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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9835679" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Nah. I believe what they're saying is that D&D, of its nature, is an adventure with, to some degree, relatively "high stakes". "Cozy" fiction, romantic or otherwise, has intentionally low stakes.Like you could sort of put it on a two-axis grid; it'd be a bit reductive, but that's kind of unavoidable. One axis is bright(/positive) vs dark(negative). The other is high-stakes vs low-stakes.Bright + high stakes = High fantasyDark + high stakes = Dark fantasyDark + low stakes = Gritty fantasyBright + low stakes = Cozy fantasyThis isn't to say that it's impossible to run a D&D-like game that is bright and low-stakes, but doing so is challenging because you're running counter to multiple elements that went into D&D's design. It intentionally aims for a high-stakes situation, and loosely moves in a High Fantasy direction as you gain more levels, though admittedly the reason why it does so is very different in different editions. (Early-edition, it's because you became a Lord or a Bishop or an Archwizard, where politics and national-threat dangers start to matter to you, which is clearly moving to high stakes, and you have made the world bright through your past actions; current editions, it just naturally moves in that direction because of all the spells, more or less, plus it's generally what folks want out of D&D nowadays.)Cozy fantasy as a D&D thing, IMO, requires intentionally slowing progression to a glacial pace, creating a world that is already pretty good but faces lots of very mundane problems, and giving players a reason to really really care about a specific place, a specific person or group of people, and/or a specific ethos or mission that is very down-to-earth and local. You aren't "adventurers"; you're chefs going out and collecting exotic ingredients to keep your barely-surviving restaurant alive, or you're innkeepers trying to disaster-proof your inn because of all these DAMNED ADVENTURERS that keep wrecking it, or you're the town militia (because the King's army hasn't been through in two generations) making friends with local orcs to stop them pillaging Farmer Gothan's fields and collecting honey from Miss Flauric's giant apiary and (etc.) Nothing that ever grows beyond the scope of your small town and its small problems; your life is rarely in any danger, and if it were, it's because you've taken on a truly monumental task relative to your usual work. But you still have to put food on the table and keep a roof over your head, and that is challenge enough.D&D is not particularly well-suited to "cozy" fantasy. That doesn't mean you can't do it--but I would recommend something like Humblewood, at the very least, or preferably a system actually built for it, like Mouse Guard.</blockquote>

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