Flat world, or round?

[TheManicMonocle]

So, as a tabletop player, which do you prefer? A flat world, with an edge (like Pirates of the carribean) or a round world? And why?

[Freed]

Round, in case my players attempt to dig to the center if the Earth. It's a more common occurrence than you would think.

[Anonymouswizard]

Spherical world, I tend to prefer science fiction which means a spherical world is assumed. It also means that even in a fantasy setting I can assume that you can hide from 'infinite range' effects by just being far enough away (as most magical effects work with a direct line they can be assumed not to curve with the planet, although few fantasy games happen at the scales where this would be noticeable).

[Honest Tiefling]

Round, because making a flat world would probably be more work then is worth it. A flat world might be interesting, but if it is basically people saying that the world is flat with no changes it didn't exactly add to the setting, did it?

[AtlasSniperman]

My setting is a flat-world. And the number of changes I had to make to make it work makes new players(new the the setting) brain melt. e.g. the sun moves in a circle in the sky and just pops in and out instead of rising/setting.

[veti]

The trouble with a flat world is that you have to make all sorts of other changes to the known laws of physics, astronomy, thermodynamics etc. to allow it to exist. And unless you're very well versed in these things, there's a good chance that sooner or later one of your players is going to start asking questions you can't answer.

Just go with round. It's much easier.

[Xuc Xac]

We've been working on making a relatively flat world in the World Building sub-forum if anyone is interested.

[Tanarii]

Round, in case my players attempt to dig to the center if the Earth. It's a more common occurrence than you would think.

Just tell them it's turtles all the way down.

[JAL_1138]

Just tell them it's turtles all the way down.

Technically there are a lot of turtles, but each of them carries a different world on it as it swims through space. On the backs of the turtles, there are elephants; four is the usual number of pachyderms, but there can be more or fewer depending on the size. The elephants hold up the world, which is a flat-ish disc. Sometimes a turtle sized for four elephants will have a fifth, which often slips off the turtle's back and orbits 'round to impact as a gigantic meteor, leaving deposits of fats and BCBs (burnt crunchy bits) deep underground.

Occasionally on one of these "disc-worlds" you'll get Wizards, who may end up creating round worlds through magical experiments.

[Jormengand]

Toroidal worlds are the best.

[Jay R]

Round, of course. Even when I ran a game in which the earth was the center of the universe, and the seven planets (including the sun and the moon) revolved around the earth, it was round. Otherwise I'd have to work out a whole new approach to eclipses, and it's not worth it. [Eclipses are one of the reasons that all educated people knew that the world was round, very early in history - because we've seen its shadow.]

[TheManicMonocle]

Very good scientific points for the round world, but I don't see it as needful for your world to have a scientific basis. Surely it helps, but with a round world you don't have Pirates of the Carribean, at worlds end!

Or Terry Pratchett's discworld! Which some here have referenced.

[Dr_Dinosaur]

We couldn't decide, so my group's setting is technically both. From a terrestrial perspective, it's a sphere and floats through space with other planets same as ours. From a planar/conceptual one it's a giant disc encased within an impossibly huge magic dyson sphere

[Knaight]

I might have done a flat world setting at some point, but they're ridiculously outnumbered by round world settings - there's the various sci-fi and space opera games alone (where flat worlds don't fit), and then there's how I tend not to find alternative world shapes that interesting*. With that said, I also have a fondness for small archipelagos where it doesn't really matter, outside of implications a flat world has on horizon distance.

*Flat worlds, worlds on the bodies of two titans that aren't either flat or round, toroids and spindles, hollow worlds where people are on the inside face, whatever.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

but with a round world you don't have Pirates of the Carribean, at worlds end!

Make sure nobody asks you how you navigate, because our latitude longitude system and the ways we use to determine those only work because the world is round. For a pirate campaign I would generally go with round.

That, or come up with a new system that would work there. A close enough sun could help.

For most non primarily ocean going games it's not really important. Maybe make the world a donut? Or a cube?

Edit: Oh, one other thing. The round earth is the reason we have a horizon. Either be prepared for that question, or use it to weird your players out and try to give them a world without one. (So stuff becomes invisible by being too small to be seen, eventually, not by being behind the earth. Binoculars are pretty cool on a flat world.)

[Grizl' Bjorn]

Flat to avoid projection issues.

And so constant reminders that it curves around aren't necessary, and things really as far from each other as they look

[Deliverance]

So, as a tabletop player, which do you prefer? A flat world, with an edge (like Pirates of the carribean) or a round world? And why?

Round. Anything else is giving Washington Irving and his poisoning of the American mind, which later poisoned global popular culture with the flat world myth, too much credit.

Form a pure game-technical perspective, there are way too many details that are counterintuitive to our own experiences to keep in mind in a flat world campaign, so I don't see much point in it unless going for deliberate silliness where all the mistakes made by the GM and players regarding how the world they are playing in works can easily be handwaved away, such as a Discworld setting.

EDIT: Of course, if players are stuck in dungeons most of the time it doesn't matter much. Unless they get really caught up in delving deeper.

[Dappershire]

Just tell them it's turtles all the way down.

While I totes adorb your reference, I can't help but feel this is self-defeating.

The moment you explain to a party that the world is flat, they'll crawl around it, make mounts of the elephants*, and start murdering their way down through an infinite amount of turtles.


Edit: *Which might just be the best use of Handle Animal ever.

Edit 2: Can you just imagine a Space Jammer's response to this? "This better be good Navigator. I wanted to be landed and unloading our gear an hour ago. Let me just see what the hol-ly Tymora! Ef this. Set sail for Krynn. Even Kender are less crazy then that thing."

[weckar]

I'll throw my hat in with the toroidal or spirallic (Or rather helicoid, or maybe a proper helix, I suppose) crowds. Best world types and easier to make sense of than flat.

[Anonymouswizard]

Surely it helps, but with a round world you don't have Pirates of the Carribean, at worlds end!

Good, couldn't wrap my head around that film anyway.

Although in that the 'falling off the edge of the world' thing seemed to be magical rather than physical, and this is a world where the world was circumnavigated (it's supposed to be 'our world, but with a touch of magic'). Really the shape of the world didn't matter to the writers as much as telling a good confusing story.

Or Terry Pratchett's discworld! Which some here have referenced.

Really, if I wanted to run a Discworld inspired campaign I'd either use the Disc itself, or more likely set it in an Ankh-Morpork style city on a roundworld. As far as I'm concerned the flat works is only there to serve the joke, and while I love Discworld the hands I'd run in the setting don't need a flat planet.

[gkathellar]

Depends on tone. Flat, or even just "assumed-to-be-flat" worlds can feel persuasively mythic. There's something about the ocean falling off of the edge of the world into the shining void that captures the imagination. When the world itself is unreal and magical, we can believe that everything else should be.

Round worlds, on the other hand, feel more real, require less handwavium, and often feel ... bigger, I guess? There's a vastness and believability to seeing the curve of the world on a map and knowing there are people and cultures and lands and wonders unseen, that will never be seen, a feeling of grandiosity and strangeness far grander and stranger than just "here be dragons."

Spherical world, I tend to prefer science fiction which means a spherical world is assumed. It also means that even in a fantasy setting I can assume that you can hide from 'infinite range' effects by just being far enough away (as most magical effects work with a direct line they can be assumed not to curve with the planet, although few fantasy games happen at the scales where this would be noticeable).

What, you mean you don't simulate the effects of the planet's gravity and rotation on line effects? For shame.

but with a round world you don't have Pirates of the Carribean, at worlds end!

So what you're really saying is, "avoid flat worlds, or you might accidentally end up with PoC: At World's End."

[JAL_1138]

There's also some weirder ones in Planescape.

Giant geometric shapes crashing together and drifting apart, mountains rising from an infinite sea, a toroidal city floating at the top(?!) of an infinitely(?!)-tall pillar of stone, two flat worlds (of infinite size) floating atop one another so that if you look straight up you're looking straight down at the ground of the other world, concentric hollow prison-worlds, a world made of tunnels in stone through which strange maddening winds howl constantly, a world of infinite sky in all directions with the occasional floating island, a world where instead of air and sky there is only the stuff of magic and cities can be built on the corpses of dead gods or broken pieces of other worlds that have drifted in, a world made of raw primordial chaos that constantly shifts and changes (the few bits of it that are even remotely stable to start with, anyway), a world made of endless gigantic clockwork gears and coils and mechanisms...

[weckar]

There's also some weirder ones in Planescape.

Giant geometric shapes crashing together and drifting apart, mountains rising from an infinite sea, a toroidal city floating at the top(?!) of an infinitely(?!)-tall pillar of stone, two flat worlds (of infinite size) floating atop one another so that if you look straight up you're looking straight down at the ground of the other world, concentric hollow prison-worlds, a world made of tunnels in stone through which strange maddening winds howl constantly, a world of infinite sky in all directions with the occasional floating island, a world where instead of air and sky there is only the stuff of magic and cities can be built on the corpses of dead gods or broken pieces of other worlds that have drifted in, a world made of raw primordial chaos that constantly shifts and changes (the few bits of it that are even remotely stable to start with, anyway), a world made of endless gigantic clockwork gears and coils and mechanisms...

And those are just the touristy ones!

[Dappershire]

There's also some weirder ones in Planescape.

Giant geometric shapes crashing together and drifting apart, mountains rising from an infinite sea, a toroidal city floating at the top(?!) of an infinitely(?!)-tall pillar of stone, two flat worlds (of infinite size) floating atop one another so that if you look straight up you're looking straight down at the ground of the other world, concentric hollow prison-worlds, a world made of tunnels in stone through which strange maddening winds howl constantly, a world of infinite sky in all directions with the occasional floating island, a world where instead of air and sky there is only the stuff of magic and cities can be built on the corpses of dead gods or broken pieces of other worlds that have drifted in, a world made of raw primordial chaos that constantly shifts and changes (the few bits of it that are even remotely stable to start with, anyway), a world made of endless gigantic clockwork gears and coils and mechanisms...

And those are just the touristy ones!

Been there, done that, all I got was this tunic.

[Lord Torath]

While I totes adorb your reference, I can't help but feel this is self-defeating.

The moment you explain to a party that the world is flat, they'll crawl around it, make mounts of the elephants*, and start murdering their way down through an infinite amount of turtles.

Edit: *Which might just be the best use of Handle Animal ever.

Edit 2: Can you just imagine a Space Jammer's response to this? "This better be good Navigator. I wanted to be landed and unloading our gear an hour ago. Let me just see what the hol-ly Tymora! Ef this. Set sail for Krynn. Even Kender are less crazy then that thing."

Did you mean Spelljammer? The elephants and turtles (and similar creatures) are called "Star Beasts", and are an exception to the normal (for Spelljammer) rules of gravity and air envelopes. And they're just so huge and old that they pay no attention to the dust motes (ie PCs) that may happen to float by them. No need to worry about the PCs taming them.

[Anonymouswizard]

What, you mean you don't simulate the effects of the planet's gravity and rotation on line effects? For shame.

To take this as if it was black text for a moment, I tend to assume 'pure magic' travels as a radio signal, removing the need to take gravity into account, although with stuff summoned with magic you have to account for gravity as if it was nonmagical. I don't know the maths for correcting for the earth's soon, but at some point I'm going to research it and include it.

The main things including curvature do is allow you to add some importance to height at long ranges and shields which bounce magic off of the ionosphere to achieve greater ranges.

[Martin Greywolf]

As in all things DM, you need to ask yourself a question of "Does this help with my game in any way?"

If not, avoid flat worlds - they require you to do additional work during worldbuilding, work that is best spent elsewhere, on things that will matter to the players. Go with the default that we're all accustomed to, which is an Earth-like planet with a single moon. Side note: adding more moons creates a massive amount of complications, and can, on occasion, create a problem when your planet should be ripped apart by tidal forces.

If you want a flat world, then it should impact the game in some way or form, otherwise it may as well not be flat and save you all the work. In some cases, the impact is to go for maximum wackyness a la Discworld, and that is perfectly fine, in other cases it creates unique effects that you couldn't have on other worlds. I'd say that one of the obligatory elephants reaching into the oceans with his trunk to have a drink is pretty cool thing to see every now and then.

Least likely option is that you want to tell a story that explicitly requires and oddly-shaped world - The Last Hero from Discworld is an example, as are some sci-fi stories (these usually aren't flat, but the work required to set games in them is comparable). In cases like these, well, definitely pick oddly shaped world, because otherwise you don't have a story.

[GungHo]

Usually round, but also have done hollow worlds, ring worlds (Niven rings and sometimes something more complex), Dyson spheres (both swarms/bubbles and shells), O'Neill cylinders. I haven't tried Alderson disks yet. I'm a fan of mixing tech with fantasy (think Endless Space/Legend) or simply having "wizard/deity did it" mega-structures, usually with enough regression/time for people to have forgotten that they don't really know they're in an artificial environment.

[Knaight]

If not, avoid flat worlds - they require you to do additional work during worldbuilding, work that is best spent elsewhere, on things that will matter to the players. Go with the default that we're all accustomed to, which is an Earth-like planet with a single moon. Side note: adding more moons creates a massive amount of complications, and can, on occasion, create a problem when your planet should be ripped apart by tidal forces.

They only require additional work if the group is going to get really nitpicky about real world geology - which is much the same case with having multiple moons. The baseline is more along the lines of remembering that there isn't a proper horizon anymore.

[Gravitron5000]

As in all things DM, you need to ask yourself a question of "Does this help with my game in any way?"

If not, avoid flat worlds - they require you to do additional work during worldbuilding, work that is best spent elsewhere, on things that will matter to the players. Go with the default that we're all accustomed to, which is an Earth-like planet with a single moon. Side note: adding more moons creates a massive amount of complications, and can, on occasion, create a problem when your planet should be ripped apart by tidal forces.

By the same logic, avoid spherical worlds (also oblong spheroid worlds). If it's not going to come up in play, who cares whether the world is flat or spherical or conical or some undefinable amorphous bloby sort of shape?

So, I guess my answer is that for most settings that I have created, I prefer not to define the shape of the world, unless I expect the players to interact with said shape in some way. Some settings/genres make this more likely (Sci Fi), where in many, it really doesn't matter.