Your ideal setting

[Fenes]

That's one of the things I dug about Planescape, Spelljammer, Ravenloft, and my all time favourite: Al-Qadim – no laundry list of powerful NPCs wandering around.

Well, there's the caliph that's been said to wander around incognito in town...

 

[Steely Dan]

Well, there's the caliph that's been said to wander around incognito in town...

But is he powerful?

…Kahlil, is his name?

 

[Fenes]

But is he powerful?

…Kahlil, is his name?

Yes. And if he, the Grand Caliph, is not powerful, commanding armies, who else is?

 

[Steely Dan]

Yes. And if he, the Grand Caliph, is not powerful, commanding armies, who else is?

I'm talking about raw/personal power, not political.


You could be a 0 level normal and still be king.

 

[Fenes]

I think the main problem people have with high-level NPCs start because the characters always seem to know those are so powerful.

"But, Elminster is Level X, why doesn't he do this himself if it's so important?"

If the players and the characters would not know how powerful an NPC actually was, and just knew their reputation, most would not have a problem with NPCs (Especially if their own reputations are well known too).

"Elminster may have been a powerful mage, if those stories were true, but look at him - he's an old man now, and probably has some memory issues. And judging from the way we were lauded as heroes for beating an orc tribe, he could have been level 10 and have that reputation."

 

[Steely Dan]

"Elminster may have been a powerful mage, if those stories were true, but look at him - he's an old man now, and probably has some memory issues."

In my ongoing Realms campaign (20 years), Elminster long ago retired to The Sunnyside Sword Coast Rest Home.

…And Drizzt has been working the streets of Calimport as rough trade for years.

 

[Fenes]

In my ongoing Realms campaign (20 years), Elminster long ago retired to The Sunnyside Sword Coast Rest Home.

…And Drizzt has been working the streets of Calimport as rough trade for years.

IMC, Elminster did not retire - but he's known as a sage first, wizard second, and doesn't go teleporting around and wasting armies. For all that people know, he could be level 5 with a special feat "overblown reputation".

Drizzt? Well, Drizzt is no problem at all. Compared to a somewhat optimised level 10+ PC, I'd rate him as rather underpowered. So, there's no reason anyone would expect him to show up the party. Not to mention that I much prefer the southern realms to the north.

 

[Steely Dan]

IMC, Elminster did not retire - but he's known as a sage first, wizard second, and doesn't go teleporting around and wasting armies. For all that people know, he could be level 5 with a special feat "overblown reputation".

Drizzt? Well, Drizzt is no problem at all. Compared to a somewhat optimised level 10+ PC, I'd rate him as rather underpowered. So, there's no reason anyone would expect him to show up the party. Not to mention that I much prefer the southern realms to the north.

I was kidding about Elminster – he was actually destroyed in my FR campaign at the hands of Asmodeus around the time of the Yamun Kahan invasion.


I wasn't saying Drizzt was an actual powerful character, he's just become a revolting cliché…but he is working as a rent boy in my FR campaign.

 

[Fenes]

My parties never met Drizzt... but in a past campaign one group once met Artemis and Jarkaxle, the later posing as the famous drow renegade Drizzt, and stringing a tale of how some Harpell magic gone wrong made him bald. Since Jarlaxle is, even though he is evil, much, much more charming and pleasant than Drizzt, there was an enjoyable evening to be had around the campfire, listening to stories, and in the morning they parted ways. I wonder if Drizzt in his cold lands up north ever heard the new songs and rumors this spawned.

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

By “gritty” I mean a setting that includes and often emphasizes the darker, more “realistic” (obviously a relative term in FRPGs) aspects of life in a quasi early medieval world where life is nasty, brutish and short and people behave accordingly. In a gritty setting, the good don’t always win; in fact, it’s sometimes hard to find any of them at all. There’s no archetypical fairytale “knights in shining armour”; only frightened, desperate people trying to deal with hard times and, just maybe, reluctantly, becoming heroes in the process. In a gritty setting, nuance and detail matter more, because rewards are few and hard-won and setbacks are frequent. Often, success means just getting by, choosing the lesser of two evils.

You caught "gritty" just as I saw it that first time. And the thing about it is: this kind of stuff blows my mind. It shuts down. There's a certain amount of in-built hopelessness that acts like a black hole to my understanding. To me there has to be an obviously "worth it" component of the world to save, and most gritty settings don't propose one as far as I can tell.

And here’s why I like my settings gritty. My campaigns have tended to run for two or three years, spanning probably 80 or more sessions, and I believe that under these circumstances, the individual episode’s dramatic arc must take second place to that of the campaign.
……So I prefer gritty, because it gives me more room to pace long-running campaigns, and slowly develop challenges, enemies and allies. The rewards, for our group, are that by starting out slow, gradually, a really well-defined world and hero personae emerge. And that’s satisfying in a way that you just don’t get from one-shots (or indeed any other kind of game, imho).

And now I get why gritty doesn't work for me, at least in your terms: I love episodic story where it's really a series of separate events that are connected by common characters and places but not much by events.

IMHO, at the bottom of this is the problem of breadth versus depth. The more high-fantasy elements your campaign contains, the (exponentially) harder it becomes to make sense of them all in relation to one another. It's hard enough to come up with detailed, credible, deep personae just using the standard set of, say, humans, elves and dwarves. Throw Dragonborn, Tieflings and Mind-Flayers in the mix, and you've got a real challenge on your hands: What are they like, deep down; how do they relate to one another? The more high-fantasy elements a campaign contains, the more it tends toward archetypes and standard genre tropes - often bordering on stereotype and rehash, in my experience.

I don't get it. Why do the multitude of elements need to make sense? I've always been very put off by peoples' insistence that everything in a fantasy world needs to tie into everything else in a way they can see. Aren't there things in the real world that you go through life not understanding? Why does a fantasy world have to be any different?

[Someone tell me if I'm getting off-topic, please.]