NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oofta" data-source="post: 9149517" data-attributes="member: 6801845">I always try to think of my campaign world as "the real world + magic".  In other words, if magic (or the supernatural, I view them as the same) doesn't come into play things work just like they do in real life.  Now, magic permeates just about everything and affects it in little ways something I alluded to in another thread recently.  If magic is real then healing salves really do work, albeit not necessarily as well as or as quickly as magic spells cast by PCs.  People use little bits of magic without even realizing it.However, the important thing is that if you took an earth-normal person and plunked them down in this world, they likely wouldn't notice the influence of magic right away.  They'd probably notice the continual flames everywhere, maybe catch on after a bit that people seem to heal faster than normal people. If they're lucky they might see a flying ship.  If they're unlucky they might see a dragon and realize that it only exists because it's supernatural.So what does all this have to do with verisimilitude?  Well if the world is too strange, too outside of what we experience in the real world I have a problem envisioning it.  Long ago at a con far, far away I had fun playing a Toons game where you, of course, play a cartoon character along the lines of Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck.  While it was fun in a one-shot sort of way, I could never really identify with the character in the way I can identify with a D&D character.  It was just obviously too silly.  Fun, but silly.So as a DM I want that sense of verisimilitude for my game so that I can make it come to life.  That includes the numbers of species running around, you can't have dozens of "hidden populations" of a few hundred members of a species scattered all over the place that also survived for tens of thousands of years.  In addition, I want each species to have their own story, their own identity that fits into the world.  I have a hard enough time coming up with that just for the core species.  Same holds true for "monstrous" races.  For example goblins are like rats and have pretty much spread everywhere but in areas where there are orcs, there's not going to be any gnolls because they compete for the "empty spaces" and one inevitably drives the other out.  A lot of monsters are either truly supernatural (e.g. ghosts) or cross over from another realm like giants.That also means I don't want fighters running around with twelve foot long swords, doing blatantly supernatural things without magic (auras that automatically damage every adjacent creature pops to mind) or wrasslin' a tornado like Pecos Bill.  Much like a good action movies push the boundaries of what humans are capable of (and then some) there's a line most people recognize.  It's okay if Indiana Jones rides an inflatable raft down a mountain because it's kind of sort of plausible (although in any real analysis they're dead) and it's fun.  But thrown several hundred feet in a refrigerator and step out of it completely okay?  That crosses a line.Obviously the line between "over the top but close enough to plausible" and "over the top so much that I can't relate to it" is going to vary from one person to the next.</blockquote>

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