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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 1819437" data-attributes="member: 6533">Great locales.   Conflicts.  And characters/roles.  Cool stuff to find out.Not saying Elminster is the way to go, cause noone can be or beat Elminster but him.  A great darklord, on the other hand, is critical as are a bunch of cool positions that PCs can either work against, for, or attain at their discretion.  I am very impressed and pleased by the variety of responses I've read in this thread.  The other DMs and I have been polling the locals to find out what's compelling so we can finally create a homebrew we can stick with, and it's been very cool seeing how different everyone's tastes are and challenging to find a happy meeting point.I was particularly impressed with Wombat's take on the importance of flavorful detail, but the second point that was made really speaks to my current take on that taste.See for me, at this point and particularly because of my experience on ENWorld, that last argument seems essentially impossible simply because making a world that achieves the goal of believability is impossible unless you know, essentially accept, and can implement the assumptions about history held by any given individual.  For me, for instance, the early middle ages are a time when it was much easier to move between classes than it was in earlier or later periods and in which gender roles are far more open, particularly when you move into the arena of the legendary.  Others have a very different understanding of the period and are perfectly willing to argue it.  So, theoretically you can't achieve believability save for an audience or two at a time.  But I think you can do better either by making the historical processes of the world apparent or by providing a lot of variety in the accidents or assumptions of your world so that people can either replace your historical assumptions with the ones they like or read their favorite ones into at least two or three areas of the world and focus on them.I, for instance, love the city surrounded by glaciers in the middle of the desert, but you had better have some explanation for how this happened or a preponderance of more intuitive desert settlements in the area.   That way there is detail and choice.For similar reasons I like settings that are very genre aware, though I prefer it when they offer you a choice of genres.  Eberron is cool cause it says Pulp right out front, but Spycraft is better because it gives you genre as a tool for character creation.So you like James Bond, well these are the people you should work for.A-Team?  Well this is for you.I love that!  I also have a special place in my heart for everything and your neighbor's kitchen sink stuff, but that's real hard to pull off.  Forgotten Realms does a lot right, but I think that is not their actual strong point.  Hackmaster does it well.Hachmaster is also, perhaps, the best handbook for setting the tone.Nearly every other setting really relies on the supplements or adventures.   The basic book always has to cover way too much ground.</blockquote>

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