Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Silvercat Moonpaw" data-source="post: 4523189" data-attributes="member: 46652">First off you can quote me almost verbatim on these.Now for mine own spin, in no particular order:Here there be threats.  Okay, I understand that writers of published settings need to fill them with threats in order to give GMs a hand.  But it confuses the hell out of me: I look at these settings and go "How the *beep* do the normal inhabitants cope?"  Do they just not see the danger?  Do they see it but not think it's that big a deal?  If I don't get presented with the world in the format that its normal people see it then I can't see the setting as anything other than a festering ball of danger that needs to be dealt with by everyone.What I'd really like is to be given a setting with no presented threats.  Then I can do all the imperiling and still have a complete understanding of why everyone isn't an adventurer.DOOM!  I don't mean doom as in big threats, I mean a doom-type thing which acts as the central point for the setting to the exclusion of all others.  Sometimes this is like Lord Mhoram's "Grim grim dark depressing settings with no hope", but also covers any settings where there is a focus on decay (of a society, of the world, of peoples' sanity, doesn't matter) or instability (ex. lots of wars).  This goes back to what I said in Here there be threats: the one single element basically consumes my attention and makes me confused as to why the rest of the setting bothers to exist.Lack of Fantastic.  The closer something is to reality the less I care about it as fiction: I can read the paper if I want reality.Versimilitude or whatever you want to call it.  If the guys who want versimilitude are the counter-culture to the original settings then I'm the counter-counter-culture to their settings.  A fictional world isn't real, they are stories based upon the internal desires of people.  So they should just as often be based off the illogic of what people want as the logic some of them want.Also I think part of what happens is that people make these settings get to figure out how everything works and then show their work on what they figured out…………………and then leave the rest of us with nothing to do.  I like trying to figure out why weird stuff exists.  Don't spoil it for me, please.  It gives me something to do.</blockquote>

Verification