Rant: Why do people always want real world equivalence in their fantasy?

[Spore]

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

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

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

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

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

Why not dare more?

[Malimar]

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


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

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

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

[Draconium]

Because we're too lazy to do otherwise.

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

[SilverLeaf167]

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

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

Because we're too lazy to do otherwise.

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

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

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

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

[Mastikator]

The harder it is to relate to the harder it is to roleplay.

[Honest Tiefling]

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

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

[nedz]

The closer you keep a fantasy setting to reality the easier the verisimilitude.

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

[Slipperychicken]

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

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

[Telok]

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

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

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

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

[Frozen_Feet]

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

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

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

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

[Takewo]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Clistenes]

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

[Yora]

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

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

[Jormengand]

In A Song of Ice and Fire, the seasons are a pretty massive, consistent theme, especially if you're House Stark.

[SilverLeaf167]

In A Song of Ice and Fire, the seasons are a pretty massive, consistent theme, especially if you're House Stark.

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

Weird how this thread ended up overlapping pretty hard with the one about fantasy calendars I started today. Given the timing of both threads, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there was some connection, but it might be better not to derail this discussion too much (even if OP was the one to use them as an example).

[Efrate]

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

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

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

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

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

[veti]

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

I agree with this.

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

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

[Milo v3]

Why not dare more?

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

[raygun goth]

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

[icefractal]

I agree with the title, but I think calendar systems are way down the list. The top of mine would be: ignoring the implications of huge changes in the setting.

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

[GorinichSerpant]

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

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

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

I kind of what to join that game.

[erikun]

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

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

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


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

[Yora]

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

[Themrys]

In A Song of Ice and Fire, the seasons are a pretty massive, consistent theme, especially if you're House Stark.

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

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


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

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

The logical degrees of difference would be:

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

[Yora]

That assumes that medieval settings are created because the writers are insecure, which I find very much without any real basis.

[Jormengand]

That assumes that medieval settings are created because the writers are insecure, which I find very much without any real basis.

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

[Spore]

That assumes that medieval settings are created because the writers are insecure, which I find very much without any real basis.

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

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

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

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

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

[2D8HP]

. I am not talking about polite space pirates from opposite world who plant flowers and kiss cute fluffy bunnies. I am talking about twists that are unexpected but still believable.

Actually, bunny kissing space pirates is definitely a twist I do not expect! Believable? Well they're pretty darn cute....
But it's well known that fluffy bunnies are vicious killers!

[Mutazoia]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[NichG]

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

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

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

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