D&D 5E Fairy tale logic vs naturalism in fantasy RPGing

[Li Shenron]

Very interesting discussion! Overall I don't worry too much... I like the game to be believable but largely unexplained. And the two are not at all incompatible.

Here's how I typically approach a few of the specific points, although my own mileage varies depending on the campaign.

But now the question - where does all that food come from? Where are the farmers? The bakers? Etc. They're never mentioned, and presumably there are not fields in a forest; but the elves don't seem to leave the forest either.

First of all, note that most of the times I purposefully stay away from depicting non-human races as copy-cats of human societies. I don't want to end up with all races being the same except for a few stupid ability bonuses. I want them to be different.

Then, questions like these spring up when the players are thinking too much in terms of contemporary life in the real world. It's not just our reality, but it's our reality now. Most people don't know how life really was in the middle ages, or even in the XIX century. They often tend to think that stuff like mass-produced food, goods, transportation, information (news and communications), knowledge (books) and training was always available, and they expect the fantasy world to be more or less the same.

If some player starts thinking too much about how the fantasy world works, to the point that it becomes detrimental to the game, I generally just point out that it's up to their characters to find out as part of the story, if they really want to know how things work. But I know that they won't find out completely because even I, the DM, doesn't know. And if a player figures out and complain, then I challenge him to explain to me for example how real life economy really works... there are few people who actually understand it, despite the fact that everybody thinks they really know.

Another, similar example: Arhturian heroes have a tendency to wander the wilds or the forests until they come upon a house or a castle, often inhabited by an enchantress. The whole effect is very fairy-tale like. But how does that work in a RPG? The norm is to have maps of the campaign world, which means that the castle has to be plonked down in some particular hex. And how do we achieve the effect of the "ever-changing" faerie forest?

It's not really the answer, but by definition in my games maps are as realiable as a kid's drawing. Just think of ancient historical overland maps, and how much they were full of errors, blanks and "here be monsters". The "norm" is not of my concern.

And all that comes up before we get to questions like, How does the Enchantress get food? Or pay her men-at-arms?

Food exists in nature. Again, this is a problem if the players think too much about our own lives, which depend on the food industry. Hunting-gathering and growing vegetables should not be a problem.

There is something inherently implausible about monsters hanging out in their rooms, more-or-less statically.

This is indeed something I typically do not like featuring in our stories, unless we're playing old-school dungeon crawls, but even in that case I avoid ecology-based monster and prefer undead, golems/elementals, outsiders etc.

Evading pursuit raises similar issues: it seems a bit unreal for a monster to be distracted by a bit of food, or a few dropped gp (as the evasion rules say can happen) when it could get more gp or more food by catching up to and robbing/eating the PCs. Yet without this sort of rule, the players can't make an effective choice to escape wandering monsters - which, again, undermines player control of the pacing and direction of the game.

I don't remember if this ever came up, but I don't see the big deal: a monster that is as intelligent as a wild animal probably stops when it achieves its purpose, so if it's pursuing for food it'll be reasonable for it to stop if food is dropped.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

There is something inherently implausible about monsters hanging out in their rooms, more-or-less statically. But something a bit like this is important to make the game that Gygax describes on pp 107-109 of his PHB work.

There's a reason why that sort of game fell out of favor by the time 2E came around. If you were to ask Gygax (of the time) why those trolls behaved as the did, I feel like he would have just told you that it's a game, or that they are there to challenge the players.

 

[billd91]

Evading pursuit raises similar issues: it seems a bit unreal for a monster to be distracted by a bit of food, or a few dropped gp (as the evasion rules say can happen) when it could get more gp or more food by catching up to and robbing/eating the PCs. Yet without this sort of rule, the players can't make an effective choice to escape wandering monsters - which, again, undermines player control of the pacing and direction of the game.

That's going to depend a lot on the monster and how well it processes the potential trade offs. As the monster, do I expend energy to run down the fleeing prey or do I stop to scoop up the goodies left behind for a lot less work? For a lot of real world predators, expending that energy is a real risk since it might not be made back if the pursuit is unsuccessful (of course, a pursuing cheetah probably wouldn't notice an impala dropping off some hard tack, beef jerky, and dried apples even if the impala had the presence of mind to do so). The same may be instinctively true for monsters in the game setting - trading off between the easy and lazy small win or the riskier big win.

 

[steenan]

"Fairy-tale" logic definitely comes into conflict with "realistic"/"physical" logic. But that is not the same as causal logic. Things can have causes and effects and can still be reasoned about within a framework that is definitely not "realistic" - as long as it is consistent and one gets an opportunity to learn it.

This also means that players don't necessarily lose control because the logic of the setting is "fairy tale". This only happens if the players are only allowed to declare their actions within the realistic framework, the system resolves them within the same framework, but the GM runs the setting by a different logic. If everybody at the table is on the same page on how the setting works and the rules support it, there is no such problem.

The castle of the Enchantress is not on a specific hex, because there are no hexes and no map of the Enchanted Forest. Maybe even "There are no maps of the Enchanted Forest" is an established setting fact. But is the Knight's player is allowed to declare "I need no map. I will find the castle because I love the Enchantress and my true love will be my guide." and have the mechanics resolve this, we have both player control and fairy-tale logic at the same time, with no conflict between them.

Nobilis and Chuubo's work very well in this paradigm. Fate is also fine, although it needs to be customized for this kind of play.
And if one is hardcore enough, "Wisher, Theurge, Fatalist" not only supports playing within fairy-tale setting, but also deciding to what extent the world is fairy-tale and to what extent realistic, using mechanical resolution.

 

[Jester David]

There's a couple things going on in the OP. It really comes down to "verisimilitude in RPGs" more than "fairy tales vs naturalism" as there's not much that conforms to the structure or tropes of fairy tales in most early D&D adventures or settings,

Ecology in fantasy worlds is fairly new. C.S. Lewis had intelligent talking animals all over Narnia but people still ate meat and hunted somehow. And Middle Earth stood in the middle ground between high fantasy and fairy tale, starting as one via the Hobbit and evolving into the other during Lord of the Rings. Things like "verisimilitude" or "logical world design" weren't a thing as imaginary worlds were still a fairly new concept.
Arguably, one of the first genre novels to really deal with ecology was Dune in 1965. But that was published fifteen years after LotR was written.
Regardless, most fantasy worlds tend to be pretty illogical in one way or another, either having nonsensical ecologies or cities or economies or terrain (rivers flowing uphill or branching is a common flaw).

It might have something to do with the creators of fantasy worlds being writers rather than economists, ecologists, geologists
Logic in fantasy campaign settings was also pretty new. Mostly because, in a pre-Internet age, gaining a working or even casual knowledge of a subject for worldbuilding required hours at a sizable library. Now, if a worldbuilder want to learn about air currents and wind cells it just takes 30 minutes on wikipedia.


From a D&D perspective... does it matter? I've never had my players question where the food an inn has comes from, and unless there's an adventure hook involved in the "why" the DM often doesn't need to know. In adventures, pages and text spent explaining the unique ecology of the dungeon is time that could be spent describing NPC roleplaying or adding details to rooms or fleshing out the plot.
Nonsensical ecologies are nice to have explained though (such as not having living things in a tomb sealed for eons) but often that gets overlooked. How many people questioned why there were so many snakes in the Ark's chamber in Raiders of the Lost Ark? What were they eating? Or drinking? What kept them from all leaving?

 

[jrowland]

My 2cp:

Fairy Tale logic is the logic of the "Feywild" - No logic at all! It is the logic of emotional narrative, where the knight finds the enchantress in the tower because that is where Knights find enchantresses. The tower cannot be found on a map, it doesn't exist, except after the knight passes three trials, then and only then is the tower revealed. Elves do not sleep, but rest in "reverie", which is closing off the mundane "natural" world for a time and drifting into the emotional narrative of the Fey.

In the Arturian sense, the King (of the fey) and the land are one not only figuratively (in the arthurian sense) but also literally! When the Fey Queen of winter is sad, it snows, when she is angry, it blizzards, when happy, the sun shines off the ice formations and sparkles in a radiant display.

My recommendation is to forget the mundane logistics, and move into high fantasy: The elves are hunter and gathers, yes, but they also engage in the fey emotional narrative: coaxing the apple tree to provide fruit with a song, wheat grows from the footsteps of a complex community dance, then spills the bran into the waiting baskets of children as the chaff blows away on the breeze. The children toss the bran into a bonfire while gnomes somersault over the fire in a song, bearing fresh bread in the arms when they leave the flames...

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

A couple of recent threads have led to me thinking about the "causal logic" of fantasy gameworlds.

For me personally, the easiest way to see the issue is by thinking about Lothlorien in LotR. To me, this is JRRT's attempt to bring the idea of the "faerie queen" into a more-or-less naturalistic novel. Like the fairy tale queen of fairy land, Galadriel is powerful, and magical, and rules an enchanted forest where mortals fear to tread lest they become ensnared by her spells. (See eg Eomer's remarks to Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas when they meet.)

But, as we expect in a traditional novel, the character also has more-or-less human motivations, and we get descriptions of houses, food etc when the Fellowship statys with the elves.

But now the question - where does all that food come from? Where are the farmers? The bakers? Etc. They're never mentioned, and presumably there are not fields in a forest; but the elves don't seem to leave the forest either. *snip*

I just wanted to say, I've been thinking about similar issues lately. E.g. I'm considering the possibility of having certain monsters not HAVE a reproductive cycle or ecology--maybe goblins and faeries just appear via spontaneous generation in places where people are afraid of or expecting them. Maybe the campaign world could be more like something out of the Shadows in Zelazny's Amber books, where the players are specifically weirdness magnets or shadow shifters or something else that makes their lives unusually interesting. Maybe Bavarian goblins are completely different from French goblins just because Bavarian folklore is different. Maybe trolls turn to stone in sunlight and vampires turn people into more vampires and you don't have to explain why vampires haven't already taken over the world and how dragons maintain a stable breeding population because that's not the kind of campaign this is. Maybe magic is weird and fantastic and idiosyncratic like folklore instead of scientific.

Maybe it's possible to have things make enough sense from a high-level perspective that you don't have to have them make sense at a low level. Maybe myths are real because collective human thought shapes reality; maybe mortals are special, and that's why the boogeymen/faeries/drow/etc. haven't killed off the humans yet, because humans aren't scared of genocide as much as they're scared of individual boogeymen, and so the boogeymen that get created aren't interested in genocide per se.

I don't have any conclusions to share, but I just wanted to observe that it's interesting recent threads have got multiple people thinking about this same subject.

 

[Aenghus]

In the depiction of the Feywild in my 4e campaign, I evolved the idea that the Feywild was inherently dramatic rather than naturalistic, bright colours were brighter, and dark colours were darker. Denizens of the Feywild tend to create and inhabit drama, and boring mundane naturalistic solutions tend not to work or even backfire horribly. Even fey enclaves in the mundane world can be imbued with such properties.

So it would do well for dedicated moneygrubbing adventurers to avoid the Feywild as their tried and trusted tactics won't function there as expected, and any treasure might end up being twigs and leaves on their return. Now there are places in the Feywild that work in naturalistic ways, half-mundane border settlements that serve as trade and transport hubs where visitors don't risk been turned into toadstools at any moment.

The answer to where food and products come from tends to be fae magic rather than pixie sweatshops.

To avoid player frustration I try to be very clear that different realms work with different rules, and that local guides or at least some homework can save a lot of trouble.

For me this feels "right" and sidesteps the urge to reduce everything to facts and figures. Fairytales aren't about facts and figures, at least IMO.

 

[Sunseeker]

Ecology in fantasy worlds is fairly new. C.S. Lewis had intelligent talking animals all over Narnia but people still ate meat and hunted somehow.

Not all animals and plants were intelligent in the Narnia-verse. The explanation is rather Biblical in reasoning, as I recall.

I don't know if the question here is "how to rationalize it", really. It's more of a question of "Does it help the game to rationalize fantasy?" Should you, as a DM, have answers ready if your players want to find the "man behind the curtain", as it were? Or should your players have an expectation that such systems exist at all?

Assuming your players do go looking for explanations, my go-to rationale is extraplanar activity. D&D players are pretty conditioned to accept weird stuff from other dimensions as a reason for situations not working the way they normally do. (D&D planes are like a chocolate box, filled with Mcguffins of various flavors!) The faerie forest then becomes a crossing point between the material and the Feywild, for example.

Hmmm, I did not consider the question in the context of "Is it beneficial to include these things?" To which my answer would then be "NO." Because 1: it's not beneficial to me as a DM, I take no pleasure or enjoyment from filling in such details and they require FAR too much detail and prep time for what they provide; and 2: because the players are almost never interested in exploring these things.

Do my games have farms and farmers? Sure. Because human farms and farmers are a staple of low-level fantasy. Either you come from a farm or there is trouble in the farms or something. But I've never once had an elven farmer. Not even a half-elven half-farmer. Same for dwarves, they're all diggers and contractors. Have I come up with ideas for how elves farm, or dwarves farm? Sure. But I don't include these in 99% of my games because frankly: noone cares.

 

[pemerton]

Thanks all for replies/posts. I've picked out a few to respond to that struck some particular chord in relation to the ideas that prompoted my OP.

I don't know if the question here is "how to rationalize it", really. It's more of a question of "Does it help the game to rationalize fantasy?" Should you, as a DM, have answers ready if your players want to find the "man behind the curtain", as it were? Or should your players have an expectation that such systems exist at all?

Assuming your players do go looking for explanations, my go-to rationale is extraplanar activity. D&D players are pretty conditioned to accept weird stuff from other dimensions as a reason for situations not working the way they normally do.

This is indeed something I typically do not like featuring in our stories, unless we're playing old-school dungeon crawls, but even in that case I avoid ecology-based monster and prefer undead, golems/elementals, outsiders etc.

I think it's not a coincidence, relative to my thoughts about world-building, GM vs player control, etc, that in my fantasy campaigns cosmological concerns (rather than mortal/mundane concerns) tend to predominate, and non-ecological threats (undead, demons, etc) figure prominently.

Because these reduce the pressure for naturalistic explanation, and integrate rather than cause tension between the ingame logic and the at-the-table dramatic/moral/thematic logic.

At the moment I'm running two campaigns - Dark Sun and GH BW - which rely less on that sort of non-naturalistic explanation and more on the mundane realities of the gameworld. I think BW doesn't have trouble with this, because it has a range of mechanics (eg its resources rules; its "circles" rules, whereby players can make checks to have their PCs bump into friendly/famiiar NPCs; its "wises" rules, which allow player narrative control over ingame "facts") that throw decisions about the gameworld to the players - and so naturalistic causal connections don't become a vehicle for too much GM decision-making.

How I will handle this in 4e Dark Sun, though, is still a work in progress.

"Fairy-tale" logic definitely comes into conflict with "realistic"/"physical" logic. But that is not the same as causal logic. Things can have causes and effects and can still be reasoned about within a framework that is definitely not "realistic" - as long as it is consistent and one gets an opportunity to learn it.

This also means that players don't necessarily lose control because the logic of the setting is "fairy tale".

<snip>

The castle of the Enchantress is not on a specific hex, because there are no hexes and no map of the Enchanted Forest. Maybe even "There are no maps of the Enchanted Forest" is an established setting fact. But is the Knight's player is allowed to declare "I need no map. I will find the castle because I love the Enchantress and my true love will be my guide." and have the mechanics resolve this, we have both player control and fairy-tale logic at the same time, with no conflict between them.

I wasn't meaning to suggest that fairy-tale logic causes players to lose control. Quite the opposite. I think fairy tale logic facilitates player control because it allows all the connections to be "on the surface" - either on the mechanical surface (as your "true love to find the Enchantress" example illustrates", or on the informal surface of drama, theme etc which eveyone at the table is experiencing.

My thought, in the OP, is that naturalistic logic reduces (or, at least, can reduce) player control because it requires the GM to make all these decisions (about everything from what the trolls do overnight to whether or not there's an oil shortage to - borrowing from an old thread on these boards - whether or not the chamberlain will grant the PCs an audience with the king), and the behind-the-scenes decision-making can come to swamp the significance of the choices made by the players at the table.

There's a reason why that sort of game fell out of favor by the time 2E came around. If you were to ask Gygax (of the time) why those trolls behaved as the did, I feel like he would have just told you that it's a game, or that they are there to challenge the players.

That sounds plausible. But I think it's not a complete coincidence that those early dungeons were referred to as "underworlds". I think the fictional veneer that was meant to sit over the gameplay set-up was the logic of a fairy-tale, not a naturalistic logic. (Philotomy Jurament has written about this in the context of classic D&D - the dungeon as "mythic underworld".) This was the ingame reason for the gameplay situation.

Fairy Tale logic is the logic of the "Feywild" - No logic at all! It is the logic of emotional narrative, where the knight finds the enchantress in the tower because that is where Knights find enchantresses. The tower cannot be found on a map, it doesn't exist, except after the knight passes three trials, then and only then is the tower revealed. Elves do not sleep, but rest in "reverie", which is closing off the mundane "natural" world for a time and drifting into the emotional narrative of the Fey.

<snip>

The elves are hunter and gathers, yes, but they also engage in the fey emotional narrative: coaxing the apple tree to provide fruit with a song, wheat grows from the footsteps of a complex community dance, then spills the bran into the waiting baskets of children as the chaff blows away on the breeze.

This reminded me of Burning Wheel, which tries to integrate a sword-and-sorcery, D&D-ish mediaeval/early Renaisssance approach to humans with ultra-Tolkienesque elves, dwarves and orcs.

The backbone of the PC build system is skills, and the skill list is longer than RQ and more like Rolemaster - so farming, vintning, a range of crafts, etc are all skills. Elves have access to a special category of skill called "skill songs" - which work like mundane skills (eg instead of orienteering, elves learn "the song of paths and ways") but (in the fiction) are sung, and (in the mechanics) are called "natural magic", which means that dice rolls using them are open-ended (keep all 6s in the pool, then roll them again).

It's one attempt to reconcile fairy tale logic with the more conventional expectations of RPG design and worldbulding.