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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8845922" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I would define the scale as follows.0: More aggressively "normal" than actual people's lives. This is the zone of things like the weird obsession with enforcing racism, sexism, religious oppression, and other IRL stuff that, yes, it really did exist but is really not fun and unnecessary in a fantasy setting.1: Actually like most ordinary lives, the "quiet desperation" angle. Very few people want to play at this level mostly because very little of consequence happens to the vast majority of people here.2-3: Special extensions beyond ordinary drudgery stuff. The people who live in a border town that sees a lot of comings and goings, or who work in a noble's mansion and thus hear all sorts of scandalous things. That kind of stuff--beyond mundane, but only just.4-5: Actually fantastical, but at a distance removed. You know the local priest can do some magical stuff, your great-grandmother left the family that "cookbook" and her husband's (now dusty and ill-maintained) sword she claimed was magical. That kind of thing.6-7: The fantastical is blended into the everyday. This means there is still an everyday to blend into, but it's hard to sharply separate the everyday stuff from the fantastical stuff. On the lower end, this resembles 2-3 but with supernatural things in addition to merely mundane-but-outlier things. On the high end, it's the home of many standard YA fantasy novels (e.g. the Old Kingdom books by Garth Nix), or Eberron.8-9: The fantastical has largely supplanted the everyday. "Weird" things are a regular occurrence, magic is almost everywhere. Harry Potter is probably on the low end of this, while arguably Lovecraftian horror tends toward the high end, where reality itself is a thin fictional coat of paint over the madness-inducing truth of reality.10: There is only the fantastical, and it strains hard against the boundaries of what is even remotely conceivable, let alone plausible.11: You have gone beyond the impossible and made even "fantastical" inadequate to describe the kind of experiences or events that occur. Congratulations for breaking the system.My preference is around 7. Pretty much the absolute bare minimum I'd accept is around 5, 5.5, where the magic and fantasy are there but they must be "brought into" the world, as it were, rather than being "already there" to interact with. Around 8.5-9 is where my tolerances start to break down, I can still deal with it but it becomes harder for me to relate unless I'm really, really on board with the premise/concept/etc.So you could say my preference is somewhere between "great-grandma was totally a witch, look at all the diagrams she drew in her 'private' cookbook!!" and "the whole world is festooning with the fantastical, from flimsy flinders to formal foundations," while I find the real blockbuster hits are just about midway between, where magic and mundane are still two poles, but the boundary between them has completely fuzzed out into a smooth gradient. The Old Kingdom books are an almost perfect distillation of the kinds of "secret lore," magic-is-everywhere yet mundane-is-important stuff, so I'll basically always mention them. The Abhorsen has tricksy bells and magic books that hide their contents in your own memory until you really need it and all sorts of other things...and must also be an actual fencer who wears a scale hauberk and, ideally, is fully trained in music, literature, and history in order to make the fullest use of their powers.I like my D&D fantastical, but not Super Weird; I like it to recognize the mundane, without enforcing it; I like it to embrace the possibility of transcending mortal/physical limits without using magic; I like it to give magic value and purpose without making it clearly superior to either so-called "mundane" martial skill or non-magic forms of supernatural power.</blockquote>

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