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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8643295" data-attributes="member: 18">If it's a world I'm running, things need to make basic sense to me, someone with some historical/archaeological training, and who doesn't like it when it's not obvious where food/water is coming from, where waste is going to and so on.Populations should not be larger than makes sense for the land being farmed/hunter-gathered/etc. Cities should be built in places that make sense for cities, and if they're not, there should be some kind of logical reason how they're still populated/operating. I don't particularly believe in &quot;realism&quot; in the sense of &quot;everyone in the past was a horrible person&quot;-type settings, because I feel like archaeology deeply undermines that. &quot;Everyone in the past was weird!&quot;, sure, but horrible? No. And stuff comes and goes. This was shown to me strikingly when someone tried to suggest &quot;communist&quot; societies never existed in the past, and whilst that's literally true on one level, societies which shared many characteristics with them, which were utopian and communitarian, often did exist (and usually an existing power structure would work extremely hard to stamp them out - but it's easy to envision that failing for various reasons). Equally, values-wise, I'm fine if most societies in a setting have somewhat stereotypically &quot;modern&quot; values. Honestly the Romans and Greeks had a lot of ideas that could easily have resulted in those values, and even back in the time of Hammurabi you see a mixture of very modern-seeming and enlightened thinking next to extremely brutal/barbaric stuff and more than anything, a lot of very practical ideas.So my priority tends to be that things make sense in a &quot;could this society/place function?&quot; sense, an archaeological/anthropological sense.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8643295, member: 18"] If it's a world I'm running, things need to make basic sense to me, someone with some historical/archaeological training, and who doesn't like it when it's not obvious where food/water is coming from, where waste is going to and so on. Populations should not be larger than makes sense for the land being farmed/hunter-gathered/etc. Cities should be built in places that make sense for cities, and if they're not, there should be some kind of logical reason how they're still populated/operating. I don't particularly believe in "realism" in the sense of "everyone in the past was a horrible person"-type settings, because I feel like archaeology deeply undermines that. "Everyone in the past was weird!", sure, but horrible? No. And stuff comes and goes. This was shown to me strikingly when someone tried to suggest "communist" societies never existed in the past, and whilst that's literally true on one level, societies which shared many characteristics with them, which were utopian and communitarian, often did exist (and usually an existing power structure would work extremely hard to stamp them out - but it's easy to envision that failing for various reasons). Equally, values-wise, I'm fine if most societies in a setting have somewhat stereotypically "modern" values. Honestly the Romans and Greeks had a lot of ideas that could easily have resulted in those values, and even back in the time of Hammurabi you see a mixture of very modern-seeming and enlightened thinking next to extremely brutal/barbaric stuff and more than anything, a lot of very practical ideas. So my priority tends to be that things make sense in a "could this society/place function?" sense, an archaeological/anthropological sense. [/QUOTE]

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