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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 6246062" data-attributes="member: 14159">The real world is "a clash of incompatible aesthetics and tropes".  The same planet gave us knights and ninjas, wild Celtic berserkers and stoic samurai.  The same planet gave us Masaai tribesmen and the Papal Swiss Guard.  Clashing tropes?  World War I was fought with 20th century weapons and 19th century tactics.  Right now, today, on this planet you've got places that have cell phones but no indoor plumbing, laptop computers and pre-modern folk medicine.  When men were walking on the Moon, we had primitive tribes in remote jungles that had never been contacted by the outside world.Two thousand years ago on the same world you could have a Roman Emperor, an Egyptian Phaeroh, a Celtic High King, the Chinese Emperor, a Native American Chief, and the Gupta Emperor in modern-day India as people PC's could meet, and that was just among the same race on a world without demihumans, humanoids, and dozens of intelligent monstrous races.Incompatible aesthetics?  D&D has always had things clashing into each other.  Remember the Barrier Peaks?  A crashed starship in a classic 1e AD&D module.  The core bestiary of D&D borrows from Tolkien, Greco-Roman mythology, European folklore, Celtic mythology, Norse mythology, to a lesser extent at least from Chinese folk religion, and still manages to splatter in some Lovecraftian influences.  The core rules classes combine monks inspired by 1970's Kung Fu movies alongside Wizards copied directly out of Jack Vance's post-apocalyptic science fantasy, throwing in rogues/thieves cribbed straight from Fritz Lieber and barbarians with Howard's fingerprints all over them, a Cleric that was unabashedly taken from The Song of Roland, a Paladin copied straight out of Three Hears and Three Lions, a Druid that's an idealized modern reimagining of a pre-Christian Celtic priest, a Ranger that started out as a clone of Robin Hood mixed with Aragorn, then became Drizzt Do'Urden, and a generic Fighter meant to stand in for every regular guy in every story who wears armor and swings a weapon without fancy powers.D&D has always been a blender game of widely varied contributions, because it came from a widely varied world.I always found the settings where they take one single setting/style and make the entire planet (or continent/hemisphere/known world) like that to be a bigger stretch to the imagination.  The real world is incomprehensibly vast in culture and mythology, and many game worlds tend to fall flat not because they moosh lots of influences together, but because they are so two-dimensional of being the same aesthetic spread implausibly far.DM's certainly don't have to have settings/worlds cross over, many campaigns may never even hint at it, but the over-setting gives them an easy way to do so, and it lets DM's have a way to introduce a new race or monster for one plotline/dungeon/encounter without having to re-think the entire ecology of their world.  In my experience, planeswalking is a common adventure for mid-to-high level PC's, and having a rich tapestry of places that are out there helps build verisimilitude.</blockquote>

Verification