D&D 5E Stink of the City and other unpleasentries, do you pay attention to them?

[Mephista]

You can evoke smells without it being an oppressive nasty stench. Generally, I want to save bad smells for evoking that something is sick/wrong. Fantasy is great with symbolism, and I like using it to the fullest extent.

That's my take anyways. I'm not here to try and make something "realistic" in a fantasy game. I smack my players for trying to use modern scientific principles in a game too.

 

[Mallus]

I'll only describe scent if a particularly vivid & pithy descriptive phrase strikes me. RPGs, like poems, are made of words, and I've got a limited amount of time during each session to blurt them out.

My fantasy cities --which it's fair to say I'm obsessed with-- resemble fantasy book covers I like. Soaring towers, labyrinthine streets, images rendered with words. I skimp on the other senses.

I save the stink and ugliness for the NPCs and their actions. It's more dramatic -- though now I'm picturing a campaign based around fighting the good fight against Medieval urban sanitation & hygiene (for dramatic fantasy reasons, obviously, like combating a magical slime mold zombie outbreak). In the right hands that could be interesting.

 

[Dausuul]

There is no reason why a pre-industrial city needs to be filthy. Many ancient civilizations had quite sophisticated sanitation systems. Medieval Europe just happened to be really bad at this.

 

[Sacrosanct]

There is no reason why a pre-industrial city needs to be filthy. Many ancient civilizations had quite sophisticated sanitation systems. Medieval Europe just happened to be really bad at this.

Which just so happens to be the #1 historical era and area where D&D is based/inspired by....

 

[Rod Staffwand]

Since near-modern sanitation is possible for numerous pre-industrial societies that make it a priority, I just make it a cultural thing. For my games, most civilized lands are relatively clean and sanitary without open sewers and unmitigated squalor. The more chaotic and evil the society (to put it into D&D alignment terms) or more barbarous, the dirtier and more repulsive it is. The "unpleasantries" become important flavor details when the more civilized adventurers enter those areas. If Main Campaign Town is as repugnant as an orc war camp, I think you've lost a powerful narrative tool to depict the alienness of some cultures. Imagine a drow city like an underground Venice where waste is dumped into the canals but only the most powerful can cover the perpetual stench with perfumes or ward off disease with mystic incense.

On a similar subject, when I'm a player I have an absolute distaste for my PCs wading through bogs or sewers, getting bombarded with feces, and anything else that would compromise their wardrobe or their dignity with disgusting liquids and semi-solids.

In a game world that is only limited by your imagination why would you imagine one covered in crap?

 

[Dausuul]

Which just so happens to be the #1 historical era and area where D&D is based/inspired by....

Inspired, yes, but inspiration is not a straitjacket. There's no reason you can't have a campaign setting which resembles medieval Europe in rough outline, but which does a better job of keeping the streets clean and generally investing in public infrastructure. (Although this does assume a certain level of wealth and stability.)

On the other hand, if you want to have filthy cities reeking of raw sewage and festering with disease, that works too. It's up to the DM, and you can go either way without having to invoke magic to explain it.

 

[evilbob]

London in the 14th century was a cesspool.

Not that I was planning on it anyway, but this is a great reason to never play a game set in 14th century London. Seriously, though, as someone else said: magic. Not just that your adventurers can literally wave their hands and clean themselves every 6 seconds, but this is a fantasy world - i.e. specifically and in all ways nothing like 14th century London. If there are unicorns and fairies in your game world, then not having sewage in the street isn't breaking any kind of principles.