>too little realism and the game feels alien and unrelatable like modern d&d doesn't really resemble any medieval or folklore but its own corporate world. An anime world with too much magic starts to feel more like sci-fi and looses verisimilitude
>On contrast a world with too much realism tend to lose any feeling of whimisy and goes into to much detail that it actually takes up too much time and generally takes out the feeling of heroics. No I don't care how many fricking halberd variants you can name for fricking sperg.
Its 100% a personal take but where do you stand on grounded/fantastic scale?
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Grounded. Whimsy is for fairies.
Like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
>No I don't care how many fricking halberd variants you can name for fricking sperg.
I feel attacked
bill hook is my favorite
NTA but Bill hook is my favourite as well.
A billhook isn't a variant of a halberd you goddamn vidya-brained dork. A billhook is a billhook, a halberd is a halberd. Words mean things.
They are both polearms/pole-axes you fricking sperg
You’re a fake sperg. Halberd is not a synonym of polearm. Varieties of Halberds are shit like lucernes, bardiches, fauchards (on the liminarity of being considered a halberd), guisarmes and others.
>bardiche
>halberd
Frick no, it's a glorified tripod.
They're both edged weapons mounted on a long stick. They're polearms. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here.
Don't worry anon, we are all bill-pilled and hook maxxing here.
Partisans are aesthetic as frick
>>too little realism and the game feels alien and unrelatable like modern d&d doesn't really resemble any medieval or folklore but its own corporate world. An anime world with too much magic starts to feel more like sci-fi and looses verisimilitude
I don't think it's a lack of realism that's the problem here so much as a lack of sovl. Or a lack of realism combined with a lack of coherent theming for the world (kitchen sink settings a shit) and a failure to properly integrate unrealistic elements into the setting (e.g. having magic-users on every street corner but castles that are still just buildings with a big stone wall around them).
Take Glorantha for example, no one would call that a realistic setting but I'd still say it resembles the world of folklore more than scifi or anything corporate. Similarly, my GM has run multiple campaigns that have gone right to the extreme fantasy end of the spectrum with us adventuring into fey realms, across the planes or into the characters' own consciousness - they often felt alien, sure, but at the same time they felt very folkloric, some of them could've been directly from the Prose Edda or Hesiod's Theogony. They definitely weren't the 'multicultural Seattle with tieflings and trannies' I see people complain about here and we've yet to come across a single adventurer's guild.
>multicultural Seattle with tieflings and trannies'
I hate how that perfectly describes modern d&d, it trys so hard to be "modern" it fails to feel fantastical
I typically pitch somewhere between Middle Earth (2nd/3rd Age) and Elric's Young Kingdoms. Any less and I feel players would start to lose interest because of their lack of ability to really play with the fantastical, any more and we start drowning in exposition.
I like work that doesn't feel like it was derivative or checklisted. When someone shows up asking for feedback on their setting and starts out with "so my elves will be like this..." Black person why do you have elves? Are you just making some shitty checklist setting?
Realistic/grounded and fantastic/alien are both good. "Generic fantasy checklist with tweaks" isn't.
I am for logical worlds that are not hastily cobbled together slop. If monster attacks are a mundane thing, then societies should be adapted to it, and not have a typical fantasy farm without walls for protection and an armed villagers militia. Basically, take into account how the world has adapted and changed by the fanatical elements that exist in it, you lazy morons from Wotc and anime industry.
Start grounded.
Introduce whimsy and fantasy from there.
Eventually make enough autism that you can explain why "grounded" is a thing, by the fantastic background the universe has.
You can have the most ridiculous bullshit imagineable and have it be grounded so long as it makes sense textually. Noone ever saw kirby absorb a sword from a sword guy and said "okay, i was fine up until now but this is too silly"
The problem with most high fantasy settings is that they're lazy
Some vague mixture of The Witcher, Warcraft 3 and Dragon Age Origins, in a sense that magic and supernatural things and larger than life stuff is a thing, but armies of regular guys with sword and spear and bow are still sensible
I occupy and claim for myself the entire ground covered by the grounded/fantastic scale. There's no reason whatsoever why I should stick to one kind of setting or campaign.
Lack of realism isn't the problem. It's lack of any sense of structure. Dark Sun isn't realistic at all but definitely draws you in.
I stand right where there is a variant of halberd for each variant of fairy.
Grounded, then when the fantasy elements do show up they actually feel fantastic.
Witcher style. Mostly mundane and grounded but old wives' tales are sometimes true and there's plenty of things hiding in the shadows.
Well I think this is a false dichotomy anyway. Too real? Too fictional? meh. Just tell a collaborative story where the dice decide possible outcomes.
I can't relate to the middle ages any more than I do to generic fantasy. Why would anyone?
I recommend reading some medieval literature from your native language, then. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in particular if you're a native English speaker. Medieval people/early moderns did not live incomprehensibly different lives from you and I.
I had to read Chrétien de Troyes at school. Ultraviolence and extremely bizarre social mores do seem much more different from my life than anything you could find in a generic fantasy story.
I don't really fall either way, but I suppose the fantastical approach is easier to sell and the grounded approach is easier to sustain. The latter covers my ass better, so I'll say grounded settings work better for me.
With that in mind, I would say that D&D and anime are terrible examples of your sliding scale, because they are each examples of both extremes at the same time. D&D has too much legacy to let go of its gonzo experimental roots, but its cannibal approach requires it stay close to the bone or it won't retain its headlining narrative/gameplay loop combo. Anime has an embarrassing obsession with staying relevant to corporate wage slaves and ideological lepers, but their power wank is also obscene and prevents anything resembling real fantasy from taking place.
It's like the worst parts of 80's fantasy novels, with west and east fighting over which specific awful parts should be emphasized most.
Good old /tg/, never missing an opportunity to b***h about something even in an ostensibly positive thread
I always start from 'grounded in reality' and the build on top, which roughly means "everything works as expected in reality unless noted otherwise". For example do i want some wuxia tier stuff with marrial types throwing boulders and splitting stone walls asunder with a stick? Here comes chi/ki introduced as a tangible fact in the world explaining how training hard enough in swinging a sword around would unlock superhuman powers. It doesn't need to be explained and expanded with minutiae of particulars but only acknowledged, even having multiple in-world credible theories would suffice, even of the superstitious kind, just enough to address the elephant in the room.
Pic related is something i take into consideration when making a setting: if i want to introduce weird alien races to the mix how does the interaction work with the dominant culture? How this culture is? How differs from our general expectations? How players expectations have to be regulated? You get the idea.
have a nice day
Never understood the need for fictional to be relatable, seems anathema to the appeal
wdym relatable? it's a game, not a story.
As long as it's internally consistent I can live with basically any degree. My only concern is that I've never even heard of a game that leaned towards realism that wasn't fricking awful to play in practice.