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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9294049" data-attributes="member: 6799660">The game rules have always been rather player-facing -- economies that don't make sense, monsters or magic items that would destroy the world if left to their own devices, occasionally 10' poles that cost more than 10' ladders made out of two 10'poles, etc. In the case of monsters, I've always gotten the impression that most monsters are a lot rarer* in the world, overall, than the wandering monster charts might imply (the PCs are chaos magnets, or somesuch). That certainly would explain how commoners can travel at all. It also explains how, in a world full of flying monsters and mounts, castles built to repel ground-walking armies can exist mostly as real medieval castles did (usually with a few ballista on top of towers as lip-service). They exist because regular human(oid) armies are common and no one's seen a griffin or manticore in these parts in decades -- until the PCs showed up (and conveniently the PCs are then around to address the problem). *As a corollary, those monsters with really useful qualities like fire beetles probably don't thrive in captivity well, or have unstated upkeep issues like special diets or they constantly chew on some other domestic necessity like cloth or timber or something. If the game worldbuilding went to the logical conclusion of the monstrous and supernatural products within the world (with the frequency that the PCs see them), a lot of things would have to change that would move the game away from the faux-medieval/renaissance fair aesthetic that a lot of people still want in their game. And that's a fundamental paradox of fantasy games -- you are (generally, I don't want to speak for everyone) trying to create a game world that is 'the late Classical to early Renaissance world, but magic and mythical creatures are real.' Well, if magic and mythical creatures were real, a lot of the traits that define that time period wouldn't still be the case. D&D 3e had (in the forum-ing community) something called 'the Tippyverse,' which was what the world looked like if all the gamebook rules applied universally to the world and the people in the world knew and understood those rules and acted accordingly. It's... certainly interesting, but also not what many people want out of their fantasy gaming.</blockquote>

Verification