D&D General How Weird Do You Like Your D&D

[Reynard]

"Fantasy" is a very broad genre, even when "constrained" by the tropes and assumptions of D&D. It can be grounded and realistic after a fashion,or wild and weird. So, how weird do you like your D&D adventures, worlds and characters.

In answering you can define "weird" however you like, but I'm specifically thing of things that don't fit in a sane world, that defy expectations and/or lean toward horrific absurdity. The Tower of the Elephant is weird, and so is Adventure Time.

On a scale of 1 to 10 I like a constant 4 or 5, where the world is weird but not absurd, but then specific places or entities get really weird. I especially like making dungeons specifically the high weirdness points in a campaign: the dungeon that is itself a giant mimic, the dungeon that is a pocket realm of faerie, the dungeon that is the dreaming of a mad God.

How weird do you like your D&D?

 

[Fanaelialae]

I too like weird, with areas that are especially weird, though I would rate it at around a 7, personally. (To me a 4 or 5 would be standard D&D weirdness.)

In my last session, the PCs (a flumph soul knife, a candy dragon barbarian, a vampiric far realm sorcerer, a tentacle horror monk, a cat spirit ranger, and a human druid) went through a magical portal and ended up inside a giant-plant-worm-thing. There were other entities living inside of the worm and they had to variously fight and negotiate their way through the innards to reach the portal at the other end. (It's a weapon being grown by the cultists of a far realm god that is trying to infest reality.) The insides of this creature were one of the weirder areas of my campaign, and the portal returned them to the clockwork forest from whence they had come (one of the more standard levels of weirdness).

 

[aco175]

I like most things grounded so everyone knows the baseline. If gravity does not work right in one place, that is cool, but everywhere- then I need to explain base things most people assume are about Earthlike. Most of my games are similar to the LotR movies with PHB races as player races, limited god interference, limited 15+level pcs/NPCs. I guess I'm rather vanilla.

 

[Reynard]

I should say that I often prefer that the PCs are less weird that the weird parts of a particular campaign,because it makes highlighting the weirdness easier. So if I'm going for Hyborean Age weirdness, the PCs should be Conan.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I like it to change from time to time - ie the Spelljammer game I'm in is cranking the weird up and that's fun, but I wouldn't want to only play that. On the other hand, never doing that would be just as boring.

So I want it to vary from game to game, rather than always being a 6 or whatever... though I'm not a huge fan of "realistic" settings and look upon low-magic with skepticism.

 

[Krachek]

Weirder than ever!

 

[Oofta]

I like fairly grounded campaigns, with my base assumption being reality + minor magic. So yes, there are magical creatures like dragons and small magic makes people's lives a little better but someone from our world probably wouldn't realize it right away. I do that so when people do encounter the truly fantastical or weird, it stands out as something special and unique.

To paraphrase Syndrome, if everything is weird then nothing is weird. Or at least it feels less weird.

 

[Umbran]

In the short term, I'm fine with just about anything.

My personal experience is that most GMs ability to maintain high weirdness such that it is interesting is limited. So, I'm fine with things getting really weird, but maybe don't try to force it to be there for too long.

 

[Xamnam]

If I wanted a consistently weird experience, I'd go for Ultraviolet Grasslands, but I absolutely want individual places that hit that level of weird. In my homebrew world, one of the principles I fell in love with is that magic begets magic, so the places that have the most weird stuff going on slowly get weirder over time.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'd kind of separate creepy-weird from cutesy weird, though obviously some stuff like Adventure Time manages to happily combine the two.

For creepy-weird, I'd say it's about a 7/10 for me. Like a bank-vault that leads into a dying future dimension where the sun is nearly dead as an ideal storage place.

For cutesy weird I definitely have some tolerance, but more like a 4/10. Like Flumphs and so on.

I can go higher on both, too, as long as creepy remains ahead of cutesy - I run Spire which is easily like 8/10 weird, maybe higher, and I'd like to run Heart, which is like 9/10.