World ideas that you think are lame

[Turjan]

You have a point. But....there's still something bugging me about the whole thing.

Okay, I think I know what it is. A tiny part of me just doesn't want to see them at all. But mostly .....if the 'typical default fantasy world' has them, they shouldn't look so well engineered and they shouldn't be close in design to ones we see from World War I and on.

Right, I can understand that. Sometimes it's just the illustrations in a setting book which destroy the mood for me, too, so it's a similar problem for me. Therefore, those elves I spoke of don't neither look like if they came from Matrix nor like taken from a WW I movie, but quite strange (add some brightly colored chador and a hat with a very broad brim to the strange large gemstone glasses ).

Multiple pantheons. If the gods are real, how did different ones all create the same world? You can have multiple views on the same pantheon (Zeus vs. Jupiter or Allah vs. Jehovah), but in a real gods world only one pantheon can actually exist.

This assumption is definitely wrong. Many, if not most, fantasy settings do not assume that the gods of the pantheon actually created the world. Of your RL examples, Zeus/Jupiter (according to myth) was not thought to have created the world, either. FR religion goes the clever way to take aspects of the RL East Indian mythos as exemplar and lays the creation of the world in the hands of an "Overgod", who does not interfere with everyday "world running" any more and is not venerated by the people. This tones down the role and might of deities and leaves enough room for different pantheons with limited powers and confined tasks in the world.

I subscribe to your second point though with the pantheons that don't make sense. Actually, there is no such thing similar to D&D pantheons in RL religions. Even the archetype, the Greek/Roman pantheon existed only in some idealized collections of mythology but had not much to do with RL religion in these countries. In Greece, e.g., most city states had only one or a few of those gods on their "worshipping list", and it was rarely Zeus who played a major role in those lists, while many other important gods from mythology were missing completely. Other gods that were considered to be very powerful and had followers all over Greece, like the 7 Gods from Samothrake, never made it to the pantheon at all, because they had no popular myths.

But, actually, this is not that important for fantasy at all . Just make your deities look alive .

 

[Chain Lightning]

Right, I can understand that. Sometimes it's just the illustrations in a setting book which destroy the mood for me, too, so it's a similar problem for me. Therefore, those elves I spoke of don't neither look like if they came from Matrix nor like taken from a WW I movie, but quite strange (add some brightly colored chador and a hat with a very broad brim to the strange large gemstone glasses ).

Cool. I'm down with that.

And you're right, its mostly the illustrator's fault and not the author of the setting.

 

[Orius]

As a counter-point, I dislike worlds that slavishly emulate Medieval Europe. Medieval Europe wasn't a romantic or fun place to be. I don't want to play "Chamberpots & Cholera". I don't want to smell like a garderrobe or have the morality of a cornered, starving rat.

I'll definitely agree there. Medieval Europe was a horrible place, and the Dark Ages truely a fitting term for the times. Why would I want to RP in a setting rife with diesease, filth and oppression? I want a game that's a bit more uplifiting. Besides, in a "realistic" medieval setting, there'd only be one group of clerics, and they'd be burning all the sorcerers, druids, and wizards at the stake. To do it realistically, you'd have to ban like half the core classes, and prohibit female characters, and probably peasant characters too. Hell, the only PC types would be bored younger sons of nobles who don't stand a chance of inheriting squat bcause they already have a slew of older brothers, and have nothing better to do besides gallivanting around or joining the Church.

The generic D&D setting only has the vaguest medieval elements, if at all. So who cares if it isn't medieval? Neither is D&D!

 

[Orius]

First, made-up slang. Once and only once have I seen it used and actually work and that's "smeg" in Red Dwarf. Any other time and place it sounds silly. That includes "frak" and "felgercarb" from Battlestar Galactica, and "berk" from Planescape.

Yeah, fake slang and swear words are silly.

Second, this bizarre compulsion to reinvent the calendar and time. Unless your world design in some fashion HINGES upon a 150-day year, with 14.7-hour days divided into 7 months containging between 20 and 33 days each what the [EXPLETIVE!] are you doing it for? If your world has 4 seasons, approximates 365 days in a year - why not just use the modern Gregorian calendar?

Really wonky calendars are dumb. It makes things harder for the players.

However, I don't use the Gregorian calendar in my world. 365 days a year (yes I know, not this year) mathematically is a pain in the ass to work with. My world has 360 days, with 12 months of 30 days each, because quite frankly, it's a hell of a lot easier to work with.

 

[Orius]

Planescape actually started to phase out their slang at the end of the product life. They knew it was annoying too. They even stated in one of the books something to effect of "Younger generations do not use the cant, it is seen as old fashioned and rarely used".

That and the cant was seen as a Sigil thing. Later products focusing on the Astral, Ethereal and Inner Planes were much more cant lite, where the boxed set squeezed the cant in every other word.

 

[Orius]

Multiple pantheons. If the gods are real, how did different ones all create the same world?

Because, sometimes the gods lie to their priests.

My world was created long ago by an overgod that keep running things today. He's the one that set the world to a 360 day year (see above). He's not worshipped by the people, because he's far above that. The pantheons of the world are made up of lesser gods.

However, the lesser gods don't mention him to their priests, and their holy writings talk about how they (or the ruling god of the pantheon) "created" everything. Some high priests might know the truth and are instructed to keep it secret; also some very learned wizards and sages know the truth too, but Joe First Level Commoner doesn't have a clue.

 

[Nifft]

Want a club sandwich with that Nifft?

Oooh... THAT's why you try to bug people, the free food!

-- N, holding the mayo

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Well, sometimes gods lie to priests and sometimes multiple people did the same thing in the same instance. We're talking gods here operating before time proper. Causality is always going to seem a lot less simple than it seems to us.

One thing I sort of hate is the anti-medieval thing. I mean I've never lived in the middle ages and neither has anyone else on this board. Some of us are pretty well informed about it, and fewer of us are informed about multiple aspects or perspectives on it.

If someone is going to say the 'dark' ages were a horrible time I'm going to be as upset by it as someone coming along saying they were the high point of human achievement. In fact, I'm probably going to be less upset because the person with the contrarion point of view has probably had to do a little bit more than the bare minimum research to come up with it.

I mean the fact was they were a time. Much like any other time with its own historical circumstances and ideological contexts. Things survived out of them and generally turned out pretty well so I don't guess they have that poor a record. And even survival is a pretty poor standard.

I appreciate games that try to draw from cultures as literary and ideological tropes, I don't so much appreciate the attempt to rehistoricize them that gamers often bring.

History is just one more literary genre, more grist for our mill, and that's the way I like. In every respect that's a far more respectful way to use history than to try to pretend that it has simple understandable dynamics that can then be applied to any sort of societal modeling.

The fact is history exactly fits the Dilbert, not originally his of course but still his, definition of insanity in that the same act repeated again and again will produce different results.

 

[tarchon]

Worlds made of marshmallows. Too squishy.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Worlds I Don't Like:
1) Gloom and Doom/Grim and Gritty/Realistic/Gloomy Postapocalyptic. Pheh. I got over my need for darkness and dismal outlooks and grisly savagrey once I realized that reality was already too full of it, and there was still no reason to be depressed. I don't mind the occasional jaunt into horror or 'tough' worlds (a la Dark Sun, Ravenloft, or Call of Cthulhu), but struggle is something my PC's do against an enemy, not against gravity, or the world, or whatever. Note that it is possible to do it right, it's just that so many go the route of "Dark and edgy, so it's sooooooo kewl! We're called the Scarred Dark Midnight Sun Land! THAT'S SO AWESOME AND DARK AND HARDCORE!"

2) Mishmash/Real-World-Hodge-Podge/WE'VE GOT IT ALL. Select your pallette, limit your style, and still make sure most, if not all, styles are covered. FR is a classic example of too much stuff in too little space. You can travel from Norway to Egypt in a day, and they can be in the same adventuring party....without a sort of inter-national metropolis, how is this possible? Note also that this can still be done well. Planescape, for instance, did a wonderful job of giving very diverse adventurers a *reason* to be together. Otherwise, I expect the questers to have a distinctly local flavor.

3) Worlds that define themselves by what they don't have. "No gnomes, or all-powerful elves!" "Low-magic!"....bah.

4) The opposite of the above, one-trick worlds...when you don't think through your world, you get a setting without adventure, not a setting for adventures. I think the advice someone else gave is good....think of the adventures, and then create a setting around it, not vice-versa.

So basically, as an Anthropology and Religious Studies student, I hate your world if it doesn't have cohesive and realistic cultures, or devotions. Since most Fantasy is the folklore and mytho of a culture 'made real,' it's hard for me to accept a world that doesn't mesh with itself in that way. Similarly, I think my home setting is one of the few monotheistic settings in existence, and the only one that draws on real-world myth to successfully create a fantasy world around it.

Anyhoo, off to write some more!