I tend to run my fantasy games with more modern cleanliness ideals. I don't really care for my characters having to dodge buckets of crap getting thrown out of upper story windows. Even my WFRP games are like this.

The only time I really deal with it being really nasty is if the players are going into a sewer or similar situation.

Dirty and gritty.  I tend to think of Lankhmar or even EGG's Greyhawk as described in the first Gord book (i.e. pretty damn seedy) when I think of fantasy cities rather than Minas Tirith.

Quote from: danbuter;640685I tend to run my fantasy games with more modern cleanliness ideals. I don't really care for my characters having to dodge buckets of crap getting thrown out of upper story windows. Even my WFRP games are like this.

The only time I really deal with it being really nasty is if the players are going into a sewer or similar situation.

Depends on the city, TBH.

Some I want to have a clean, upkept, and tidy demeanor and others I want to be filthy, rundown, and seedy. It all depends on the character of the individual city and how it fits into the setting.

Dirtier than modern cities, but I'm sure much cleaner than real life medieval cities.

Lived in.

Depends on the neighbourhood. If you're right next to the meat market with livestock strolling back and forth all day and blood and entrails gushing forth out of the slaughterhouses it's completely foul. If you're on the street where the great and the good maintain their townhouses (merchant princes, nobles who maintain a home in the city to use when they have to attend courtly gatherings, that sort of thing), it's going to be kept clean and if you're making the place untidy (either by your activities or by your presence) you'll be asked to hustle along.

Depends on the city, some places are cleaner than others. In my current High Valor game they're in the city of Mohrn, attached to the keep at Thayn Mohr  (the latter which the players saw collapse last session with the Dragon Gluum, escaped.) Its pretty ragged, but fairly clean for a no-paved road fishing town.

Quote from: Technomancer;640694Dirtier than modern cities, but I'm sure much cleaner than real life medieval cities.

This way.

Filthy dirty, a brothel on every streetcorner.

Oh you mean sanitary-wise? Depends.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;640695Lived in.

That's probably closer to what I'd say, rather than "clean" or "dirty". No modern assumptions or conveniences (concrete sidewalks, public restrooms,) but the better places do occasionally use a scrub brush on a long pole to give a building a quick wipe-down. The more squalid parts of town may have people tossing the contents of chamberpots out into the street, but I don't normally call for dodge rolls. You have to be cursed/already having a bad day/have low Dex, Wisdom, *and* Intelligence before I'd do that. Presumably, people in medieval environments know how to avoid routine inundations of filth.

It depends on the race.

Elven and dwarven cities are really clean. Elves because they are naturally clean, dwarves because they build high tech sewers and water distribution systems.

Humans are the stinky ones, yet if its high fantasy they may adopt some of the systems from elves and dwarves.

I totally read this thread as "Are your fantasy titties dirty or clean?"

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;640769I totally read this thread as "Are your fantasy titties dirty or clean?"

-clash

Still a rock star at heart, eh Clash?


Most of my fantasy cities have packed earth streets, so I guess that qualifies as 'dirty'. They all handle waste in different ways, but how they do doesn't factor into play often. I describe things in the game from the character's point of view, so the filth of a city might not even make an impression on characters who are city-folk, as they will have trained themselves not to notice such things (unless they make a living from such things).

I did once run a game that featured some scenes around an open-pit garbage dump outside of city walls that had corpses mixed in with the rubbish - It was where foreigners were buried, and a lot of foreigners were dying at the time. It was inspired by something I saw in a documentary about La Paz, Bolivia.

Quote from: Thalaba;640775Still a rock star at heart, eh Clash?

Hey! What can I say? Groupies will be groupies!

-clash

It varies by system and setting.  Using the D&D default, they're clean across the board due to the active intervention of magic-using institutions (religions, for the most part, with wiser wizards pitching in).