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

[Reynard]

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.

 

[Bill Zebub]

My world is a blurry haze of sinister, phantasmagorical characters and gloomy landscapes, sheathed in ever-shifting psychedelic hues, where reality has no meaning.







Or were you talking about my game world?

 

[GMforPowergamers]

it depends...

I love world building, and sometimes I do it to crazy levels of details (I know that the king 4 generations back to a kingdom months of travel away was really a bastard of the sword master and the queen, so that changed the line of kings) but in general I like to make worlds to at least make sense most times...

having said that I also made a world where tree bark was made of milk chocolet (you could just rip it off and eat it like a hersy bar) and root beer sprang out of some natural springs... that world also had naturally flying mountains.

 

[delericho]

Depends on the setting.

But for my default world: as real as I can make it. Which probably isn't very.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

But for my default world: as real as I can make it. Which probably isn't very.

I bet most people who try to make them as simulations and realistic as possible still fail. People just don't have the time, and we also are all bad judges of what is and is not real.

and the real world has some design flaws the campaign creator should have rethought...

 

[MGibster]

For me, no. I've said it in other threads, but D&D worlds feel like themeparks to me. It's like visiting Disney World and going from Animal Kingdom to Epcot and then to Magic Kingdom. None of these places are real, and they simply exist to provide visitors with a specific experience. And that's how D&D settings work. They simply exist to provide the PCs with an experience. They feel about as lived in as the Harry Potter section of Universal Studios.

 

[DEFCON 1]

For me, not at all. Any setting I run a game in is there purely for the players and the game / narrative they are experiencing. I personally don't care about the setting's growth, what it has going on behind the scenes, or anything that isn't directly related to what the characters have or are going to experience. That stuff might already exist in the setting book I am using (which is why I use setting books), but I'm not a world-builder nor a writer. So I won't expand on that stuff until my players butt up against it. The best way of describing myself related to DMing would probably be a game facilitator. So anything not related to the game as it stands or where it probably can and will head is not really touched upon at all.

 

[payn]

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.

I gotta plug bounded accuracy as a great feature for making the real setting come to life. By real I mean a setting that makes sense for its existence. Why have trolls, demons, and dragons not taken over the world yet? So, I would agree with the above in that it's real as it makes as much logical sense as a fantasy world with magic can.

That said, I also like crazy unreal worlds too, but its nice to have a real default in the ruleset that you can dial up from there.

 

[Mallus]

My current campaign setting is a 4000 X 450 mile arc of unbreakable magic material with about 3 miles of biosphere on top. It floats in a inky void along with a sun and smeary stars that look more like comets. The whole thing is a construct about 500 years old (so the legends go). It's inhabited by 30+ intelligent species.

None of that really answers how believable I think it is, though. That'll come done to how realistic the NPCs and their motivations are as I play them.

 

[jdrakeh]

I designed Yarnmaster specifically as a lighter alternative to HarnMaster. When I run Yarnmaster, I run games in Harn and tend toward realism. When I run D&D of any stripe, realism pretty much goes out the window. The rules don't really encourage it and I feel as though I'd be playing against the grain by trying to force it. Same deal with Tunnels & Trolls. But I play different games for different reasons. For example, I play T&T because I can play a Living Skeleton as a PC!