Is "A Wizard Did It" Acceptable Worldbuiling?

[RangerWickett]

I make copious use of Dreamscapes and extraplanar funkiness, so if I need to justify something, I can say, "That's how the rules here work."

Respawning enemies? Yeah, the dungeon is in a demiplane bound to an eldritch clock that resets reality every hour. However, if you're wearing the right medallion, you're immune. If you lose that medallion, you'll loop too and forget you already did this. If an enemy gets a medallion, look out.

In War of the Burning Sky, there's an adventure inside the dreams of a psychic dragon, where you literally cannot progress until you're in the right mindset, and so some challenges are more about experiencing the right emotion by exploring one of the dragon's traumas than about just traveling in a specific direction.

 

[Fauchard1520]

Dungeons - the Underworld - are the Realm of Chaos. Chaos doesn't make sense.

I guess that's the trick. Even "a wizard did it" or "chaos magic" is a sort of explanation. If you present that to your players as an actual explanation rather than a handwave, it still works to suspend disbelief.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It would be inconsistent to not have at least, one rambling mega dungeon, in a world with no shortage of immortal(ish) Wizards.

Yes, but The Forgotten Realms has always been a kind of joke setting. Seriously, they have a city ruled by a council of archmages! That's not really something that would ever show up in a serious game/world.

 

[Nagol]

I guess that's the trick. Even "a wizard did it" or "chaos magic" is a sort of explanation. If you present that to your players as an actual explanation rather than a handwave, it still works to suspend disbelief.

Eh, "The Underworld is Chaos and thus inherently unpredictable" has a different problem. To wit: it discourages and/or prevents players from looking for/finding common threads to exploit.

Many of my dungeons end up with both internal themes as well as common shared design styles. Observant player groups can (and have) taken advantage of extrapolation and expectation.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Eh, "The Underworld is Chaos and thus inherently unpredictable" has a different problem. To wit: it discourages and/or prevents players from looking for/finding common threads to exploit.

Many of my dungeons end up with both internal themes as well as common shared design styles. Observant player groups can (and have) taken advantage of extrapolation and expectation.

I disagree. Funhouse doesn't necessarily equate to unpredictable. It just means that it doesn't make sense from a normal viewpoint.

For example, you could have a dungeon where every room has a different orientation of gravity. But there is a pattern to the orientation that a clever player can discern and exploit.

Admittedly, not the best example, but I think you can extrapolate the idea. You can theme the dungeon in such a way that seems nonsensical at first glance but has it's own internal logic.

 

[Nagol]

I disagree. Funhouse doesn't necessarily equate to unpredictable. It just means that it doesn't make sense from a normal viewpoint.

For example, you could have a dungeon where every room has a different orientation of gravity. But there is a pattern to the orientation that a clever player can discern and exploit.

Admittedly, not the best example, but I think you can extrapolate the idea. You can theme the dungeon in such a way that seems nonsensical at first glance but has it's own internal logic.

The original quote: "Dungeons - the Underworld - are the Realm of Chaos. Chaos doesn't make sense"

If it doesn't make sense, it can't be extrapolated from. Any learning from this location is inapplicable to any other except perhaps through random chance which means players cannot build expertise. Can the chaos riddle a theme and affect a locale but leave enough sense for the players to make meaningful choices? Sure. If the sense if left enough across locales then it is no longer the Realm of Chaos, is it?

 

[Fanaelialae]

The original quote: "Dungeons - the Underworld - are the Realm of Chaos. Chaos doesn't make sense"

If it doesn't make sense, it can't be extrapolated from. Any learning from this location is inapplicable to any other except perhaps through random chance which means players cannot build expertise. Can the chaos riddle a theme and affect a locale but leave enough sense for the players to make meaningful choices? Sure. If the sense if left enough across locales then it is no longer the Realm of Chaos, is it?

I did a chaos dungeon in one of my campaigns. It was the dream of a world seed left over from Creation.

Each level had a different theme. The logic of one didn't impinge on another. Yet they were each internally consistent.

 

[Khelon Testudo]

If a wizard did it, I'd want to be able to say which wizard, and what their motivation was. Even 'madness' has motivation: paranoia, rage, homicidal pleasure, etc. (Of course none of these have much relation to real mental health problems.)
"Oh, that's an owl-bear. You'll find a lot of chimeric creatures around here, from when old Archmage Halitosus Flemfromage used to live up in the castle. He was experimenting with combining unrelated biologies. The fish-squids in the lake are edible, but watch out for spiderbats."

 

[Mallus]

Yes, but The Forgotten Realms has always been a kind of joke setting. Seriously, they have a city ruled by a council of archmages! That's not really something that would ever show up in a serious game/world.

I imagine the numbers of serious games/worlds is vanishingly small then...

 

[Ovinomancer]

Goodness, I love "a wizard did it." Not, like, saying out loud a wizard did it, that's kinda lame, but introducing elements that are fantastical and strange and never, ever even trying to offer an explanation for it. How can you have a good swords and sorcery theme or a campaign set in the ruins of an ancient magical empire without using "a wizard did it?" The very point here is that things exist that are unexplained and unknowable to the PCs yet there they are.

This doesn't mean things should have some consistency -- I'm a big believer in consistency -- but explanations? Nah, not super interested in explanations. I'm also not really interested in a game mindset where anything that exists should be something the PCs can do. The PCs already do things that normal people can't, so I don't see why there can't be things they can't do, too. If introducing an element means I also have to introduce a way for the PCs to understand and copy it, I'm out. I like my mysteries too much to bother trying to actually solve them. D&D isn't a real world simulator, it's a magical world simulator. Go with magic.