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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6985826" data-attributes="member: 1465">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.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.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.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.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 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.</blockquote>

Verification