and nearly instant and painless cures for all transmissible diseases
- The ability to have lost limbs and organs restored
- Even death can be fixed
- And if you don't like something about your body, there are temporary and permanent ways to change it - polymorph, reincarnation, sarrukhs, Wish rituals ...
- Immortality is possible too if you want.
- Perfect and near instant cleaning of things
- Broken, even damaged until nearly lost things can be trivially restored
- Perfect comfort in extremes of weather is possible
- You can have an instantaneous commute or near-instantaneous global travel. Even space travel.
- Post-scarcity supply of certain resources is possible
- One can be a barehanded machine shop for all manner of mundane goods
- It's possible to at least personally totally decouple from basic needs of survival: food, water, and shelter. At high level, that decoupling is even swank

So D&D itself has a lot going for it. It's specifically stuff about the settings people create that ends up restricting these benefits to the adventuring class, populating the world with monsters, etc.

As much as I roll my eyes at Tippyverse, it does manage to be a setting that would be competitive with the real world for quality of life. Even without the resetting trap shenanigans that probably shouldn't work under any given GM, just the attitude of 'how can we turn these spell effects into shared infrastructure' and 'what if these were subsidized by a government rather than people needing to pay adventurer rates?' creates a setting more comparable to the modern world than the medieval one.

[LibraryOgre]

So D&D itself has a lot going for it. It's specifically stuff about the settings people create that ends up restricting these benefits to the adventuring class, populating the world with monsters, etc.

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed. "

[MonochromeTiger]

I do have to wonder how much of the issue with Forgotten Realms being a terrible setting to live in, and other settings for that matter, is down to the Star Trek problem.

Put simply, Star Trek constantly tries to say that future society is idyllic and prosperous. Many of our cultural issues just flat out got solved off screen, resource scarcity is a thing of the past and technology allows for most of the things people want to be casually made, and bigotry (at least between Humans) is so rare that the exceptions stand out for how out of place they are. Then it turns around and makes it seem like the galaxy is one great big death trap by having the crew run into disaster after disaster and constant threats that have the potential to end civilizations and even entire worlds.

The relative comforts that the setting claims to have are undermined simply by the fact that as a conceit of it being a show it has to focus on the "exciting" parts where everything is going wrong so there's something for the crew to fix. On screen we have death, destruction, disease, bigotry and bias of all kinds, and massive societal unrest that the crew are expected to resolve within one or two episodes and move on to the next flashy conflict. Off screen there's still the entire rest of the galaxy where most planets are perfectly fine and not experiencing the kind of apocalyptic disasters that would make Star Fleet burst within a week if they were as widespread and constant as the shows imply.

Put more simply, how much of these places being terrible to live in is just down to the fact that the things that go very wrong are what gets the narrative focus while actual day to day life is at best a vague set dressing?

Obviously the question has some obvious counters in the fact that, taken at face value, the game's mechanics imply that on a daily basis the average peasant taking a stroll into town has a non zero chance of running into everything from bandits to extremely powerful monsters like Beholders and Dragons that are supposed to be rare and reclusive. Issue being at least in the latter case the setting does make a point that those things are supposed to be rare and reclusive. Beholders are so worried about things that could actually threaten them that they generally keep to their lairs where they've worked out all the defenses and traps and possible variables for any threat showing up and Dragons have a habit of hibernating for years at a time when they don't have anything better to do.

So, obviously, there's mechanics at play in the setting logic and some of that is actually built into the setting. Still some of it isn't, sort of like how PCs have access to spells that, in the setting, are actually supposed to be unique or almost unheard of and quickly advance in power faster than even the super powered designated heroes and villains of the setting did. There has to be more to a setting than what's focused on or the world is just an empty husk with a few dozen people at best and a ton of things trying to kill you; at the same time there has to be more to the way the world works than the mechanics of the game say or society would've logically never made it far enough for cities or even some PC classes to exist.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I do have to wonder how much of the issue with Forgotten Realms being a terrible setting to live in, and other settings for that matter, is down to the Star Trek problem.

Put simply, Star Trek constantly tries to say that future society is idyllic and prosperous. Many of our cultural issues just flat out got solved off screen, resource scarcity is a thing of the past and technology allows for most of the things people want to be casually made, and bigotry (at least between Humans) is so rare that the exceptions stand out for how out of place they are. Then it turns around and makes it seem like the galaxy is one great big death trap by having the crew run into disaster after disaster and constant threats that have the potential to end civilizations and even entire worlds.

The relative comforts that the setting claims to have are undermined simply by the fact that as a conceit of it being a show it has to focus on the "exciting" parts where everything is going wrong so there's something for the crew to fix. On screen we have death, destruction, disease, bigotry and bias of all kinds, and massive societal unrest that the crew are expected to resolve within one or two episodes and move on to the next flashy conflict. Off screen there's still the entire rest of the galaxy where most planets are perfectly fine and not experiencing the kind of apocalyptic disasters that would make Star Fleet burst within a week if they were as widespread and constant as the shows imply.

Put more simply, how much of these places being terrible to live in is just down to the fact that the things that go very wrong are what gets the narrative focus while actual day to day life is at best a vague set dressing?

Obviously the question has some obvious counters in the fact that, taken at face value, the game's mechanics imply that on a daily basis the average peasant taking a stroll into town has a non zero chance of running into everything from bandits to extremely powerful monsters like Beholders and Dragons that are supposed to be rare and reclusive. Issue being at least in the latter case the setting does make a point that those things are supposed to be rare and reclusive. Beholders are so worried about things that could actually threaten them that they generally keep to their lairs where they've worked out all the defenses and traps and possible variables for any threat showing up and Dragons have a habit of hibernating for years at a time when they don't have anything better to do.

So, obviously, there's mechanics at play in the setting logic and some of that is actually built into the setting. Still some of it isn't, sort of like how PCs have access to spells that, in the setting, are actually supposed to be unique or almost unheard of and quickly advance in power faster than even the super powered designated heroes and villains of the setting did. There has to be more to a setting than what's focused on or the world is just an empty husk with a few dozen people at best and a ton of things trying to kill you; at the same time there has to be more to the way the world works than the mechanics of the game say or society would've logically never made it far enough for cities or even some PC classes to exist.

Yeah, I think this is most of it. It's like why PCs are often weird (from a setting perspective) and run into tons of monsters, etc.--the sample is really skewed. THis isn't a slice of life where we try to get a uniform sampling of the actual underlying setting. It's intentionally and inherently biased toward "interesting" things.

The PCs aren't special because they're PCs--they're PCs because they're special (for other reasons). In this case, we follow their adventures because they're interesting. And so the setting descriptions focus on those interesting parts and the rest is soft-focus. If these people weren't interesting and doing interesting things...we'd follow people who were.

And that last paragraph is really true--the mechanics are related (at least in more simulationist games) to the actual underlying fictional mechanics. But they are not, at all, in any meaningful ways the real fictional mechanics. That's the nature of an abstraction--abstractions are inherently lossy. And game mechanics are GAME mechanics first, foremost, and almost exclusively. The map is not the territory. Fireball in game always hits a defined radius for a fixed (range) of damage, and has particular properties. In universe, that may or may not be true. But we decide that the differences don't matter from a game UI perspective, so we elide them.

[NichG]

I do have to wonder how much of the issue with Forgotten Realms being a terrible setting to live in, and other settings for that matter, is down to the Star Trek problem.

Put simply, Star Trek constantly tries to say that future society is idyllic and prosperous. Many of our cultural issues just flat out got solved off screen, resource scarcity is a thing of the past and technology allows for most of the things people want to be casually made, and bigotry (at least between Humans) is so rare that the exceptions stand out for how out of place they are. Then it turns around and makes it seem like the galaxy is one great big death trap by having the crew run into disaster after disaster and constant threats that have the potential to end civilizations and even entire worlds.

The relative comforts that the setting claims to have are undermined simply by the fact that as a conceit of it being a show it has to focus on the "exciting" parts where everything is going wrong so there's something for the crew to fix. On screen we have death, destruction, disease, bigotry and bias of all kinds, and massive societal unrest that the crew are expected to resolve within one or two episodes and move on to the next flashy conflict. Off screen there's still the entire rest of the galaxy where most planets are perfectly fine and not experiencing the kind of apocalyptic disasters that would make Star Fleet burst within a week if they were as widespread and constant as the shows imply.

Put more simply, how much of these places being terrible to live in is just down to the fact that the things that go very wrong are what gets the narrative focus while actual day to day life is at best a vague set dressing?

Obviously the question has some obvious counters in the fact that, taken at face value, the game's mechanics imply that on a daily basis the average peasant taking a stroll into town has a non zero chance of running into everything from bandits to extremely powerful monsters like Beholders and Dragons that are supposed to be rare and reclusive. Issue being at least in the latter case the setting does make a point that those things are supposed to be rare and reclusive. Beholders are so worried about things that could actually threaten them that they generally keep to their lairs where they've worked out all the defenses and traps and possible variables for any threat showing up and Dragons have a habit of hibernating for years at a time when they don't have anything better to do.

So, obviously, there's mechanics at play in the setting logic and some of that is actually built into the setting. Still some of it isn't, sort of like how PCs have access to spells that, in the setting, are actually supposed to be unique or almost unheard of and quickly advance in power faster than even the super powered designated heroes and villains of the setting did. There has to be more to a setting than what's focused on or the world is just an empty husk with a few dozen people at best and a ton of things trying to kill you; at the same time there has to be more to the way the world works than the mechanics of the game say or society would've logically never made it far enough for cities or even some PC classes to exist.

It depends a lot on which Trek though. Like, for me at least, without question it'd be better to live in the TNG Star Trek setting than in the modern world as it is now. If you want peace you can get it. If you want risk or high stakes adventure, that exists too out on the frontier, but (for the most part) the dangers of the frontier stay far away from the core. You've got the Borg attack as the one big exception, which massacres a large portion of the Federation military but otherwise, basically, its handled decisively in very short order compared to any kind of real-life military conflict. The other dangerous stuff like the crystalline entity, Romulan tensions, Kardassian conflict, etc are all on frontier worlds or not-yet-member nations. But if you live in France you can go grow your grapes to a ripe old age of 300 if you want, or run a restaurant in San Francisco despite replicators being everywhere, or whatever, and it works for those people.

And, importantly, the show actually takes the time to show us that rather than just saying 'yeah those are the boring bits, we'll keep it off-screen'.

On the other hand, that age is book-ended by TOS and DS9, both of which are much more warfare-centric narratives. DS9 does a good job of taking on the question of 'how would we imagine that a utopian society should wage war, and when is it appropriate for one to do so?', but in order to ask that question it has to introduce a threat of similar size that had not yet been encountered and had relations normalized, and then well we're into the whole 'make the setting globally more dangerous so there's meaningful stakes' pattern, oops. Couldn't just be about Bajor, oh well. Still though, even with DS9 and the Dominion, I'd say that Trek comes out ahead of real life on the balance. Dominion invasion or the threat of a nuclear WW3 hanging over multiple generations' heads, which is worse? I'd probably still take the universe with the Dominion and the Borg and the Q picking on a chosen representative now or then (I guess I wouldn't walk away from the Omelas built on the periodic trolling of a single Picard ...)

Would I take the universe of, say, Enterprise or Discovery or Picard or some of the TNG movies? In some sense, only based on the premise that these all do belong to a single continuity, so seeing what TNG said about the history of Earth means I can assume that remains true of Enterprise or whatnot. But its a bit less inviting if it had to be based purely just on what's shown on those particular shows and nothing else. Strange New Worlds? Sure I'd go for that based on what I've seen so far.

Of course that's not to say in any of those cases that I'd be trying to join Starfleet. But thats kind of the thing - in that setting, you don't have to embark on a dangerous military career in order to get access to the perks. You don't have to be an Adventurer facing life and death on a weekly basis in order to get at the things that could make life better within the setting logic.

But also I think this is why I didn't respond so strongly to the view from the OP on the problems with Faerun being the abstract negatives so much as the absence of material that really highlights the redeeming positives. Maybe a presentation of Faerun could exist that would make me say 'oh, that sounds good enough to give lip service to some deity so I don't get tortured forever, and work on getting a second home somewhere out in the planes for when the occasional plotline drifts too near by Waterdeep or Silverymoon or wherever'. But at the very least it would require spending some ink and effort to actually imagine, build up, and present those positives. Whereas for other people more focused on the negatives or on the risks, even an otherwise-paradise where you know that somewhere in the random campaign table 'an elder evil descends' is in the cards wouldn't be tolerable.

TL;DR - the reason Star Trek (for me) comes out ahead of Faerun is that the authors of Star Trek took the time to actually show those good lives people get to live, rather than just focusing on the action all the time.

[DammitVictor]

I wouldn't want to live in a utopia like Star Trek, at least if I had to live in the safe and prosperous Federation. Give me a one-time shot of that Starfleet medicine, and I'd just get my hands on a ship and make a beeline for the nearest lawless frontier or hot border and make a bloody nuisance of myself.

My problem with the Realms isn't that it's technologically or socially primitive, or that it's dangerous, because those are frankly positives for me. My problem with the Realms and Oerth and Krynn and practically every other official AD&D and post-AD&D setting is that is that the fundamental, divinely ordained cosmological order of the universe is unspeakably corrupt and anathema to me. They are universes that I would not want to live in and I would do absolutely anything in my power to avoid dying in.

Mystara, Eberron (maybe?), the Nentir Vale... okay. Athas is terrible and I wouldn't want to live there, but it's a better place to die than anywhere in the Radiant Triangle.

Personally, my picks would look something like a Mystara-centric Spelljammer, or the Mushroom Kingdom, or a Galaxy Far Far Away, or maybe Marvel if I'd get powers and some sort of say in what kind. Worlds where the natural order is harsh, uncaring, or even antagonistic but not unbearably morally corrosive.

[Telok]

The PCs aren't special because they're PCs--they're PCs because they're special (for other reasons).

Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Boot Hill, Twilight 2000, Gamma World, and a large set of other games disagree. And while the above quote may be true in modern D&D it wasn't even universally true in the early editions of the game. Think about it, we can actually honestly debate if Forgotten Realms is a worse place to live than a world where there is no afterlife (although there are fates worse than death) and nothing you do will ever really matter. That we can reasonably entertain and debate the idea that Call of Cthulhu is a better setting to live in than FR says something, and it doesn't reflect well on ol' FR there.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Boot Hill, Twilight 2000, Gamma World, and a large set of other games disagree. And while the above quote may be true in modern D&D it wasn't even universally true in the early editions of the game. Think about it, we can actually honestly debate if Forgotten Realms is a worse place to live than a world where there is no afterlife (although there are fates worse than death) and nothing you do will ever really matter. That we can reasonably entertain and debate the idea that Call of Cthulhu is a better setting to live in than FR says something, and it doesn't reflect well on ol' FR there.

"Special" here means "encounters events most people don't" or "does things out of the setting norm". That's all.

[KorvinStarmast]

Some posters here tend to go out of their way to dump on D&D. FR just adds additional self justification for doing so.

The higher lethality of Old School D&D has nothing to do with settings, however. (And I agree with Telok about Traveller).

[Telok]

"Special" here means "encounters events most people don't" or "does things out of the setting norm". That's all.

Well that just means you can dump Call of Cthulhu from the list. Traveller, Boot Hill, Gamma World, Paranoia, Twilight 2000... the list of "ordinary people not being special in the setting" is still pretty big.

Still thinking that 1924 east coast USA is probably better living than FR sword coast pretty much any year an adventure module takes place.

[KorvinStarmast]

Well that just means you can dump Call of Cthulhu from the list. Traveller, Boot Hill, Gamma World, Paranoia, Twilight 2000... the list of "ordinary people not being special in the setting" is still pretty big.

Still thinking that 1924 east coast USA is probably better living than FR sword coast pretty much any year an adventure module takes place. Unless you catch pneumonia. (That's what killed my grandfather in 1938: penicillan wasn't a thing back then ...)
I am not sure how we got on the "I'd rather live in the real world versus the FR" digression (I guess that branch happened a few posts back) but the FR is kind of a vague place to be / live. Are you a noble in Neverwinter? Are you a beggar in Chult? Do you live in Cormyr?
Depending on where you are it may be more or less dangerous than living in

Prohibition-era Chicago, New York, or any large city
Central America when Yellow Fever was a non-trivial menace (19th and early 20th centuries)
China between 1926 and 1949 (a civil war, a world war, and an imperial power occupying substantial parts of the country, and behaving badly were part of the fun in those days ..)
France in the 14th century. (Yeah, the Black Death featured as a part of that setting ...)

But all of that takes me back to the art of world building.
Some people are good at it (Jordan, Tolkien) and some people are not.
(Ed, bless him for his efforts in any case, and he had "help" from a variety of others in terms of inconsistency in a setting .. ). I'll take a further step and put GRR Martin in the "world building not great" box.

But, even with a published setting, any DM can tweak it or improve it.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Well that just means you can dump Call of Cthulhu from the list. Traveller, Boot Hill, Gamma World, Paranoia, Twilight 2000... the list of "ordinary people not being special in the setting" is still pretty big.

Still thinking that 1924 east coast USA is probably better living than FR sword coast pretty much any year an adventure module takes place.

Uh, I'm not seeing what you mean? In Boot Hill, PCs are "special" not at the setting level, but they experience things that most "normal" people in the setting don't. That's why they're PCs. That's the meaning of "special" I intend. Paranoia, they're troubleshooters. Most citizens are not troubleshooters. Thus, PCs are special.

And I don't claim that it's 100% of all games[1]...but this whole conversation is in the context of D&D and other "adventure" games. Where PCs definitely are special.

[1] because any statement about 100% of all games is false. Even this one.

[MoiMagnus]

Scale of threats: When there isn't a CaS GM guaranteeing level-appropriate challenges, a 1st level commoner kinda gets insta-gibbed by an ancient dragon. There's a huge power scale at play on Toril, and that should be as rightly terrifying as nukes were to the Eminence in Shadow pre-Isekai. But I struggle to think of many settings that don't have dragons or gods or nukes or the sun or lightning and thunder or otherwise have things far beyond the scope of the inhabitants (except maybe one two settings where the sun is just "some dude" (although still a far more powerful dude than your average citizen)), so I'm not sure what a good takeaway here would be.

IMO what happen is that peoples don't want to live in a world where they would be the under-priviledged (in term of power, social class, etc), and where this lack of privilege would be felt in their day-to-day life.

So I guess that the "take-away" is that if your world are peoples that are seriously under-privildeged to the point that it makes their life a living hell, make sure that readers don't identify with those under-privildeged but instead identity to peoples higher in the pyramid of powers. It's kind of difficult to do because everyone identify with different characters, but for example you might have an easier time selling your ruthless medieval setting if you bake in it the default assumption that every PC or relatable character is a noble.

[icefractal]

That brings up a big point - are we entering this world through a "veil of ignorance" where we could end up as anyone? Or are we people who'd be PCs/protagonists?

Because most D&D settings, for example, are harsh and dangerous worlds for the majority of people in them, but "high-level caster" is a pretty sweet gig. Get to live forever, no worry about disease or injury, travel dimensions, hang out with all kinds of interesting people, as much money as you want, literally make your own (small) world, etc.

But if it's purely random and I'm more likely to end up as "farmer who gets eviscerated by an Ogre before the heroes get there" then hell no.

[gbaji]

I usually do assume that PCs are "special", but not in some sort of magical way, but more of a "these are people who, for whatever reason, decide to do something about <bad things> going on in the world around them". They are people who will spend their spare time actually practicing, training, and preparing for whatever conflicts they may later encounter. And yeah, that may reflect itself in bonuses in game for various things.

I once had a fellow GM for a game world we were running (we tend to share GMing duties), and he was constantly calculating the skills and abilities for NPCs based on the game systems experience system. His thinking was that these were the rules in the book, so therefore everyone in the game followed those rules. I pointed out that, no, these were the rules in the book which represent the maximum gains someone could get, over time, assuming they are spending pretty much all of their spare time/effort improving themselves in game relevant skills. It's designed to tell us what PCs can get in terms of skill/ability increases over time, when they are not actively adventuring.

But most people in most settings don't spend their time preparing for going on an adventure later, right? Most people, having spent enough effort to put a roof over their heads, and food in their belly, will spend the rest of their time on leisure activities, right? They aren't going to obsessively work out, or train with weapons, or practice spellcraft. They're going to hang out with their friends at the local tavern. Maybe take in a show. Engage in social/fun activities. You know... the stuff normal people do.

So yeah. PCs are assumed to be exceptional in that way, and that will result in increased skills/abilities/spells/etc relative to "regular people". Of course, some NPCs are also going to be of the same mindset as well. But not all. This concept allows us to explain why every single soldier in the evil Duke's army isn't a top level weapons expert. And why every thief in town can't actually rob everyone blind. And why everyone who studies wizardry isn't blasting small towns off the map by the time they're in their 40s. Only the rare exceptional people spend the amount of time/energy/focus to achieve those levels of ability. PCs are somewhat assumed to be in that category (though you can certainly play characters who are not, if you really want to). The GM should have a light hand in terms of which NPCs also fall into that exceptional category.

And yeah. This concept also makes settings work better IMO.

[Telok]

The PCs aren't special because they're PCs--they're PCs because they're special (for other reasons). In this case, we follow their adventures because they're interesting.


Uh, I'm not seeing what you mean? In Boot Hill, PCs are "special" not at the setting level, but they experience things that most "normal" people in the setting don't. That's why they're PCs. That's the meaning of "special" I intend. Paranoia, they're troubleshooters. Most citizens are not troubleshooters. Thus, PCs are special.

See, its like you're saying pcs are special in the setting not because they're pcs and then you turn around and say they aren't special in the setting that they'te speciap because thry're pcs. You make no sense there. And the way Paranoia works all clones start infrared and follow the security colors up, since all red citizens are troubleshooters therefore nearly every single red & higher citizen is or has been a troubleshooter. So in Paranoia being a troubleshooter is not special.

But yeah, the forums' monofocus on d&d does screw up talking about general gaming stuff and non-d&d games. I agree with you there. But its a tangent so I'll drop

[Mechalich]

See, its like you're saying pcs are special in the setting not because they're pcs and then you turn around and say they aren't special in the setting that they'te speciap because thry're pcs. You make no sense there. And the way Paranoia works all clones start infrared and follow the security colors up, since all red citizens are troubleshooters therefore nearly every single red & higher citizen is or has been a troubleshooter. So in Paranoia being a troubleshooter is not special.

I think the idea is that PCs have an uncommon role in society that is generally presumed to be more 'exciting' than what the average person is doing, usually by a very large amount. 'Exciting' usually means that whatever this person is doing has very high stakes, whether in terms of money, emotions, freedom, or life&death. That's why there are so many dramas set in high finance (money), extremely dysfunctional families (emotions), law enforcement or the judicial system (freedom), or medicine (life&death). This doesn't imply that the PCs are 'special' as people - most cops, to use the obvious case, are, the moment they take the uniform off, stunningly ordinary individuals - but that they occupy circumstances that are special from the view of the society they occupy.

This is, however, rather rare in RPGs. Many, possibly most, games posit that the PCs are inherently special, either through the possession of special abilities (superpowers), special training (which is what a D&D PC class represents), or membership in a special class (like being a Vampire in VtM). Even when this is not the case, the PCs are usually presumed to be part of some elite subset within some larger group of people who lead exciting lives - the crew of the best starship, the students at the elite academy, the members of the championship sports team, etc. Stories and games focused on Joe Average are rare.

[KorvinStarmast]

Jeez, it isn't that complicated.
PCs in any role-playing game are the protagonists of the story, so the spot light is necessarily on them.
Just like in TV shows, movies, plays, etc ...

One of the things I like about the way our GM is running our Blades in the Dark game is that he shares with us the results of some of his rolls/off screen deliberations, via informants or allies we make, that let us know how some of the other factions are doing, or what they are doing, while we are mucking about doing crime. In a few cases this has led us to change what score we were trying to set up and achieve ...

[PhoenixPhyre]

Jeez, it isn't that complicated.
PCs in any role-playing game are the protagonists of the story, so the spot light is necessarily on them.
Just like in TV shows, movies, plays, etc ...


Yeah, that was my intent. But I missed a "may" in my original statement--a more full statement might be:

PCs may or may not be special in setting. If they are special in setting, it's not because they're PCs. At least in most games that don't involve 4th wall violations as a core mechanic.

Regardless of their special nature (or lack thereof) in setting, PCs are PCs because they are interesting to observe from the outside. They have adventures, meet things, do things, etc so that having the spotlight on them is interesting. And this is why they're PCs--very few games[1] are devoted to following the non-exploits of uninteresting, utterly ordinary people going about their daily business in a perfectly normal, boring world. The game conceit is that by creating the PCs, they're guaranteed to be cursed with interesting lives. And part of the social contract of most RPGs is that the players will accept that curse and lean into it, not have to be dragged kicking and screaming to bite at "plot hooks" or other ways the universe (aka whoever is narrating, if anyone) decides to make their lives interesting.

Another consequence of this is that the view of the setting PCs (and thus players) see is extremely warped toward the "interesting". Which in D&D particularly, tends to mean violent, rife with potentially (if not stopped) cataclysmic events and high-power people. We only see what the spotlight is focusing on with any clarity--and that's focused on the "interesting" life of the PCs most of the time.

[1] all generalizations, including this one, are false. So I wouldn't be too shocked to find there is at least one RPG out there that specializes in "slice-of-life" games where nothing "interesting" (in the sense used above) happens. But they're not the majority, by far.

[KorvinStarmast]

Regardless of their special nature (or lack thereof) in setting, PCs are PCs because they are interesting to observe from the outside. They have adventures, meet things, do things, etc so that having the spotlight on them is interesting. And this is why they're PCs--very few games[1] are devoted to following the non-exploits of uninteresting, utterly ordinary people going about their daily business in a perfectly normal, boring world. The game conceit is that by creating the PCs, they're guaranteed to be cursed with interesting lives. And part of the social contract of most RPGs is that the players will accept that curse and lean into it, not have to be dragged kicking and screaming to bite at "plot hooks" or other ways the universe (aka whoever is narrating, if anyone) decides to make their lives interesting. The stories we tell about the adventures we shared seems to me an integral part of the point of a TRPG.

Another consequence of this is that the view of the setting PCs (and thus players) see is extremely warped toward the "interesting". If one didn't do that, the players would get interested in something else, like a board game, Twister, what have you.

I wouldn't be too shocked to find there is at least one RPG out there that specializes in "slice-of-life" games where nothing "interesting" (in the sense used above) happens. But they're not the majority, by far. I quite a D&D game over the overuse of the 'slice of life' aspect of the game. I like it, a lot, in measured doses, but there can be too much of a good thing. (The Dm also bragged about being a low prep DM, which also informed my decision to use my free time elsewhere and elsewhen.

[gbaji]

The game conceit is that by creating the PCs, they're guaranteed to be cursed with interesting lives. And part of the social contract of most RPGs is that the players will accept that curse and lean into it, not have to be dragged kicking and screaming to bite at "plot hooks" or other ways the universe (aka whoever is narrating, if anyone) decides to make their lives interesting.

I guess that's a way of looking at it. I really do prefer to think of it, not in terms of some external "curse", but rather an internal choice by the PCs. They are PCs because they're the ones who choose to do something about something. They happen to be the 4-6 people in the bar who, when the old man stumbled in holding a tattered map in his hand, and then promptly expired, decided "we'll take the map and go see what it leads to" and *not* "well just mind our own business and let the experts handle things".

If they don't do that, and some other people do, then *they* are the PCs. This is more or less why I have a rule of "one random conicidence per scenario" (which is usually the hook for it). You can say "what are the odds that the exact characters we just rolled up happend to all by right there when this event happend that started the adventure", but the answer is simple: "I was having you roll the stats and determine the background for the exact people who *were* standing there when this happened". There was always going to be a group of people who find the map and follow it. You were always going to play those people. I mean, you could choose not to, but then why are you playing the game?

And yeah, that's where I agree 100% on the absurity of thinking that the players have to be dragged kicking and screaming into things. Um... You decided to play the game. Somewhat by definition, you are agreeing to engage in the events that happen in that game. You are free to roleplay a person who doesn't do anything interesting or exciting or dangerous if you want, but go do that on your own time. I don't find any problems at all with the GM making this assumption and moving forward with it.

Um... But from that moment forward, there is nothing "special" about the PCs at all, other than whatever stats/skill/abilities they have. Fate may have brought them the circumstances that started the adventure, but there's no magical fate that ensures what sequence of events happen after that point. That's all up to the players. And yeah, they are absolutely free to decide to have a character retire and live out their days on an okra farm or something. Great. Roll up a new character and that's the next person who is interested in engaging in exciting/dangerous things and will just happen to be waiting around when the next opportunity for someone to join the group occurs.

It is funny, because I hear about some players who do this sort of thing, but I just don't get it. Yes. You are free in my game to do anything you want (and can physically do based on what's on your sheet). And I'll play that out for you if you want. But there are very high odds that, if I've written a scenario for the game, that nothing you decide to do that *isn't* that scenario is going to be anywhere near as interesting. You want to wander the hills looking for treasure. Ok. You spend X time doing that. You found <rolls dice> 16 copper pieces and an old rusty hammer. And yeah, if a player just insists on not going along on an adventure, I'll happily just leave them behind. They can sit and "roleplay" their character doing mundane things back where we left him, while everyone else is having a grand adventure. And your table time will consist of me telling you once a sesssion "Nothing interesting happens to your character", perhaps followed by "Do you want to roll a new character? Maybe someone actually interested in adventuring with the rest of the group?"

Dunno. It seems like a self correcting problem to me. And yeah, that doesn't mean that players can't come up to me with a "plan" they want to do. That can totally lead to all sorts of adventures (and I will certainly inject little side stuff along the way based on this as well). But this is a group game and group experience, so there is an expecation that I'm writing stuff that everyone can particpate in, not just the stuff you want to do all by yourself. Now, you come to me with something interesting, and I'll write an adventure using it, which will (purely by coincidence of course!) happen to involve 3-5 of your friends and cohorts helping you with whatever you wanted to accomplish. Amazing how that just happens to work out that way. Anything else you want to do can happen off table.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I guess that's a way of looking at it. I really do prefer to think of it, not in terms of some external "curse", but rather an internal choice by the PCs. They are PCs because they're the ones who choose to do something about something. They happen to be the 4-6 people in the bar who, when the old man stumbled in holding a tattered map in his hand, and then promptly expired, decided "we'll take the map and go see what it leads to" and *not* "well just mind our own business and let the experts handle things".

If they don't do that, and some other people do, then *they* are the PCs. This is more or less why I have a rule of "one random conicidence per scenario" (which is usually the hook for it). You can say "what are the odds that the exact characters we just rolled up happend to all by right there when this event happend that started the adventure", but the answer is simple: "I was having you roll the stats and determine the background for the exact people who *were* standing there when this happened". There was always going to be a group of people who find the map and follow it. You were always going to play those people. I mean, you could choose not to, but then why are you playing the game?

And yeah, that's where I agree 100% on the absurity of thinking that the players have to be dragged kicking and screaming into things. Um... You decided to play the game. Somewhat by definition, you are agreeing to engage in the events that happen in that game. You are free to roleplay a person who doesn't do anything interesting or exciting or dangerous if you want, but go do that on your own time. I don't find any problems at all with the GM making this assumption and moving forward with it.

Um... But from that moment forward, there is nothing "special" about the PCs at all, other than whatever stats/skill/abilities they have. Fate may have brought them the circumstances that started the adventure, but there's no magical fate that ensures what sequence of events happen after that point. That's all up to the players. And yeah, they are absolutely free to decide to have a character retire and live out their days on an okra farm or something. Great. Roll up a new character and that's the next person who is interested in engaging in exciting/dangerous things and will just happen to be waiting around when the next opportunity for someone to join the group occurs.

It is funny, because I hear about some players who do this sort of thing, but I just don't get it. Yes. You are free in my game to do anything you want (and can physically do based on what's on your sheet). And I'll play that out for you if you want. But there are very high odds that, if I've written a scenario for the game, that nothing you decide to do that *isn't* that scenario is going to be anywhere near as interesting. You want to wander the hills looking for treasure. Ok. You spend X time doing that. You found <rolls dice> 16 copper pieces and an old rusty hammer. And yeah, if a player just insists on not going along on an adventure, I'll happily just leave them behind. They can sit and "roleplay" their character doing mundane things back where we left him, while everyone else is having a grand adventure. And your table time will consist of me telling you once a sesssion "Nothing interesting happens to your character", perhaps followed by "Do you want to roll a new character? Maybe someone actually interested in adventuring with the rest of the group?"

Dunno. It seems like a self correcting problem to me. And yeah, that doesn't mean that players can't come up to me with a "plan" they want to do. That can totally lead to all sorts of adventures (and I will certainly inject little side stuff along the way based on this as well). But this is a group game and group experience, so there is an expecation that I'm writing stuff that everyone can particpate in, not just the stuff you want to do all by yourself. Now, you come to me with something interesting, and I'll write an adventure using it, which will (purely by coincidence of course!) happen to involve 3-5 of your friends and cohorts helping you with whatever you wanted to accomplish. Amazing how that just happens to work out that way. Anything else you want to do can happen off table.

I don't actually disagree with any of this. In my mind, at every moment in a campaign the players have two choices that are in keeping with the overall social contract[1]. Choose to have their characters follow the Call To Adventure (even if they have to make that Call themselves) or have their characters retire and bring a new one. In which case the old PC is now an NPC (allowed to be boring) and the new character is the new PC. PCs have the spotlight because they do interesting things. As soon as they stop doing interesting things (for more than an inter-arc break or beach episode or so), the spotlight finds someone else and the old characters fade back into the background. A meta-aware character who can see the PC tag would correlate "PC" with "always in the right place for something to happen". But it's not always the same ones, and it's not some in-universe "destiny". Unless it is in some cases.

If someone decides that their character is interested in X, and X is interesting to the rest of the party (which usually means some form of adventure, although palette cleansers with things like rock concerts[2] can work if they're understood as tension/pace management not a steady diet), then everything's fine. We do X. If they don't have some driving thing they want to explore, then the adventure might come to them (in the form of plot grenades or plot hooks, where "plot" should be interpreted very widely as "anything that starts another narrative arc not as some pre-determined path). But either way, you're not sitting at home. You're out there doing something. And that puts PCs in a very different environment than the rest of the "normal" (ie non-PC, even if adventurer) population.

My setting has "adventurers" as a formalized social class that roughly replaces "mercenary", and most of the military of a group of countries (by international treaty). The ultra-vast majority of all adventurers never graduate past guarding caravans or possibly engaging in light banditry themselves. They adventure for a few months, sometimes make a "big" strike or get hurt, then retire. Most of the "professionals" or "lifers" have never seen anything more exciting than a pack of marauding hippogryphs or a raid by some of the "wild" (ie not treaty-member) goblin tribes. And those who are not adventurers have seen even fewer "interesting" things. There may be the dryad of the local woods, but they're aware of her foibles and their shaman/priest/Listener handles propitiating her so they can gather enough firewood. Etc. Yet my last 3 campaigns have dealt with dragons plotting to blow up all the other adult+ dragons, have blown up two different mountains and saved a different one. One fought and defeated the avatar of one of the major deities on live worldwide TV[3]; another ended up destroying the incarnation of Despair, an entity trapped outside of time and space, by invading its thoughts and smashing its True Name with an artifact. They've consorted with demon princes, devil dons, and angelic leaders. With Ascendant Powers, fey quasi-deities, and one even is dating the one who is responsible for keeping time nice and linear. Etc.

[1] Ok, 3. They can choose to leave and find a different table (or not).
[2] Hey Dil! I especially liked the finale where you recreated King Kong. And didn't tell two of the party members (or even their players!) you were going to pretend to be kidnapped and that the giant ape was really Tsun, polymorphed.
[3] well, really the deific equivalent. The goddess of Justice tends to go for very blatant means when she wants to get the point across that someone dun screwed up. And the god deserved it, he shouldn't have crashed Tsun's kid's wedding and started throwing threats around. That wasn't very nice of him.

[Telok]

I think there's conflicting assumptions going on here. Things I'm seeing:

1. Rules as physics + what rules are used for a setting. I can run any setting using Call of Cthulhu, Champions, or Paranoia rules. But if you insist on rules as physics you get stuff like a CoC-ruled D&D-land with higher body counts & insane murderoid magic users, or a Champs-ruled CoC-world with no sanity loss and normal people tanking 2 storey falls every five minutes (falling rules in supers tend to be generous). To the contrary, if you assume the rules only generally describe how to play a rpg game in the setting without actually being perfectly accurate in all details then you get a different outcome. There you get stuff happening as described in the setting and generally along "like RL except where noted", rather than depending on specific game rules.

2. Narrative causality + speed of plot. Narrative causality is stuff happening to make a 'better story', and speed of plot is basically a subset of that. What happens though is if you assume rules as physics and narrative causality then anyone in a setting you talk about to any significant extent becomes a PC and starts encountering 'interesting' situations and using PC advancement rules. Now for, say Classic Traveller, you might not notice a big change. People can start play as PCs in their 50s after retiring from active military service in a shooting war. There's two to six weeks per hyperspace jump and potentially several jumps between 'interesting' stuff, which can just be a broken non-critical ship part. And it takes 2+ years of most of your spare time to learn basic competent anything like computer programming or knife fighting. But for a modern D&D rule set you get average of 3-6 "level appropriate" fights a day and new superpowers every 10-20 fights, plus after your first couple days you can start casting magic spells because the rules say so. Without narrative causality, totally different.

3. "I am PC, hear me min/max my xp grind". Do you assume you're "you", with full knowledge of the setting & game, dropped into a setting that's running rules as physics, and as a PC (maybe even edit or being generous with your own 'character sheet' a bit?) with the full access to those rules and a missing/ultra-permissive GM? Yay! Time to abuse rules loopholes (if any which is usually a yes) to powerlevel up to god-level. Or you can ask what the vast majority of people, or yourself as a normal person, experiences in a setting as the setting is described as working, without relying on any specific narrative causality to gaurantee your survival & optional rules/permissive rulings to shortcut your way to superpowers.

I've been tending to assume not rules as physics, no narrative causality, and not being dropped into the setting as a fanfic self insert. In that case, 1920s Call of Cthulhu Earth isn't a utopia but its a damn sight better than D&D ass-gods and random wererats or goblins ganking your cr 1/16th self in Forgotten Realms. But then something like Classic Traveller or Eclipse Phase totally wins out there, the default setting having decent medical care and no current serious wars or universe destroying threats. Assume all the murder-hobo rpg character enablers & narrative causality are turned up to 11? Sure, go with some WotC D&D FR. But only because its sloppy rules let me hook up with a party of clerics & paladins while cheesing my way to god-wizard status and dumping the setting like a sack of rotting fish guts for another, nicer, place (Wish spell sez 'hi!').

[KorvinStarmast]

My setting has "adventurers" as a formalized social class that roughly replaces "mercenary", and most of the military of a group of countries (by international treaty). The ultra-vast majority of all adventurers never graduate past guarding caravans or possibly engaging in light banditry themselves. They adventure for a few months, sometimes make a "big" strike or get hurt, then retire. Most of the "professionals" or "lifers" have never seen anything more exciting than a pack of marauding hippogryphs or a raid by some of the "wild" (ie not treaty-member) goblin tribes. And those who are not adventurers have seen even fewer "interesting" things. There may be the dryad of the local woods, but they're aware of her foibles and their shaman/priest/Listener handles propitiating her so they can gather enough firewood. Etc. Yet my last 3 campaigns have dealt with dragons plotting to blow up all the other adult+ dragons, have blown up two different mountains and saved a different one. One fought and defeated the avatar of one of the major deities on live worldwide TV[3]; another ended up destroying the incarnation of Despair, an entity trapped outside of time and space, by invading its thoughts and smashing its True Name with an artifact. They've consorted with demon princes, devil dons, and angelic leaders. With Ascendant Powers, fey quasi-deities, and one even is dating the one who is responsible for keeping time nice and linear. Etc. But because there are a number of adventuring companies, each of whom has their own agendas or priorities, this adds some depth in terms of political nuance and scheming, but it also provides another hook for the players to plug into the game world. (I am/was a player in all three of the campaigns Phoenix has mentioned)

[2] Hey Dil! I especially liked the finale where you recreated King Kong. And didn't tell two of the party members (or even their players!) you were going to pretend to be kidnapped and that the giant ape was really Tsun, polymorphed. Dreaming up and then executing that publicity stunt was some of the most fun I've had at a D&D table, ever. Tsun's enthusiastic support of the idea - which we discussed in Discord - was an important aspect of making that possible, as was the pre briefing I had with you. Engaged players make a big difference, whether one is a Dm or one is another player.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Dreaming up and then executing that publicity stunt was some of the most fun I've had at a D&D table, ever. Tsun's enthusiastic support of the idea - which we discussed in Discord - was an important aspect of making that possible, as was the pre briefing I had with you. Engaged players make a big difference, whether one is a Dm or one is another player.

Amen to that. Both parts, but especially that last sentence.

[Kami2awa]

To make a world people want to live in, I think one way is to take a leaf (or rather, several hundred pages) from Tolkien's books.

Middle-Earth is not always a good place. There are dark lords, orcs, corruption, literal demons, and every so often civilisation collapses and has to rebuild in a new Age. It's definitely an imperfect world (and Tolkien's fantasy theology has a lot to say about that). However, it is also full of joyous things. Light, food, good cheer, song, family, and beautiful things and places. Tolkien, perhaps because he fought in the First World War and so had to leave all the comforts of home behind, really knew what makes people happy, and he put it into his world in contrast to all the darkness and evil.

So that's why people would want to live in that world - there need to be things to make people happy, in contrast to all the bad stuff.

[gbaji]

That's a really good point. While full on grim/dark worlds can work sometimes, it's helpful to have a "what are we fighting for" concept in there. There should be areas of the world (perhaps quite large portions in fact) that are peaceful, fun, enjoyable, etc. The idea being that the PCs are maybe motivated to go into the more hellish areas, and fight against terrible enemies, specifically so that their influence/evil/whatever doesn't spread to those nice parts of the world.

[gatorized]

What's the problem with the wall of the faithless?

[glass]

What's the problem with the wall of the faithless?It is torture, for millennia. That would be excessive and monstrously evil even if it applied to people who had done something in life that deserved some kind of punishment. And it doesn't.

[Anymage]

What's the problem with the wall of the faithless?

In universe it makes the gods - even good gods - out to be bullies who have to compel worship on pain of torture instead of earning it. There's also the part where supposedly good aligned characters who one would expect to be unhappy at this thing existing are instead indifferent to supportive of it. And how a lot of attempts to justify it have had authors make claims that either fail to track with real people or assume an intrinsic level of jerkishness to every living humanoid in the world.

Out of universe, it also feels like commentary on real world religious beliefs, or at least analogues thereof. And while some might say that real world religious beliefs should be considered irrelevant to fantasy worlds, I invite them to write an adventure where the villainous cult has all the trappings of a given real world religion and then observe fan and publisher reactions.

[Vahnavoi]

What's the problem with the wall of the faithless?

Nothing. The concept is of the sort you'd find in actual myth, so fits fantasy just fine. It's the rest of the Forgotten Realms that is a mess. :smalltongue:

Some people get offended by it because it doesn't fit with what they personally believe or want out of a fantasy. Same goes for the cataclysm in Dragonlance. That's not particularly damning because the same would be true of all the real myths these fictional devices are based on.


I invite them to write an adventure where the villainous cult has all the trappings of a given real world religion and then observe fan and publisher reactions.

Outside places such as this forum, this is just day like any other.

[Telok]

Nothing. The concept is of the sort you'd find in actual myth, so fits fantasy just fine. It's the rest of the Forgotten Realms that is a mess. :smalltongue:

Keeping in mind that the myths we're talking about aren't the sanitized Disney versions, but the ones where a prince mouthed off to some random old woman last month and now night monsters have killed and eaten half the children in the kingdom.

[Cazero]

Some people get offended by it because it doesn't fit with what they personally believe or want out of a fantasy.
It's not a problem of opinion. It's a problem of internal consistency.
You think people are "offended" by it ? Try "verisimilitude passing under a train" due to the massive blow to morality and agency an Evil of such scale poses to all non-Evil gods.
Especialy when fixing it would be so trivial. Any Good god could just claim all faithless, no questions asked, and the problem would vanish.

edit : even easier fix, make the god of death Evil and untouchable. Stuff like can't die unless he wants to because god of death. Not a chump that changes every edition.

[gatorized]

Sounds like you should probably worship a god then. problem solved.

[Kish]

Sounds like you should probably worship a god then. problem solved.
No, that would be the solution to the problem "some players are complaining about something I don't want to worry about." It has nothing to do with the problem "all the gods of the Forgotten Realms are supportive of a horrific punishment for something that isn't evil, and the setting doesn't permit anyone to meaningfully oppose it."

[Vahnavoi]

@Cazero: The (already feeble) internal consistency of Forgotten Realms is not wrecked by Wall of the Faithless. What is wrecked is consistency with external opinions, such as notions end-users have of what is plausible of a good god. That is all verisimilitude is. Feeling your verisimilitude got run over by a train because something reflects badly on fictional entities is not an alternative to being offended because fiction didn't fit your real beliefs or expectations of a fantasy; it's an example of it happening.

---

@Kish:


It has nothing to do with the problem "all the gods of the Forgotten Realms are supportive of a horrific punishment for something that isn't evil, and the setting doesn't permit anyone to meaningfully oppose it."

This isn't a problem that needs fixing, it's a statement to make players (and their characters) pick a side. Which side to pick is the actual player-facing problem.

[Cazero]

What is wrecked is consistency with external opinions, such as notions end-users have of what is plausible of a good god.
I'm sorry, but this is basic definitions. Good and Evil are incompatible, by definition. If your definition of Good allows to be okay with infinite Evil, your definitions are broken.

[NichG]

@Cazero: The (already feeble) internal consistency of Forgotten Realms is not wrecked by Wall of the Faithless. What is wrecked is consistency with external opinions, such as notions end-users have of what is plausible of a good god. That is all verisimilitude is. Feeling your verisimilitude got run over by a train because something reflects badly on fictional entities is not an alternative to being offended because fiction didn't fit your real beliefs or expectations of a fantasy; it's an example of it happening.


Being a 'world worth living in' isn't about verisimilitude or internal consistency though. Ancient myths aren't generally about how awesome a place the world is. While they're often about the things people wonder over, they're just as often about things people deeply fear.

The Wall of the Faithless can be a coherent element of a setting, but if you were a multiversal traveller it'd definitely mark a setting as 'caution: this is a really bad place to die'. Or, if your character comes into enough power or importance that their decisions determine whether a setting should be saved or fled or burned down or allowed to collapse under its internal threats, well, it shifts the needle towards 'get out' or 'let it burn'. It makes it a world worth ending rather than saving.

[Kish]

@Cazero: The (already feeble) internal consistency of Forgotten Realms is not wrecked by Wall of the Faithless. What is wrecked is consistency with external opinions, such as notions end-users have of what is plausible of a good god. That is all verisimilitude is. Feeling your verisimilitude got run over by a train because something reflects badly on fictional entities is not an alternative to being offended because fiction didn't fit your real beliefs or expectations of a fantasy; it's an example of it happening.

---

@Kish:



This isn't a problem that needs fixing, it's a statement to make players (and their characters) pick a side. Which side to pick is the actual player-facing problem.
An epicure dining in Crewe
Found a rather large mouse in his stew
Said the waiter, "Don't shout
And wave it about
Or the rest will be wanting one too!"

[Vahnavoi]

I'm sorry, but this is basic definitions. Good and Evil are incompatible, by definition. If your definition of Good allows to be okay with infinite Evil, your definitions are broken.

Good and Evil are incompatible when considering alignment of a single action. This doesn't mean a Good character is incapable of Evil actions, characters aren't presumed to be perfectly consistent over time.

Forgotten Realms gods are characters. They aren't perfect. They can and do take out-of-alignment actions, and occasionally suffer the consequences for it.

As for the "infinite evil" bit? That's a red herring. Even admitting the Wall of Faithless is an infinite evil doesn't preclude Good gods being okay with it. Why? Because it's not the only infinity in D&D cosmology. So even infinite evil of the Wall can be justified from a divine perspective, if it exists to keep some even greater infinite evil in check, whether that be the Abyss or the Far Realm or whatever else. Never mind all possible infinite goods that good gods can only offer if - get this - people have faith in them. Those stand even if there is no Wall, so the idea that being Faithless or False is not Evil in a setting like Forgotten Realms is suspect under the same logic of infinities you use to complain about the gods.

---

@NichG: we aren't in disagreement over that. Not wanting to live in a setting because it offends one's real beliefs or because it doesn't fit what one wants out of a fantasy is perfectly normal. My larger point is that it's silly to single out the Wall for when Forgotten Realms is a mess in general. :smalltongue:

[Mechalich]

People really, really seem to make factual errors about the Wall of the Faithless.

First off, it's not infinite and it's not a fundamental part of the FR cosmology. It's a bit of divine artifice created by the direct action of Myrkul sometime after he ascended to the position of God of Death in -357 DR. For the overwhelming majority of FR history - the history of FR goes back to ~35,000 DR - Jergal was god of the dead and he apparently treated the Faithless like he did everyone else: he ignored them. It is also implied in the novel Crucible: the Trial of Cyric the Mad, the Kelemvor either god rid of or seriously modified the Wall of the Faithless to be a little more bland and boring, however a series of bad copy pasta ever since has made it completely unclear what happens to the Faithless after all.

Second, the gods of good, or even neutrality, can't really do anything about it. The way the FR cosmology is structured, the God of Death has dominion over the Faithless. Myrkul was an Evil entity, so he treated them in an evil manner. Jergal and Kelemvor, being Neutral, did not. That doesn't mean they were nice to the Faithless, but it would seem rather strange for the gods to reward those who fail to worship them.

Third, being Faithless in the realms is just an odd thing overall. The gods manifestly do exist, intervene actively in the world, have pervasive priesthoods, and are quite clear that worship is compulsory. In order to become Faithless a mortal has to pervasively and continually deny this fundamental fact of reality. The gods consider it perfectly acceptable for their worshippers to hate them - there are a lot of male Drow in the Demonweb Pits.

Fourth, being stuck in a wall until you merge with a plane is a long, long way from the worst thing that can happen to someone in the FR version of the afterlife. Souls don't need to eat, sleep, or breathe, all being stuck in a wall does is immobilize them. A male Drow in the Demonweb Pits is highly likely to also be immobilized, just in a spiderweb instead of a wall, and poisonous spiders will continually eat their flesh for all eternity. That's very clearly a much worse outcome.


My larger point is that it's silly to single out the Wall for when Forgotten Realms is a mess in general.

Yeah, the Wall is mostly just an odd quirk of the setting, especially considering how rare Faithless are in the Realms. Hardly any sources reference it, and it's not considered sufficiently important for 5e to even properly decide whether or not it exists (the Sword Coast Adventures Guide initially mentioned it and then quietly removed all reference via errata). The whole thing was created by Troy Denning for the novel Waterdeep in 1989 as a way to hold a threat over the character of Adon for daring to doubt the gods. Considering Troy Denning's generally antagonistic relationship with coherent world-building, it can be assumed that no coherent thought into the cosmology of the Realms was made when the Wall of the Faithless was created.

[Telok]

Considering Troy Denning's generally antagonistic relationship with coherent world-building, it can be assumed that no coherent thought into the cosmology of the Realms was made when the Wall of the Faithless was created.

To be fair, for most people who have only encountered FR's "setting" via a random selection of WotC's adventures (myself among them), the phrase "<author name>'s generally antagonistic relationship with coherent world-building, it can be assumed that no coherent thought..." pretty much sums up FR as a setting anyways.

[Psyren]

I dislike the Wall too, or more accurately I dislike WotC's wishy-washy approach to what being put there actually means. Is it unblinking stasis, a gradual slide to oblivion, a painless soul-recycler, or torment on par with the Hells? Myrkul clearly intended it to be the last one, but he's not in charge anymore, so it should be changed to fit the aesthetics of new management. If it can't be for whatever arbitrary reason, I can understand that not being satisfying, considering that we're talking about gods here who constantly undermine one another and bend if not break the cosmic rules anyway.

One thing I will say though is that people who dislike the Wall should be happy about WotC's Multiverse approach to their official settings. Born in Realmspace and think the Wall is a load of bollocks? Your character can commandeer a Spelljammer or find a portal to Sigil and leave Kelemvor's jurisdiction behind entirely. You can even join up with the Athar and thumb your nose at him and the whole system directly.

[Mechalich]

To be fair, for most people who have only encountered FR's "setting" via a random selection of WotC's adventures (myself among them), the phrase "<author name>'s generally antagonistic relationship with coherent world-building, it can be assumed that no coherent thought..." pretty much sums up FR as a setting anyways.

Eh, well, there are some people involved with FR such as Ed Greenwood, its ultimate creator, and Jeff Grubb, the big world-builder at TSR when the basics for most major settings were ironed out, who clearly care. Their decisions weren't necessarily good ones, and they were subject to both corporate whims and exterior authorial interference, but you can look at their stuff and tell that they were trying. Troy Denning is not. He rampages across settings distorting the world-building for the express purpose of tormenting characters in order to try and build personal drama.

The genesis of the Wall of the Faithless is something like: Adon, formerly a priest of Sune, has a crisis of faith during the Time of Troubles and decides the gods suck and he won't worship any of them anymore. This doesn't matter in and of itself because Adon is a distinctly secondary character in the trilogy and only really matters via his relationship to Midnight; Midnight travels to the City of the Dead and discovers the existence of both the Faithless and the False (which I strongly believe prior to this were not a thing in FR) and his horrified and also just happens to know a person who falls into each class; Midnight is later given the chance to ascend to godhood at the conclusion of the Time of Troubles and her exposure to the Faithless and False are part of her personal choice to accept that option. The whole thing exists to support Midnight's justification to reluctantly go through apotheosis and try to 'fix the system from inside.' As such, Troy Denning deliberately broke the metaphysical framework of FR so that he could give a protagonist character a reason to choose to fix it.

How Ed Greenwood managed to work with the guy for many years I will never know.

[Vahnavoi]

@Psyren: Moving from Realms to the wider Great Wheel setting is hardly an improvement. Souls unclaimed by gods go to the afterlife most fitting of their lifetime actions and beliefs; a godless existentialist will go realm of godless existentialists, most likely Limbo, and dissolve into primordial chaos. Plus it doesn't do much to dodge all other horrible fates such demons and eldritch abominations preying on you.

[Psyren]

@Psyren: Moving from Realms to the wider Great Wheel setting is hardly an improvement. Souls unclaimed by gods go to the afterlife most fitting of their lifetime actions and beliefs; a godless existentialist will go realm of godless existentialists, most likely Limbo, and dissolve into primordial chaos. Plus it doesn't do much to dodge all other horrible fates such demons and eldritch abominations preying on you.

Everyone outside FR with no deity = Limbo seems... unfounded.

If we're talking about people who wouldn't be happy with any of the FR deities or the Wall - then dissolving into a matching plane sounds pretty ideal, particularly doing so peacefully as a good or even neutral character might expect. And there being a clear route out of FR for those people, at least to Sigil or Wildspace, seems pretty ideal as a plan B.

[Vahnavoi]

Everyone outside FR with no deity = Limbo seems... unfounded.

Faithlessness isn't quite the same as simply having no deity. Especially for a proposed multiversal traveller who has a good look at the Great Wheel as a whole, hence my specific remark on godless existentialism.


If we're talking about people who wouldn't be happy with any of the FR deities or the Wall - then dissolving into a matching plane sounds pretty ideal, particularly doing so peacefully as a good or even neutral character might expect. And there being a clear route out of FR for those people, at least to Sigil or Wildspace, seems pretty ideal as a plan B.

For majority of outer planes, the dissolution process isn't particularly more peaceful than being mortared into a wall. I can imagine a godless existentialist preferring the former (out of spite), but I can also imagine them being indifferent to or even proud of being subjected to the latter. "We must imagine Sisyphus happy" and all that jazz.

More importantly, though, you too are working on the underdeveloped notion that a character can be good and Faithless, even after having a good look at the multiverse.

Seriously. A multiverse's worth of good and neutral gods and not a single one worth of worship? That's about as plausible as not finding a single nation you'd be willing to pay taxes to - it speaks of particular philosophical commitment, and in the Great Wheel, such philosophical commitment comes with a particular alignment and a particular destination. The most fitting is Chaotic Neutral, hence Limbo.

See, that's the deal with worlds where faith and beliefs influences behaviours and outcomes. You don't actually have a choice of destination unless you're willing to change yourself. In a cosmology filled to the brim with gods? Most changes point away from godlessness.

[Mechalich]

@Psyren: Moving from Realms to the wider Great Wheel setting is hardly an improvement. Souls unclaimed by gods go to the afterlife most fitting of their lifetime actions and beliefs; a godless existentialist will go realm of godless existentialists, most likely Limbo, and dissolve into primordial chaos. Plus it doesn't do much to dodge all other horrible fates such demons and eldritch abominations preying on you.

In the Great Wheel cosmology, godless characters go to the realm most fitting their lifetime actions and morality, their beliefs and philosophical views don't mean squat. The Great Wheel doesn't care one whit about anyone's philosophical views, because it imposes it's own - which are admittedly very confused - on everyone. That is how religious afterlives are usually structured, the gods/cosmic forces decide what happens to the mortals upon death, the mortals don't get to argue about it, they just have to take what the system offers.

Does the system imposed by the Great Wheel or FR's unique cosmology kinda suck? Sure. Eternal torture until the soul dissolves from the burden of endless agony sounds like a pretty awful thing to impose one anyone, even the truly horrible. However, it's pretty par for the course in terms of the kinds of mythologies that D&D uses for inspiration. The real question regarding how horrible the D&D afterlife is revolves around the ratios: what portion of the population of the multiverse is good, neutral, and evil respectively, and D&D has been unbelievably inconsistent on that subject.

[NichG]

More importantly, though, you too are working on the underdeveloped notion that a character can be good and Faithless, even after having a good look at the multiverse.

Seriously. A multiverse's worth of good and neutral gods and not a single one worth of worship? That's about as plausible as not finding a single nation you'd be willing to pay taxes to - it speaks of particular philosophical commitment, and in the Great Wheel, such philosophical commitment comes with a particular alignment and a particular destination. The most fitting is Chaotic Neutral, hence Limbo.


Any philosophical position that objects to surrendering moral authority to another versus taking responsibility for your own morality. Bahamut can be a pretty great guy with some good ideas, but if he starts to call for the destruction of an entire prime world for the greater good or something like that, its not an inherently nihilistic position to say 'well in that case I can't promise to keep travelling this road with you'. A position of infinite trust, e.g. faith, can be philosophically objectionable without that philosophy being Chaotic Neutral. Most routes to that kind of point might lean on the Chaotic side, but equally well someone who says 'this is my code, this tells me what is right and wrong, and I will hold to that regardless of the gods or influences around me' would be taking a coherent position and that would of all things be more likely to be LN or LG.

Similarly, any philosophical position that asserts that power is not a particular indicator of truth/morality/etc could naturally object to worship even as a Great Wheel traveller. Again, Bahamut might be a pretty great guy and worth listening to, but worship accepts that 'status as a god' somehow privileges Bahamut's ideas and ethos over, say, an enlightened mortal saying the same sorts of things.

Basically, 'worship' does not have to be a natural reaction to the existence of a hierarchy of powers. Especially when many of those powers are just ascended mortals and when those powers are by and large more like flawed people than ineffable embodiments of cosmic concepts. And the variation of worship that is 'propitiate them and hope they don't look at me' even breaks down as a pragmatic matter when, well, the power level of gods isn't really so unreachable for individuals, and those gods are not inviolable constants of reality but relatively frequently do get deposed, suffer loses of power and agency, etc.

If it would seem weird to worship (not just respect, follow, etc) your favorite Lv20 wizard, it can make just as much sense to hold a position that it would be weird to worship your favorite Great Wheel (or FR) deity.

[Vahnavoi]

@Mechalich: morality is a matter of philosophy, as are all religions. Two basic tenets of alignment, and hence the Great Wheel, are that philosophy informs actions and actions reveal philosophy. All of the specific alignments stand for identifiable moral philosophies and even a superficial look at the outer planes will tell which plane was ripped off from what tradition because game designers didn't even file the serial numbers off.

[Vahnavoi]

Any philosophical position that objects to surrendering moral authority to another versus taking responsibility for your own morality.

Placing weight on the individual in this manner is Chaotic in the context of the Great Wheel, because the conflict between Law and Chaos is that of large organized groups versus the individual.


Bahamut can be a pretty great guy with some good ideas, but if he starts to call for the destruction of an entire prime world for the greater good or something like that, its not an inherently nihilistic position to say 'well in that case I can't promise to keep travelling this road with you'. A position of infinite trust, e.g. faith, can be philosophically objectionable without that philosophy being Chaotic Neutral.

Non-nihilist positions don't lead to before-the-fact categorical rejection of worship. A non-nihilist will be happy to worship a god to the point where a god actually breaks conduct, and the more gods there are, the likelier it is a given person will find a god who will never break conduct in practice.


Most routes to that kind of point might lean on the Chaotic side, but equally well someone who says 'this is my code, this tells me what is right and wrong, and I will hold to that regardless of the gods or influences around me' would be taking a coherent position and that would of all things be more likely to be LN or LG.

"This is my code and I will stick to it regardless of anyone or anything else!" is fundamentally self-centered and individualistic position and arguing it is Lawful is a corruption of the alignment system. Again, the conflict is between large organized groups and the individual, to even get from "my code" to "Lawful" requires us to define what exactly that code is, and it has to include group interest in a way that would contradict "I will hold to that regardless of anyone or anything else".


Similarly, any philosophical position that asserts that power is not a particular indicator of truth/morality/etc could naturally object to worship even as a Great Wheel traveller. Again, Bahamut might be a pretty great guy and worth listening to, but worship accepts that 'status as a god' somehow privileges Bahamut's ideas and ethos over, say, an enlightened mortal saying the same sorts of things.

Given mortals can become gods, the line in the sand between god and enlightened mortal doesn't matter. Which we can actually see from the original Great Wheel schema, because it has a plane from a philosophy that fits this description and gives it a definite alignment.


Basically, 'worship' does not have to be a natural reaction to the existence of a hierarchy of powers. Especially when many of those powers are just ascended mortals and when those powers are by and large more like flawed people than ineffable embodiments of cosmic concepts. And the variation of worship that is 'propitiate them and hope they don't look at me' even breaks down as a pragmatic matter when, well, the power level of gods isn't really so unreachable for individuals, and those gods are not inviolable constants of reality but relatively frequently do get deposed, suffer loses of power and agency, etc.

If it would seem weird to worship (not just respect, follow, etc) your favorite Lv20 wizard, it can make just as much sense to hold a position that it would be weird to worship your favorite Great Wheel (or FR) deity.

The point of failure for this argument is that for a lot of people worshipping their favorite lv20 wizard would not be weird at all. In fact, we can see all over that worship of flawed and limited things, people included, is quite common for humans.

Which leads us back to the beginning: deciding it is weird and then not doing it speaks of particular commitment and hence particular alignment.

[icefractal]

The point of failure for this argument is that for a lot of people worshipping their favorite lv20 wizard would not be weird at all. In fact, we can see all over that worship of flawed and limited things, people included, is quite common for humans.

Which leads us back to the beginning: deciding it is weird and then not doing it speaks of particular commitment and hence particular alignment.This seems like an odd take. So if I roll into town as a powerful mage (not like most of the world could discern my exact level), then only people strongly committed to a CN anti-worship philosophy would refuse to worship me, everyone else would be like "all hail Bob the Illusionist, our new god!"?

And if the answer is "they wouldn't because they already worship existing gods", then doesn't that go both ways? If my answer to "why not worship Bahamut?" is "I already worship Fred the dragon summoner", then by your standard I'm not an anti-theist weirdo, I'm just already committed. But I'm pretty sure that in FR, worshiping Fred (a mid-level Sorcerer with rather impressive charisma) would count as being "Faithless".


I mean heck, that (the ambiguity between "real gods", "powerful beings", and "frauds using illusions" for most people in a D&D world) is a reason to be against worshiping gods without any philosophy beyond "I don't wanna get scammed again" -
Priest: "You should join the following of Bahamut, who watches over us all!"
Bob: "No way, I'm not losing all my money to one of these cults again."
Priest: "It's not a cult, Bahamut is an all-powerful god who's actively protecting us all the time."
Bob: "Yeah, that's what the Followers of the Great Sphinx said, and after they'd scammed me out of my horse and all my gold, they skipped town. I heard the leader was imprisoned for fraud a few months ago."
Priest: "Yes, but that was a false god, Bahamut is a true god."
Bob: "And do you have a way to prove that? That I'd believe, given that I know people can make all kinds of illusions with magic, and I have no way to tell if they're real or fake."

[Vahnavoi]

This seems like an odd take. So if I roll into town as a powerful mage (not like most of the world could discern my exact level), then only people strongly committed to a CN anti-worship philosophy would refuse to worship me, everyone else would be like "all hail Bob the Illusionist, our new god!"?

You can replace "powerful mage" with something far more mundane, such a rock star, and you will still see sizable fraction of people engage in worship.


And if the answer is "they wouldn't because they already worship existing gods", then doesn't that go both ways? If my answer to "why not worship Bahamut?" is "I already worship Fred the dragon summoner", then by your standard I'm not an anti-theist weirdo, I'm just already committed. But I'm pretty sure that in FR, worshiping Fred (a mid-level Sorcerer with rather impressive charisma) would count as being "Faithless".

Both in Realmspace and the larger Great Wheel cosmology I'm actually talking about at the moment, Fred has a genuine shot at becoming a god and claiming you as a petitioner. Nothing weird about it in the context of these settings. If Fred is unsuccesful, then you might end up in the Wall in the Realms. I'm not sure, I don't know if this exact scenario has come up. I do know non-gods are occasionally worshipped as gods in Realmspace, but the examples I know don't generalize (for example, infernal patrons claiming souls of those they deceived). In the larger Great Wheel, we can look at what Fred actually stands for to determine alignment of both Fred and his followers.


I mean heck, that (the ambiguity between "real gods", "powerful beings", and "frauds using illusions" for most people in a D&D world) is a reason to be against worshiping gods without any philosophy beyond "I don't wanna get scammed again" -
Priest: "You should join the following of Bahamut, who watches over us all!"
Bob: "No way, I'm not losing all my money to one of these cults again."
Priest: "It's not a cult, Bahamut is an all-powerful god who's actively protecting us all the time."
Bob: "Yeah, that's what the Followers of the Great Sphinx said, and after they'd scammed me out of my horse and all my gold, they skipped town. I heard the leader was imprisoned for fraud a few months ago."
Priest: "Yes, but that was a false god, Bahamut is a true god."
Bob: "And do you have a way to prove that? That I'd believe, given that I know people can make all kinds of illusions with magic, and I have no way to tell if they're real or fake."

Only if you're approaching this from a particular mindset. And that's really the crux of this: you, NichG and several others come to this with the mindset that people choose to worship an entity because it is a god. When the actual causality in both Realms and the Great Wheel goes that people choose to worship what they value and in doing so elevate those entities to divinity. Fred the Rock Star will be worshipped as an idol and a hero for being an overall awesome dude long before the question of their godhood comes up.

Sure, a person can be burned by having placed their faith in the wrong thing, and become distrusting as a result. That is a far cry from principled godlessness; such a person may well find a new deity more worth their trust, and as the number of gods grows, so does the likelihood of finding such a new deity.

[Thane of Fife]

But I'm pretty sure that in FR, worshiping Fred (a mid-level Sorcerer with rather impressive charisma) would count as being "Faithless".


I don't think you would. Neither Elminster's Forgotten Realms nor the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (even pre- Wall of the Faithless removal) really has much to say about patron deities, and I'd say that both imply that you don't count as Faithless for not having one. You have to go out of your way to oppose or disregard the gods to count. I think the patron deity requirement thing is no longer canon at this point.

[Anymage]

One thing I will say though is that people who dislike the Wall should be happy about WotC's Multiverse approach to their official settings. Born in Realmspace and think the Wall is a load of bollocks? Your character can commandeer a Spelljammer or find a portal to Sigil and leave Kelemvor's jurisdiction behind entirely. You can even join up with the Athar and thumb your nose at him and the whole system directly.

Two very different things. An already existing planehopper can think that realmspace is crummy, and a reader can draw their own conclusions. (The latter especially given the setting's own inconsistent treatment of it. Mechalich's mention of Midnight is the first I've heard in any Wall topic of someone inside the setting acknowledging how crap it is. Most of what I'd heard involved the Myrkulite version and either active or tacit support.) Meanwhile I'd consider it bad form to sign up for someone else's FR game only to bring a character whose sole goal was to leave the setting, and I'd be very annoyed as a DM if someone brought a character to my game whose primary drive was to avoid the main setting and plots I'd been preparing for.


Seriously. A multiverse's worth of good and neutral gods and not a single one worth of worship? That's about as plausible as not finding a single nation you'd be willing to pay taxes to - it speaks of particular philosophical commitment, and in the Great Wheel, such philosophical commitment comes with a particular alignment and a particular destination. The most fitting is Chaotic Neutral, hence Limbo.

See, that's the deal with worlds where faith and beliefs influences behaviours and outcomes. You don't actually have a choice of destination unless you're willing to change yourself. In a cosmology filled to the brim with gods? Most changes point away from godlessness.

On the one hand, agreed that the Athar are kind of a dumb position to build one's whole personality around and very reflective of the time period that Planescape came out in. Even if one takes the view that gods are just big outsiders and not in principle that different from powerful wizards, people in the real world absolutely invest time and money into causes they consider important. Characters would be silly not to devote prayer when those prayers very clearly empower divine beings devoted to causes they find important. If there's a flaw in that system, it would be pantheism where the worshipper wants to praise multiple gods they consider worthy instead of only focusing on one.

On the other hand, all of that does hinge on finding divine beings worth worshiping. (Or charities worth donating to, or other analogous organizations worth belonging to.) I can think Chanteau is pretty cool and everything, but if I find out that she asked Kelemvor to keep the Myrkulite Wall instead of changing or removing it that would sour my respect for her. That wouldn't impact my view of gods in general or my ability to respect a god like Pelor without such a black mark on their record, just the ones in the setting. Although it would suck if I were in a setting where even the supposedly good gods never gave so much as a negative comment about an evil artifact existing because said artifact happened to be personally convenient to them.

[KorvinStarmast]

The Wall of the Faithless can be a coherent element of a setting, but if you were a multiversal traveller it'd definitely mark a setting as 'caution: this is a really bad place to die'. Is there a good place to die? :smallconfused:

People really, really seem to make factual errors about the Wall of the Faithless.
Considering Troy Denning's generally antagonistic relationship with coherent world-building, it can be assumed that no coherent thought into the cosmology of the Realms was made when the Wall of the Faithless was created. Well, he did OK in Dark Sun, but that world was grim, chaotic, and massively different than FR. (To say that it could not have used a few tweaks to the world building would be wrong).

To be fair, for most people who have only encountered FR's "setting" via a random selection of WotC's adventures (myself among them), the phrase "<author name>'s generally antagonistic relationship with coherent world-building, it can be assumed that no coherent thought..." pretty much sums up FR as a setting anyways. Yes. A mess.

Eh, well, there are some people involved with FR such as Ed Greenwood, its ultimate creator, and Jeff Grubb, the big world-builder at TSR when the basics for most major settings were ironed out, who clearly care. Their decisions weren't necessarily good ones, and they were subject to both corporate whims and exterior authorial interference, but you can look at their stuff and tell that they were trying. Troy Denning is not. He rampages across settings distorting the world-building for the express purpose of tormenting characters in order to try and build personal drama. Hmm, did he write any Dragonlance books?

@Mechalich: morality is a matter of philosophy, as are all religions. Two basic tenets of alignment, and hence the Great Wheel, are that philosophy informs actions and actions reveal philosophy. All of the specific alignments stand for identifiable moral philosophies and even a superficial look at the outer planes will tell which plane was ripped off from what tradition because game designers didn't even file the serial numbers off. I'd put this in my sig, but it's a bit too large. +1

Placing weight on the individual in this manner is Chaotic in the context of the Great Wheel, because the conflict between Law and Chaos is that of large organized groups versus the individual. Which WotC has not bothered to carry forward, nor explain in sufficient detail.

"This is my code and I will stick to it regardless of anyone or anything else!" is fundamentally self-centered and individualistic position and arguing it is Lawful is a corruption of the alignment system. It's all about me is certainly Chaotic, so it makes for a nice option for a Chaotic Paladin in D&D5e: that is the one who takes the Oath of Vengeance.

Again, the conflict is between large organized groups and the individual, to even get from "my code" to "Lawful" requires us to define what exactly that code is, and it has to include group interest in a way that would contradict "I will hold to that regardless of anyone or anything else". But the WotC dev team does not grasp that, apparently.

World building needs to fit the purpose of the campaign and the campaign's creator. To answer the OP's title question (and not the random sound bytes in the text of that post) a world worth living in for a TTRPG (not for any other media or game!) is one worth exploring (so it needs some unknowns and a sense of wonder and discovery here and there), it needs to have conflict to resolve, and it needs to be worth either saving (generally good parties) or exploiting (generally evil parties) or growing in (any kind of party). It also needs to feel "real enough" to the players (verisimilitude) that they most of their assumptions about real life (with exceptions being codified by the game/campaign) fit well enough to not create dissonance.

[NichG]

Placing weight on the individual in this manner is Chaotic in the context of the Great Wheel, because the conflict between Law and Chaos is that of large organized groups versus the individual.

Non-nihilist positions don't lead to before-the-fact categorical rejection of worship. A non-nihilist will be happy to worship a god to the point where a god actually breaks conduct, and the more gods there are, the likelier it is a given person will find a god who will never break conduct in practice.

"This is my code and I will stick to it regardless of anyone or anything else!" is fundamentally self-centered and individualistic position and arguing it is Lawful is a corruption of the alignment system. Again, the conflict is between large organized groups and the individual, to even get from "my code" to "Lawful" requires us to define what exactly that code is, and it has to include group interest in a way that would contradict "I will hold to that regardless of anyone or anything else".

Given mortals can become gods, the line in the sand between god and enlightened mortal doesn't matter. Which we can actually see from the original Great Wheel schema, because it has a plane from a philosophy that fits this description and gives it a definite alignment.

The point of failure for this argument is that for a lot of people worshipping their favorite lv20 wizard would not be weird at all. In fact, we can see all over that worship of flawed and limited things, people included, is quite common for humans.


You can have a philosophy that centers the good of the collective, without being a hierarchical deontology where you take moral orders from a single source above you. A utilitarian perspective or consequentialist perspective centering the good of all for example can still make it the responsibility of the one taking that respective to ensure that they make correct choices.



Which leads us back to the beginning: deciding it is weird and then not doing it speaks of particular commitment and hence particular alignment.

...

You can replace "powerful mage" with something far more mundane, such a rock star, and you will still see sizable fraction of people engage in worship.


I don't think you have to be a radical individualist to decide that 'do what Elvis would do' isn't the end-all be-all of moral philosophy. It's not that far to go to conclude that maybe statements of the form 'do what X would do' where X is a particular other singular entity are a pretty limited language to explore moral philosophy with. Lots of people do approach morality this way, sure. There are practical and cultural reasons for that to be the case. But 'having been caused to be this way by the dynamics of large groups' is not the same thing as 'valuing the concerns of large groups first', and it wouldn't be such a strange thing to break down and reconstruct your beliefs upon becoming widely traveled and discovering that there are other large groups that both believe different things in detail from you, but which have structural commonalities in those beliefs.

I don't think it would be so strange for a strongly collectivist, pro-social character to start to say 'okay, there's bits of Pelorite worship and bits of Bahamut worship and bits of Chauntea worship that happen to agree with each-other and look the same, but Pelor has this crusade against the undead, Bahamut this whole dragon focus, and Chauntea is focused on the pastoral - maybe what I actually believe most strongly isn't any of them in their entirety, but is actually the underlying reason for the bits they agree about?'. I would not immediately jump to the conclusion that that character would be a rugged individualist caring about personal freedom over all, just that they had cause to sit down and think more deeply about morality due to the breadth of societies they visit and coexist with compared to the average faux-medieval person who never leaves the culture that they grew up in.



Only if you're approaching this from a particular mindset. And that's really the crux of this: you, NichG and several others come to this with the mindset that people choose to worship an entity because it is a god. When the actual causality in both Realms and the Great Wheel goes that people choose to worship what they value and in doing so elevate those entities to divinity. Fred the Rock Star will be worshipped as an idol and a hero for being an overall awesome dude long before the question of their godhood comes up.


I'm approaching it from the mindset that 'worshipping' is not the philosophical default way to think about values, even if its the most common way that people have historically thought about values. Choosing to relate to things via worship is a particular narrow stance. It can be both a common stance and a narrow stance - the narrowness is in relation to the space of other coherent possibilities, whether those approaches are currently popular or not.

I'm not going to say the converse argument that 'well if someone chooses worship, they're automatically going to Mechanus!' because I think the space is broad enough that the choice of approach to values doesn't have to correlate at all with selfish/selfless and group/individual axes.

[Psyren]

More importantly, though, you too are working on the underdeveloped notion that a character can be good and Faithless, even after having a good look at the multiverse.

Seriously. A multiverse's worth of good and neutral gods and not a single one worth of worship?

Literally any good (or neutral for that matter) person disillusioned with FR's afterlife or the ineffectiveness of the good gods at preventing evil could fall into that bucket. To say they would all invariably end up in Limbo if they somehow got out of Realmspace is just odd.


Two very different things. An already existing planehopper can think that realmspace is crummy, and a reader can draw their own conclusions. (The latter especially given the setting's own inconsistent treatment of it. Mechalich's mention of Midnight is the first I've heard in any Wall topic of someone inside the setting acknowledging how crap it is. Most of what I'd heard involved the Myrkulite version and either active or tacit support.) Meanwhile I'd consider it bad form to sign up for someone else's FR game only to bring a character whose sole goal was to leave the setting, and I'd be very annoyed as a DM if someone brought a character to my game whose primary drive was to avoid the main setting and plots I'd been preparing for.

"I want to leave FR eventually" does not mean "I want to avoid your plots." Striking out across the multiverse is as valid a long-term goal / retirement plan for a high-level character as any other, and does not have to happen during the events of your campaign/story at all.

[Kish]

I don't think you would. Neither Elminster's Forgotten Realms nor the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (even pre- Wall of the Faithless removal) really has much to say about patron deities, and I'd say that both imply that you don't count as Faithless for not having one.

If you choose Ao as your patron deity you explicitly do count as Faithless, so no, I'm pretty sure worshiping anything that isn't an actual god means you count as Faithless...


I think the patron deity requirement thing is no longer canon at this point.
...if that concept still exists.

Hopefully, it does not (though, alas, the developers have not yet explicitly said anything to that effect). Which brings us right back to where we were before gatorized and Vahnavoi decided to explain to most other people in this thread how wrong we are to object to the Wall of the Faithless.

[Mechalich]

If you choose Ao as your patron deity you explicitly do count as Faithless, so no, I'm pretty sure worshiping anything that isn't an actual god means you count as Faithless...

Eh, Ao is kind of a jerk, and choosing to worship him means being both sufficiently well-informed to recognize that he exists - which applies to maybe 0.01% of the Realms, most of whom are high-level mages or priests who already have patron deities that they like - and trying to game the system by bypassing the deities entirely. This is rather like screaming 'I want to speak to your manager's manager!' without talking to the actual manager first and is something almost guaranteed to piss that person off (I have seen this happen a couple of times, it never goes well for the complainant). Of course Ao flips the metaphysical bird to people who pull that stunt.

The actual deities of the Realms are supposed to come down awfully hard on people who aren't deities but who are claiming to be, since such cults both cast doubt into the system, make the gods look bad, and deprive them of belief (importantly, the gods require belief not worship, they can feed off the hatred of mortals just fine). FR, as we might expect, is inconsistent about this, because various authors want to have weird cult stories or to have power demons impersonate deities and so forth, but this really should not be a thing in FR or most other D&D settings. The proper response to someone, even a high-level wizard, walking into a town square and proclaiming 'I am the messenger of the New God X!' ought to be an instant smiting by Helm, but, well, yeah, that's apparently too much to expect.

[Lord Torath]

The whole thing was created by Troy Denning for the novel Waterdeep in 1989 as a way to hold a threat over the character of Adon for daring to doubt the gods. Considering Troy Denning's generally antagonistic relationship with coherent world-building, it can be assumed that no coherent thought into the cosmology of the Realms was made when the Wall of the Faithless was created.Well, he did OK in Dark Sun, but that world was grim, chaotic, and massively different than FR. (To say that it could not have used a few tweaks to the world building would be wrong). He started out okay. Then he turned around and ruined the setting with the metaplot, having his NPCs knock off most of the BBEGs of the setting, leaving nothing for PCs to do. Okay, not nothing, but nothing on the scale of what Rikus and Co. did.

[KorvinStarmast]

He started out okay. Then he turned around and ruined the setting with the metaplot, having his NPCs knock off most of the BBEGs of the setting, leaving nothing for PCs to do. Okay, not nothing, but nothing on the scale of what Rikus and Co. did. A fair criticism.

[gatorized]

No, that would be the solution to the problem "some players are complaining about something I don't want to worry about." It has nothing to do with the problem "all the gods of the Forgotten Realms are supportive of a horrific punishment for something that isn't evil, and the setting doesn't permit anyone to meaningfully oppose it."

If the gods decide it's evil, it is. Good is a cosmic force in D&D and has nothing to do with morality or philosophy.

[Gurgeh]

Two very different things. An already existing planehopper can think that realmspace is crummy, and a reader can draw their own conclusions. (The latter especially given the setting's own inconsistent treatment of it. Mechalich's mention of Midnight is the first I've heard in any Wall topic of someone inside the setting acknowledging how crap it is. Most of what I'd heard involved the Myrkulite version and either active or tacit support.)
"The Wall sucks but the entire pantheon of FR is engaged in a racket to stop anyone who doesn't like it" is the entire plot of Mask of the Betrayer (the epic-level expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2).

The PC is unwillingly enlisted to at least notionally do something about it but no matter how much (or little!) you try, Kelemvor will just turn up and politely explain that you get no say in the matter and the status quo is permanent and immutable. I can't remember whether you can Game Over yourself by standing your ground or if the game doesn't even bother to let you spit in Kelemvor's eye on the matter, but either way the point is moot.

One of your potential companions is a half-celestial who has made it her personal mission to get rid of the Wall, and every one of her endings sees her fail - the only difference is how fast or slow the failure is, and whether it's of the "gradual crushing disappointment" or "utter destruction and damnation" variety.

Of course, this was all at least a decade after the Wall had been invented (and, let's be honest, mostly forgotten), so it's an explicitly revisionist text - but it's pretty telling that a story that's very hostile to the Wall still goes out of its way to establish that it's a permanent and immutable feature of the setting and that notionally benevolent forces will conspire to keep it in place.

[icefractal]

If the gods decide it's evil, it is. Good is a cosmic force in D&D and has nothing to do with morality or philosophy.Yeah, but it's not the opinion of beings within the fiction that matters in determining whether we (outside the fiction) consider a world worth living in, it's our opinion.

Trivial example, but if I made a setting which was:
* Things operate like The Purge pretty much all the time.
* If any group of people tries to form an island of stability, demons will show up and kill them all, messily.
* According to all the gods of this setting, this is 100% Good, and in fact the current state of the world counts as a paradise.

Then most people would consider that a world they didn't want to live in - and the third bullet point wouldn't be changing anyone's mind (nor should it).

[Psyren]

If the gods decide it's evil, it is. Good is a cosmic force in D&D and has nothing to do with morality or philosophy.

"Nothing to do with" is an overstatement. It's possible for Good gods in FR to be Good while propping up (or at least tolerating) some unjust systems, sure - but that says more about celestial bureaucracy tying their hands than their own attitudes or desires. Free-willed mortal heroes seeking to undermine those systems can still find success in doing so, without being instantly smitten from on high. We've seen multiple examples of this as recently as Baldurs Gate 3, and these were cosigned by both WotC and Ed Greenwood himself.

[MonochromeTiger]

If the gods decide it's evil, it is. Good is a cosmic force in D&D and has nothing to do with morality or philosophy.

Important to note, at least in Forgotten realms and as far as I know in many other settings, the Gods don't "decide what's evil and good." The Gods are just as much stuck with what the setting's ideas of Good and Evil are supposed to be as everyone else, what they decide is their personal doctrine and allowed or prohibited behavior which then is part of what sorts out their alignments. You could argue Ao does get to determine what's Good and Evil but then Ao is just a figurehead for the writers or DM and rarely if ever actually takes a clear stance, meanwhile the Gods are just working with the system he set up.

A God doing terrible things like mass genocide and then turning around to say "this is fine, Good alignments should totally be doing this" doesn't make it Good, it makes that God Evil and a liar and raises questions of why other Gods and sufficiently powerful mortals aren't doing more to oppose them. Very few settings have the Gods as such a deciding factor in things, they'll absolutely have power and influence but they're just as much a part of the setting as everything else, and those that do say "well they're Gods so they get to decide" will generally not shy away from the fact that system is terrible and none of them should really have that kind of power because they're making a mess of it.

All that aside, something having a "this is good actually" sticker slapped on it doesn't make it less objectively terrible for the people subjected to it. It doesn't make a setting more livable or likeable. It just means somebody's weird personal stance or idea for a grimmer grittier story showed up in the setting and now everybody else has to make their own decision on if it's going too far for them to enjoy or not, which just loops back to "would I be able to enjoy or tolerate living in this setting" being a very subjective thing.

[Pex]

In my experience when playing a game where the DM runs in the Forgotten Realms, whatever is official canon of published works is irrelevant. The Forgotten Realms is merely a flavor text place setting. The only thing that matters is whatever the Campaign/Adventure Arc plot is that we're playing. Time of Troubles, Spellplague, Drizzt, Elminster - they don't exist and have no influence in anything that we're doing. Waterdeep or Silvery Moon or Neverwinter is just where we are as a home base or city we need to save or city we're passing though on downtime or whatever. The Pantheon determines what gods our PCs worship and whatever NPC temple that becomes relevant as the game happens. If we're playing a module we do the module, but the module is just the MetaMcGuffin of playing the game.

[Kish]

If the gods decide it's evil, it is. Good is a cosmic force in D&D and has nothing to do with morality or philosophy.
Amazing. Everything you just said was wrong.

Good Vs. Evil

Good characters and creatures protect innocent life. Evil characters and creatures debase or destroy innocent life, whether for fun or profit.

"Good" implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.

"Evil" implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.

People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships.

Being good or evil can be a conscious choice. For most people, though, being good or evil is an attitude that one recognizes but does not choose. Being neutral on the good-evil axis usually represents a lack of commitment one way or the other, but for some it represents a positive commitment to a balanced view. While acknowledging that good and evil are objective states, not just opinions, these folk maintain that a balance between the two is the proper place for people, or at least for them.

Animals and other creatures incapable of moral action are neutral rather than good or evil. Even deadly vipers and tigers that eat people are neutral because they lack the capacity for morally right or wrong behavior.