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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AmerginLiath" data-source="post: 7421815" data-attributes="member: 777">The one thing I would add to Zardnaar’s points is to pay attention to what fantasy (or historical) sources you think should inform a game and how they actually intersect with how D&D is designed as a game. There are a lot of sources mentioned above, different tabletop and video games — all modern — as well as modern fantasy literature. Be mindful that, much as D&D has changed over the years, the assumptions of the ruleset are 40+ years old at heart. The game started as a reskinning of Napoleonic wargames with elements of midcentury pulp sword & sorcery and classic science fiction (hence why magic acts like artillery but refreshes like mentalism). The addition of high fantasy and more true to life medievalisms occurred over the years mainly through Dragon Magazine articles, but added onto to an extant skeleton.What that actually means for playing or designing a game is not to design a game to look like Game of Thrones or the feudal era and expect the rules to support it properly. Instead, imagine that the game is a Western with the veneer of medieval fantasy — swords instead of sixguns, knights instead of sheriffs, orcs instead of bandits, fireballs instead of union cannon, adventurers in the wilderness hunting for dungeons instead of wagon trains going to California looking for gold — and it all fits together far closer than any assumptions one sees in history or modern high fantasy. Look at Zardnaar’s very good low-level campaign plan: that’s both a D&D starting adventure AND the beginning of a Western as the hero comes to the besieged town.So, my advice to setting up a D&D campaign is two things that your players likely haven’t done. First, check out some of the “Appendix N” pulp writers that Gary Gygax and company read to see where many assumptions of the game came from so you aren’t trying to copy a book or movie instead against the grain of the rule. Secondly, perhaps more aptly, to design an adventure that fits the conceits of D&D, watch some Westerns and see how the threats and environments are constructed (watching some classic pulps to see dungeons in actions couldn’t hurt either). Once you add some armor and a sword, no one will realize the old knight is Gary Cooper!</blockquote>

Verification