D&D General How "Real" is your world?

[FrozenNorth]

Even worse is when something actively makes anti-sense, which you seen occasionally, like the tomb of a Paladin of the anti-undead god who was known for fighting the undead is protected by... a bunch of undead... not positive-energy undead, not like, not undead trying to stop people from getting something in that tomb for the sake of er... undeadkind, but rather just apparently thoughtless/lazy writing because it's a tomb therefore undead (like maybe they decided it was the tomb of a famous Paladin after designing it). In the example I'm thinking of, there was clearly no realization of the irony. And you can fix it a bunch of ways, but like, for me that does need to be fixed and there are usually easy solutions.

To me, even that is a pretty tame example. I’m running a published module by a respected company. The party is stuck in a large palace (a megadungeon) in a city that they need to puzzle their way out of. The curse of the palace is that once you enter you cannot leave (the party teleported in by accident). This has been the case for hundreds of years.

Naturally, one of the factions in the palace is a league of assassins using it for their headquarters. The kobold and mephit slaves of the owners are still around. There are a bunch of other factions of Humanoid creatures that need to eat that have someone survived in the palace with no apparent sources of food.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

To me, even that is a pretty tame example. I’m running a published module by a respected company. The party is stuck in a large palace (a megadungeon) in a city that they need to puzzle their way out of. The curse of the palace is that once you enter you cannot leave (the party teleported in by accident). This has been the case for hundreds of years.

Naturally, one of the factions in the palace is a league of assassins using it for their headquarters. The kobold and mephit slaves of the owners are still around. There are a bunch of other factions of Humanoid creatures that need to eat that have someone survived in the palace with no apparent sources of food.

Oh jesus that's pretty bad.

 

[Larnievc]

This is going to be subjective, and people are going to disagree from the very beginning about certain definitions, but I am curious how "real" you consider your campaign world to be. It doesn't matter if you use an official 5E setting, a legacy setting, a 3rd party setting or something you designed yourself. I am not really asking about the setting details but how real the world feel when you playing.

What I mean by "real" in this context covers a lot of ground, much of it nebulous. Things like: feeling lived in by whoever populates it; having an ecology even if it isn't a realistic one; same for an economy; does it have religions and cultures and political institutions that make sense in the context of the wider world. Like that.

To reiterate: I am not talking about "realism." I am not even talking about verisimilitude necessarily, although it is related. I am referring to the feeling that the world as a whole operates by rules beyond those that exist to serve it as a game or as a narrative.

My worlds have verisimilitude but run on Pratchet’s narrative causality.

 

[Lanefan]

To me, even that is a pretty tame example. I’m running a published module by a respected company. The party is stuck in a large palace (a megadungeon) in a city that they need to puzzle their way out of. The curse of the palace is that once you enter you cannot leave (the party teleported in by accident). This has been the case for hundreds of years.

Naturally, one of the factions in the palace is a league of assassins using it for their headquarters. The kobold and mephit slaves of the owners are still around. There are a bunch of other factions of Humanoid creatures that need to eat that have someone survived in the palace with no apparent sources of food.

Er...if no-one can leave the palace then how are the assassins getting out in order to do their assassinating? Or do they just wait around to knock off anyone who wanders into the dungeon?

Inquiring minds want to know...

 

[TwoSix]

I've realized that the best way for me to run D&D games is to make them feel lived-in, but not necessarily coherent. You need room to allow for centaurs, warforged, halflings, and goblins to all have a chance to bump into each other and decide to work together, which means a lot of your classic fantasy world setups simply don't work.

I don't need a town my PCs visit to have hundreds of years of history, and a list of all the major shopkeepers, but I do demand the town has an obvious reason to exist and details that feed into that. Same thing for dungeons, major factions, etc. They can't exist just to exist, they have to be doing something that wasn't simply waiting for the PCs to show up.

 

[billd91]

To me, even that is a pretty tame example. I’m running a published module by a respected company. The party is stuck in a large palace (a megadungeon) in a city that they need to puzzle their way out of. The curse of the palace is that once you enter you cannot leave (the party teleported in by accident). This has been the case for hundreds of years.

Naturally, one of the factions in the palace is a league of assassins using it for their headquarters. The kobold and mephit slaves of the owners are still around. There are a bunch of other factions of Humanoid creatures that need to eat that have someone survived in the palace with no apparent sources of food.

Well, dammit, now I'll be wracking my brain (and the internet) to figure out what this is. Thank you. :shakes fist in frustration:

 

[Baron Opal II]

This is going to be subjective, and people are going to disagree from the very beginning about certain definitions, but I am curious how "real" you consider your campaign world to be. It doesn't matter if you use an official 5E setting, a legacy setting, a 3rd party setting or something you designed yourself. I am not really asking about the setting details but how real the world feel when you playing.

To me, it feels "real" when I can see the NPCs and the background in my mind's eye. Then I'm describing what I perceive, in a way, rather than simply "making it up". I think that it feels "real" to my players when they start saying "I attack the monster" rather than "Holger attacks the monster". When their perspective shifts from third- to first- person I think I am succeeding. When they stop saying "Opal wouldn't do that", that's another sign that the world feels real.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I've realized that the best way for me to run D&D games is to make them feel lived-in, but not necessarily coherent. You need room to allow for centaurs, warforged, halflings, and goblins to all have a chance to bump into each other and decide to work together, which means a lot of your classic fantasy world setups simply don't work.

I don't need a town my PCs visit to have hundreds of years of history, and a list of all the major shopkeepers, but I do demand the town has an obvious reason to exist and details that feed into that. Same thing for dungeons, major factions, etc. They can't exist just to exist, they have to be doing something that wasn't simply waiting for the PCs to show up.

Lived-in rarely means coherent anyways. The least realistic bureaucracy is the symmetric one where every branch makes sense and is handled equally.

 

[TwoSix]

Lived-in rarely means coherent anyways. The least realistic bureaucracy is the symmetric one where every branch makes sense and is handled equally.

Very true. Adding a dose of irrationality to your NPCs and organizations does help lend a feeling of legitimacy.

 

[hawkeyefan]

As a DM, fine; but as a player trying to look outward from my character and "see" the world from its point of view I want there to be a lot more than just the other PCs to look at/focus on/interact with.

I wasn’t talking about PCs.