D&D 5E Does the world exist for the NPC's?

[Fenris-77]

It doesn't clear anything up, because you're talking about a campaign, not a setting. Making a category mistake before you unlimber all that sarcastic rhetoric is really embarrassing, isn't it?

 

[77IM]

Uhhhh, are you implying that your settings do exist? That you didn't just make them all up? That when a foul dragon named Scorulax the Murky dwells in the lower levels of Cleft-Rock Caverns, that those setting elements actually exist? Do they cease to exist when we start playing a campaign? Or are you implying that player characters somehow exist outside of the setting, but within a campaign? Does a setting contain a campaign or does a campaign contain a setting?!?!? We might need Venn diagrams to sort this all out.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Uhhhh, are you implying that your settings do exist?

There is that whole otherkin thing: the idea that every fictional world exists in some other world or alternate reality, and bleed psychically into our reality, inspiring the artists who create the fiction, and spawning the mis-placed souls who are reminded of their true place when they encounter that fiction.

 

[Azzy]

Uhhhh, are you implying that your settings do exist?

Sure, they exist... Once you create them. They exist on paper (or digital files, if you wrote them on a computer), and in a person's imagination. You can even share them with other people, "Look, this is my setting." It'd be very diifficult to run in a game in a setting that doesn't exist, "Sorry, Carl, your character can't go to a town or interact with any NPCs—I didn't make a setting, so none of that exists."

 

[afretz]

While, clearly, the setting of a fictional campaign isn't real, you still have to make sure it has an internal consistency, the NPCs should make sense and, if returned to, should have had experiences while the PCs were gone.

 

[Li Shenron]

No, the world exists for ME, the DM!

 

[Riley37]

While, clearly, the setting of a fictional campaign isn't real, you still have to make sure it has an internal consistency, the NPCs should make sense and, if returned to, should have had experiences while the PCs were gone.

Some early modules would fail this test: if you walk into the dungeon, then go away for a month, and return, do you find the bodies of orcs, kobolds, etc. who have all died of thirst or starvation?

 

[Maxperson]

Some early modules would fail this test: if you walk into the dungeon, then go away for a month, and return, do you find the bodies of orcs, kobolds, etc. who have all died of thirst or starvation?

Why would they not be able to go out and forage for food and water?

 

[Riley37]

Why would they not be able to go out and forage for food and water?

I don't know why they never do this, but ANY time the adventurers enter the dungeon, they are ALWAYS at their assigned post. When the adventurers enter room #11, they encounter three guards with bows strung. Room #11 is never empty, with the usual inhabitants out foraging.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't know why they never do this, but ANY time the adventurers enter the dungeon, they are ALWAYS at their assigned post. When the adventurers enter room #11, they encounter three guards with bows strung. Room #11 is never empty, with the usual inhabitants out foraging.

That's the DM's fault, though, not the module. A module shouldn't have to spell out the life of each inhabitant.