Wahoo vs. Traditional

[Pbartender]

As a DM, I prefer the run campaigns where the Weird collides with the Mundane. I tend to start things off looking fairly ordinary and historically based, and gradually reveal the utter strangeness lurking under the surface. In my opinion, the Weird (or Wahoo) quickly becomes ordinary and just as boring as the mundane, unless it used sparingly and in contrast to the ordinary order of things.

The other reason I like to start things out more mundane is that it makes it easier for players to grasp the setting initially. If you can just tell players "think medieval Arabia" or "think Aztec" when they are making up characters, things go much faster and they play their characters more in tune with the setting's expectations. I've found that in practice, no matter how hard you try to create bizarre and unique cultures, players actually base their PCs characterizations (when they bother with them at all) on other characters from fiction, movies, or history. So, I create settings where that's possible. As they go on, the players discover that the old washerwoman is actually a shape-changing reptiloid in disguise, or that the brothel hides a doorway to the Plains of Liquid Sapphire. So there's Wahoo, but its hidden by the Traditional.

And here I thought I was the only one...

 

[alleynbard]

I think a closer definition of what I prefer could be summed up as "a rather modern setting painted to look marginally medieval". Its how I see Eberron and one of the things I like about it.

In my homebrew, the people have modern viewpoints while the world is one of "medieval" fantasy. There are castles, though they might look a bit different. Society is generally agrarian, though factories have been established in more advanced areas of the setting and some farms have automated constructs that do most of the work.

I guess you could say the settings I prefer have more in common with a Renaissance festival than an honest depiction of the Renaissance. And this is coming from a former Medieval and Renaissance Studies major. I use those periods for inspiration, but I rarely try to re-create them.

But I am also a fan of "magic as technology", so I am sure that figures into my preferences towards how my worlds are put together.

 

[Baron Opal]

It depends on my mood, really. Right now I am eagerly awaiting the Eberron player’s guide so I can finish up my 4e game where the noble families mine residuum from meteorite craters to give to the Empress of the Golden Throne. In return she keeps the creatures of Twilight beyond the Barrier Peaks and lets the scions of the noble families expose themselves to the glowing pattern in the depths of the Imperial citadel so they can gain pattern shards. (Dune + Dark Border + Warhammer)

I’m also putting together a B/X game where the players are surviving and exploring a pseudo-Hyboria. It’s my CAS + Howard mix. So for me it varies weekly.

 

[mlund]

Frankly, the "Wahoo" style settings don't appeal to me. I'll take Greyhawk over Forgotten Realms any day, let alone Eberron.

I prefer the "rubber forehead" aliens / demi-humans are playable races because it is easier to piece together some sort of rhyme or reason behind their social structures and traditions. Having every civilization in a game world at least tenuously evolved out of our real world notions of human tribalism / barbarism is important to me. It creates a baseline "social physics" that encourages role-playing. Trying to create that same baseline for the more "Wahoo" races is just too much work.

I'm not a huge fan of well-developed, wide-spread Magi-Tech infrastructure for the same reason. 3E style teleportation, for example, compromises too many classical tropes such as the Merchant Caravan or the Trade Route Wars. Re-skining them to fit the new "technology" is, again, a bunch of unnecessary work.

What can I say? I like the world to be kept consistent and simple so players are comfortable attempting to boldly manipulate it through role-playing.

- Marty Lund

 

[Primal]

This is my preference for all fantasy games. My original D&D was in this mould, and it has been ever since (along with other fantasy games I run or play).

Probably reflects my fantasy literature upbringing of Tolkein, Howard and Lieber.

Cheers

Same here, which is why I favor Golarion, Greyhawk and FR of the published settings.

 

[Ariosto]

For D&D, I like variety as in different things at different times. I did the "all that and a watermelon" (all at once) thing back in the '80s. I would love to do that again with (say) Encounter Critical, if I could find some mutants to play it.

It's good to check on the fit between prospective players and a given setup. A while ago, I ran a game for some fellows who took for granted a basically Northern Europe - cum - Tolkien kind of milieu. They very definitely did not want any Orientalism (cities of spice and ivory, desert caravans, etc.) or science-fantasy, and professed never to have read a bit of Robert E. Howard -- or anything in the "sword and sorcery" vein.

 

[Cadfan]

I like relatively low magic worlds, but I'm totally cool with weird player races. You can do basic medieval fantasy with humans and dragonborn living side by side. There's really no reason you couldn't. Its not like cheap and easy healing of injuries, or affordable resurrection, cheap and unlimited creation of permanent light sources through magic, or the ability to communicate with the dead, all of which would vastly change society.

 

[Jack Daniel]

Hm. This is tough for me to characterize, because the primary conceit of my setting is steampunk, with human and gnome tinkers running around building big scientific inventions all the time... and yet, apart from that (and the fact that my game is set in a period more like the Industrial Revolution than the Middle Ages), I'm very conservative about how I set up my setting's mythology.

The list of allowed PC races is very short, and it basically comes from Tolkien, Celtic myth, Norse myth, and Greek myth. Human, elf, dwarf, gnome, hobbit, fairy, merfolk, centaur, faun... and if you're not one of those races, and you walk into a tavern in a town, expect lots of screaming and bloodshed.

In this regard, I think standard D&D is more "wahoo" than my world. In D&D, you could have a friendly orc or kobold or troll get by in a big city. Not so for my setting.

In some cases, I even take pains to streamline things so that they're closer to the source mythology. No need for different races of orc and hobgoblin and goblin and kobold: they're all just "orcs" in Tolkien, so that's how it is in my world. No need for a monster called a "nymph," becuase "nymph" is a category that includes dryads, naiads, nereids, etc. And a gorgon is a stony-eyed lady with snake-hair, not an iron bull that breathes gas (that's a catoblepas). Elves in Tolkien are good fighters and skilled semi-magical healers, so their favored class should be cleric or maybe druid, not ranger or fighter/wizard. That sort of thing.

Why do I do this? For one thing, my setting was first conceived for writing stories, not for playing RPGs. RPGs lend themselves well to a proliferation of material: lots of different races and sub-races and monsters and monster-variants and sub-classes and prestige classes... but a literary setting needs only a few races and a few monsters and a few professions/organizations to serve as plot devices. An RPG that mimics that style can be a whole lot more conservative and minimalist.

 

[Bumbles]

Wahoo makes me think of Jar Jar Binks.

 

[FireLance]

During my formative years, I immersed myself in stories about boots that could travel seven leagues in one step, a talking fish that could grant wishes, a doctor who could talk to animals, a shepherd boy who could kill a giant with a sling stone, a Gaulish warrior who grew strong enough to defeat entire armies by drinking a magic potion, a swordsman so skilled that he could decapitate an entire room full of enemies by just throwing his scimitar (and have it return to him, too), a warrior that was invulnerable to injury (except for a single weak spot), an immortal stone monkey who battled demons and protected a travelling monk, and a god of thunder (yes, several of these stories had the gods as protagonists).

For me, wahoo is traditional.