Worlds of Design: Baseline Assumptions of Fantasy RPGs

You can write a set of fantasy role-playing game (FRPG) rules without specifying a setting, but there’s a default setting assumed by virtually every FRPG. Moreover, some rules (e.g. the existence of plate armor, and large horses) imply things about technology and breeding in the setting.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

The Basics of FRPG​

All FRPGs start with some assumptions built into the setting, some of them so innocuous that gamers might not even realize they're assumptions to begin with. For example the assumption that there are horses large enough to be ridden, even though for thousands of years of history, horses weren’t large enough for riding (the era of war chariots from about 1700-1000 BCE, and the era before that of infantry only).

Familiarity vs. strangeness is an important question for any worldbuilder to answer. What are gamers familiar with? That tends to be the default. J. R. R. Tolkien’s works (Lord of the Rings, Hobbit, etc.) are nearly a default setting for many, as in the dwarves and elves who are quite different from traditional stories of dwarves and elves. You could argue that the default setting is more Tolkien than it is medieval European, but he largely adopted Late Medieval European (1250-1500), so I prefer to refer to that.

The question is, do you want your ruleset, or your campaign setting, to follow the default? An early example of great deviation from the default was the wonderfully different world of Tekumel (Empire of the Petal Throne, and a few novels). A “different” FRPG might posit no monsters at all, perhaps not even elves and dwarves, just a lot of humans, yet never explicitly say so: if you leave out rules for monsters and humanoid races other than humans, you have a different-than-baseline setting, even if you didn't consciously make that decision. But be warned: too much unfamiliarity may make some players uncomfortable.

Are there baseline assumptions for science fiction? There seems to be so much variety, I wouldn’t try to pin it down.

The Baseline​

What ARE the baseline assumptions? In general, they are mostly late medieval (not “Dark Ages” (500-1000) or High Medieval (1000-1250), as FRPGs tend to be magic grafted to later medieval Europe. In no particular order here is a list of categories for baseline assumptions that I’ll discuss specifically:

• Transportation
• Communication
• State of Political Entities
• Commonality of Magic
• Commonality of Adventurers
• Commonality of Monsters
• Length of History and Rate of Change
• Level of Technology
• Warfare and the Military
• Religion
• Demography
• Climate

Transportation​

Wooden sailing vessels, late medieval style. In calm waters such as landlocked seas and lakes, galleys; in wild waters (such as oceans), small sailing vessels. River barges much preferable to poor roads and carts. And are there wonderful roads left by or maintained by an Empire (Rome)? See "Medieval Travel & Scale."

Communication​

Proceeds at the rate of travel, by horse or by ship. In other words, very slow by modern standards. Even as late as 1815, the Battle of New Orleans was fought after the War of 1812 had ended (in 1814), but before news of the treaty had reached Louisiana from Europe.

State of Political Entities​

Monarchies and lower level independent states (such as Duchies) ruled by “the man in charge” (very rarely, a woman). Nobles. States, not nations (the people rarely care which individual is actually in charge). Castles are so defensible that it’s fairly easy for subordinate nobles to defy their superiors. There are small cities (5-10,000 usually), not really large ones (over 100,000 people).

Commonality of Magic​

Magicians are usually rare, secretive folk. Few people ever see any manifestation of magic. In some cases the church or the government tries to suppress magic. See "The Four Stages of Magic."

Commonality of Adventurers​

Magicians, knights, powerful clerics, all are rare. 1 in 500 people? 1 in 10,000?

Commonality of Monsters​

Human-centric. Monsters are usually individuals rather than large groups. Intelligent monsters are rare. (Here Tolkien’s influence, the great orc/goblin hordes, often overrides European influence.) Undead may be common. Dragons are “legendary.”

Length of History and Rate of Change​

Slow pace of change of technology. Awareness of the greater days of a “universal empire” in the past (such as Rome), now gone. Technology changed much faster in late medieval times, than in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

Level of Technology​

Late medieval, or possibly less. (Late medieval for the technology necessary to make full plate armor, if nothing else.) See "When Technology Changes the Game."

Warfare and the Military​

Wars rarely changed borders much (Late Medieval) - the great migrations have ended. Wars certainly aren’t national wars, the common people are spectators. See "The Fundamental Patterns of War."

Religion​

What we’re used to in later medieval times is a universal monotheistic church (Catholicism), though with foreign churches of different stripe (Orthodox Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist). But in games, more often the setting seems to derive from older, pantheon-based, religions.

Demography​

Density of population is low. Depends on whether the local area is frontier or settled. Cities are population sinks (high mortality rates). There may be stories of a Great Plague (later-1340s and onward in Europe).

Climate​

Temperate medieval European (more often, English (governed by the Gulf Stream)), with fairly cool summers so that full armor is not impossibly hot. (Imagine wearing full armor when the average summer high is 91 degrees F, as in northern Florida.) But winters are much less severe than in the northern USA. (Modern European climate is currently getting much warmer than in late medieval times.)

Your Turn: Do you see the default setting as different that what I’ve summarized?

 

[Aldarc]

Most of the time NPCs don't need stat blocks at all. If they aint going to be involved in a fight they don't need stats.

Exactly. A GM could even claim that the "11th level Necromancer" dies in one hit from a rock thrown by the angry mob, if they so desire for the purposes of the fiction.

 

[TwoSix]

I think you and myself were the only two people in this discussion who agreed that DnD has some sort of baseline. Everyone else does not believe that a DnD baseline exists at all, they see each setting as entirely divorced from the assumptions of each other setting and the rule books.

Yea, I think that's the kicker (and the more interesting question that's been raised). How much is there a distinct D&D milieu that's divorced from any of the published setting? Can you define a pure D&D setting extrapolated from the core books, not using any of the published settings as a guideline, with any sort of specificity?

 

[TwoSix]

Exactly. A GM could even claim that the "11th level Necromancer" dies in one hit from a rock thrown by the angry mob, if they so desire for the purposes of the fiction.

Spellcasters with a ton of environmental changing high-level magic but absolutely no ability to put up a fight (like they have 5 HP) would certainly help explain a lot of monster and trapped filled lairs, and be an amusing inversion of the "BBEG" trope.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think it's that odd.

Armies are more reliable and stable than a few magicians. The base assumption is that magic users who can turn battles with magic alone are rare. Most spellcasters are low level, squishy, and expensive to hire. This makes them bad linchpins for battle.

It's better for a noble to train as a fighter or rogue as a youth then use levied peasant spearmen, train man-at-arms, and knights (if you outrank them) to do most battles. If you have the money and rank, you kill a dragon with a few hundred dudes and some siege engines, not 3-6 action heroes. It's likely cheaper.

Adventurers fill in for poor nobles, nobles with busy armies, or nobles who can't roll out a full force for some other reason.

IMHO any caster who could master FIREBALL would then be essentially a 'nuclear weapon'. They would present an overwhelmingly powerful capability to simply obliterate any 'normal' military force. Now, obviously, being able to cast such a spell only once in a day or even 2-3 times per day wouldn't negate the possibility of larger military forces existing, but imagine you were trying to siege the castle of a lord with such a guy on his staff. Every few hours a chunk of your army goes up in flames. It would be a pretty untenable situation, particularly in any sort of 'medieval' like army (IE smallish groups of mostly professionals and some badly trained draftees). Every fireball either lands on the peasants and they all run far away, or on the scarce professionals, who are unlikely to stick around to get barbecued either for very long (and will surely demand huge pay raises not to go work for the other guy).

Practically speaking such 'nuclear armed states' would avoid direct conflict at all costs. Particularly if you start getting into a realm of high-level magic (think 3.5 and its epic spells) where you can really wipe someone out with them. I think there would be a lot more black ops and low level fighting. This could be a good premise for a game. The PCs are employed by one of the major players in such a system as 'spec ops' or mercenaries to help fight small scale border wars, maybe in proxy states that have useful resources, but not much development (in the magical sense mostly).

Other elements of course can be designed as one sees fit.

 

[Minigiant]

We care about the number of people able to become wizards through the study of magic. And, if magic is so difficult to learn, then it doesn't matter how many spell books are in existence, magic is still rare and hard to learn. Whether you have a hundred, a thousand or a million spellbooks doesn't make a difference if you are claiming only a dozen people can ever learn magic.

No I am claiming that only a small percentage of wizards are can cast spells over the 2nd level. There are a lot of low level wizards. A noble has access to much of the effect a low level wizards could provide especially since most wizards have to spend hours preparing a spell before they have the effect ready.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Magocracies can of course make sense. If you want magocracies to be the typical form of government throughout the setting then that is super easy, just say learning magic is barely an inconvenience just like Chaosmancer thinks it is. Now if one wants them to exist in a world where most of the setting operates in the classic rare-wizard manner, the nobles mostly being mundane, then it requires some thinking why some nations would be able to do it differently. If you want one nation to have the ruling class to be magic nobles, then I think making them sorcerers would work well (I think you already said this earlier.) You would get all sort of typical noble arranged marriages to preserve the purity of blood crap with magic on top. Now if learning magic is hard, I don't think wizardly hereditary magocracies would work very well, as it would commonly be the case that the heir is unable to become a wizard. I think wizard-based magocracies would perhaps operate more like theocracies, people from different backgrounds rising though the ranks. Something like the medieval Papal States, just archmages instead of bishops, the supreme archmage instead of the pope.

I think what people are saying is, there are only certain permutations which really make sense. If learning magic is, relatively, easy then surely the richest people will be more likely to learn it, or teach it to their children, etc. They are also likely to want to put some controls on the whole thing such that serious magical prowess is unlikely to arise in anyone outside of themselves, or at the very least of their control.

If it is hard to learn magic, OK, then maybe, perhaps, they aren't as exclusive, in that anyone who CAN learn it probably will be recruited to do so, within reason. However, again it is highly logical to assume that this is vastly most likely to take place under the patronage of, and even within the families of, the nobility (IE they are sure going to test themselves for magical aptitude before anyone else!). Given the huge potential of magic, even lower level stuff, it is hard to see how it would be otherwise. Possibly even to the degree that anyone outside of their control learning, practicing, maybe even talking about, magic would subject to persecution, even death. That would be consistent with the behavior of elites across the vast majority of human history.

Now, I can see a model where wizards are not controlled by the nobility. It is one where only an immersion in an 'arcane environment', which is corrupting and toxic to most people, is required. Thus the 'swamp wizards' exist because the only place to get that exposure is out in the Forbidden Swamp, in Swamp Tower. This is possible, but of course means 'wizard' is a bit more like 'warlock' or 'sorcerer' in flavor (in editions that have those). This does however clash pretty heavily with the stock assumptions built into certain subsystems in AD&D and 3.x, which seem to indicate arcane casters are actually fairly common. Lest you think 0.5% is not 'fairly common' I must remind you that, HISTORICALLY, all the nobility of Europe, from the lowest to the highest levels, comprised significantly less than 1% of the population. In fact, medieval agriculture had a production ratio of only 1.03. That meant that for every 100 agricultural laborers, enough food was, on average, produced for 103 people. Even a moment's consideration shows how few of those could be nobles (since there are tradespeople, soldiers, clerics, etc. as well). So 0.5% is not rare, it is actually a pretty high rate. This won't mesh with the above assumption. IMHO ANY other assumption about wizards pretty much leads to the nobility establishing a monopoly or near-monopoly on wizardry.

Thus I conclude that the assumptions of, at least, games like AD&D and 3.x are incoherent with any logically consistent version of society.

 

[Chaosmancer]

You just don't get it, do you. The player character doesn't need hundreds of years of study. They just need to be A PLAYER CHARACTER. They are not governed by the same rules as the rest of the world.

Go watch Raiders of the Lost Ark. What Henry Jones Jnr goes through would kill a normal human 10 times over. He doesn't have superpowers, he is able to survive because he is a player character. Normal rules do not apply to him.

Hey, that's fine for you, but you realize not everyone plays that way right? I mean, I play with heroic characters, but I don't play with characters who ignore the rules of reality.

Because my players like seeing themselves compared against fellows of similar strength. They have a mentor they studied under, a rival who is competing with them. If praying to their gods allows them to raise the dead, they expect that someone else in the world can do that exact same thing.

If I established in the world that all wizards needed at least a hundred years to learn any magic, then my players would be confused how it was so easy for them, maybe seek to capitalize on being a unique being with insights beyond mortal ken. And it feels less like they are going into this world, and more like we are just making things up for no reason.

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Yea, I think that's the kicker (and the more interesting question that's been raised). How much is there a distinct D&D milieu that's divorced from any of the published setting? Can you define a pure D&D setting extrapolated from the core books, not using any of the published settings as a guideline, with any sort of specificity?

I agree it is an interesting question. I think a lot can be done with negative space, since there are clearly things that are not DnD, but how far you could take that I do not know for sure.

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No I am claiming that only a small percentage of wizards are can cast spells over the 2nd level. There are a lot of low level wizards. A noble has access to much of the effect a low level wizards could provide especially since most wizards have to spend hours preparing a spell before they have the effect ready.

Well, again, I've been keeping my discussion centered on 1st level spells. So, it seems you are agreeing with me. Higher level magics like that of a 5th level wizard are difficult, but the lower level stuff less so.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yea, I think that's the kicker (and the more interesting question that's been raised). How much is there a distinct D&D milieu that's divorced from any of the published setting? Can you define a pure D&D setting extrapolated from the core books, not using any of the published settings as a guideline, with any sort of specificity?

It is heavily dependent on what material you look at, but I think MANY, if not MOST, D&D settings are built on small variations of the assumptions put forward in the 1e DMG and Greyhawk. In that setting, and in the DMG, there are a lot of low level classed PCs. Now, there are some statements which say effectively "these aren't PCs and they don't have the talent to advance like PCs." However, the rest of the setting and standard play assumptions of Gygax belie that.

First of all, if I go and peruse my Greyhawk Gazetteer, it lists VERY high levels for virtually all, actually 100% IIRC, of rulers. Most of them are quite a bit over name level, and many have caster levels. Since the baseline assumption of AD&D seems to be that you need to be name level to achieve a stronghold, it looks like that is pretty much assumed. So at least every barony, etc. has a 9th level+ lord, and many of them are non-fighters (although the rules are more vague about exactly what you can rule as a wizard, etc.). So there is AT LEAST a superstructure of powerful nobility and equivalent in Greyhawk and the AD&D defaults (IE if you create your world by reference to material in the DMG).

Secondly, this, plus the commonality of the practice of promoting NPCs into PCs in troupe play, indicates that in fact NPCs are pretty capable of progressing in their class levels! This seems to be true of all classes. It does not appear that this necessarily requires adventuring either, nor are all high level NPCs ancient! Kara-Tur leans even MORE heavily into this trope, with mid and high level NPCs being quite common. I would take this to be the assumed default of a D&D world.

So, to the extent that one can say there is a default (since you can certainly devise any sort of world if you wish) it appears to be relatively high magic and contain a considerable number of high level figures of all different classes. As was detailed up thread, this appears to be consistent with the most straightforward interpretation of most of the other 'classic' D&D settings as well. Athas MIGHT be a partial exception, but even there it sure seems like magic exists, it is just expensive to power it and thus less used. Still, the rulers of that world are themselves ultra-powerful magical beings/wizards/whatever.

 

[Minigiant]

Well, again, I've been keeping my discussion centered on 1st level spells. So, it seems you are agreeing with me. Higher level magics like that of a 5th level wizard are difficult, but the lower level stuff less so.

And my point is that 1st level spells are too close to the effects that a noble could produce with just wealth. So nobles would not pursue wizardry unless they could reach "real wizard" levels. So only magical prodigies of the nobility would really get into wizardry and not embarrass themselves at decades of study to still be a lower level mage and sacrifice their proficincies and HD. Only long lived races would have their nobles brute force it.

This is what makes Forgotten Realms weird. It hands out "prodigy status" out like candy because its a novel and video game setting.

 

[Chaosmancer]

And my point is that 1st level spells are too close to the effects that a noble could produce with just wealth. So nobles would not pursue wizardry unless they could reach "real wizard" levels. So only magical prodigies of the nobility would really get into wizardry and not embarrass themselves at decades of study to still be a lower level mage and sacrifice their proficincies and HD. Only long lived races would have their nobles brute force it.

This is what makes Forgotten Realms weird. It hands out "prodigy status" out like candy because its a novel and video game setting.

That was something you never stated until just now, that 1st level magic is too weak to be useful to nobles, because they are rich.

Unless you are again equating things like Alarm to hiring a bodyguard, which, I really don't feel like discussing how obviously different that is... again.

But, I've made my points, and you seem bound and determined to stay back in 2nd edition with your assumptions. While most of the rest of the thread wants to tell me that no baseline exists.

So, since you aren't willing to look at the present of DnD with more than a cursory glance, refuse to acknowledge that actually most of the settings are just as "weird" as FR in giving out the status of being good at magic (check out @AbdulAlhazred 's post right above yours if you haven't for points about Greyhawk) and I've gotten to the point of just repeating myself ad infinitum... I don't see much point in continuing this discussion.

Enjoy 2e. I'll be playing 5e.