Maintaining Grim and Gritty Flavour!

[WSmith]

Amen to the description factors.

"You have moved the branches aside, to reveal a small puddle of a pool filled with crimson ichor. Hovering about 3 feet above it, with wings flapping so fast that appear almost still, is a miniature insubstantial cloudy mass, shaped in the effige of a beautiful elven winged madien, only one dagger long from head to toe. The most noticable feature is the completely onyx orbs, where her eyes should be. "

Was that a fairy or something else? Was it a tiny ghost? You just don't know. Granted I don't have the talent like some here do. But that is the idea.

Magic, excpet for a few covens or cults with highe level leaders, there are NO NPC spellcasters. Magic is consider diabolic. An overt display of such is certain to lead to an early grave.

Many regions are either undeveloped, or fallen into ruin. What nasty beasts and worse lurk in the many crumbled halls of the last age?

The quick and easy fix for DR is turn it to subdual damage. It may not be grim that a company of plate wearing soldiers lay unconsciouns on the field of battle, until the enemy begins rounding up the sleeping survivors for slaves, food, or even a more sinister fate!

 

[Umbran]

Wow, this is interesting! Usually these types of threads focus more on mechanics, and nobody has mentioned that yet!

Perhaps because folks are realizing that mechanics are secondary to creating grim and gritty flavor?

Gimness and grittyness really aren't much a finction of mechanic, but of atmosphere, plot and setting. If the game world is dark and full of moral terpitude and ambiguity, it doesn't matter much what the mechanics are, and what the characters can do, physically. Go ahead and be of superheroic abilities (and even personal outlook) if you want, if the plot is grim, the game will be grim.

The fact that a character may be hard to kill, or can come back from the dead, or can leap tall buildings in a single bound has nothing to do with whether the government officials are corrupt, the normal man is in poverty, and the PC is spending his time in fetid alleyways

 

[Yuan-Ti]

Re: grim 'n gritty

and remember that all badness doesn't have a goal, when han solo was brought to the prison cell after being tortured on the cloud planet he says, shocked, "they didn't even ask me any questions"

They were causing him pain, under Darth's orders, in order to give Luke bad dreams and lure him to Bespin. At least that was my take on it... in other words, there was a point to it.

But your point is well taken!

 

[Moe Ronalds]

a pinch of salt and a dash of pepper oughtta do it.

 

[WSmith]

Paedophilia - nobody likes a rockspider. Want your players to hate the Royal Wizard? Give him a 9 year old boyfriend.

Sweet Be-jezz-hus! That is so darn vile I don't even think Monte Book of Vile Things will even touch on it. And neither will I, that is just WAY to contraversial.

 

[Terwox]

why does grim and gritty imply low magic?

A lot of people in this thread are saying that to be grim and gritty has to be lowmagic. What stops a world from being grim when magic is prevalent?

 

[Umbran]

Re: why does grim and gritty imply low magic?

A lot of people in this thread are saying that to be grim and gritty has to be lowmagic.

Oh, really? Look again. 25 replies. How many of them actually call for low magic? It sure isn't a majority. A couple call for low magic. A couple more specifically for having little clerical healing around (which isn't the same as low magic). DOesn't look like "a lot" to me.

 

[Sigma]

Re: grim 'n gritty

and remember that all badness doesn't have a goal, when han solo was brought to the prison cell after being tortured on the cloud planet he says, shocked, "they didn't even ask me any questions"

(Completely off-topic, but Han Solo was tortured to create pain which would in turn cause a disturbance in the force to attract Luke's attention and lure him to Vadar's trap. I'm not saying that Vadar wouldn't necessarily torture someone just for fun, but in that instance, he did have a reason.)

Edit: Yuan-Ti beat me to the bunch!

 

[nameless]

Re: Re: why does grim and gritty imply low magic?

How many of them actually call for low magic? It sure isn't a majority. A couple call for low magic. A couple more specifically for having little clerical healing around (which isn't the same as low magic). DOesn't look like "a lot" to me.

They don't explicitly call for low magic, but I think the immense utility of magic makes a society more capable of helping itself. If a cleric can cure diseases, then influenza and cholera sweeping through the slums isn't very dangerous. If hunger and sickness are taken care of with relatively minor magics, then the setting goes from gritty to self-pitying. People aren't starving to death, they're whining because their fathers are making them be masons instead of writers (no offense intended to angst-ridden writers ).

It's easy to say that magic is beyond the general populace, but any benevolent force capable of magic would easily be able to make a self-sustaining cycle to improve things until Dark Sun becomes Forgotten Realms. That, and the paradigm of gritty is that the heroes are ultimately unable to change things. Big magic is a big lever to change the world.

EDIT: The reason Dark Sun doesn't become like that is because mechanics restrict magic. Just another last minute thought...

-nameless

 

[Falkayn]

Grim-n-Gritty Mechanics

I must say I agree that it is the flavour of the campaign that makes all the difference. The original Cyberpunk black box rules suggested that GMs run the game as if everything was against the players, because it is!

But ... the game mechanics can help or hinder that flavour.

Having played "Vampire: The Masquerade" for a couple of years I found that the mechanics helped you play a creature of the night so much more easily than if you had been using D&D to do the same thing.

For some grim-n-gritty d20 rules check out Ken Hood's "The Grim-n-Gritty Hit Point and Combat Rules" available from his d20 downloads page.

Implement those rules in your campaign and you'll soon see your players having a much greater fear of combat's fatal effects than they would in a 'normal' d20 game.