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Name something that's very common to find in a D&D setting that you really don't care for. And, if explanation is needed, why.

Dragons.

Never been a huge fan. Though a dragon can add a mythical aspect to a game world.

Burying the dead.  It makes no sense at all for that to happen in a D&D world. They should cremate.

I mean, people know the gods are real, what happens after death and so the body is not important for religious purposes. And most importantly, undead exist. Even low level undead is dangerous, much less the higher types that can reproduce. So why let it even get started by burying bodies?

Lazy history, geology and ecology hand-waved away with "a wizard did it".

Societies that look just like historical ones, making no attempt to incorporate the impact functioning magic would have on them.

Monocultures, where everyone from a particular society has all the same personality traits.

The treatment of land ownership as being the same in the setting as we typically have today, being "fee simple" ownership. All the while still having a class of nobles about as if they're really running things. Are you really the Baron of Westerly if the Count of Easterly buys up almost all of land held by Westerly's commoners?

Revolving Door Afterlife. I like the idea of bringing someone back, but it should be more than a resource drain.

"Race" as a mix of "Species" and "Culture".  When humans get a huge number of cultures, and no one else does, I think it irritates me even more.  And the facile exceptions usually aren't much better.  "Oh, let's go all cosmopolitan with a mishmash culture of every race imaginable."  

Me, I think that maybe the friendlier elves that live right next to a major human/halfling agricultural center, with frequent trade and alliance for the last 300-400 years, are going to have a notably different culture than the xenophobic elves deep in hidden wilderness.  And those latter elves get along just fine with the reclusive dwarves living in the mountains nearby, because both groups respect boundaries.  The more mercantile dwarves  to the south, not so much with either of them.

"There must be Balance between Good and Evil."

Quote from: Dr. Ink'n'stain;1031606Revolving Door Afterlife. I like the idea of bringing someone back, but it should be more than a resource drain.

+1 to this. The killing/assassination of important/wealthy people would require complete disintegration. Just poisoning the king is no longer effective provided his court has any wealth and means at all.

Modern mores and social norms in pre-modern societies. Basically modern middle-class North Americans in ren faire clothings. Paizo's stuff is the worst for this.

Settlement patterns that are closer to the American West in density than medieval Europe, often with 15 or 20 miles between settlements. In medieval France of England, a 30 mile by 30 mile area would have more than a dozen villages, several towns, and a city or two. If your settlements is two days walk from the next closest settlement, you've got a god-forsaken backwater, not a bustling medieval town with taverns and other signs of healthy commerce.

As mentioned above, the superficial trappings of feudal society without the social structure.

Lazy real-world analogues (fantasy-Arabia over here, fantasy-Russia over there, fantasy-Aztecs down there, etc) instead of original cultures.

Humanoids as pests rather than horrifying monsters. Goblins should do far worse than steal an occasional sheep. Humanoids should have a niche distinct from small and ugly bandits.

Nations of good people worship good gods and nations of evil people worship evil gods. A religious pantheon, and the culture that sustains it, should accommodate the full sweep of archetypes and deities.

Far too much focus on high-level politics and history, and far too little on boots-on-the-ground geography, lairs, ruins, and NPCs.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1031608"There must be Balance between Good and Evil."

Agreed. Also, "there must be Balance between Law and Chaos".

I've got news for all the "philosophically superior" "anti-Extremist" Neutrals: Balance is itself an Extreme. The opposite Extreme is Imbalance, aka "Entropy". Welcome to the Extremist camp!


(Yes, I just demonstrated a third axis on the Gygaxian alignment chart. Implications are left as an exercise for the reader.)

I find that the world building is often arbitrary and neither holistic nor organic.

The terminology and classification of things is ad hoc, such as dragons and dragon-kin or elementals and elemental-kin.

Lots of concepts are pilfered from world mythology and mutilated into something unrecognizable. Gorgons are called medusas, catoblepases are called gorgons, minotaurs easily solve mazes, titans are the children of the gods, etc.

The "fey" and "elementals" are nature spirits, tricksters and the nobility of the otherworld depending on context, despite these concepts being diametrically opposed.

Nature spirits are occasionally mentioned, but there is no mechanic for spirituality like there is in Runequest.

There are separate evil gods and archfiends, which typically have little to do with one another.

Demons and devils are separate groups, but have nothing to distinguish them.

Law and chaos play second fiddle to good and evil, which misunderstands the entire point of the law/chaos dynamic.

The other planes are boring expanses of nothing and needlessly hostile to visit on top of that.

Dragons are pigeonholed into the western stereotype. We rarely see dragons with unusual body plans or different coverings like feathers or fur.

Attempts at creating ecologies for dungeons and monsters usually destroy the fantastical elements or needlessly restrict creativity.

Magic is typically treated as something separate from nature, and nature is assumed to operate the way science describes the real world.

Way too many monsters that are way too similar to one another.

Quote from: Haffrung;1031613Modern mores and social norms in pre-modern societies. Basically modern middle-class North Americans in ren faire clothings.

That one bugs me too.  I can tolerate a certain amount of that as a concession to play.  It is fantasy after all, and I'm not all that interested in more than a patina of historical accuracy.  What gets me is when people start the modern ideas without even thinking, or worse, deliberately accelerate into it.  "I'm sorry officer.  When I saw the crash was going to happen anyway, I decided to floor it and go out in a blaze of glory!"

Clerics being the primary source of hit point recovery. You can criticize 4E for whatever you like, but making it explicit that HP =/= meat points and then allowing for inspirational hit point recovery (regaining your fighting spirit) via warlords and skalds after they've been knocked around and bloodied a bit models a lot more fantasy world settings from fantasy novels, movies, television, comics, etc. than having a plate-bedecked priest accompanying just about every group of tomb robbers so they can magically knit them back together after they took a gut shot from a battleaxe.

Clerics and magical healing of meat points with no other options makes D&D awful at emulating anything other than D&D-shaped objects and gets quite ridiculous when explicitly non-magical settings (ex. a Robin Hood themed campaign) or settings without clerics (ex. Dark Sun) have to write around the fact that the game was built with divine healbots as a major setting expectation.

By contrast, 4E was able to model both of those settings perfectly just by saying "only martial classes" or "no divine classes" respectively without the game getting wonky. 5E can work if you squint and limit bards to spells that could be passed of as inspiration/misdirection/intimidation type tricks, but not quite as effortlessly as 4E did.

Shops.  Particularly the "General Store" sort of shop that sells a wide variety of adventuring gear.  In a real medieval society, you did not have shops, you had craftsmen whom you bought from directly.  Nobody would have a shop full of swords -- you'd commission one from a smith with experience making blades.  If you wanted a ladder, you didn't go to the general store and buy a ladder, you either built it yourself or you commissioned a woodworker to build you one.  The standard adventurer's shop just feels incredibly video gamey to me.

Renaissance Faires with magic; that is, costumes and weapons are medieval, but speech, morals, and mores -- and culture! -- are 21st century fan/gamer culture.

Magic shops.

Wandering through life in full armor always.

Quote from: Skepticultist;1031648Shops.  Particularly the "General Store" sort of shop that sells a wide variety of adventuring gear.  In a real medieval society, you did not have shops, you had craftsmen whom you bought from directly.  Nobody would have a shop full of swords -- you'd commission one from a smith with experience making blades.  If you wanted a ladder, you didn't go to the general store and buy a ladder, you either built it yourself or you commissioned a woodworker to build you one.  The standard adventurer's shop just feels incredibly video gamey to me.

Shrug.  I simply don't play it out, because to me going to a ropemaker to buy a rope, to a woodworker to buy a ladder, and to a blacksmith to buy some iron spikes sounds so very, very, very incredibly dull.  I know there is no such thing as a "general store," and in 46 years I've encountered exactly one player who cared.

Settings that are totally or mostly based on real world history. Zzzzzz. When I want history, I'll read an actual history book.

Magic.

I can deal with the non-medievalness.  If I'm playing D&D, I expect a Wild West fantasy that is little like medieval history.

What bugs me a little is the weird economics and to some degree social structures. How do these towns work with gold pieces flowing through them like water? Towns sometimes don't even feel like Wild West towns, and more just like thin excuses to buy stuff, have a few encounters, and get the next quest.

On a similar note, dungeon ecology. In many modules, there are a bunch of mortal, ordinary creatures that need to eat and go do things - and it is utterly unclear how they can survive even a short time. Some modules deal with this reasonably. Others, not so much.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1031607"Race" as a mix of "Species" and "Culture".

So much this. I physically cringe when I read that Elves are better with a bow, or all halflings good at throwing stuff, or Dwarves are all naturals at stonecraft. As if every member of the species gets the exact same training regimen growing up. Race-as-class exacerbates this by making it canon.

Quote from: Kiero;1031587Lazy history, geology and ecology hand-waved away with "a wizard did it".

Societies that look just like historical ones, making no attempt to incorporate the impact functioning magic would have on them.

Monocultures, where everyone from a particular society has all the same personality traits.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1031607"Race" as a mix of "Species" and "Culture".  When humans get a huge number of cultures, and no one else does, I think it irritates me even more.  And the facile exceptions usually aren't much better.  "Oh, let's go all cosmopolitan with a mishmash culture of every race imaginable."  

Me, I think that maybe the friendlier elves that live right next to a major human/halfling agricultural center, with frequent trade and alliance for the last 300-400 years, are going to have a notably different culture than the xenophobic elves deep in hidden wilderness.  And those latter elves get along just fine with the reclusive dwarves living in the mountains nearby, because both groups respect boundaries.  The more mercantile dwarves  to the south, not so much with either of them.

Quote from: Haffrung;1031613Modern mores and social norms in pre-modern societies. Basically modern middle-class North Americans in ren faire clothings. Paizo's stuff is the worst for this.

Settlement patterns that are closer to the American West in density than medieval Europe, often with 15 or 20 miles between settlements. In medieval France of England, a 30 mile by 30 mile area would have more than a dozen villages, several towns, and a city or two. If your settlements is two days walk from the next closest settlement, you've got a god-forsaken backwater, not a bustling medieval town with taverns and other signs of healthy commerce.

As mentioned above, the superficial trappings of feudal society without the social structure.

Lazy real-world analogues (fantasy-Arabia over here, fantasy-Russia over there, fantasy-Aztecs down there, etc) instead of original cultures.

Humanoids as pests rather than horrifying monsters. Goblins should do far worse than steal an occasional sheep. Humanoids should have a niche distinct from small and ugly bandits.

Nations of good people worship good gods and nations of evil people worship evil gods. A religious pantheon, and the culture that sustains it, should accommodate the full sweep of archetypes and deities.

Far too much focus on high-level politics and history, and far too little on boots-on-the-ground geography, lairs, ruins, and NPCs.

Quote from: Skepticultist;1031648Shops.  Particularly the "General Store" sort of shop that sells a wide variety of adventuring gear.  In a real medieval society, you did not have shops, you had craftsmen whom you bought from directly.  Nobody would have a shop full of swords -- you'd commission one from a smith with experience making blades.  If you wanted a ladder, you didn't go to the general store and buy a ladder, you either built it yourself or you commissioned a woodworker to build you one.  The standard adventurer's shop just feels incredibly video gamey to me.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1031660Renaissance Faires with magic; that is, costumes and weapons are medieval, but speech, morals, and mores -- and culture! -- are 21st century fan/gamer culture.

Magic shops.

Wandering through life in full armor always.

All of the above, except "lazy real-world analogues":). I can live with those, though there should be an explanation why they have no cultural exchange.
But the Ren Faire syndrome really gets on my nerves;)!

Quote from: RandyB;1031618Agreed. Also, "there must be Balance between Law and Chaos".

I've got news for all the "philosophically superior" "anti-Extremist" Neutrals: Balance is itself an Extreme. The opposite Extreme is Imbalance, aka "Entropy". Welcome to the Extremist camp!


(Yes, I just demonstrated a third axis on the Gygaxian alignment chart. Implications are left as an exercise for the reader.)

News for you: you only demonstrated that you don't know what "Entropy" means, because it's basically a synonym of chaos, and the opposite of order:D! So, no, there's no "third axis", and "balance" is not, in fact, an extreme, it's the middle of ground between chaos and order.

The opposite of balance is hegemony. A True Neutral character will tend to help the opposite of whichever side seems to be gaining the upper hand in order to maintain balance, so the antithesis would be someone who tries to help whichever side appears to be winning in order to end the ancient struggle.

Alignment. It has never made sense in a fantasy setting as a personal character aspect.

It is very rare to see it actually work as a setting aspect.

Quote from: JeremyR;1031583Burying the dead.  It makes no sense at all for that to happen in a D&D world. They should cremate.

I mean, people know the gods are real, what happens after death and so the body is not important for religious purposes. And most importantly, undead exist. Even low level undead is dangerous, much less the higher types that can reproduce. So why let it even get started by burying bodies?

This, along with little understanding what spells like Raise Dead and Resurrection would do to succession/inheritance law.

I probably have quite a list, but off the top of my head. Prolific dungeons... Traps that would have made said dungeons a daily hazard for anything that actually called them home... Creatures that live in dungeons, but don't serve any other purpose than to die on the sword of a murder hobo (not to mention how said creatures actually survives being locked in a 10x10 room)... Undead (with the exception of spirits), any setting were the dead can rise needs to stop burying corpses... One of the reasons I like to play Earthdawn is that the setting lends itself to giving a reason for many of these.

#1 is premodern agrarian societies that have the morals and social expectations of high-tech, urban, industrial societies.
#2 is taking the time and effort to fill in details on religion and politics, yet somehow the entire spectrum is comprised of things that are comfortable to American politics ca. The Current Year.
#3 is having too much detail filled in.

Quote from: AsenRG;1031720News for you: you only demonstrated that you don't know what "Entropy" means, because it's basically a synonym of chaos, and the opposite of order:D! So, no, there's no "third axis", and "balance" is not, in fact, an extreme, it's the middle of ground between chaos and order.

Actually...  Pure Gray is as much an extreme Pure White or Pure Black.  NOTHING is dead center, it always leans in one direction.

I don't like it when magic emulates modern technology, especially mass produced magical items. No magical street lights. No clerics as doctors, and absolutely no magic stores. Magic stores are my biggest pet peeve. I found this +2 magical axe in a dungeon, but I use swords so I'll sell it at the local magic store and then buy a +3 long sword, which is what I'm specialized with. Oh yeah, and put some healing potions and a ring of fire resistance on my bill.

That completely destroys the fantasy feel of a setting for me. Magic should be rare, it should be special, it should not be the equivalent of technological equipment in a modern or sci-fi setting.

Medieval worlds should have a reasonably medieval or pre-modern culture. It doesn't have to be super well researched and historically accurate, but it shouldn't break emmersion or suspension of disbelief.

I hate it when religion doesn't matter, when ckerics and paladins are just combat medics. A cleric or a paladin is the equivalent of a saint - a person so devoted to their god/region that they can perform miracles. It should be treated as such too.

Quote from: RandyB;1031618Agreed. Also, "there must be Balance between Law and Chaos".

I've got news for all the "philosophically superior" "anti-Extremist" Neutrals: Balance is itself an Extreme. The opposite Extreme is Imbalance, aka "Entropy". Welcome to the Extremist camp!


(Yes, I just demonstrated a third axis on the Gygaxian alignment chart. Implications are left as an exercise for the reader.)

Quote from: AsenRG;1031720News for you: you only demonstrated that you don't know what "Entropy" means, because it's basically a synonym of chaos, and the opposite of order:D! So, no, there's no "third axis", and "balance" is not, in fact, an extreme, it's the middle of ground between chaos and order.

No, I understand quite well what Entropy means. And on the Gygaxian "Law-Chaos" alignment axis, Chaos does not equal Entropy. Even so, if "Imbalance = Entropy" is a stumbling block for you, I'll drop it. You're welcome.

Nevertheless, there is a diametric opposite to balance, and that opposite is imbalance, which puts Balance at one extreme end of an alignment axis, and Imbalance at the other. True Neutrals are extremists.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1031725The opposite of balance is hegemony. A True Neutral character will tend to help the opposite of whichever side seems to be gaining the upper hand in order to maintain balance, so the antithesis would be someone who tries to help whichever side appears to be winning in order to end the ancient struggle.

"Hegemony" works as a synonym for "imbalance". Thanks!

Demi-humans that are as diverse in temperament and culture as humans. Makes them just humans that are stout or have pointy ears.

D&D's main background issues come with having a huge legacy that just keeps adding to its lore. Nearly impossible to maintain consistency, if say the Tolkein world still had never ending additions to this day, even that glorious setting would become bloated and inconsistent. D&D's great success is partly why it has this problem in the first place, of course a GM can do weeding to counter this.

Without a doubt for me the alignment system is a nightmare. This is why nearly every over roleplaying game moved away from that system, but at the time it must have seen a natural fit, almost classical in its treatment of fantasy tropes. It is in my mind a perfect example of the legacy issues which beset any long term beloved project; they could just remove it...heresy! :)

But as always its down to the GM, I have seen D&D played were everyone had an alignment and they were hardly used as part of the players personality and more just a mechanic for certain rolls. If it works for you, use it, if not side line it.

I really hate the whole "menagerie of freaks" party that's become so common. My ideal party is two humans and two demihumans, not cat-person, turtle-person, dragon-person, and devil-person.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1031820I really hate te whole "menagerie of freaks" party that's become so common. My ideal party of for is two humans and two demihumans, not cat-person, turtle-person, dragon-person, and devil-person.

I agree, though I am a fucking hypocrite on this. I want all the wacky options (á la Palladium Fantasy), but don't want wacky parties.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1031820I really hate te whole "menagerie of freaks" party that's become so common. My ideal party of for is two humans and two demihumans, not cat-person, turtle-person, dragon-person, and devil-person.

One of the many reasons I prefer straight historical to fantasy.

I made an exception with my group's 13th Age game, because it used a specifically envisioned set of races. Besides humans, the only other humanoids were Planetouched. Our party consisted of two Humans, a Genasi and an Aasimar.

Put me down for alignments being anything other than a statement of factions.  There must be a balance between good and evil is the worst notion ever.  Personally, I  don't like overly diverse races.  A good dwarf from the ancient holds and an evil dwarf from the northern volcanoes are the same race they differ culturally and perhaps due to magic induced mutations.  I'm fond of chaos mutations because they allow for variety without the constant worry about where yet another humanoid race came from.

1. Common tongue/language. Sure, demi-humans (sort of) have their own cultures, and monsters do to, but we all speak the same language all over the whole planet. And the only time anybody you ever meet doesn't speak Common is when they are fucking you over or being dicks.

2. The previous mentions of demi-human's Race/Species/Culture and the ecology of dungeons sort of combine for my second peeve- the huge multitude of seemingly naturally occurring humanoid races. Why do they all exist? Over in that swamp is some lizardmen and that forest has some gnolls and them there hills have some ogres, and heck, on the way to any of them you could run into a random band of pert near anything. All completely isolated from any others of their kind and none have a breeding population large enough to support themselves but it is OK. I know some settings do actually explain it well. Others just throw up their hands and say "who cares? it's fun so it is good enough" and I roll with it and have fun but if I think about it, it does irk me.

Some of my pet peeves...

Non-human player characters.  I like the PCs to be normal folks exploring the world and encountering the strange and mysterious, not to be the travelling circus.

Anything that makes magic anything less than rare, mysterious, and dangerous.  Magic shops, magic schools, magical trinkets proliferating every freaking chest.  In the current setting I'm working on, every spell is tied to a specific place or person on the map, so acquiring them is an adventure.  Every magic item (of which I have less than a dozen of so far) is named, has a history, and a reason for being where it is.

Class, in the social sense, not mattering.  Again, the wandering circus showing up with a bunch of strangers decked out in ridiculous armor.  Who you are, where you're from, what you've done, and how you present yourself should matter.

Large groups of monsters.  I hate location descriptions of 50 hobgoblins camped out over here, 30 orcs over here, blah blah.  I don't necessarily demand every monster be unique, but they should be few enough and hard enough to find that the local lords wouldn't have just sent their armies out to fight them by now, and they should have a reason to be where they are and doing what they're doing.  Large groups of monsters just milling around is so boring.

Kind of goes with magic, but easy healing annoys me.  People just expect to be able to quaff down healing potions like it's Diablo so they can keep fighting stuff.  I want a setting that discourages senseless violence because even if you feel confident you can win, getting wounded sucks and takes a long time to recover from.  Even the toughest warrior should consider whether a fight is worth it cause getting stabbed isn't fun no matter who you are.

Most of my D&D peeves are actually about the system (steep power curves, high hitpoints, levels, alignments, classes, easy healing & resurrection, many of the races & monsters, much of the magic).

And most of the things that bug me about D&D settings arise naturally from those same things.

And it also bugs me that D&D settings seem to me to tend to not really be what I expect would naturally arise from the situations presented using the rules, if someone were to play out all the factions in a situation. Mainly it seems to me that the steep power curve would result not in the usual situation as presented in the monster-&-magic-dense settings I've mostly seen, where there are static known monsters arranged neatly in zones and levels of different difficulty for PCs to safely climb through on their rise up the power curve. No, I think what would happen would be more like the smarter things higher on the power curve intelligently hunting the things below them on the power curve for magic loot, XP, gold and domination over the others. Wacky happy-go-lucky PC parties who get any reputation would seem to be ripe targets for eradication and looting for magic items, and/or recruitment into larger stronger groups. The higher-level agents in the world wouldn't just be outside the focus of the PCs' situation waiting for the PCs to level up, but going about fighting for their place in the power hierarchy and pro-actively wiping each other out, and the steep power curve, high hitpoints, and especially the high-powered high-level magic would seem to me to lead to situations very different from what D&D adventure settings tend to look like. And, how it would play out seems sort of interesting but far too complex in terms of how much magic and how many factions there are and who has immunity to what attacks and who's scrying whom and all that.

Quote from: Sergeant Brother;1031780I don't like it when magic emulates modern technology, especially mass produced magical items. No magical street lights. No clerics as doctors, and absolutely no magic stores. Magic stores are my biggest pet peeve. I found this +2 magical axe in a dungeon, but I use swords so I'll sell it at the local magic store and then buy a +3 long sword, which is what I'm specialized with. Oh yeah, and put some healing potions and a ring of fire resistance on my bill.

That completely destroys the fantasy feel of a setting for me. Magic should be rare, it should be special, it should not be the equivalent of technological equipment in a modern or sci-fi setting.

Medieval worlds should have a reasonably medieval or pre-modern culture. It doesn't have to be super well researched and historically accurate, but it shouldn't break emmersion or suspension of disbelief.

I hate it when religion doesn't matter, when ckerics and paladins are just combat medics. A cleric or a paladin is the equivalent of a saint - a person so devoted to their god/region that they can perform miracles. It should be treated as such too.

Agreed. Magic is technology blows. I'm readings some 2E Greyhawk material right now and the night watch have potions of infravision, merchants have amulets of protection from ESP, wizards use telekinesis to help build fortifications. Ugh.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1031820I really hate the whole "menagerie of freaks" party that's become so common. My ideal party is two humans and two demihumans, not cat-person, turtle-person, dragon-person, and devil-person.

I've posted about this before, but there needs to be some way to incentivize humans as PCs. Otherwise yeah, you end up with the Superfreak Dungeon Kill squad, instead of a plausible band of mercenaries of adventurers.

Quote from: under_score;1031837Non-human player characters.  I like the PCs to be normal folks exploring the world and encountering the strange and mysterious, not to be the travelling circus.

I'm mostly the same, but it does depend on the setting. One of the ones we're currently playing in has demon-tainted humans as a perpetual underclass for as long as anyone can remember (with different faiths ascribing various reasons why they were cursed in their creation myths) while the Elves only arrived just a few human generations back from another realm and keep largely isolated from other species. In that setting a group of humans, dwarves (seen as just a race in the proper sense of the term of humans) and malfeans (the term for the demon touched) wouldn't be atypical (all are essentially commonfolk in the setting), but elves mixing with any but their own kind would draw immediate notice.

QuoteClass, in the social sense, not mattering.  Again, the wandering circus showing up with a bunch of strangers decked out in ridiculous armor.  Who you are, where you're from, what you've done, and how you present yourself should matter.

Again, I generally agree, but it is setting dependent. Something set right after a great societal collapse (ex. c. AD 500 in Europe) is going to be a lot more fluid in its social classes than one with long established hereditary nobility (ex. AD 1500 in Europe).

In the earlier period, gathering up a bunch of wealth, a reputation of skill at arms and a bunch of loyal warriors is what established you AS a noble in the first place. In the latter period doing the same would only be allowed with the permission of an already established noble and doing so on your own would probably see you labled an insurrectionist.

The point being, if you want your setting to have social mobility you better structure your setting so it's plausible.

QuoteLarge groups of monsters.  I hate location descriptions of 50 hobgoblins camped out over here, 30 orcs over here, blah blah.  I don't necessarily demand every monster be unique, but they should be few enough and hard enough to find that the local lords wouldn't have just sent their armies out to fight them by now, and they should have a reason to be where they are and doing what they're doing.  Large groups of monsters just milling around is so boring.

I don't mind it if it fits the setting. A lot of times in the early D&D material the monstrous humanoids were basically just proxies for 'that tribe on the other side of the valley' without the ethical ramifications of genociding a tribe of neighboring humans so you can take their land for yourself.

Likewise a setting that's lacking the degree of central authority and civilization hangs by a thread with barely enough forces to hold the lands in their immediate proximity having large groups of monstrous raiders hiding out in the woods two days travel from civilization isn't that hard to envision. A density of about 1/square mile would essentially be hunter-gatherer level density, so a 10 mile x 10 miles stretch of unexplored forest hosting 2-3 bands of 20-30 orcs or goblins each wouldn't be pushing credibility to my mind.

Conversely, dropping the same in the middle of a square mile of woods surrounded by long settled lands would be ridiculous in exactly the manner you describe.

This also, tangentially brings another pet peeve of mine up... Barbarian being a character class (particularly when linked to the raging mechanic) instead of a background or social class. It does a massive disservice to a setting to paint all the many groups historically called barbarians with such a tiny subset of a subset.

Heck, the fact that a book accurate Conan the Barbarian wouldn't even be a member of the D&D barbarian class but some sort of multiclass fighter/rogue (maybe a ranger if the edition isn't married to making them two-weapon fighters with animal companions and spells) says just about everything about how malformed the barbarian as class approach is.

It took me a ridiculously long time to realize it, but I finally discovered that one of the reasons for the "freak party" was that some players really enjoy having mechanical widgets to pick from in the "race" department.  I guess I had always assumed that the motivation was all about being the freak on purpose, even though in retrospect, there were signs that it wasn't so.  I'm not that terribly bothered by the freak party most of the time, but some of the players were.

Once I realized that mechanics were driving the problem, the solution was obvious.  Have several different kinds of mechanical packages for humans, and a few of the races I wanted to support.  To make it easy, I cannibalized mechanics from some of the races I didn't want.  For example, I've got "humans" represented using human, half-elf, and half-orc mechanical packages, with the serial numbers filed off and the descriptions changed.  I've got over 20 players in multiple campaigns in this world now, some with multiple characters.  It's about 50% "human", 30% "elf", and the rest a few dwarves and halflings.  And that's with a lot of new players picking pre-gens that skewed non-human for variety.  I think overtime it may transition to an even greater human proportion of PCs.

If this isn't just some odd characteristic of my groups, then it would seem it is exactly counter-productive in D&D to have one brand of humans and then a bunch of sub-races for each demi-human.  It should be the other way around.

I never did like the hybrid 'races' like 1/2-elf or 1/2-orc.  Now there are 1/2-dragons and 1/2-devils (Dragonborn and Tiefling).  

About the General Store.  I've always used the market day concept from BIMT (Back in Medieval Times)  The town or village square essentially becomes a department store on Market Day.  Keeps the verisimilitude; does away with pixel-bitching.

Dungeons as apartment complexes for monsters.  Unless there is a landlord. :D

Ah, Tolkien-esque elves.  Never liked 'em.  I prefer elves more like the creatures of actual folklore.

Quote from: Franky;1031885I never did like the hybrid 'races' like 1/2-elf or 1/2-orc.  Now there are 1/2-dragons and 1/2-devils (Dragonborn and Tiefling).

"Let me tell you about my exciting character - he's 1/8 elf 1/4 half-orc 1/8 halfing 1/8 dragonborn-tiefling-devil 1/8 half-dragon 1/8 brownie 1/8 bugmoose-centaur were-jaguarundi Fetishist/Unicorn-Rider!"

Quote from: Skarg;1031891"Let me tell you about my exciting character - he's 1/8 elf 1/4 half-orc 1/8 halfing 1/8 dragonborn-tiefling-devil 1/8 half-dragon 1/8 brownie 1/8 bugmoose-centaur were-jaguarundi Fetishist/Unicorn-Rider!"

Rocks Fall.  It dies.

Quote from: Skarg;1031891"Let me tell you about my exciting character - he's 1/8 elf 1/4 half-orc 1/8 halfing 1/8 dragonborn-tiefling-devil 1/8 half-dragon 1/8 brownie 1/8 bugmoose-centaur were-jaguarundi Fetishist/Unicorn-Rider!"

You should have had the fractions add up to more than one ;)

I think that this kind of thing happens from snowflake inflation. Lot's of people want special character, someone who stands out from the rest of the fictional world. That makes sense, not many players want to play the average peasant.

Being a high elven wizard is pretty special, but after a while it doesn't seem so special anymore. It's just another common adventurer type. So, maybe a half elf and half orc. Or a faerie orc, or what ever. More special, more different, more unique until we get into the realm of silliness.

This isn't necessarily a problem with settings, though I think that some settings can encourage this attitude. If a setting has special snowflake NPC's all over the place. If you walk down the street and see elves, orcs, and ogres on average street corner and the local village elder is a 15th level wizard and the local priest is a 12th level cleric, then players are going to want some kind of added feature to make their own characters seem cool and unique in a world overflowing with specialness.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1031725The opposite of balance is hegemony. A True Neutral character will tend to help the opposite of whichever side seems to be gaining the upper hand in order to maintain balance, so the antithesis would be someone who tries to help whichever side appears to be winning in order to end the ancient struggle.

No, it's not. The opposite of balance is disbalance, pure and simple.
Hegemony is a strongly hierarchical order. It's one of the manifestations of disbalance, but "total chaos" is the other. It's the "horseshoe theory" in action;).

Quote from: RandyB;1031781No, I understand quite well what Entropy means. And on the Gygaxian "Law-Chaos" alignment axis, Chaos does not equal Entropy.

Given that entropy is defined as "lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder", I strongly doubt that. Unless you mean Gygax was making up new meanings of words, not just crafting neologisms.

QuoteEven so, if "Imbalance = Entropy" is a stumbling block for you, I'll drop it. You're welcome.

It is, but the whole idea that neutrality is a form of extremism still doesn't make sense. Both Order and Chaos are the extremes between "a balance between Chaos and Law".

QuoteNevertheless, there is a diametric opposite to balance, and that opposite is imbalance, which puts Balance at one extreme end of an alignment axis, and Imbalance at the other. True Neutrals are extremists.

So Imbalance=Chaos and/or Law, when taken to extremes (as well as Good and/or Evil).
True Neutrals aren't extremists. They're just people who know that too much Law is stiffling, and too much chaos is dangerous.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1031820I really hate the whole "menagerie of freaks" party that's become so common. My ideal party is two humans and two demihumans, not cat-person, turtle-person, dragon-person, and devil-person.

Well, I actually include demihumans in the "menagerie of freaks". But I agree with the general feeling:D!

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1031820I really hate the whole "menagerie of freaks" party that's become so common. My ideal party is two humans and two demihumans, not cat-person, turtle-person, dragon-person, and devil-person.

This one gets on my nerves too.  It starts feeling like Myth Adventures.  Like the whole world is the Bazaar of Deva as drawn by Phil Foglio (how's that for a deep cut).  In anything resembling a realistic world that would result in pitchforks and torches, non-stop.

In my setting only Dwarves, Elves and Aarakocra are welcomed into human communities.  Dwarves are considered as more or less brothers of men and generally pass without notice, while Elves tend to invoke awe and a lot of curious gawping. Aarakocra are considered funny and non-threatening, and most works as entertainers of some sort.

Anything else?  Pitchforks and torches.  All day, every day.  You walk into town with any combination of fur, fangs, claws or horns, and you are being asked to leave in the least polite way possible.

I offered to drop "entropy" from the conversation. You declined. So be it.

Quote from: AsenRG;1031917Given that entropy is defined as "lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder", I strongly doubt that.

In real world physics, your definition is correct, as it describes a physical phenomenon identified by taking the Laws of Thermodynamics to their logical conclusion. And I have known this for several decades. I am also able to distinguish between this and the following...

Quote from: AsenRG;1031917Unless you mean Gygax was making up new meanings of words, not just crafting neologisms.

He did. As Gygax defined the Law-Chaos axis in his moral and ethical alignment schema, starting in the 1e AD&D Player's Handbook, he used Chaos to refer to an ethical concept unrelated to entropy. Since that book was published in 1978, and all editions of D&D derived from it (2e, 3.x, PF, 5e) have retained a definition of Chaos-as-an-alignment derived from Gygax's work, you are obviously too short for this ride.

Quote from: AsenRG;1031917It is, but the whole idea that neutrality is a form of extremism still doesn't make sense. Both Order and Chaos are the extremes between "a balance between Chaos and Law".

True Neutrals on the 2-dimenstional Law-Chaos/Good-Evil grid are extremists on the Balance-Imbalance axis, where Balance is their chief value and Imbalance their antithetical value.

Oh, OK. I'll throw you a bone. True Neutrals who value balance are not extremists on that third axis. The extremes of that third axis are imbalance and stasis, where balance is a dynamic state that only exists across space and time - and planes, if you want to go there. So at any given point in space and time, balance cannot and will not be found or established. Cosmically, balance is then potentially self-sustaining, needing no champions to establish or maintain it.

As an aside, I note that you are using Law-Chaos as a single alignment axis. In that alignment schema, I prefer definitions of Chaos that are synonymous with Entropy. That makes for an existential conflict. And existential conflicts eliminate a lot of the moral pseudo-quandaries that bad DMs like to throw at players.

Quote from: AsenRG;1031917Well, I actually include demihumans in the "menagerie of freaks". But I agree with the general feeling:D!

My preferences of late are definitely in the "all-human PC party" direction, with demihumans as less "near human" and more "alien but not inimical".

Quote from: Franky;1031893Rocks Fall.  It dies.

Oh NOOOOOOoooooooOOOooo!!!

Quote from: Sergeant Brother;1031898You should have had the fractions add up to more than one ;)

Ew, I had almost forgotten talking to a player who did that, and didn't understand fractions, or percentages... or genetics.

Quote from: Sergeant Brother;1031898I think that this kind of thing happens from snowflake inflation. Lot's of people want special character, someone who stands out from the rest of the fictional world. That makes sense, not many players want to play the average peasant.

Being a high elven wizard is pretty special, but after a while it doesn't seem so special anymore. It's just another common adventurer type. So, maybe a half elf and half orc. Or a faerie orc, or what ever. More special, more different, more unique until we get into the realm of silliness.

This isn't necessarily a problem with settings, though I think that some settings can encourage this attitude. If a setting has special snowflake NPC's all over the place. If you walk down the street and see elves, orcs, and ogres on average street corner and the local village elder is a 15th level wizard and the local priest is a 12th level cleric, then players are going to want some kind of added feature to make their own characters seem cool and unique in a world overflowing with specialness.

Yeah, I think you're pretty much right about that. Also what Steven Mitchell wrote above about wanting racial benefits. And hey, they should just get all the good powers they want from every race they find and list on their pedegree, right? Same with lycanthropy, vampirism, lichcraft - it's all just a shopping list of cool powers, right?

Goes great with agreements that the party should all get along and work together and be on a railroad course to save the world...

Quote from: RandyB;1032015I offered to drop "entropy" from the conversation. You declined. So be it. ...

Uh oh!

Quote from: AsenRG;1031917True Neutrals aren't extremists. They're just people who know that too much Law is stiffling, and too much chaos is dangerous.

  This is why I don't have any problems myself with the 'balance' principle as applied to Law and Chaos, although I'm also fine with a "Law is generally 'good', Chaos is generally 'evil'" approach in a monaxial system. It's when you try to state "Good is objectively Good, Evil is objectively Evil ... but both are equally valid and fundamental principles of the cosmos" that my suspension of disbelief goes ka-blooey.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1032020This is why I don't have any problems myself with the 'balance' principle as applied to Law and Chaos, although I'm also fine with a "Law is generally 'good', Chaos is generally 'evil'" approach in a monaxial system. It's when you try to state "Good is objectively Good, Evil is objectively Evil ... but both are equally valid and fundamental principles of the cosmos" that my suspension of disbelief goes ka-blooey.

Agreed. Particularly when you move past cartoon-level ethics (where heat and cold are opposites) into the genuine article where evil is more properly defined as the absence of good instead of its opposite (as in a proper understanding of physics heat is motion at the atomic level and cold is not atomic movement in the opposite direction but the absence/reduction of atomic movement). Theologically, the Christian interpretation of Hell isn't something opposed to God, its the complete absence of God's presence.

Any theology that argues that you have to encourage a certain level of murder, rape and slavery in the world and that those seeking to wipe those things out need to be opposed is either evil, a lunatic and/or a complete hypocrite. The hypocrisy specifically is that they have declared that allowing moral evils to exist is actually their highest good... and since that is a good end it must also be kept from getting too strong relative to the evil of allowing good or evil to grow too strong.

Neutral only makes sense on the So-called ethical axis of Law(stasis)/Chaos(entropy) where too much of one or the other can be a bad thing (and it can further be argued that the normal mortal range of the law/chaos spectrum all falls within the Neutral range compared to Cosmic level divide of Stasis vs. Entropy... even your typical Chaos-Lord wants to rule more than the eternal darkness of a post-protonic decay universe... nor does your typical Champion of Order dream of all Creation frozen forever in unchanging stasis).

Honestly, I think Palladium got it right with its 'no neutrals' (in relation to good/evil) with its Good/Selfish/Evil spectrum. The Selfish character would be perfectly happy in a world without murder/rape/slavery; but they aren't going to go out of their way to end such practices unless it directly affects them and/or might be okay with committing a few evil acts to get what they want if they don't see any better way (while evil characters take pleasure in engaging in those acts against others).

Good/Selfish/Evil and Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic are a lot clearer and sensible to my mind. Instead of True Neutral you'd have Selfish Neutral... someone willing to perform the occasional evil act to preserve the balance between order and chaos... Chaotic Selfish which will engage in evil acts if it keeps the most people free of Order's iron grip (basically your terrorist/freedom fighter who justifies some attacks on civilian targets for the greater good of bringing down a tyrant)... and Lawful Selfish which will use whatever means is most practical to ensure order; the carrot when possible, the stick when not.

This also keeps good and evil in context with regard to ethical neutrality as well. Neutral Good won't cross any moral lines in keeping the balance while Neutral Evil keeps the balance by any means necessary and without remorse.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1031666Magic.

Stupid players.

Humanity bring on top of the racial food chain. When the only advantage seems to be a ability to breed like rabbits and a drive to succeed. Apparently in too many fantasy rpgs non-humans have no drive to succeed. Then again previous editions of D&d tried to hard to emulate Tolkien imo. Dwarves have too low a birth rate and are dying out. The FR elves leave the mainland to hide out in Evermeet. At least give them a special racial ability which explains why they out perform every other race. Alignment not because I hate it so much that too many players run Lawful Good as Awfully Stupid with DMs sharing equal blame. Just waiting for the Paladin player to fall. Don't get me started on "I can't play class XYZ unless I play Chaotic Neutral" types. DMs trying to put in modern morality into D&D. "sorry you can't kill the orc because um, er Geneva Convention on prisoners".

For me it's technology creep. We go from standard medieval type weaponry, like crossbows ans siege engines. Next thing you know, there are guns and you have gadgeteers running around with flimsily disguised near-20th century tech. And don't get me started on "crashed alien ships with laser guns lying around to pick up."

Quote from: sureshot;1032070Humanity bring on top of the racial food chain. When the only advantage seems to be a ability to breed like rabbits and a drive to succeed. Apparently in too many fantasy rpgs non-humans have no drive to succeed. Then again previous editions of D&d tried to hard to emulate Tolkien imo. Dwarves have too low a birth rate and are dying out. The FR elves leave the mainland to hide out in Evermeet. At least give them a special racial ability which explains why they out perform every other race.

I solved that one with a fairly simple solution in my campaign setting; humans get the benefits of information density.

All the nigh-immortal races (elves and elemental avatars in this case) have a finite quantity of souls to go around. Once they hit their population limit, no new offspring are born until one dies and their overall numbers are so low they just don't have the society capacity for specialization much beyond iron-age technology.

While the Beastmen (a whole catch-all of once magitech engineered former slave species like minotaurs, crocodin and wolfen who broke free of man's control a couple of societal collapses back) can theoretically outbreed humans because they reach maturity in about two years, they are still largely ruled by their animal instincts when it comes to population patterns (i.e. herds/packs more akin to tribes that break up into smaller groups past a certain point) and so never achieve reach the critical level of societal specialization that comes with larger population centers. They also only live about 60 years.

Humans (and dwarves, who are just a subspecies of humans adapted by long ago magics to life as subterranean miners), by contrast, not only live longer (thanks to advances by past civilizations cancer and genetic defects were wiped out so, barring accident, famine, toxins/disease or homicide, the typical lifespan is just over a century) but also have no limits to their population size like the immortals (via limited numbers possible) or Beastmen (via lack of large group cohesion) do. This allows them to do things like specialize in trades which in turn leads to technological advancements (they literally invented arcane magic and created the various Beastmen species from common animals for just two examples) that the other species just can't pull off.

They're also hubris personified so their entire history (and thus the history of the world) is one of great empires rising, often reaching pinnacles beyond any empire before them, only for them to collapse in on themselves... with each fall greater than the last. The current setting is about 200 years after the worst one yet... a magical catastrophe simply called the Cataclysm so severe and with such lasting consequence (creating all manner of hideous mutations among other problems) that the planet's population density is still less than one sapient per square mile on average (the city of 15,000 in the campaign region is considered the greatest metropolis for a thousand miles and the relatively small populated zone around it is surrounded by countless miles of ruin-filled and monster haunted wilderness with the next closest point of civilization weeks away when travel is good) and the only reason they're not back in the stone age is because of bits of technological know-how they were able to hold onto and because good steel is so ridiculously available with little effort from the ruins of the past civilization (just beneath the surface of the many hills that the ancestors said once scraped the sky).

I love these threads.

One person's pet peeve is another's must have.

It's quite interesting, especially seeing numerous similar pet peeves appear to be D&D mainstays.

Trying to rationalize D&Disms.  Dungeons, magic, the huge number of different creatures occupying exactly the same ecological niche, none of it makes any sense. Trying to force it to make sense takes away the fun.

I don't mind games that treat some of these with realism and rationality. "Dungeons" that are designed as actual structures with sensible ecosystems for example. But don't expect those games to lend themselves to the wild and wooly style of D&D.

I actually play a lot less D&D than used to because i got so sick of trying to rationalize D&Disms and realized I would rather play games that make more sense.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1032083I love these threads.

One person's pet peeve is another's must have.

It's quite interesting, especially seeing numerous similar pet peeves appear to be D&D mainstays.

Yeah it's particularly interesting to me since I'm knocking together a setting for my first time GMing. It's basically a mishmash of the Old World from WFRP, the Lands of Legend from Dragon Warriors and RE Howard's Hyboria. All of these settings use historical, real world cultural pastiche to describe different regions. I hadn't thought about creating anything super original or detailed because I want to get into the meat of setting creation (i.e frontier town and some nearby 'sites of interest'), and in the interest of not spending too much time on things that likely won't come up in play I'll probably stick with what I've got.
But it was interesting to me that many of the classic settings that I enjoy reading about and playing in are pet peeves for some. I think because most of the gamers here are fairly experienced there is a sense of 'been there, done that' with historical pastiche. I doubt it would prevent many here from playing in a well run WFRP campaign, however.

The Hyborian Age is awesome for a RPG for the same reason Tony Bath chose it for his wargames campaign; you can have any human culture from "cavemen" to the High Middle Ages, and everything in between.  Saxon Huscarles fighting Egyptian Chariots?  NO PROBLEM!  And in RPG terms you can have anything from grimy city adventures to desolate wastelands to pseudo-Arthurian chivalry to demon-haunted temples.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1032083I love these threads.

One person's pet peeve is another's must have.

It's quite interesting, especially seeing numerous similar pet peeves appear to be D&D mainstays.

Some of mine are a question of taste, but my peeve about race = species + culture is a practical one.  I didn't mind it for a long time, because I've always understood why it was there, and it's a useful enough simplification for some settings.  No, what has caused the peevishness is that as a design strategy it sits right across a major fault line for the way I want to warp the game to my purposes.  That's the very definition of "peeved."  I can't say its bad design, much less wrong, but it still annoys me.  

In fact, it bugs me in exactly the same way that some people fully understand and appreciate the design intent of armor as lowing chance to hit but just don't like what that does to the underlying combat system.  (As opposed to people that rail against it because it offends their sensibilities for how any such mechanic should work.)

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1032147In fact, it bugs me in exactly the same way that some people fully understand and appreciate the design intent of armor as lowing chance to hit but just don't like what that does to the underlying combat system.  (As opposed to people that rail against it because it offends their sensibilities for how any such mechanic should work.)

The funny thing about the above is that the more I learn about the effectiveness of medieval armor against period weapons and the techniques required to bypass it (ex. Half-swording with a longsword) the more I come to appreciate Armor Class/Hit Points as a combat system; particularly when you use the original hit point description where only the last few are physical and the rest is a mixture of skill, endurance, luck and divine providence that you spend evading and turning lethal hits into glancing blows until you're too worn down to stop a lethal attack and get dropped.

Of course its also led me to feel like their rankings and choices of armor (like making padded the weakest* and continuing to make studded leather** a thing) are completely retarded. I can forgive designers in the 70s/early 80s; they worked with what info they had, but there's been so much research since then that their not updating the lists just comes off as lazy and ignorant.

* Studies have shown that padded gambesons are ridiculously effective at absorbing hits (including sword strikes and arrows fired at close range) and do so far better than any leather armor ever could while also being cheaper and easier to repair than leather. A realistic armor list would have "Padded/Gambeson" as the best light armor entry and leather would be down where padded is now, but simultaneously more expensive than padded.

** Studded Leather was a misinterpretation of Brigandine armor. The "studs" were actually the rivets holding the underlying steel plates to the lining. In actuality Brigandine would be on par with a steel breastplate in terms of protection on its own and would qualify as 'plate and mail' level protection when worn over mail. It was so good and so widely used that its name literally means "soldier's armor" (Brigand is another name for soldier; it got associated with banditry because that's what out of work soldiers did to make ends meet). Hell, most modern hard body armor is a Brigandine-style with overlapping steel or ceramic plates inside a liner. It's also easy to don and not too heavy to wear making it ideal for the adventuring lifestyle.

ETA: If I were doing an armor list from best to worst it’d be Full Plate Harness, Munitions Armor (3/4 Plate), Half Plate, Plate & Mail, Mail (full suit), Brigandine, Mail Hauberk (3/4 mail), Mail Shirt and Gambeson with a HUGE step down to “no armor.” (If a Gameson was AC 9, unarmored would be AC 15 using AD&D values or AC 11 gambeson, 5 unarmored for 3e and later math).

Game "designers" don't research, they crib from Gary's 1973 writings, when Ashdown was about the only source commonly available.  The Internet has resulted in the spread of even more bullshit about armor.  Like jazerant being called "plated mail."

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1032182Game "designers" don't research, they crib from Gary's 1973 writings, when Ashdown was about the only source commonly available.  The Internet has resulted in the spread of even more bullshit about armor.  Like jazerant being called "plated mail."

Like I said, I don't blame Gary for the original armor tables; you can only use the info you have and "garbage in, garbage out" (how was he supposed to know that boiled leather armor was in the same class as jousting armor; stuff you wore in tournaments while armed with sword-shaped bludgeons... basically the SCA/Renfair armor of its day) but yeah, I do kinda hold it against modern 'developers' when they can't be bothered to do half an hour or so research into sources less than half a century out of date (though I make an exception if they're referencing primary sources). It's like saying you wrote a serious time travel story while including T-Rexes that are cold blooded, stand upright, drag their tails and don't have feathers (though this would be entirely forgivable if you said it was a retro 50s sci-fi story).

If you can't do the research equivalent of a sixth-grade history paper, why the heck should I trust your game math or that everything else isn't equally shoddy?

And again, I make an exception for someone just trying to deliberately ape early editions of D&D, but anyone designing something they claim is historically accurate or just to be modern game design using crap like leather and studded leather unironically deserves every jeer thrown at them.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1032182Game "designers" don't research, they crib from Gary's 1973 writings, when Ashdown was about the only source commonly available.  The Internet has resulted in the spread of even more bullshit about armor.  Like jazerant being called "plated mail."

Well, why bother? The market demographic neither knows or cares, from what I've seen.

Quote from: RandyB;1032015I offered to drop "entropy" from the conversation. You declined. So be it.

Actually, I agreed.
Then I kept debating whether your definition of "Balance-Imbalance" is correct, or should be subsumed into "law/chaos";). Because "imbalance" is "chaos OR law"...so you're just taking the three-options scale, and turning it into a two-options one.

QuoteIn real world physics, your definition is correct, as it describes a physical phenomenon identified by taking the Laws of Thermodynamics to their logical conclusion.

And that is what "entropy" means in conversations, when not talking about physics.

QuoteAnd I have known this for several decades.

You're THAT old:D?

QuoteHe did. As Gygax defined the Law-Chaos axis in his moral and ethical alignment schema, starting in the 1e AD&D Player's Handbook, he used Chaos to refer to an ethical concept unrelated to entropy.

Actually, no. Chaos, as Gygax describes it, is quite related to "lack of order";).

QuoteTrue Neutrals on the 2-dimenstional Law-Chaos/Good-Evil grid are extremists on the Balance-Imbalance axis, where Balance is their chief value and Imbalance their antithetical value.

It's an axis that doesn't exist, though. Because Imbalance can be either Chaos OR Law. Balance is "balancing between the extremes of chaos and law", therefore both of them are its opposite - but that's not a "new" outlook. It's just the outlook of someone who is Neutral himself, and so is only interested whether other people are Neutral as well, or not.

...but overall, this particular line of discussion is quickly approaching the "as fun as visiting the dentist" state.

QuoteMy preferences of late are definitely in the "all-human PC party" direction, with demihumans as less "near human" and more "alien but not inimical".

Same here.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1032083I love these threads.

One person's pet peeve is another's must have.

It's quite interesting, especially seeing numerous similar pet peeves appear to be D&D mainstays.

Indeed;).

About Leather vs. Padded and crossing the streams with the "PC's Armed in Town" thread.

Leather armor probably wouldn't be seen as battlefield issue and would probably be more effective vs. slender pointed weapons which you'd find in cities.  Gambeson would be hot, not particularly comfortable to wear around town and could be seen as a battlefield type of armor.

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1032200Well, why bother? The market demographic neither knows or cares, from what I've seen.

Why have set dressers for films put in all sorts of meaningful background details that 99.9% of the audience is never going to notice? Because you're a professional dammit and you should care that you're doing your job right so that when the 0.1% do notice they'll appreciate that you actually know your shit (TVTropes even has a name for this; "shown their work").

At least, that's why I do it; for that one-in-a-thousand reader who does care and will come up to me at some convention and thank me for caring as much about what they care about as they do.

I do engraving work for a day job. A lot of it is commercial stuff where I'm doing up a hundred of this or a couple dozen of that that goes to some company looking to give some promotional item out to customers or employees. What keeps me doing the job instead of just packing it in for some 9-5 gig is the <1% of jobs where I'm putting together a custom piece just for them (often for a wedding, birthday, memorial or other special event) and they absolutely appreciate the craftsmanship and thought that goes into the job (more than half of which is presenting them options they didn't even know they had to make it truly personal). But I wouldn't get those jobs without putting just as much work into the other 99+% that the end user probably thinks just pops off an assembly line.

Maybe I'm an anomaly in that line of thinking though.

Quote from: Chris24601;1032204Why have set dressers for films put in all sorts of meaningful background details that 99.9% of the audience is never going to notice? Because you're a professional dammit and you should care that you're doing your job right so that when the 0.1% do notice they'll appreciate that you actually know your shit (TVTropes even has a name for this; "shown their work").

At least, that's why I do it; for that one-in-a-thousand reader who does care and will come up to me at some convention and thank me for caring as much about what they care about as they do.

I do engraving work for a day job. A lot of it is commercial stuff where I'm doing up a hundred of this or a couple dozen of that that goes to some company looking to give some promotional item out to customers or employees. What keeps me doing the job instead of just packing it in for some 9-5 gig is the <1% of jobs where I'm putting together a custom piece just for them (often for a wedding, birthday, memorial or other special event) and they absolutely appreciate the craftsmanship and thought that goes into the job (more than half of which is presenting them options they didn't even know they had to make it truly personal). But I wouldn't get those jobs without putting just as much work into the other 99+% that the end user probably thinks just pops off an assembly line.

Maybe I'm an anomaly in that line of thinking though.

I agree with you - but I think we're both anomalies. I know exactly what you're taking about, re the detail and craftsmanship getting put into a project. I think you have the stats right, too; over all the time I've been in this hobby, I'd agree that about one in a thousand players who drop by one of my games actually notices the fine detail. The vast majority of them, I've found, simply don't have any background or knowledge to appreciate, understand, or notice what's on the table in front of them.

Like you, though, the very very rare times that somebody does indeed notice that Lord Chirine has a deck chair or that the Ladies-in-Waiting all have nice beach umbrellas does really please me.

It's the process of getting to meet them that I'm finding depressing.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1032203About Leather vs. Padded and crossing the streams with the "PC's Armed in Town" thread.

Leather armor probably wouldn't be seen as battlefield issue and would probably be more effective vs. slender pointed weapons which you'd find in cities.  Gambeson would be hot, not particularly comfortable to wear around town and could be seen as a battlefield type of armor.

The irony of this statement is that one of the primary articles of men's clothing in the period, the doublet, grew directly from the gambeson (or as it was sometimes called, the arming doublet) and gambeson's themselves often served double duty as jackets in colder weather during the period.

Your best bet for inconspicuous armor in town would actually be a brigandine (i.e. a doublet with metal plates sewn into it) as the outer lining could be leather or cloth. Nobles and courtiers often had brigandines with ornately embroidered outer surfaces making them basically the "bulletproof vests" of the day for the rich and powerful.

One that had metal plates just protecting the torso would probably be more than sufficient for city use and, if you needed something heavier you could throw it on over a gambeson (or a gambeson and mail) and add a helmet and you're ready for a real fight.

Which actually is another pet peeve of mine. Armor types in a lot of D&D settings are all or nothing affairs when the reality is they were a whole lot of pieces. A suit of full plate could also function as half plate or a breastplate just by removing pieces and there'd always be a gambeson under that to boot, but if you wanted to wear armor that way in D&D you'd need four separate suits of armor (padded, breastplate, half plate and full plate).

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1032205Like you, though, the very very rare times that somebody does indeed notice that Lord Chirine has a deck chair or that the Ladies-in-Waiting all have nice beach umbrellas does really please me.

It's the process of getting to meet them that I'm finding depressing.

I'm Catholic... if I'm suffering it's probably because I deserve it. ;)

My other thought is that the nice thing about the people who do care is that they will talk about it and, even if the listener doesn't care that much, they'll still know that you're professional enough to include those details and, slowly but surely, you'll get a reputation for quality that translates into more sales than you'd get if all your work is shoddy (its how I'm still in business after a dozen years while the business partner I split with who's main concern was profit lasted barely two years without me).

No one's going to remember the crap he put out, but I've made pieces of art that are going to be family heirlooms for generations. Even if they don't know me from Adam, they'll be appreciating my work long after I'm gone. My intention with game design is similar... I want to take the care with the design that will see it pulled off the shelf and enjoyed years from now the same way I can still enjoy an old school game (Palladium Fantasy 1e being my favorite) today.

There's a reason I try and shoehorn certain house rules in certain types of games.  I want armour to, even if it's to vaguely seem like it, mimic some of the real world properties.  And I will modify what I need to get even if it's just the 'feeling' of getting 'right'.

Quote from: Chris24601;1032204Why have set dressers for films put in all sorts of meaningful background details that 99.9% of the audience is never going to notice?

99.9 percent of them don't.

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1032200Well, why bother? The market demographic neither knows or cares, from what I've seen.

Frankly, I agree.  You know how hard I worked to construct a medieval world with some degree of authenticity for my RPGs, and you know that nobody gave a crap.  It's the same in any endeavor, by the way; the vast majority of model railroaders, for instance, do not CARE that the Athearn 40' boxcar is 1 HO scale foot too wide.

Quote from: The Black Ferret;1032077For me it's technology creep. We go from standard medieval type weaponry, like crossbows ans siege engines. Next thing you know, there are guns and you have gadgeteers running around with flimsily disguised near-20th century tech. And don't get me started on "crashed alien ships with laser guns lying around to pick up."

Ever seen The Book of Wondrous Inventions?  Hooo boy.  I really dug that book, but for entertainment value more than using any of it in a game.

Speaking of crashed alien spaceships...I had a lot of fun running a few groups through Expedition to the Barrier Peaks back in the day.  Learned a lot from the first time I ran it.  Second time and subsequent times, the adventure ended with a horrifying engine core breach resulting in "you now have...six...hours to reach minimum safe distance" and a satisfying nuclear explosion meaning that no, they wouldn't be back to get more power discs for the fucking blasters or antigrav belts.

Oh, and don't neglect the "you have no idea how this thing works" tables.  Nothing says "quit dicking around with this shit" like disintegrating the fighter's +2 longsword.

Quote from: Chris24601;1032204Why have set dressers for films put in all sorts of meaningful background details that 99.9% of the audience is never going to notice? Because you're a professional dammit and you should care that you're doing your job right so that when the 0.1% do notice they'll appreciate that you actually know your shit (TVTropes even has a name for this; "shown their work").

At least, that's why I do it; for that one-in-a-thousand reader who does care and will come up to me at some convention and thank me for caring as much about what they care about as they do.

I do engraving work for a day job. A lot of it is commercial stuff where I'm doing up a hundred of this or a couple dozen of that that goes to some company looking to give some promotional item out to customers or employees. What keeps me doing the job instead of just packing it in for some 9-5 gig is the <1% of jobs where I'm putting together a custom piece just for them (often for a wedding, birthday, memorial or other special event) and they absolutely appreciate the craftsmanship and thought that goes into the job (more than half of which is presenting them options they didn't even know they had to make it truly personal). But I wouldn't get those jobs without putting just as much work into the other 99+% that the end user probably thinks just pops off an assembly line.

Maybe I'm an anomaly in that line of thinking though.

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1032205I agree with you - but I think we're both anomalies. I know exactly what you're taking about, re the detail and craftsmanship getting put into a project. I think you have the stats right, too; over all the time I've been in this hobby, I'd agree that about one in a thousand players who drop by one of my games actually notices the fine detail. The vast majority of them, I've found, simply don't have any background or knowledge to appreciate, understand, or notice what's on the table in front of them.

Like you, though, the very very rare times that somebody does indeed notice that Lord Chirine has a deck chair or that the Ladies-in-Waiting all have nice beach umbrellas does really please me.

It's the process of getting to meet them that I'm finding depressing.

Well, my wife is a crafter. What you're telling me is exactly like what I hear from you two:).
I think that "excellence is its own reward" applies in all kinds of human activity;).
Personally, I appreciate such details, or at least the ones I've noticed.

Quote from: DavetheLost;1032084Trying to rationalize D&Disms.  Dungeons, magic, the huge number of different creatures occupying exactly the same ecological niche, none of it makes any sense. Trying to force it to make sense takes away the fun.

I don't mind games that treat some of these with realism and rationality. "Dungeons" that are designed as actual structures with sensible ecosystems for example. But don't expect those games to lend themselves to the wild and wooly style of D&D.

I actually play a lot less D&D than used to because i got so sick of trying to rationalize D&Disms and realized I would rather play games that make more sense.

Yeah, this is why I've never been able to get into D&D in the first place.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1031569Name something that's very common to find in a D&D setting that you really don't care for. And, if explanation is needed, why.

 I have some problems with D&D type systems, but the settings don't bother me that much because I see D&D as its own genre that does its own thing.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1032214Frankly, I agree.  You know how hard I worked to construct a medieval world with some degree of authenticity for my RPGs, and you know that nobody gave a crap.  It's the same in any endeavor, by the way; the vast majority of model railroaders, for instance, do not CARE that the Athearn 40' boxcar is 1 HO scale foot too wide.

Yep.

Now, if you modeled God's Wonderful Railway in OO, this wouldn't be an issue. Three-link couplings and shunters' poles, for that RPG immersion factor... :)

Quote from: AsenRG;1032257Well, my wife is a crafter. What you're telling me is exactly like what I hear from you two:).
I think that "excellence is its own reward" applies in all kinds of human activity;).
Personally, I appreciate such details, or at least the ones I've noticed.

Yep. I model for myself, and those who can be delighted by what I do.

Quote from: jeff37923;1032292I have some problems with D&D type systems, but the settings don't bother me that much because I see D&D as its own genre that does its own thing.

D&D is a treasure hunt game in a slightly medieval setting.  If you accept it on its own terms, it can be whacking great fun.

Quote from: DavetheLost;1032084Trying to rationalize D&Disms.  Dungeons, magic, the huge number of different creatures occupying exactly the same ecological niche, none of it makes any sense. Trying to force it to make sense takes away the fun.

I don't mind games that treat some of these with realism and rationality. "Dungeons" that are designed as actual structures with sensible ecosystems for example. But don't expect those games to lend themselves to the wild and wooly style of D&D.

I actually play a lot less D&D than used to because i got so sick of trying to rationalize D&Disms and realized I would rather play games that make more sense.

I took it for granted that dungeons and monsters are churned out by the forces of chaos.

Quote from: Chris24601;1032190Like I said, I don't blame Gary for the original armor tables; you can only use the info you have and "garbage in, garbage out" (how was he supposed to know that boiled leather armor was in the same class as jousting armor; stuff you wore in tournaments while armed with sword-shaped bludgeons... basically the SCA/Renfair armor of its day) but yeah, I do kinda hold it against modern 'developers' when they can't be bothered to do half an hour or so research into sources less than half a century out of date (though I make an exception if they're referencing primary sources). It's like saying you wrote a serious time travel story while including T-Rexes that are cold blooded, stand upright, drag their tails and don't have feathers (though this would be entirely forgivable if you said it was a retro 50s sci-fi story).

If you can't do the research equivalent of a sixth-grade history paper, why the heck should I trust your game math or that everything else isn't equally shoddy?

And again, I make an exception for someone just trying to deliberately ape early editions of D&D, but anyone designing something they claim is historically accurate or just to be modern game design using crap like leather and studded leather unironically deserves every jeer thrown at them.

I'll agree with all of this except the bolded part. It has nothing to do with research. I know we all want to think of this or that designer as truly clueless or the like, but... at this point in time (and frankly since the mid 90s or so) no one elbows deep in fantasy game design somehow has missed that padded, leather and studded leather are not as we picture them in D&D*. They did not somehow miss the single most widely known and forum-discussed fact about historical armors (that being studded leather, to my mind). They just don't care. Which is not necessarily better, but it is different.
*nor, for completely tangential examples that games routinely get wrong that I thoroughly believe no designer doesn't realize are wrong, that longsword is the wrong name for the D&D longsword, and that katanas are not all that and a bag of chips.

I'm not sure they are wrong, either. At least from their goals. 'Studded leather' sounds cool. Maybe a little biker gang or pirate wear (or just what the D&D illustrators have turned it into, which is historically inaccurate and wouldn't actually work, but looks cool). 'Padded armor' sounds like wearing a winter coat and/or what you wear under 'real' armor (neither of which  is not false, but does it a disservice in a way that takes a bunch of paragraphs to explain), and 'gambeson' sounds like an odd French word. I think the designers have taken a very 'it would take more ink than the average gamer really cares about to explain why they are wrong to think of leather or studded as awesome and that padded/gambeson is what would actually be awesome, and in the end what does it get me?' route.

I think the real problem IFAIC is that there really isn't such a thing as 'light' armor, but gamers want it for their rogues and rangers and the like. So that, to me, is the fundamental realism-vs.-genre issue.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1032426I think the real problem IFAIC is that there really isn't such a thing as 'light' armor, but gamers want it for their rogues and rangers and the like. So that, to me, is the fundamental realism-vs.-genre issue.

Good point.  That, and others have mentioned, the way "light armor" is often a partial set of other armor.  In any game without sectional armor (often for good reasons, due to the handling time), it's all an approximation anyway.

The lame gods and pantheons which always look and sound like a fourth-grader attempt at remembering greek and roman lore but mixed them with a Naruto episode. D&D is no the sole culprit though, even "I'm moare medieval than u" Harn as a pantheon that looks and sound like a supplement for Pokethulhu.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1032426I think the real problem IFAIC is that there really isn't such a thing as 'light' armor, but gamers want it for their rogues and rangers and the like. So that, to me, is the fundamental realism-vs.-genre issue.

In the medieval era, maybe not. In earlier ones, it was called leaving out the body armour, and just relying on your helmet and shield.

If you legit just don't care or don't think your audience would care you could still at least do a little something like call it say; light, medium, heavy and full and give some historical examples you think would fit into each.

It doesn't work for every system, but D&D's AC as a bypass check (instead of damage absorbtion) works really well with a light/medium/heavy armor system since it can refer to coverage. Light is a breastplate, medium is half-plate, heavy is munitions armor (3/4 Plate) and Full is a Full Plate Harness. If running something in an earlier medieval period you could swap it out for gambeson, mail shirt, mail hauberk and full coverage in chain (all presumably with a helmet) versus the less effective weapons of the day (you didn't need plate piercing weapons until there was plate to pierce... it's always been an arms race).

Also, I've never met anyone who's ever learned about brigandine (which given that it sounds like brigand is a much cooler name than the aforementioned gambeson is; evoking images of rough highwaymen and scoundrels) who continues to think studded leather is cool by comparison and "concealed steel plates riveted into a leather vest or coat" is every bit as short as "leather armor covered in metal studs for added protection" is.

It's antecedent the Coat of Plates would also be a good alternative since half its description is right there in its name.

As to the longsword, I have to at least give later editions of D&D credit for adding the versatile property to them so that their damage pops up to a respectable two-handed weapon when wielded as such (the longsword was truthfully a hand-and-a-half sword... best wielded in two hands, but useable in one hand if necessary... of which the bastard sword was just one example).

Now if only they'd add a proper straight-bladed Messer to the sword list.

Quote from: kobayashi;1032444The lame gods and pantheons which always look and sound like a fourth-grader attempt at remembering greek and roman lore but mixed them with a Naruto episode. D&D is no the sole culprit though, even "I'm moare medieval than u" Harn as a pantheon that looks and sound like a supplement for Pokethulhu.

Let me add to that...

A) everyone on the entire planet worshiping the same gods by the same names when even small historical empires couldn't even get everyone worshipping the same gods and, even when they kind of could, couldn't get them to use the same names for them.

B) Not really treating their pantheons like pantheons, but as a collection of invididual gods that you choose one from to worship exclusively.

-and-

C) Nearly every setting being another pantheon instead of say, a world with only animist beliefs or a monotheistic God or, maybe like the real world where there's a variety of different religions each with an explanation for their supernatural gifts while over in the corner the atheist wizard grumps that you're going to blow yourself up using arcane magic by screaming at sky gods instead of learning to channel it properly.

Nope... new setting, new set of gods each with a portfolio to match those available in the core book's default setting because that's what there's rules for and they don't feel like inventing their own.

Something to add about D&D settings that I got through my interest in anime and manga. Japanese interest in Western Fantasy comes almost entirely from D&D with its basis being Record of Lodoss War which came out in 1988. Since then, millions of anime and manga have been made based upon the D&D vision of medieval fantasy. Today, it is perfectly acceptable to find things in that media like entrances to megadungeons in the center of a town built up around the entrance to cater to adventurer's and fleece them of their wealth as they return (or don't). Adventurer is considered a job like almost any other, even if it is more dangerous than most.

You would not have gotten to that point if Japanese interest in Western Fantasy began with say Runequest or Le Morte de Arthur. D&D and its settings are their own unique thing and are fun to play because of it.

Quote from: Chris24601;1032459If you legit just don't care or don't think your audience would care you could still at least do a little something like call it say; light, medium, heavy and full and give some historical examples you think would fit into each.

It doesn't work for every system, but D&D's AC as a bypass check (instead of damage absorbtion) works really well with a light/medium/heavy armor system since it can refer to coverage. Light is a breastplate, medium is half-plate, heavy is munitions armor (3/4 Plate) and Full is a Full Plate Harness. If running something in an earlier medieval period you could swap it out for gambeson, mail shirt, mail hauberk and full coverage in chain (all presumably with a helmet) versus the less effective weapons of the day (you didn't need plate piercing weapons until there was plate to pierce... it's always been an arms race).

Oh, to be sure, they could. I notice in the last few editions, there are always only about 3-4 types of armor that end up being used after a certain point anyways (and in the TSR era it was 'as heavy as possible, unless you were in a naval-heavy adventure, or found a set of +5 ringmail or the like'). They could certainly go with maybe light, medium, semi-heavy, and heavy, and then just list examples that might qualify for each.

This does, however, create confusion where there used to be straightforward (if historically specious) answers. And that probably alienates more than it pleases. Again, I am not saying this is good or bad, merely acknowledging that someone like you (and myself, I would prefer that as well) are not the primary audience, but rather the casual gamer who just wants to write down what kind of armor they have and do not especially care about the historical realism.

QuoteAlso, I've never met anyone who's ever learned about brigandine (which given that it sounds like brigand is a much cooler name than the aforementioned gambeson is; evoking images of rough highwaymen and scoundrels) who continues to think studded leather is cool by comparison and "concealed steel plates riveted into a leather vest or coat" is every bit as short as "leather armor covered in metal studs for added protection" is.

It's antecedent the Coat of Plates would also be a good alternative since half its description is right there in its name.

Those are great historical 'pseudo-light' armors (wouldn't want to swim in either, and certainly would never mistake someone in coat of plates for an unarmored noncombatant, which I think is part of what people want out of 'light' armor). I use them in my own campaigns (coat of plate replacing studded, and brigandine for scale).

QuoteAs to the longsword, I have to at least give later editions of D&D credit for adding the versatile property to them so that their damage pops up to a respectable two-handed weapon when wielded as such (the longsword was truthfully a hand-and-a-half sword... best wielded in two hands, but useable in one hand if necessary... of which the bastard sword was just one example).

Now if only they'd add a proper straight-bladed Messer to the sword list.

I would agree on the Messer-- for a historical style game targeted towards medievally-knowledgeable adults. I can only imagine the confusion created at the table of the 10-year olds picking up the book and having to choose between "sword, gladius; sword, messer; sword, arming; sword, long; sword; zweihander." My group stuck with BECMI until I was 14, but we looked at AD&D, and I think the only mistakes we made was pronouncing scimitar 'skim-itar' and thinking the glaive was something from Krull (but then, I think we just looked at the polearms and thought, "gibberish I'm okay with not understanding."

Quote from: kobayashi;1032444The lame gods and pantheons which always look and sound like a fourth-grader attempt at remembering greek and roman lore but mixed them with a Naruto episode. D&D is no the sole culprit though, even "I'm moare medieval than u" Harn as a pantheon that looks and sound like a supplement for Pokethulhu.

This can bother me too, but I'm not going to throw any stones in my glass house.  Because I care about some plausibility and cultural variety in my gods right up until I get enough to satisfy me, and then I don't anymore.  Since I'm always more picky than the players, none of them particularly notice the holes left in the deity schemes, but I'm sure people in other groups, and certainly other GMs, would find what I do not much better than the bog-standard stuff.  

It does bother me a little that on questions like that, so much of the published stuff makes the same lazy GM choices.  If each product had one or two different things where the author cared to display some nuance, then I could appreciate the lazy out in the other areas.

The funniest thing about the Messer to me is everyone knows exactly what it is as soon as they see one, they just didn't know they were called that (to make matters worse, since 3e D&D has used a Messer-type design to represent an Elven-style Longsword which just... NO!). Regardless of your feelings on quantity of interior artwork, weapons and armor really DO benefit in excess of the art costs from having them depicted. Being able to see a Short sword (Seax), Messer, Arming Sword (though I use Sidesword just because it conveys the idea of it being a sidearm rather than your primary weapon from its name alone and because it was an intermediary step between the Arming Sword and Rapier so stat-wise it can reasonably sub in for both), Longsword, and Greatsword (Zweihander being too specific type for my tastes) helps a lot; as does seeing different examples of the armor used.

Personally, I'm NOT a huge fan of using period names for weapons because when you actually translate the names using the language of the time and place they were used in they almost always end up just being that language's words for 'spear, sword, big sword, axe, big axe, axe on a pole, etc.' So generally I prefer simple descriptive names over fancier ones unless the fancy one is so ubiquitously used that everyone knows what it is already. It allows your weapon list to cover a lot more ground with a lot fewer entries that way.

Quote from: Chris24601;1032507they almost always end up just being that language's words for 'spear, sword, big sword, axe, big axe, axe on a pole, spoon with ears from Bohemia, etc.'

FTFY

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1032426At least from their goals. 'Studded leather' sounds cool.

Also is a little easier to argue that it really doesn't qualify as "metal armor," whereas a brigandine...?

Quote from: Chris24601;1032466Let me add to that...

A) everyone on the entire planet worshiping the same gods by the same names when even small historical empires couldn't even get everyone worshipping the same gods and, even when they kind of could, couldn't get them to use the same names for them.

See, this doesn't bug me because the real world didn't have the issue of Mars literally showing up and saying "Pay attention you chuckleheads: my name is NOT Ares. It's Mars."

On the other hand, when little Timmy, 10 year old son of King John in the second year of his reign, stumbles upon a magic ring in the treasure room of the castle and says "I wish grandpa were still alive"...Does John abdicate, or what?

Bucolic, unwalled hamlets of thatched huts rather than stone houses inside palisades.

Foppish nobles who don't like to get their hands dirty but are somehow still in charge, instead of all being character-classed monster slayers themselves.

Innkeepers who look at heavily armed bands of landless mercenaries with gold to burn, and put on a gruff voice and give them crap instead of bowing and scraping (and raising prices).

Quote from: JeremyR;1031583Burying the dead.  It makes no sense at all for that to happen in a D&D world. They should cremate.

I mean, people know the gods are real, what happens after death and so the body is not important for religious purposes. And most importantly, undead exist. Even low level undead is dangerous, much less the higher types that can reproduce. So why let it even get started by burying bodies?

My head-canon has long been that a necromancer can always get undead.  If the body is burned, there's some kind of undead cloud of ash and sparks that can be raised.  If the body is disintegrated you can call back it's ghost.  Skeletons and zombies are then the least of all possible evils, and best contained by a consecrated graveyard.  Granted this is not explicitly supported by the monster manual, but the fix is easy.

Quote from: Haffrung;1031613Settlement patterns that are closer to the American West in density than medieval Europe, often with 15 or 20 miles between settlements. In medieval France of England, a 30 mile by 30 mile area would have more than a dozen villages, several towns, and a city or two. If your settlements is two days walk from the next closest settlement, you've got a god-forsaken backwater, not a bustling medieval town with taverns and other signs of healthy commerce.

There are analyses of the first D&D settings as being closer to either the American wild west or a literal post-apocalyptic wasteland than to a true medieval society.  (It's fair to point out the settings themselves don't make this claim.)

Quote from: Skepticultist;1031648Shops.  Particularly the "General Store" sort of shop that sells a wide variety of adventuring gear.  In a real medieval society, you did not have shops, you had craftsmen whom you bought from directly.  Nobody would have a shop full of swords -- you'd commission one from a smith with experience making blades.  If you wanted a ladder, you didn't go to the general store and buy a ladder, you either built it yourself or you commissioned a woodworker to build you one.  The standard adventurer's shop just feels incredibly video gamey to me.

I feel your pain.  It's not even that I want or expect to play out shopping, you can write down your purchases on your character sheet just as quickly, but it would be nice to have the baseline be something that doesn't yank me into the modern world.

Speaking of videogamey, a subset of the shop problem is blacksmiths selling magic swords and armor.  As far as I can tell that started in video games as an artifact of item types (blacksmiths sell swords, so everything of type "sword" gets bought and sold at the blacksmith), and uneducated gamers copied it over.  But keeping swords in stock to sell to random passersby isn't what a village blacksmith does to begin with, much less buying and selling magic swords.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1031660Magic shops.

I actually do assume that magic items are bought and sold from time to time.  It's just... not in stores, and not kept on shelves.  It's the kind of thing arranged over time between wealthy nobles and merchants.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1031820I really hate the whole "menagerie of freaks" party that's become so common. My ideal party is two humans and two demihumans, not cat-person, turtle-person, dragon-person, and devil-person.

I had an ambition at one time to start a D&D campaign with a session of Dawn of Worlds to build the map and history (then probably go away for a month to prep more).  So that if players wanted to play tieflings, cat-people and winged humans they could damn well put tieflings, cat-people and winged humans down on the map before making their characters, and I and they would know where these things came from, instead of being circus freaks in human-land.

I shelved the idea for unrelated reasons, but I now suspect a couple of my likely players would then want to play elves, dwarves or humans, whatever wasn't placed in Dawn of Worlds.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1032426I think the real problem IFAIC is that there really isn't such a thing as 'light' armor, but gamers want it for their rogues and rangers and the like. So that, to me, is the fundamental realism-vs.-genre issue.

The real issue is that armour is a dodge bonus.  And it's the only scaling Hit Point defense mechanism.  Which is a binary option, either you take all the damage rolled, or you take none.  So if you're not wearing armour, your AC will never increase, and at higher levels in older editions, you need that protection, or the math will murder characters.  It's a bad design, to be perfectly honest, but for most people it doesn't matter because they see it working.

Quote from: Dave R;1032592Bucolic, unwalled hamlets of thatched huts rather than stone houses inside palisades.

Foppish nobles who don't like to get their hands dirty but are somehow still in charge, instead of all being character-classed monster slayers themselves.

Innkeepers who look at heavily armed bands of landless mercenaries with gold to burn, and put on a gruff voice and give them crap instead of bowing and scraping (and raising prices).

The first one in typical-D&D-land particularly bugs me, so I've taken to drawing palisades round the typical unwalled villages you find in most D&D adventures. If there are isolated farmhouses then they resemble at least Scottish border farms, with stone walls and defended doors (narrow steps up, spear holes etc), not some wattle & daub house as you might see in a Kentish medieval village. I tend to make a point of noting the locals' defences, eg the lowly shepherds IMC are typically skilled slingers backed up by massive Ghinarian shep-hounds, able to deal with typical daytime threats to the flock. And they retire at night behind the walled palisades when the goblins & wolves & gnolls come out to play. :)

Foppish nobles - agree, I occasionally have inept nobles, who quite often come to a sticky end, but tough fighters are normative.

Gruff Innkeepers - have not really seen this in published settings, sounds more like a GMing fail. Mine tend to be friendly or obsequious even when plotting to drug the PCs and sacrifice them to the Dark God. :D

Quote from: Doom;1032516See, this doesn't bug me because the real world didn't have the issue of Mars literally showing up and saying "Pay attention you chuckleheads: my name is NOT Ares. It's Mars."

That is why I prefer an Eberron-style agnostic setting where clerics get their power from gods who might not exist. If characters decide to visit heaven (http://torar.wikia.com/wiki/Firmament) and talk to the gods in order to settle a heresy dispute, the gods end up being flawed individuals who themselves do not know which is right because they are not the source of good (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma).

Right now I am trying to compromise and mix this with a Stormbringer-style cosmic balance where the alignments are limited to law, chaos and neutrality and good/evil is a matter of extremes. As others have said previously, neutrality works best when it includes human norms and law/chaos works best as hostile extremes. The creative parts of law/chaos are allied with neutrality, whereas the destructive parts constitute the factions fought in the game world. The Elric multiverse has a surprisingly nuanced portrayal of the three sides (http://stormbringer.wikia.com/wiki/Lords_of_the_Higher_Worlds), to the point that I have identified at least six distinct sub-factions. On top of that I am trying to work in the Great Old Ones (http://www.departmentv.net/2014/05/gods/) to justify aboleths and mind flayers and beholders since the Elric mythos never accounted for those sorts of things (even though, oddly enough, it did at one point introduce a fourth force of oblivion called "Limbo" to represent what would happen if imbalance reigned).

Quote from: Doom;1032516On the other hand, when little Timmy, 10 year old son of King John in the second year of his reign, stumbles upon a magic ring in the treasure room of the castle and says "I wish grandpa were still alive"...Does John abdicate, or what?

I have yet to figure out a solution to this problem, but according to most editions I am familiar with revival spells cannot reverse death by old age. This does not solve the problem completely but it does mean that succession will not diverse too much since kings still die permanently of old age. Honestly, magic has huge consequences for world building and one really needs to build the world around the magic from the start or provide really complicated reasons why magic does not upset the status quo. If magic is common then the setting will turn into some kind of magic technology scifi setting, and if it is rare then the magic-users will probably take over since there are few who can challenge them. Of course this also depends on how powerful and controllable the magic is as well.

Quote from: Dave R;1032592There are analyses of the first D&D settings as being closer to either the American wild west or a literal post-apocalyptic wasteland than to a true medieval society.  (It's fair to point out the settings themselves don't make this claim.)

This is what I like the most, to the point where my setting is a fantasy western (http://dungeonsmaster.com/2012/04/dd-the-final-frontier/) with crashed alien space ships loosely adapted from the Wilderlands of High Fantasy. (https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Wilderlands_of_High_Fantasy) I probably take cues from Wizard of Oz (http://sorcerersskull.blogspot.com/2017/04/ozian-d.html) too, like talking animals and stuff. It sets the setting apart from typical Tolkien clones and the untamed wild west stereotype is more conducive to adventuring than a pseudo-Europe where everything is already mapped out. Honestly, it never made much sense to me how adventuring is possible in a world that is already mapped out.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1032624I have yet to figure out a solution to this problem, but according to most editions I am familiar with revival spells cannot reverse death by old age. This does not solve the problem completely but it does mean that succession will not diverse too much since kings still die permanently of old age. Honestly, magic has huge consequences for world building and one really needs to build the world around the magic from the start or provide really complicated reasons why magic does not upset the status quo. If magic is common then the setting will turn into some kind of magic technology scifi setting, and if it is rare then the magic-users will probably take over since there are few who can challenge them. Of course this also depends on how powerful and controllable the magic is as well.

I would think society would adapt.  It's not as if "abdication" was never heard of, forced or otherwise.  Given known but not 100% reliable resurrection magic, I would expect that the succession rules would normally account for that.  Could be a "without blemish" thing, where having once died is considered a blemish.  The former king is no longer eligible to be king, even though he is now up and walking around again.  Or it could be a timeframe.  The heir is regent for a year and a day to see if anyone can return the old king, otherwise the rule passes.  Or any number of other variations.  

The various rules for succession, in various places and times, exist for a reason.  It's not always a reason that makes sense to us, but they didn't just make up rules for the hell of it.  Change the facts on the ground, and the rules will change with them.

Quoteand if it is rare then the magic-users will probably take over since there are few who can challenge them.

In a typical D&D setting, a wizard is never getting powerful enough to case Fireball unless he partners with a warrior who simultaneously becomes powerful enough to shrug off a Fireball, then murder the offending wizard without much effort.

I think it is something of a mistake that magic-users and warriors are no longer almost equally dependent on finding powerful items.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1032627In a typical D&D setting, a wizard is never getting powerful enough to case Fireball unless he partners with a warrior who simultaneously becomes powerful enough to shrug off a Fireball, then murder the offending wizard without much effort.

I think it is something of a mistake that magic-users and warriors are no longer almost equally dependent on finding powerful items.

I've been mulling this one over since you posted it. I think there are issues with the wizard/fighter balance. While 5e fixed the whole 'a fighter is equivalent to one of the druid's class features' level of imbalance, it still isn't the old era where fighters shrugged off all spells at an insane capacity and could undoubtedly cream a wizard in a 1:1 fight (much of the time). OTOH, BITD, much of a fighter's power did come from the loot table (especially pre-rogues, when for the most part all those fancy swords with X/day powers were their providence alone). How much those items really affected the game depended on exactly how often they showed up.

In 5e, I guess the fighter is more dependent on magic items to do their job than a wizard is, since there are so many monsters resistant to non-magic weapons, but a wizard with a wand of fireballs is probably giggling like a madman just as much as the fighter that finds a flametongue sword. Particularly in this case where we are talking about whether or not the magic-users will probably take over, I don't know how much I see the fighter being left at the wayside.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1032630I've been mulling this one over since you posted it. I think there are issues with the wizard/fighter balance. While 5e fixed the whole 'a fighter is equivalent to one of the druid's class features' level of imbalance, it still isn't the old era where fighters shrugged off all spells at an insane capacity and could undoubtedly cream a wizard in a 1:1 fight (much of the time). OTOH, BITD, much of a fighter's power did come from the loot table (especially pre-rogues, when for the most part all those fancy swords with X/day powers were their providence alone). How much those items really affected the game depended on exactly how often they showed up.

   I am an Unclean Middle/New School gamer, but I think in this context, 'finding powerful items' includes spellbooks, which makes the magic-users more dependent on loot in their own way. (And the cleric and druid spell lists were much more tightly curated back in those days than now.)

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1032627In a typical D&D setting, a wizard is never getting powerful enough to case Fireball unless he partners with a warrior who simultaneously becomes powerful enough to shrug off a Fireball, then murder the offending wizard without much effort.

I think it is something of a mistake that magic-users and warriors are no longer almost equally dependent on finding powerful items.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1032630I've been mulling this one over since you posted it. I think there are issues with the wizard/fighter balance. While 5e fixed the whole 'a fighter is equivalent to one of the druid's class features' level of imbalance, it still isn't the old era where fighters shrugged off all spells at an insane capacity and could undoubtedly cream a wizard in a 1:1 fight (much of the time). OTOH, BITD, much of a fighter's power did come from the loot table (especially pre-rogues, when for the most part all those fancy swords with X/day powers were their providence alone). How much those items really affected the game depended on exactly how often they showed up.

In 5e, I guess the fighter is more dependent on magic items to do their job than a wizard is, since there are so many monsters resistant to non-magic weapons, but a wizard with a wand of fireballs is probably giggling like a madman just as much as the fighter that finds a flametongue sword. Particularly in this case where we are talking about whether or not the magic-users will probably take over, I don't know how much I see the fighter being left at the wayside.

That sort of thing only happens in D&D. Other fiction generally portrays magic and martial arts in a completely different manner. There are numerous fairy tales of witches or wizards taking over a kingdom only to die with embarrassing ease. In The Son of Seven Queens, the evil enchantress is simply executed. In Snow White, the evil queen is danced to death in red iron shoes. In the Arthurian mythos, Merlin (who put Arthur on the throne in the first place) is turned into a tree by his girlfriend/apprentice. Other times the magicians are stupid or gullible and tricked into offing themselves. In Puss in Boots the cat tricks an ogre mage into becoming a mouse and eats him, then claims the ogre's wealth and gives it to his owner. In Hansel and Gretel the children trick the child-eating witch and shove her into an oven. In pulp fiction, Conan the Barbarian regularly defeats wizards in combat even though he does not operate by D&D rules.

In fact, other fiction regularly portrays fighters (or other non-magic people) defeating giant monsters single-handedly, solving puzzles, outwitting evil wizards and performing physical feats impossible in reality. None of those things are possible in D&D when other equally impossible things are. Even if fighters can single-handedly defeat whole armies, they still cannot run up a wall or damage anything immune to non-magic weapons.

Quote from: Chris24601;1032190It's like saying you wrote a serious time travel story while including T-Rexes that are cold blooded, stand upright, drag their tails and don't have feathers

That sounds like a great plot hook to me. Why are the T-Rexes so far from anything we've been able to reconstruct?

One thing that infuriates me is when people reject things that, by the rules, should be fairly obvious. A first level cleric can, at will, stabilize even the most badly injured individual, purify fairly large amounts of food and water, and create modest amounts of clean drinking water, or instead of that, create temporary non-fuel-burning light sources. He's the go-to guy for emergency medicine and for night-time or bad weather search and rescue. "But that doesn't fit the setting! Clerics wouldn't treat their gods' gifts of grace so casually!" Why not? Their gods are the ones who allow such use, why would their priests be reluctant to use them when applicable? This isn't the (common perception of the) medieval Church, where everything bad was your own fault for being sinful. In a setting in which some gods are genuinely evil, the idea that maybe, just maybe, some evils are actually not the victim's fault could actually have some currency.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1032630I've been mulling this one over since you posted it. I think there are issues with the wizard/fighter balance. While 5e fixed the whole 'a fighter is equivalent to one of the druid's class features' level of imbalance, it still isn't the old era where fighters shrugged off all spells at an insane capacity and could undoubtedly cream a wizard in a 1:1 fight (much of the time). OTOH, BITD, much of a fighter's power did come from the loot table (especially pre-rogues, when for the most part all those fancy swords with X/day powers were their providence alone). How much those items really affected the game depended on exactly how often they showed up.

In 5e, I guess the fighter is more dependent on magic items to do their job than a wizard is, since there are so many monsters resistant to non-magic weapons, but a wizard with a wand of fireballs is probably giggling like a madman just as much as the fighter that finds a flametongue sword. Particularly in this case where we are talking about whether or not the magic-users will probably take over, I don't know how much I see the fighter being left at the wayside.

I don't know about higher levels, because some of those upper level spells have always been game changers.  But up through about level 9, I think we are almost to something reasonable in current 5E.  A 1:1 confrontation between fighter and wizard has always been highly situational, and of course magic enters into that.  Invisibility and Fly spells make a big difference, unless the fighter has a few potions or something similar to compensate.  

However, I think the wizard now can probably afford, at most, one mistake.  Let the fighter get up in his grill one time, and it's all but over.  That extra attack at 5th level is nasty.  A reasonably smart fighter going after that wizard is going to ditch the shield and use an off-hand weapon--which while not nearly as powerful as in some editions, doesn't carry any penalties either.  It's just a little gravy when the fighter isn't using second wind.  Or the fighter is already using a two-handed weapon for extra damage (and when something like a long sword, that's a good move in this situation.)  And right when the wizard thinks that he survived the barrage, the fighter uses Action Surge to do all those attacks again.  Throw any kind of special magic weapon on top of that, and we are talking probably "dead wizard" instead of "seriously hurt wizard trying anything to get out of longbow range as soon as possible."  The wizard has more hit points than early D&D, but no way to artificially boost it as with 3E.  Having a great Con score is going to come at the expense of Dex, which isn't going to help matters any.

Of course, most wizards are going to do everything in their power to avoid getting into that situation, which is why the imbalance exists.  It is mainly their room for error that has narrowed.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1032633That sort of thing only happens in D&D. Other fiction generally portrays magic and martial arts in a completely different manner. There are numerous fairy tales of witches or wizards taking over a kingdom only to die with embarrassing ease. In The Son of Seven Queens, the evil enchantress is simply executed. In Snow White, the evil queen is danced to death in red iron shoes. In the Arthurian mythos, Merlin (who put Arthur on the throne in the first place) is turned into a tree by his girlfriend/apprentice. Other times the magicians are stupid or gullible and tricked into offing themselves. In Puss in Boots the cat tricks an ogre mage into becoming a mouse and eats him, then claims the ogre's wealth and gives it to his owner. In Hansel and Gretel the children trick the child-eating witch and shove her into an oven. In pulp fiction, Conan the Barbarian regularly defeats wizards in combat even though he does not operate by D&D rules.

In fact, other fiction regularly portrays fighters (or other non-magic people) defeating giant monsters single-handedly, solving puzzles, outwitting evil wizards and performing physical feats impossible in reality. None of those things are possible in D&D when other equally impossible things are. Even if fighters can single-handedly defeat whole armies, they still cannot run up a wall or damage anything immune to non-magic weapons.

This is a true statement whose relevance to the subject I'm not grasping. D&D (and most-with-notable-exceptions fantasy RPGs) is exceptional in that it expects both (at least semi-) heroic mortal, martial characters, as well as break-the-normal-rules-of-the-universe wizards to coexist within an adventuring party and have some kind of parity (not defined the same in different editions, but such that all players don't fight over who has to be X and/or who gets to be Y). This makes it systematically different than genre fiction (be it pulp, myth, or fairy tale), where the wizard is easily fooled in to highlight the singular non-magical (but oh so clever) hero.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1032630I've been mulling this one over since you posted it. I think there are issues with the wizard/fighter balance. While 5e fixed the whole 'a fighter is equivalent to one of the druid's class features' level of imbalance, it still isn't the old era where fighters shrugged off all spells at an insane capacity and could undoubtedly cream a wizard in a 1:1 fight (much of the time).

Well, in both 5e and 1e, high-level duels come down to "Does the wizard have Forcecage prepared, and did he win initiative?" At most stages of the game, a Fighter with a reasonably level-appropriate magic weapon will destroy a same-level wizard with an Action Surge. And IMO Indomitable should have been gaining proficiency in the other key saves...but it is what it is.

What 5e really fixed was wizards taking over combat at high levels. You gotta get rid of enemy hp, and nobody puts out hurt or soaks it up like a warrior class.

QuoteOTOH, BITD, much of a fighter's power did come from the loot table

So did a wizard's. Probably the biggest change WotC made was taking the discovery of spells completely out of the DM's hands, which is still around and still an issue.

Quotea wizard with a wand of fireballs is probably giggling like a madman just as much as the fighter that finds a flametongue sword

Flametongue is ridiculous. I gave one of those out once...it's nuts. I also never give out 5e-style wands because the new casting system combined with player-chosen spells at level up time makes them pretty superfluous.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1032639This is a true statement whose relevance to the subject I'm not grasping. D&D (and most-with-notable-exceptions fantasy RPGs) is exceptional in that it expects both (at least semi-) heroic mortal, martial characters, as well as break-the-normal-rules-of-the-universe wizards to coexist within an adventuring party and have some kind of parity (not defined the same in different editions, but such that all players don't fight over who has to be X and/or who gets to be Y). This makes it systematically different than genre fiction (be it pulp, myth, or fairy tale), where the wizard is easily fooled in to highlight the singular non-magical (but oh so clever) hero.

My pet peeve is that wizards are allowed to replicate the spells of every genre fictional wizard and more, yet fighters are NOT allowed to emulate the feats of every genre fictional fighter, such as King Arthur (https://www.reddit.com/r/respectthreads/comments/895oh2/respect_king_arthur_pendragon_arthurian_myths/), Gilgamesh (https://www.reddit.com/r/respectthreads/comments/6av0e0/respect_gilgamesh_the_epic_of_gilgamesh/), Cú Chulainn (https://www.reddit.com/r/respectthreads/comments/665h1q/respect_the_hound_of_culann_c%C3%BA_chulainn_the/), Beowulf (https://www.reddit.com/r/respectthreads/comments/2ff348/respect_beowulf/), and more.

I know people criticize Tome of Battle for being too anime, but these 100% Western heroes performed equally absurd stunts. Cú Chulainn jumped on darts being thrown at him, Beowulf chopped a dragon in half, King Arthur chopped a rider and his horse in half, and Gilgamesh never slept.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1032642What 5e really fixed was wizards taking over combat at high levels. You gotta get rid of enemy hp, and nobody puts out hurt or soaks it up like a warrior class.

Is that a good solution? I was under the impression that magic-users render the martials superfluous (http://librarians-and-leviathans.blogspot.com/2015/04/power-and-utility-for-wizards-and.html).

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1032650My pet peeve is that wizards are allowed to replicate the spells of every genre fictional wizard and more, yet fighters are NOT allowed to emulate the feats of every genre fictional fighter, such as King Arthur, Gilgamesh, Cú Chulainn, Beowulf, and more.

I know people criticize Tome of Battle for being too anime, but these 100% Western heroes performed equally absurd stunts. Cú Chulainn jumped on darts being thrown at him, Beowulf chopped a dragon in half, King Arthur chopped a rider and his horse in half, and Gilgamesh never slept.

Got it! Sorry, I must be slow today. I will say that you are not wrong. Each edition has tried its' own fix. I think the solution that would best address this would be to make two discrete games-- one where warriors act fairly similar to the Robin Hoods of the genre but the wizards had to suffice with slow, unreliable, or miniscule impact magic and a separate one where warriors were chopping everything in half while wizards were re-writing the rules. Given that hundreds of RPGs (including D&D 4e) have come along to challenge the D&D status quo, this appears not to be a solution that will work (at least for what I will call the 'D&D base.' For everyone else, the problem was solved decades ago). The other option is to make it such that when the wizard actually hits the levels where they are rewriting the rules, the fighter is commanding armies and/or being able to single-handedly take them on. Various editions of D&D have done this, to varying levels of success.

 

QuoteIs that a good solution? I was under the impression that magic-users render the martials superfluous (http://librarians-and-leviathans.blogspot.com/2015/04/power-and-utility-for-wizards-and.html).

In a word, no. In 5e, a party never doesn't need martial classes. Nor does a spellcaster ever replace them. If you came away from 4e thinking it was the greatest thing ever and it solved all of D&D's problems and you just don't understand why everyone doesn't agree, I am sure 5e looks like more of the same old stuff we just escaped and why are we backsliding? But no, fighters are not rendered superfluous, nor rogues. There are still highly specific scenarios that a wizard can address that a martial without appropriate magic items (I guess effectively making them part magic user) literally can't resolve (usually problems up in the air that can't be solved by shooting them with arrows, and/or magic spells like curse and geas and the like that can only be resolved by another spell), and that's a legitimate criticism. I've only skimmed/started on this Librarians and Leviathans guy's article. It's a far cry more thought out than most of the 'martials can't have nice things' crowd, but it is still very white-room abstract and sets bizarre goalposts ("A level twenty fighter cannot kill a CR2 thug with a single critical hit"... Okay, that's true. Exactly what does that prove?). The article isn't explicitly wrong, certainly not the point about D&D trying to mash pulp and epic fantasy together, and that it's spellcasters who receive most of the epic, but to use that to conclude that 5e spellcasters make martials superfluous is... I guess just a case of theory overshooting reality.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1031569Name something that's very common to find in a D&D setting that you really don't care for. And, if explanation is needed, why.

The rules. They're usually a poor fit.

Quote from: Whitewings;1032637One thing that infuriates me is when people reject things that, by the rules, should be fairly obvious. A first level cleric can, at will, stabilize even the most badly injured individual, purify fairly large amounts of food and water, and create modest amounts of clean drinking water, or instead of that, create temporary non-fuel-burning light sources. He's the go-to guy for emergency medicine and for night-time or bad weather search and rescue. "But that doesn't fit the setting! Clerics wouldn't treat their gods' gifts of grace so casually!" Why not? Their gods are the ones who allow such use, why would their priests be reluctant to use them when applicable? This isn't the (common perception of the) medieval Church, where everything bad was your own fault for being sinful. In a setting in which some gods are genuinely evil, the idea that maybe, just maybe, some evils are actually not the victim's fault could actually have some currency.

Furthermore, in most D&D settings the gods get their power from the number of worshipers they have. What gets you worshipers faster? platitudes and non-intervention or performing honest to god (heh) miracles that aid the common people?

If I were a god in most D&D settings I'd be handing out the "help the common man" spells to my clerics like candy and punishing the clerics who didn't use them at every opportunity to grow my congregations.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1032650Is that a good solution? I was under the impression that magic-users render the martials superfluous (http://librarians-and-leviathans.blogspot.com/2015/04/power-and-utility-for-wizards-and.html).

You know how sometimes you come across an article where the author clearly had never played the game? This is one of them.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1032650Is that a good solution? I was under the impression that magic-users render the martials superfluous (http://librarians-and-leviathans.blogspot.com/2015/04/power-and-utility-for-wizards-and.html).

No, IME a 5e full caster does not render martial PCs superfluous even up in Epic Tier (17-20). The Barbarian class especially stacks up well at very high level; Rogue I think to a lesser extent. I built a BBEG as a level 20 Eldritch Knight, my players saw the stats and complained that he's unbeatable! :D I have one group that finished up with level 17 Cleric, level 18 Druid, and level 18 Barbarian; the Barbarian definitely did not feel superfluous. High level Shadow Monk also very powerful.

From your link:

A level twenty fighter cannot kill a CR2 thug with a single critical hit without some magical gear or spell to boost damage

A stupid criticism when the F20 gets at least 4 attacks/round and can get 8/round twice before short resting, while usually having a greatly superior AC to the Wizard IME. Martials do benefit from having magic weapons, but in 5e powerful magic weapons are cheap & plentiful unless you run a purposely low-magic game. An F20 with flametongue sword +2d6 dmg does enormous DPR - and easily hits anything in the MM, whereas magic resistance, legendary saves et al make the W20's work much harder than in 3e/PF.

When GMing high level NPC caster vs high level PC warriors, almost always the optimum action is to teleport/d-door away immediately. Even with all allowed buff spells up the caster can't survive for long anywhere near a high level martial PC. This is basically the same as Classic D&D, without the 20d6 fireballs vs 70 hp high level Fighters.

At 5 hit dice, 2 attacks per round, and easily gained advantage, a Thug is approximately equal to a weak 5th-level character. Even then, he'll last barely more than a round against 5th-level fighter. Furthermore, a CR-appropriate encounter  (we're talking "medium" encounter, which in 5e terms means nobody will die unless you're stupid or very unlucky) typically involves doing enough damage in 1 round to knock a wizard unconscious, whether solo  or group monsters.  Wizards are just extremely easy to kill across all levels.  I have frequently seen them go down to a dragon's opening breath attack.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1032627In a typical D&D setting, a wizard is never getting powerful enough to case Fireball unless he partners with a warrior who simultaneously becomes powerful enough to shrug off a Fireball, then murder the offending wizard without much effort.

Sadly, this hasn't been true since late AD&D 2e and early 3.x and on.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1032627I think it is something of a mistake that magic-users and warriors are no longer almost equally dependent on finding powerful items.

I don't know of earlier editions, but I know that in 2e and later, Wizards didn't.  To be fair, that divide jumped exponentially in 3.x.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1032650My pet peeve is that wizards are allowed to replicate the spells of every genre fictional wizard and more, yet fighters are NOT allowed to emulate the feats of every genre fictional fighter, such as King Arthur (https://www.reddit.com/r/respectthreads/comments/895oh2/respect_king_arthur_pendragon_arthurian_myths/), Gilgamesh (https://www.reddit.com/r/respectthreads/comments/6av0e0/respect_gilgamesh_the_epic_of_gilgamesh/), Cú Chulainn (https://www.reddit.com/r/respectthreads/comments/665h1q/respect_the_hound_of_culann_c%C3%BA_chulainn_the/), Beowulf (https://www.reddit.com/r/respectthreads/comments/2ff348/respect_beowulf/), and more.

I know people criticize Tome of Battle for being too anime, but these 100% Western heroes performed equally absurd stunts. Cú Chulainn jumped on darts being thrown at him, Beowulf chopped a dragon in half, King Arthur chopped a rider and his horse in half, and Gilgamesh never slept.

I criticize Tome of Battle: Book of 9 Swords for having too limited options to making 'Fighter' types impressive.  Honestly, Iron Heart (I think that's the name) was the most straightforward of them.  But none, absolutely none, allowed to be superhuman, which is the primary thing that a lot of fighting heroes are INCREDIBLY strong.  D&D has never let anyone be anything close.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1032650Is that a good solution? I was under the impression that magic-users render the martials superfluous (http://librarians-and-leviathans.blogspot.com/2015/04/power-and-utility-for-wizards-and.html).

Personal experience suggest that it's mostly true.  Shape shifter Druids, Life Clerics, Bards all make good back up Fighting men.  While the Casters (typically Wizard) is the real 'damage' dealer.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1032687At 5 hit dice, 2 attacks per round, and easily gained advantage, a Thug is approximately equal to a weak 5th-level character. Even then, he'll last barely more than a round against 5th-level fighter. Furthermore, a CR-appropriate encounter  (we're talking "medium" encounter, which in 5e terms means nobody will die unless you're stupid or very unlucky) typically involves doing enough damage in 1 round to knock a wizard unconscious, whether solo  or group monsters.  Wizards are just extremely easy to kill across all levels.  I have frequently seen them go down to a dragon's opening breath attack.

Don't use the Fighter's Attacks Per Round thing as anything other than the trap it is.  At 5th Level, a Monk can do 4 attacks per round, as can a Dual Wielding Hunter Ranger with Horde Breaker against multiple targets (i.e. more than 1.)  A fighter's extra attacks don't scale up in damage either, which means that a Hunter Ranger with a Hunter's Mark active can increase his damage above and beyond the base weapon, on every successful strike.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1032700Honestly, Iron Heart (I think that's the name) was the most straightforward of them.  But none, absolutely none, allowed to be superhuman, which is the primary thing that a lot of fighting heroes are INCREDIBLY strong.  D&D has never let anyone be anything close.

There was a level 20 Barbarian in my 5e game who was certainly 'incredibly strong', STR 24 CON 24, 325 hit points & half damage while raging making that more like 650; he could easily solo ridiculously powerful monsters just like epic mythological warriors (his battle with a huge ancient black dragon was laughably easy). I saw similar running 1e too.

(His 500gp boots of striding & springing were handy for those superhero giant leaps)

I think the ivory tower stuff also misses one very important component in the comparison.  I've yet to see a 5E wizard that feels as if they can fully relax anywhere but in a fortified friendly location.  Sure, those players may be overestimating the dangers, but the way they can get mauled so quickly with physical attacks makes them nervous as cats at a square dance convention.  Conversely, I've seen more than a few fighters (and barbarians and paladins but not rangers) have the opposite problem--feeling 6 feet tall and bullet proof.  Of course, in my limited selection so far, that could easily be personality types self-selecting into those classes.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1032700Sadly, this hasn't been true since late AD&D 2e and early 3.x and on.

It's true in every edition except 3rd. That's a lot of editions, and a lot of settings.

QuoteI don't know of earlier editions, but I know that in 2e and later, Wizards didn't.

2e wizards don't need to find scrolls?

QuoteDon't use the Fighter's Attacks Per Round thing as anything other than the trap it is.  At 5th Level, a Monk can do 4 attacks per round

How does a Monk's Flurry of Blows power make the fighter's Extra Attack a trap? Is there some rule I'm missing where when the party's Monk spends a ki to make two bonus attacks, the Fighter is subject to Level Drain?

QuoteA fighter's extra attacks don't scale up in damage either, which means that a Hunter Ranger with a Hunter's Mark active can increase his damage above and beyond the base weapon, on every successful strike.

Hunter's Mark isn't "always on," and if you're using TWF, it's "frequently off."

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1032713It's true in every edition except 3rd. That's a lot of editions, and a lot of settings.

Sorry, personal experience.  Not fact.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;10327132e wizards don't need to find scrolls?

Personal experience, Magic Users didn't USE scrolls for anything other than to add them to their spell books.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1032713How does a Monk's Flurry of Blows power make the fighter's Extra Attack a trap? Is there some rule I'm missing where when the party's Monk spends a ki to make two bonus attacks, the Fighter is subject to Level Drain?

Because to get 4 attacks (without dual wielding) a Monk just needs to spend a resource, whereas a fighter to has to wait until level 20.  And the Monk will be able to maintain that four attacks, AND will get d10+Dex by level 17.  Thing is, the Monk as a class is kinda lackluster.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1032713Hunter's Mark isn't "always on," and if you're using TWF, it's "frequently off."

Lemme check the core book, I was reading it off a wiki, but apparently I wasn't wrong.  According to the PHB, after the first round's Bonus Action to activate HM, as long as you HIT your target and keep Concentrating, you add a +D6 to the damage roll.  So effectively, as you keep hitting a target, with a Handaxe or Shortsword, your damage is the equivalent to a Greatsword strike.  And if you're fighting multiple targets as Hunter Ranger with Horde Breaker, that's up to four attacks at level 5.

The Fighter's extra attacks are cute, but not really as earth shaking as people are being fooled into thinking.

Personally, is it too much to ask for higher level fighters like 10+, to be able to do feats of incredibly physical activity?

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1032716Personal experience, Magic Users didn't USE scrolls for anything other than to add them to their spell books.

So how else did they get new spells? IME it was typically from finding scroll.

QuoteBecause to get 4 attacks (without dual wielding) a Monk just needs to spend a resource

So? Monks who spam flurry of blows are what we call in common parlance "dead before anyone in Orlane has gotten to know them." By contrast, a Fighter who takes an offensive style gets that bonus everywhere and always. How's that shake out in practice? We'll look at a couple options, all at level 6, all humans.

Fighter 1: Duelist, Shield Bash Feat, +1 sword. 20 AC, 18 STR
Fighter 2: Great Weapon, +1 sword. 18 AC, 20 STR
Monk: Minmaxed so he has 17 AC, 18 DEX, and a +1 staff.

Target: A Vrock, who stupidly has decided not to fly. We are assuming that the Monk's Way of the Open Hand technique succeeds (reality: it has I think about 50% chance of failure), so he gets advantage on his fourth attack.

The monk, spamming Flurry of Blows, has a damage distribution of 25.72 +/- 8.79.
The duelist knocks the Vrock down and opens up with an Action Surge for 48.92 +/- 9.72
The Big Sword Man is just his Big Sword self and opens up with an Action Surge 46.33 +/- 14.72

The monk is not catching up in damage before the Vrock goes down (medium fight probably will last 4 or 5 rounds). What he's going to do is die because he has the lowest AC and HP of all three, and he's not doing something smart like Step of the Wind or Fangs of the Fire Snake or Stunning Strike. The reality is that standing there and swinging away is an idiotic thing for a 5e Monk to do.

QuoteLemme check the core book, I was reading it off a wiki, but apparently I wasn't wrong.  According to the PHB, after the first round's Bonus Action to activate HM, as long as you HIT your target and keep Concentrating, you add a +D6 to the damage roll.

Fantasy World: TWF Ranger with HM and Horde Breaker is ssssuuuuuuppper OP bro!
Real world: You are frequently having to choose between making your off-hand attack and moving/recasting your HM. Also pretty much all your spells are Concentration. When Horde Breaker + FOB + HM all activate for two consecutive rounds, it's pretty badass, but it's not reliable. On balance, melee rangers (WHY) are better off choosing Dueling or Defense.

Quote from: S'mon;1032707There was a level 20 Barbarian in my 5e game who was certainly 'incredibly strong', STR 24 CON 24, 325 hit points & half damage while raging making that more like 650; he could easily solo ridiculously powerful monsters just like epic mythological warriors (his battle with a huge ancient black dragon was laughably easy). I saw similar running 1e too.

(His 500gp boots of striding & springing were handy for those superhero giant leaps)

I had a reasonably high level Eldritch Knight in my campaign open up against an adult dragon by doing over 100 damage. 1 round in, and almost 2/3 of the dragon's health is gone.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1032716Personally, is it too much to ask for higher level fighters like 10+, to be able to do feats of incredibly physical activity?

As I said, high level Barbarians definitely can do feats of incredible physical activity. I do think Fighters seem a bit underpowered by comparison. The designers seem determined to keep specifically the Fighter class as the 'not magic guy'. My solution was to have some race-limited fighting styles that do more damage and increase the Fighter's power closer to the other marshall classes, while leaving it the 'mundane class' - so Cuchalainn is a Barbarian, Arthur a Paladin; Fighter is for the everyman hero with a lot of DPR - Xena Warrior Princess might be a Fighter. It works ok as a niche class in 5e; it doesn't cover the breadth of mythic and fantasy warriors.

The fighter class works really well if you use the feat system. By being Single-Ability-Dependent (plus Con, of course), and getting extra Ability Score Increase/Feat opportunities, they can rapidly get their stat boosting done with and then take the crème of the crop of feat abilities.  A Shield-bashing, critical-fishing Champion is a consistent, damage dealing powerhouse. A Great Weapon Master, Polearm Master with a Halberd and some way to get advantage (such as Battlemaster trip maneuver, or having a familiar or ally aid them) can dish out obscene damage. Eldritch Knights don't play like the Elves of TSR-era (by the time you get each new level of evocation spell, it is usually not worth the round's action), but they pretty much can't be hit for the first 2-3 encounters per day.

I think the real limitation of fighters is the same as the limitation of warlocks -- some of their best stuff requires longer workdays than a lot of people play. The base-fighter expendable perks (2nd wind and action surge) are short-rest recharging, as are battlemaster maneuvers. Only the EK has long rest recharging benefits, and their schtick is defensive (and thus it looks less impressive). Yet apparently most people don't get the expected 2 Short rests per long rest (as I've mentioned before, this was entirely foreseeable, as game group encounters/day distribution appears to be bimodal). The Champion actually comes out ahead (of other fighters, barbarians, paladins, and the spellcasters) if you play long, drawn-out sessions similar to TSR-era dungeon crawls where places to short rest are rare and places to long rest almost nonexistent (and/or leaving the dungeon to rest might have serious consequences to layout and enemy setup).

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1032779I think the real limitation of fighters is the same as the limitation of warlocks -- some of their best stuff requires longer workdays than a lot of people play. The base-fighter expendable perks (2nd wind and action surge) are short-rest recharging, as are battlemaster maneuvers. Only the EK has long rest recharging benefits, and their schtick is defensive (and thus it looks less impressive). Yet apparently most people don't get the expected 2 Short rests per long rest (as I've mentioned before, this was entirely foreseeable, as game group encounters/day distribution appears to be bimodal). The Champion actually comes out ahead (of other fighters, barbarians, paladins, and the spellcasters) if you play long, drawn-out sessions similar to TSR-era dungeon crawls where places to short rest are rare and places to long rest almost nonexistent (and/or leaving the dungeon to rest might have serious consequences to layout and enemy setup).

I am fairly sensitive to making rests possible but not a sure thing.  No doubt that contributes to the fighter types being more impressive.  In particular, the caster players know that if they blow all their spells early, I'm not cutting them any slack just because they did.  The ability to rest is based on the environment, the situation, and how clever the players are about finding a way to do it.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1032779The fighter class works really well if you use the feat system. By being Single-Ability-Dependent (plus Con, of course), and getting extra Ability Score Increase/Feat opportunities, they can rapidly get their stat boosting done with and then take the crème of the crop of feat abilities.  A Shield-bashing, critical-fishing Champion is a consistent, damage dealing powerhouse. A Great Weapon Master, Polearm Master with a Halberd and some way to get advantage (such as Battlemaster trip maneuver, or having a familiar or ally aid them) can dish out obscene damage. Eldritch Knights don't play like the Elves of TSR-era (by the time you get each new level of evocation spell, it is usually not worth the round's action), but they pretty much can't be hit for the first 2-3 encounters per day.

I think the real limitation of fighters is the same as the limitation of warlocks -- some of their best stuff requires longer workdays than a lot of people play. The base-fighter expendable perks (2nd wind and action surge) are short-rest recharging, as are battlemaster maneuvers. Only the EK has long rest recharging benefits, and their schtick is defensive (and thus it looks less impressive). Yet apparently most people don't get the expected 2 Short rests per long rest (as I've mentioned before, this was entirely foreseeable, as game group encounters/day distribution appears to be bimodal). The Champion actually comes out ahead (of other fighters, barbarians, paladins, and the spellcasters) if you play long, drawn-out sessions similar to TSR-era dungeon crawls where places to short rest are rare and places to long rest almost nonexistent (and/or leaving the dungeon to rest might have serious consequences to layout and enemy setup).

I do find the Barbarian with Reckless Attack is a far superior GWM/Polearm Master than the Fighter - a highly tactical, Reckless Attacking PM & GWM barbarian with halberd is my favourite build. :D

Lack of Short rests - agreed. I solved this decisively by making Long Rest a between-session benefit taking about a week, leaving short rests unchanged. I use a 'delve' structure where basically the group know they have 2-3 short rests that session & LR at the end.

Quote from: S'mon;1032782I do find the Barbarian with Reckless Attack is a far superior GWM/Polearm Master than the Fighter - a highly tactical, Reckless Attacking PM & GWM barbarian with halberd is my favourite build. :D

When a Berserker pops both RA and Frenzy, it's just about the single most potent offensive force in the game, just madness. The Fighter in my campaign is a Cavalier, and he's damned near unstoppable when mounted. He's Large. He has reach with a 1d12 weapon. He has 20 AC. His horse is practically untouchable. He is nearly impossible to knock off his horse. If something he attacks responds with AoE, it's going to die next round. And he just took Shield Master instead of an ASI, so he's nearly always attacking with advantage whether mounted or dismounted. Oh yeah, he can hop off his horse, shield bash, hop on his horse, then stab something with his lance.

QuoteLack of Short rests - agreed. I solved this decisively by making Long Rest a between-session benefit taking about a week, leaving short rests unchanged. I use a 'delve' structure where basically the group know they have 2-3 short rests that session & LR at the end.

My party rarely even tries to take short rests. It's weird. I think it's because it's a rotating 6-man team* where only one or two characters ever have short rest abilities. The current cast is up to six of Ro2/Ro4/S2/Wiz4/War4/F4/C1-S2/Bard3/P2.

So nobody even has Channel Divinity.

*Just like to take a moment of appreciation for this being a forum where mods don't give you shit for speaking English minus PC taboos.

Quote from: S'mon;1032782I do find the Barbarian with Reckless Attack is a far superior GWM/Polearm Master than the Fighter - a highly tactical, Reckless Attacking PM & GWM barbarian with halberd is my favourite build. :D

I find that if you play roll-stats and do well, or find stat booster items, or are willing to wear half-plate as a barbarian such that you only need a 14 Dex (violating half the reason I personally would want to play a barbarian), then a barbarian can do that. But the lack of extra ASIs really hurts, especially in point buy or array.

More to the point, 2handed fighting is lower AC (especially a medium armor character), and raging (and the complementary damage resistance) is Long Rest recharging. I find the great weapon barbarians end the afternoon leaking like sieves compared to a fighter (who may be in plate, plus have the defensive fighting style).

None of this is to say that barbarians aren't awesome, they are (and they exemplify the overall point that martials are not superfluous in this edition). There is simply a place for fighters to shine as well. Plus, with one of those extra ASIs, the fighter can pick up Sharpshooter and throw javelins 120' with no penalty, semi-eliminating the real penalty both these great weapon builds have such trouble with.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1032791My party rarely even tries to take short rests. It's weird. I think it's because it's a rotating 6-man team* where only one or two characters ever have short rest abilities. The current cast is up to six of Ro2/Ro4/S2/Wiz4/War4/F4/C1-S2/Bard3/P2. So nobody even has Channel Divinity.

My party has Inspiring leader and healer feats in the mix. The opposite is true for us (people look for chances to short rest, but no one has trouble with Long Rests being between gaming sessions).

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1032796I find that if you play roll-stats and do well, or find stat booster items, or are willing to wear half-plate as a barbarian such that you only need a 14 Dex (violating half the reason I personally would want to play a barbarian), then a barbarian can do that. But the lack of extra ASIs really hurts, especially in point buy or array.

More to the point, 2handed fighting is lower AC (especially a medium armor character), and raging (and the complementary damage resistance) is Long Rest recharging. I find the great weapon barbarians end the afternoon leaking like sieves compared to a fighter (who may be in plate, plus have the defensive fighting style).

I found the opposite - my standard tactic is using Polearm Master & attacking with halberd from 10' then step back to 15'. The enemy can then either close on me and suck up an opportunity attack thanks to PM (& will do half damage thanks to rage) or they can attack one of the other PCs. Indeed often moving 10' up to attack me they would incur opp atts from other PCs too. If I wanted to take no damage, I usually could.

In fact this works SO well I often had to stop doing it since I had tons of hit points, with Rage far more than anyone else, while my squishy comrades were taking all the damage. So I took to Reckless Attacking from 5' away & encouraging enemies to attack me instead of the AC 21 Fighter.

DEX - I definitely would not make a barbarian with DEX higher than 14. Indeed the last Barb I played for a long time had DEX 10, STR 16, CON 16. Started off with AC 13 until he got some armour. It was a Primeval Thule game which has good Medium armour & the Slayer path that doubles 2hw Rage damage... :D

Edit: Pet peeves - people who talk about their charbuilds on the Internet. :p

Yeah, this is getting pretty off-topic from setting peeves. I think the point of divergence was from here:

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1032624I have yet to figure out a solution to this problem, but according to most editions I am familiar with revival spells cannot reverse death by old age. This does not solve the problem completely but it does mean that succession will not diverse too much since kings still die permanently of old age. Honestly, magic has huge consequences for world building and one really needs to build the world around the magic from the start or provide really complicated reasons why magic does not upset the status quo. If magic is common then the setting will turn into some kind of magic technology scifi setting, and if it is rare then the magic-users will probably take over since there are few who can challenge them. Of course this also depends on how powerful and controllable the magic is as well.

Regardless of specific character builds, I think it's fair to say that magic probably should upset the status quo in some way. I think that's inherent enough in most settings and tricky enough to address that I wouldn't call it a pet peeve. But it does bother me sometimes.

Quote from: Whitewings;1032637One thing that infuriates me is when people reject things that, by the rules, should be fairly obvious. A first level cleric can, at will, stabilize even the most badly injured individual, purify fairly large amounts of food and water, and create modest amounts of clean drinking water, or instead of that, create temporary non-fuel-burning light sources. He's the go-to guy for emergency medicine and for night-time or bad weather search and rescue. "But that doesn't fit the setting! Clerics wouldn't treat their gods' gifts of grace so casually!" Why not? Their gods are the ones who allow such use, why would their priests be reluctant to use them when applicable? This isn't the (common perception of the) medieval Church, where everything bad was your own fault for being sinful. In a setting in which some gods are genuinely evil, the idea that maybe, just maybe, some evils are actually not the victim's fault could actually have some currency.

In a setting in which some gods are genuinely good, they might just like for their clerics to run around dispensing Cure Light Wounds, Purify Food and Drink, Light, etc. Because those spells make life better for people. A good god wants good things for his/her worshippers.

Quote from: DavetheLost;1033013In a setting in which some gods are genuinely good, they might just like for their clerics to run around dispensing Cure Light Wounds, Purify Food and Drink, Light, etc. Because those spells make life better for people. A good god wants good things for his/her worshippers.

I'm with this.  And it applies to Paladins in my settings too.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1031569Name something that's very common to find in a D&D setting that you really don't care for. And, if explanation is needed, why.

"Magic shops." Doesn't seem like resources devoted to the arcane would be available on shop shelves. You gotta figure they'd be ransacked on opening night (if not before). This is especially ridiculous if the GM paints magic as some dangerous, deadly, practice. If that's so, you'd think it be strictly regulated.

Gonna chime in about Dragons, as well, but only in the context of campaigns where they aren't super rare. (which explains why I never took to Dragonlance, though I liked the stories well enough--guess I'd visit, but would never play there)

Oh--Elves...Elves that never have to sleep, that live forever, that are beautiful and mysterious (yet appear in pairs in every adventuring group). I think Elves, I think "Woodland Archer." I guess I lack imagination...

And, finally, the conceit that the typical world might be humanocentric (which seems typical, IME), but the player party isn't. I blame favorable widgets and mechanics for non-human races on this phenomenon.

I also dislike construct races/classes. No reason, just a thing. Sorta jibes with the above, I guess.

Quote from: cranebump;1033189"Magic shops." Doesn't seem like resources devoted to the arcane would be available on shop shelves. You gotta figure they'd be ransacked on opening night (if not before). This is especially ridiculous if the GM paints magic as some dangerous, deadly, practice. If that's so, you'd think it be strictly regulated.

To be fair, in a lot of earlier settings the "magic shop" wasn't a magic item supermarket like it is in newer settings. Instead it was rather like your modern day occult bookshop that's full of snake oil/folk remedies and psuedo-magical quackery that also happens to have a lot of the material components (bits of amber, cricket legs, bat guano, etc.) that a wizard needed to actually use their spells in the days before the game started hand-waving material components via the "spell component pouch" and probably some of the more common banes for magical creatures (i.e. wolvesbane, silver knives, garlic, a whole array of holy symbols said to have been blessed by various holy men from mythical lands, etc.).

On the other hand, the actual "magic item shop" might make sense where magic is more common (ex. Eberron) and particularly if arcane magic is more like a PhD in Mechanical Engineering or a Medical Doctor specialized in Brain Surgery than basically an alternate religious path (ex. Hermeticism or many real world magical belief systems that mostly invoke spiritual entities instead of some universal principles like chemistry or physics; what used to be called the study of natural magic). In that setting arcane magic is just an extremely useful skill whose mastery requires more determination to achieve that most people are capable of and magic items are just the end results of some of their labors (and really... can you code the software that runs your iPhone? It may as well be magic for nearly all the people who use it know about how it actually operates).

Quote from: cranebump;1033189"Magic shops." Doesn't seem like resources devoted to the arcane would be available on shop shelves. You gotta figure they'd be ransacked on opening night (if not before). This is especially ridiculous if the GM paints magic as some dangerous, deadly, practice. If that's so, you'd think it be strictly regulated.

For me it all depends on what type of magic is for sale. A shop with some potions, low-level scrolls and maybe a +1 weapon for sale is fine by me. A store with 50,000 gold pieces on hand to buy that vorpal sword to add to their set of four is not.

Magic shops - if it's trivial stuff like the 5e Common Items, fine.

I know a thing that bugs me! Dragons as god-wizard-lizards who hide behind lairs of magical defences and scores of minions. That's Evil Wizard behaviour, that's not a dragon. I want powerful, arrogant dragons who don't hide away. I want dragons like in the stories, not dragons who are Machiavellian master manipulators and plotters. Dragons should be like forces of nature, in complete contrast to frail but crafty humans.

Quote from: S'mon;1033250Magic shops - if it's trivial stuff like the 5e Common Items, fine.

I know a thing that bugs me! Dragons as god-wizard-lizards who hide behind lairs of magical defences and scores of minions. That's Evil Wizard behaviour, that's not a dragon. I want powerful, arrogant dragons who don't hide away. I want dragons like in the stories, not dragons who are Machiavellian master manipulators and plotters. Dragons should be like forces of nature, in complete contrast to frail but crafty humans.

The dragon as master-plotter is probably due to the fact that, ever since video games with even a hint of plot started to be a thing, dragons started being used as the final boss type fight in them. Hell, you can probably even peg Super Mario Brothers as an early instance, but certainly by Dragon's Lair and Final Fantasy on the notion of a dragon either being the end boss or at least well, the Dragon (penultimate boss or at least a mini-boss), of any fantasy game. Hell, even sci-fi franchises like Metroid used defeating a dragon as the gateway to the final fight (i.e. Ridley; who is not just a dragon, but a space pirate dragon and later a cyborg space pirate dragon).

Over time its back-flowed into source material for all those fantasy video games as players who loved those games growing up became game line developers for D&D and now, here we are.

Add to which, in most editions of D&D any moderately powerful dragon is also a shapeshifter.

Quote from: Kiero;1033257Add to which, in most editions of D&D any moderately powerful dragon is also a shapeshifter.

Only the good aligned metallic dragons.

Quote from: S'mon;1033265Only the good aligned metallic dragons.

Some of the more powerful evil ones can usually cast spells as well, and can also turn into human shape.  Although technically, certain Alignments preclude active planning and deception, like the psychopathic Chaotic Evil.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1033269Some of the more powerful evil ones can usually cast spells as well, and can also turn into human shape.  Although technically, certain Alignments preclude active planning and deception, like the psychopathic Chaotic Evil.

I guess that ties in to my point - I don't want dragons who are really wizards.

Speaking, magic using dragons should be the rare exception, not the norm.  I can accept the very occasioanl shapechanged gold dragon, but have always considered gold dragons to be the rarest of the dragons too.

My biggest pet peeve with dragons in D&D is that are often cheapened. Instead of being Smaug the Golden or Fafnir or Vermithrax Pejorative, they are just a big pile of EXP sitting on a mound of treasure. I want an encounter with a dragon to be memorable. When they are just another entry in teh monster manual and there is a black dragon in every swamp, a tree in every forest, a white on every snowy mountain, etc they lose something.

The more powerful metallic dragons are more like demigods than wizards.

Quote from: S'mon;1033250I know a thing that bugs me! Dragons as god-wizard-lizards who hide behind lairs of magical defences and scores of minions. That's Evil Wizard behaviour, that's not a dragon. I want powerful, arrogant dragons who don't hide away. I want dragons like in the stories, not dragons who are Machiavellian master manipulators and plotters. Dragons should be like forces of nature, in complete contrast to frail but crafty humans.

I get that, but there's a mechanical difficulty.  In AD&D at least, dragons don't actually have the hit points of a force of nature, they have the hit points of a glass cannon.  Their breath weapon can take out a party, but a party that can bring their own spells and weapons to bear can take them out pretty quick.  I imagine DMs and adventure writers, not wanting dragons to go down like chumps, started looking at tactics and perimeter warning ideas.  The motivation is broadly in line with your own, even if the execution conflicts.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1033277The more powerful metallic dragons are more like demigods than wizards.

More powerful wizards are more like demigods than adventurers, too;).

Quote from: Dave R;1033279I get that, but there's a mechanical difficulty.  In AD&D at least, dragons don't actually have the hit points of a force of nature, they have the hit points of a glass cannon.  Their breath weapon can take out a party, but a party that can bring their own spells and weapons to bear can take them out pretty quick.  I imagine DMs and adventure writers, not wanting dragons to go down like chumps, started looking at tactics and perimeter warning ideas.  The motivation is broadly in line with your own, even if the execution conflicts.

Running Classic D&D level 1-19 for a few years recently, it was clear to me that normal ("small" in Classic) dragons are on the same power scale as griffins, manticores, chimerae and other such beasts, and should be treated as such. The problem is with designers who want to make them more than that. Classic added Large and Huge dragons with x1.5 and x2 hit dice, but 1e never had a solution.

I remember at least one article from an old Dragon magazine about giving dragons improved combat options to make them scarier. Wing buffet, rear foot kick and stomp, tail lash, and of course grab, fly and drop from altitude. I'm pretty sure it is a subject that has had many articles.

Dragons by the book and dragons as imagined don't really match well if you are imagining Godzilla and the rules are giving you Gadzuki.

Labyrinth Lord dragons have 6-11 hit dice as mature adults depending on type, adjustable by +/- 3 HD depending on age. They save as Fighters of level equal to their ht dice. Their scale are at least the equivalent of plate mail. Considering that a zero level "normal" man has 1/2 to 1 HD, dragons by the book are pretty impressive until the PC heroes come along.  I think we sometimes forget the "normal" man as a standard of comparison.

Quote from: Elfdart;1033203For me it all depends on what type of magic is for sale. A shop with some potions, low-level scrolls and maybe a +1 weapon for sale is fine by me. A store with 50,000 gold pieces on hand to buy that vorpal sword to add to their set of four is not.

I can see there being libraries (private ones, I imagine) where you can study up on spells. Makes sense. Potions strike me as medicinal, so yeah, that makes sense, too. I think you hit on it solidly with the 50K gp example. Tying it to economy makes it cost prohibitive (or makes some NPCs really rich arms dealers).:-)

Quote from: Chris24601;1033194To be fair, in a lot of earlier settings the "magic shop" wasn't a magic item supermarket like it is in newer settings.

Correct. That would be the one I was referring to--the video game type of shop.

Quote from: DavetheLost;1033309I remember at least one article from an old Dragon magazine about giving dragons improved combat options to make them scarier. Wing buffet, rear foot kick and stomp, tail lash, and of course grab, fly and drop from altitude. I'm pretty sure it is a subject that has had many articles.

Dragons by the book and dragons as imagined don't really match well if you are imagining Godzilla and the rules are giving you Gadzuki.

Labyrinth Lord dragons have 6-11 hit dice as mature adults depending on type, adjustable by +/- 3 HD depending on age. They save as Fighters of level equal to their ht dice. Their scale are at least the equivalent of plate mail. Considering that a zero level "normal" man has 1/2 to 1 HD, dragons by the book are pretty impressive until the PC heroes come along.  I think we sometimes forget the "normal" man as a standard of comparison.

2nd edition AD&D were basically OD&D/1e AD&D dragons with those optional abilities, and the spellcasting earlier ones only had a chance at. They made sufficiently good Godzilla-alikes (only the really young ones were appropriate for pre-name-level parties.

Quote from: DavetheLost;1033309I remember at least one article from an old Dragon magazine about giving dragons improved combat options to make them scarier. Wing buffet, rear foot kick and stomp, tail lash, and of course grab, fly and drop from altitude. I'm pretty sure it is a subject that has had many articles.

5e dragons get to do this sort of thing as an off-round action. It makes them much tougher.

Quote from: DavetheLost;1033273Speaking, magic using dragons should be the rare exception, not the norm.  I can accept the very occasioanl shapechanged gold dragon, but have always considered gold dragons to be the rarest of the dragons too.

My biggest pet peeve with dragons in D&D is that are often cheapened. Instead of being Smaug the Golden or Fafnir or Vermithrax Pejorative, they are just a big pile of EXP sitting on a mound of treasure. I want an encounter with a dragon to be memorable. When they are just another entry in teh monster manual and there is a black dragon in every swamp, a tree in every forest, a white on every snowy mountain, etc they lose something.

Oh totally! I actually disliked the dragon ecology introduced in later editions because they turned dragons from forces of nature into talking animal wizards who lived everywhere.

In actual mythology, fairy tales, legends, etc, dragons are a big deal whenever they appear. In many cases they are personified natural disasters. For example, the chimera (which is considered a dragon (http://www.theoi.com/greek-mythology/dragons.html) in real world bestiaries, along with the hydra and sea serpents) was believed to be a volcano personified.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1032214Frankly, I agree.  You know how hard I worked to construct a medieval world with some degree of authenticity for my RPGs, and you know that nobody gave a crap.  It's the same in any endeavor, by the way; the vast majority of model railroaders, for instance, do not CARE that the Athearn 40' boxcar is 1 HO scale foot too wide.

Was the Medievalism just lore and background? Or was it something you made into part of the POINT of playing?

Because that's what I did with Lion & Dragon; the Medieval environment is total and has very significant effect on how you play. Stuff like religion and social class, economics and politics. And when players get into that it becomes a feature, because it makes the gameplay itself completely different from standard D&D in exciting ways.

Quote from: Kiero;1032457In the medieval era, maybe not. In earlier ones, it was called leaving out the body armour, and just relying on your helmet and shield.

Well, there was Padded Jack and Jack Splint armor.

Oh yeah, and in most settings, "magic shops" are utterly ridiculous.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1033800Oh yeah, and in most settings, "magic shops" are utterly ridiculous.

Yeah, there's no such as an Occult Shop anywhere, especially not real life.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1033816Yeah, there's no such as an Occult Shop anywhere, especially not real life.

I regularly order wands of CLW in bulk from my local occult shop.

The thing about Occult shops -- particularly as a literary theme or trope -- is that the vast majority of the wares to be found there are nothing but worthless trinkets, with singular special and actually magical items showing up only rarely, and often not even recognized as such by the proprietor.

Quote from: Zalman;1033838The thing about Occult shops -- particularly as a literary theme or trope -- is that the vast majority of the wares to be found there are nothing but worthless trinkets, with singular special and actually magical items showing up only rarely, and often not even recognized as such by the proprietor.

Ding!  Winner.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1033816Yeah, there's no such as an Occult Shop anywhere, especially not real life.

So how many +1 swords or Staves of Wizardry have you bought at your local Occult Shop?

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1033852So how many +1 swords or Staves of Wizardry have you bought at your local Occult Shop?

They are referring to real life equivalents. How many actual Staves of Wizardry have you seen in real life? I am guessing none. How many objects have you seen that some people believe actually have religious or magical functions? Quite a lot, I would guess.

Quote from: Zalman;1033838The thing about Occult shops -- particularly as a literary theme or trope -- is that the vast majority of the wares to be found there are nothing but worthless trinkets, with singular special and actually magical items showing up only rarely, and often not even recognized as such by the proprietor.

And regardless, real magic items, if they worked, are either the bazookas/tanks of their world, or the bulldozers/life-saving medicine. What are they doing on some store shelf gathering dust? Particularly if they are non-expendable. At the very least they should be in use, and you should be negotiating with their owner or operator that they should sell you this tool of their profession because you're giving them enough gold to retire on or the like.

There are real world occult stores. Then again, what they sell doesn't actually do anything, or what they do is subtle enough that it can't be objectively confirmed. I bought a magical item in a real world magical store. My wife and I were on vacation in Europe and we went to the Vatican. There was a Vatican store where we bought a Saint Christopher medal blessed by the Pope. What did this magic item do? Well, if anything we didn't notice, and we likely wouldn't notice a +1 bonus to d20 rolls involving the rest of our trip.

Similar sorts of stores or merchants have existed through history. Places that sell blessed items, religious relics, charms, potions, medicine, snake oil, and so on. The effects of these things is usually subtle if not non-existent and they tend to be affordable for common people.

A magic item store in a D&D setting is closer to a store that sells advanced military hardware rather than an occult store, both in terms of how effective (or dangerous) the merchandise is and how expensive it is. You can go to a corner store in any real world city to sell a tank that you captured in battle so that you can buy that jet fighter you want. You can buy and sell extremely expensive or dangerous items in the real world, but not in a corner store.

Might there be certain mystical, economic, social, and political conditions where a D&D style magic store is possible? Yes.

I would still hate them though and think that they are silly and ruin the atmosphere of a setting or campaign because it reduces something that should be special, rare, and wonderous to a commodity with a price tag. You exchange an epic quest to find a legendary artifact with role playing a trip to Walmart.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1033816Yeah, there's no such as an Occult Shop anywhere, especially not real life.

There wasn't in the middle ages.

Quote from: Zalman;1033838The thing about Occult shops -- particularly as a literary theme or trope -- is that the vast majority of the wares to be found there are nothing but worthless trinkets, with singular special and actually magical items showing up only rarely, and often not even recognized as such by the proprietor.

That would, at least, make more sense; if you had a culture sufficiently technologically/industrially and culturally advanced to have those kinds of shops at all.

But a far more likely model would be to have to hire a wizard to make a specific type of talisman or object for you. But these would be different than legendary/powerful magic which would be kept in families or institutions (ie. the church) for generation after generation and would be almost impossible to purchase.

The real issue is the necessity of Healing.  Especially the older editions.  If you can't get easy access to hit point recovery (no matter what you want to explain it as), the game can and will grind to a stop.  Ye Olde Occult Shoppe is the easiest way to keep that from happening, especially if your Cleric is out of of spells for the day.

Quote from: Zalman;1033838The thing about Occult shops -- particularly as a literary theme or trope -- is that the vast majority of the wares to be found there are nothing but worthless trinkets, with singular special and actually magical items showing up only rarely, and often not even recognized as such by the proprietor.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1034294That would, at least, make more sense; if you had a culture sufficiently technologically/industrially and culturally advanced to have those kinds of shops at all.

But a far more likely model would be to have to hire a wizard to make a specific type of talisman or object for you. But these would be different than legendary/powerful magic which would be kept in families or institutions (ie. the church) for generation after generation and would be almost impossible to purchase.

Here's the thing, though. The use of a "magic shop" is a time honored one in literature. For an excellent use of this trope, read Djinn, No Chaser by Harlan Ellison.

So if it is used in literature, then why can't the concept be used in a fantasy RPG? Is it appropriate for all interpretations of setting? No, but it is for some.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1034301The real issue is the necessity of Healing.  Especially the older editions.  If you can't get easy access to hit point recovery (no matter what you want to explain it as), the game can and will grind to a stop.  Ye Olde Occult Shoppe is the easiest way to keep that from happening, especially if your Cleric is out of of spells for the day.

Alchemists, though, are well known in legend and literature, and it seems like they ALWAYS need money for their next Sure Fire Way to turn Lead into Gold.  So flogging healing potions (that work) would actually make sense.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1034311Alchemists, though, are well known in legend and literature, and it seems like they ALWAYS need money for their next Sure Fire Way to turn Lead into Gold.  So flogging healing potions (that work) would actually make sense.

Never in all of my gaming years have I ever had or seen any other group do the whole 'Magi-Mart' thing.  So a lot of this is very much alien to me.  Well, OK, one of my friends likes to recant a tale from his old Palladium days in which a player of his would also make a character with a Magical Katana, so in a fit of Pique he asked the guy, "Where do you get those, 'Bullshit Bob's Bargain Basement of Magical Katanas'?"

But frankly, the 'Ye Olde Potion Shoppe' to help fund Magical research (whether it's new spells, old spells or other magical alchemistry) doesn't sound too egregious to me.  Wouldn't churches also do it?  Maintaining buildings isn't cheap.

I would have thought alchemists more likely to be hobbyist aristocrats, who make enough money from their estates not to have to worry about how to fund their researches, than some pauper with no other source of income. Or else someone with a wealthy patron who supports them, not dependent on shilling snake oil to wandering vagabonds.

Also worth pointing out about the presence of magic shops is that, unlike in the real world, magic is a demonstrably provable force in the world. Even if the number of people who can actually pull off a couple low level spells is just one in a few thousand, everyone's probably heard of there being an actual 'wizard, witch or warlock' or a 'miracle working holy man' within a day or two's travel of their home.

And these aren't myths... Sick people who go to the holy man come back hale and hearty and wealthy yeoman farmers who can pay the wizard's fee come back with plows that never break or need sharpening (+1 plow of sowing would be a rather prevalent magic item if enchanting items were real). Even if they can only cure a few people every day the holy man's residence will be swamped with sick people who traveled days or weeks for a shot at being healed and the wizard would be backlogged with requests for magical farming tools for the rest of his days (and can they really refuse the local lord when he demands the full use of their time?).

The real world had merchants selling 'relics' and other reputedly holy/magic items all along the pilgrimage routes. Imagine just 1% of those merchants' goods had real magical powers. That is absolutely going to warp the natural of the world and the presence of merchants who sells wares (potions and alchemical items mostly, but minor trinkets like the ever-burning torch are certainly possible too) produced by such wizards (probably with a guild to protect their interests) would almost certainly pop up. Magic in these settings isn't like ancient Greek steam engines; it produces obviously useful effects through its use.

And this doesn't even go into the fact that monsters are REAL in these worlds. Merchants claiming to sell powdered dragon teeth and hydra fangs (a renewable resource they assure you) are certainly going to exist. Some of it may even be real. Those things are probably going to be sold by the same merchants who have cornered the market on selling the potions and alchemical wares above.

All that's needed now is for one of these merchants to settle down and open an shop and you have a magic shop... because the real presence of magic supports there being one in the same way that a large harbor supports the presence of shipwrights and sail makers.

And that's with a 1:2000 or less ratio of spellcasters (so 1:4000 wizards and 1:4000 clerics) who might never go beyond 2nd level spells in their whole lives. D&D 3e suggests that Adepts able to work minor spells number about 1 in 200 persons (about the same as for nobles). So in that type of setting every village of 500 or more is probably going to have 2-3 adepts living in it working minor spells and if they make that their livelihood by brewing potions and casting spells for the locals in exchange for pay and they have a shop in town where you can come to buy their goods and services... guess what that's going to be called?

One of my biggest pet peeves of D&D settings is the way they include real and rather pervasive practical magic and actual monsters and yet expect the setting to run in anything resembling an 'authentic' medieval fashion. Its rather like if you added knowledge of how to build 1880's era steam engines to medieval Britain and expect it to run as if the presence of steam powered tractors and transportation didn't exist.

Quote from: Chris24601;1034326One of my biggest pet peeves of D&D settings is the way they include real and rather pervasive practical magic and actual monsters and yet expect the setting to run in anything resembling an 'authentic' medieval fashion. Its rather like if you added knowledge of how to build 1880's era steam engines to medieval Britain and expect it to run as if the presence of steam powered tractors and transportation didn't exist.

Seems like a lot of people are really annoyed that there are settings other than Eberron.

Quote from: Chris24601;1034326One of my biggest pet peeves of D&D settings is the way they include real and rather pervasive practical magic and actual monsters and yet expect the setting to run in anything resembling an 'authentic' medieval fashion. Its rather like if you added knowledge of how to build 1880's era steam engines to medieval Britain and expect it to run as if the presence of steam powered tractors and transportation didn't exist.

Default D&D is anything but 'authentic' medieval. The last part of the medieval era (late Hundred Years War through Thirty Years War) had the printing press, gunpowder, and working, regularly available firearms and cannon. The medieval era as a whole did not have Renaissance era rapiers, and the early medieval era did not have the ocean-going ships of the late medieval era. And no medieval city was anywhere near as cosmopolitan as your typical D&D "hub" city (Greyhawk, Waterdeep, and the like).

D&D is a genre all its own. If you want to be charitable and call it "medieval", it is "fantastic medievalist" akin to what you would see at the SCA or a Ren Faire (aka "SCA for normies"), only D&D also has magic, monsters, and demihumans.

Uh, the Thirty Years War isn't "medieval" by any definition of the word. None of the 17th century is.

Quote from: Kiero;1034333Uh, the Thirty Years War isn't "medieval" by any definition of the word. None of the 17th century is.

Fair point. The transition point between medieval and Renaissance varies depending on which historian you read. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War, is often marked as the end of medieval feudalism and the birth of the modern nation-state.

The greater point remains - there was gunpowder during the period(s) from which D&D draws other available equipment, and the absence of gunpowder is a D&D trope. This is one of the ways in which default D&D is not 'authentic' medieval.

(I'll let Our Host promote his own historic-authentic products here.)

I call OD&D "Hollywood pseudomedievalish.". Which I'm okay with as long as we admit that's what it is.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1034316Never in all of my gaming years have I ever had or seen any other group do the whole 'Magi-Mart' thing.  So a lot of this is very much alien to me.  Well, OK, one of my friends likes to recant a tale from his old Palladium days in which a player of his would also make a character with a Magical Katana, so in a fit of Pique he asked the guy, "Where do you get those, 'Bullshit Bob's Bargain Basement of Magical Katanas'?"

But frankly, the 'Ye Olde Potion Shoppe' to help fund Magical research (whether it's new spells, old spells or other magical alchemistry) doesn't sound too egregious to me.  Wouldn't churches also do it?  Maintaining buildings isn't cheap.

Good point about clerics!

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1034327Seems like a lot of people are really annoyed that there are settings other than Eberron.

Not really. I just like logically coherent worlds.

If you want authentic medieval then magic needs to either be so rare (one-in-a-million) and/or subtle (akin to Coincidental Magic in Mage the Ascension... was it really magic or was it just fortuitous circumstance) as to not disrupt the non-magical social order.

The problem is that D&D (sans 4E) makes it rather difficult to run non-magical settings because of how its healing rules are built around needing either magic or amounts of time that are more than most events PCs get involved in allows for. 4E's complete decoupling of hit points from meat (so it was almost entirely fatigue and morale... surges were more akin to longer lasting wounds/deep fatigue) allowed the warlord class to replace the cleric (sure it could have a better name, but the function behind it is absolutely sound) and inherent bonuses meant you didn't need magic items to make the math work made it the only version of D&D I've ever been able to pull off a "Robin Hood" or similar non-magic medieval setting in that didn't require kludges (often obvious ones) to work around the existing rules.*

But once magic is pervasive enough that there's at least one known wizard and/or holy man working provable miracles in every large town (or worse, one in every hamlet) trying to pretend that isn't going to warp the setting and just pretending the effect that would have on society doesn't exist by claiming the setting is "authentically medieval" is just lazy world-building.

*5e is second best at it since there are enough bard spells you could re-fluff as non-magical morale and inspiration-like effects so you can pretend they're not actually a spellcaster if they avoid the overt stuff. You could probably still use the cleric, paladin and ranger too if you selectively pruned their spell lists of overt effects (i.e. no calling down the fires of heaven, but bless, bane, aid, calm emotions would all work).

Quote from: RandyB;1034332Default D&D is anything but 'authentic' medieval. The last part of the medieval era (late Hundred Years War through Thirty Years War) had the printing press, gunpowder, and working, regularly available firearms and cannon. The medieval era as a whole did not have Renaissance era rapiers, and the early medieval era did not have the ocean-going ships of the late medieval era. And no medieval city was anywhere near as cosmopolitan as your typical D&D "hub" city (Greyhawk, Waterdeep, and the like).

Oh, I know... the Known World of Basic D&D was practically "Thundarr the Barbarian" level zany (that's a compliment by the way) and it didn't have the slightest pretense that it occurred in an authentically medieval setting. Hell, the solo adventure introduction in the Mentzer Red Book had you going to the local armorsmith in your town and buying a suit of plate armor off the rack like you were shopping for a new suit.

Quote from: D&D Basic Set Player's ManualYou spend a few days in town, letting your wounds heal. Since you found so much treasure on your first adventure, you go shopping for some better armor.
Armorer Baldwick knows you well. He's a jolly fellow, getting a bit gray. You remember snitching apples from the big tree in his yard when you were young and foolish.
"Well, well!" he booms, as you enter his shop. "How have YOU been these days? All grown up now, I see!"
You chat for a few minutes about your younger days, and then you ask if he has any armor that would fit you.
"Why, surely! Let me see, let me see . . ." He pushes his way through racks of armor of all kinds, as you follow closely behind. There are dozens of sets of armor, for people of all sizes, but most of them need repair.
"AHA!" he exclaims, pulling an armload of metal down. "Try this on!" The armor you are wearing is made of round chain links, all skillfully interwoven to form a covering for most of your body. But this armor is different. Large pieces of well-crafted metal are
fastened to chain mail and leather, fashioned into pieces that you could wear.
"Plate mail, of course; just finished it a week or two ago. Want to try it on? I think it'll fit."
You go to a back room and remove your chain mail, and try this heavier armor on for size. Sure enough, it fits, almost as if it were made just for you. The metal plates hang from leather straps and chain mail links, forming a tough protective suit. But it's very heavy, almost twice as heavy as your chain mail.
You come out to show him, and he walks around you, carrying a piece of charcoal and marking the armor here and there for some necessary adjustments.
"Looks good!" he exclaims. "Just a bit here, and a bit there . . . want to trade in that chain mail you had on? Looked to be in pretty good shape . . . ."
"Wait a minute!" you reply. "Don't you have anything lighter than this stuff? I'm not going to be able to carry as much treasure if I wear all this metal!"
"Ah, well!" he says, soothingly. "If you want better protection, you have to use this. Unless, of course, you can somehow find magical armor."
Plate mail will improve your Armor Class to AC 2, better than your current AC 4, so it would be nice to have.
"Well, how much?" you ask.
"Well . . . 75 gold pieces as is. Want to trade in that chain mail?" he repeats.
"Oh, I guess so," you reply. "How much?"
"For you, well . . . since you're trying to get started, and since I've known you so long . . . 50 gold pieces, with your trade-in."
You talk with him a bit more, using your Charisma, and bargain him down to a better price.
"Okay, OKAY!" he says finally. "Just 30 gold pieces with the trade-in, and you promise to come here first the next time you need better armor or more weapons. Agreed!" He stomps off, grumbling, then stops and turns. "You can pick it up Tuesday. Pay the clerk on your way out!"

I have no problems with settings like that. They aren't pretending that magic and monsters and adventurers don't make the world radically different from what we'd think of as a historical setting (it acquires especially dark humor if you presume that most of those damaged suits of armor he has probably came from other adventurers who had the same ideas you have of striking it rich by raiding the local dungeon for lost treasures and he's just re-selling the stuff to the next round of hapless adventurers).

I do have problems with settings that drop real magic, monsters and adventurers into Medieval England but say that doesn't have any effect on the world at all. That's just lazy.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1034371I call OD&D "Hollywood pseudomedievalish.". Which I'm okay with as long as we admit that's what it is.

Good label. I'm with you. It is what it is, and we enjoy it as it is. If we want it different, its our table, anyway.

Quote from: Chris24601;1034405Oh, I know... the Known World of Basic D&D was practically "Thundarr the Barbarian" level zany (that's a compliment by the way)...

Why wouldn't that be a compliment?:)

Quote from: Chris24601;1034405...and it didn't have the slightest pretense that it occurred in an authentically medieval setting. Hell, the solo adventure introduction in the Mentzer Red Book had you going to the local armorsmith in your town and buying a suit of plate armor off the rack like you were shopping for a new suit.



I have no problems with settings like that. They aren't pretending that magic and monsters and adventurers don't make the world radically different from what we'd think of as a historical setting (it acquires especially dark humor if you presume that most of those damaged suits of armor he has probably came from other adventurers who had the same ideas you have of striking it rich by raiding the local dungeon for lost treasures and he's just re-selling the stuff to the next round of hapless adventurers).

I do have problems with settings that drop real magic, monsters and adventurers into Medieval England but say that doesn't have any effect on the world at all. That's just lazy.

Yep.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1034293There wasn't in the middle ages.

Actually, there was trade in relics with supposed abilities to heal and protect, and witches were offering for sale items with less beneficial properties;). Whether the items would have miraculous properties is another matter.

I still don't like magic items shops, though:D!

Quote from: Chris24601;1034405Not really. I just like logically coherent worlds.

I guess for me, D&D isn't logically coherent and really can't be, so one of the most annoying things any setting can do is take itself too seriously. We're talking about a game that originates in a castle whose basement contained a gigantic bowling alley and a portal to King Kong World, not a carefully crafted simulation. When I ran Against the Cult of the Reptile God in 5e, Ramne regularly grumbled that in his day, wizards could only cast one spell at first level, were grateful to the gods if they started with more than 2 hp, etc.

So yes, there are kings and nobles, and a suit of plate mail is hard to come by, you can't buy a Ring of Protection at Walmart, your average peasant doesn't have a +1 Magic Plow, and no, your wizard can't craft magic items. The reason for all of this is "because." I wouldn't call it "authentically" medieval, as the Greyhawk setting's populations are far too scattered (they recently came across a small village of shepherds that is way too far away from a major population center to make sense) and, as many people have pointed out, the weapons are drawn across far too many time periods, but I reserve the right to say "because" for any logical inconsistency in my world-building that players point out, and think all D&D DMs should do the same.

Trying to work out all the socio-economic implications of +1 magic swords and potions of heroism lying in underground lairs is a fool's errand. People have fun playing "Eight Centuries of Medieval England Mashed Together And Also There Are Fireballs." So I've got no problem giving it to them. I like the term "Hollywood pseudomedievalish" and don't pretend I'm accurately simulating a world with a d20 physics engine and a coherent, dungeon-based, international economy.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1034496I guess for me, D&D isn't logically coherent and really can't be, so one of the most annoying things any setting can do is take itself too seriously.

And among the fastest ways to lose me is an internally incoherent setting. So this part of your post expresses my pet peeve about D&D settings in a nice nutshell.

Quote from: AsenRG;1034511And among the fastest ways to lose me is an internally incoherent setting. So this part of your post expresses my pet peeve about D&D settings in a nice nutshell.

My point is that none of them are, not even Eberron. Although at least Eberron tries.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1034526My point is that none of them are, not even Eberron. Although at least Eberron tries.

Oddly, the most gonzo setting out there, Tekumel, has the most consistent and coherent explanations for the existence of all the whacky stuff like huge dungeons and scattered magic items.

Quote from: Rod's Duo Narcotics;1034527Oddly, the most gonzo setting out there, Tekumel, has the most consistent and coherent explanations for the existence of all the whacky stuff like huge dungeons and scattered magic items.

Yes, but Tekumel is just a setting. It's not a D&D setting, it just can be played with a D&D-like system (namely, EPT).
The setting wasn't made for the system, it was the other way around.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1034496Trying to work out all the socio-economic implications of +1 magic swords and potions of heroism lying in underground lairs is a fool's errand. People have fun playing "Eight Centuries of Medieval England Mashed Together And Also There Are Fireballs." So I've got no problem giving it to them. I like the term "Hollywood pseudomedievalish" and don't pretend I'm accurately simulating a world with a d20 physics engine and a coherent, dungeon-based, international economy.

Yet I can lay out a coherent framework for it in three sentences.

"A globe-spanning magitech utopia was destroyed in a cataclysm that wiped out 99.9% of the population, mutated many of the survivors into monsters and ripped open the barriers between worlds allowing all manner of alien horrors into the world. Two centuries later communities founded by survivors that have barely managed to hold onto iron age technology struggle to survive in a world transformed. Their best hope; brave heroes willing to risk the monster-haunted ruins beyond the safety of civilization's walls in order to recover the lost secrets and treasures of a bygone age; advantages that could mean the difference between civilization's survival and its extinction."

That was the starting premise for the setting of the game system I'm working on and while the actual development is now far more complex than what's written above (it now involves a series of successive grand empires and dark ages in its mythology; and just about anything from more than 200 years back is myth and legend; the recorded history referenced in the setting is all from after the cataclysm as is the count of years; BC (before cataclysm) and AC (after cataclysm). Population growth has been slow (about 1% per year) due to the depredations of monsters (which also keeps the population fairly urbanized... any community needs walls and guards if it has any hope of surviving for long). The biggest "kingdom" in the region started with about 3500 survivors (out of Pre-Cataclysm population of 3 million; they were some of the lucky ones) and has grown over the last 200 years into a population of about 25,000 people huddled along about 50 miles of especially fertile river coastline (a Mississippi, Amazon or Nile sized river). Five miles inland (less in some places, a bit more in others) the farmlands supporting the fortress city and towns that house what passes for civilization gives way to the overgrown ruins of the old Empire; often hidden by two centuries of vegetation except where all manner of monsters, brigands and barbarians have made the ruins their homes.

* * * *

Internally coherent settings aren't hard and they don't have to be all that complex; they just need to not pretend that the changes the fantasy elements make to the setting don't occur in a vacuum. Those settings that take even a little time time to account for these things are far less forgettable than "random hodge-podge of fantasy tropes #257."

Quote from: Chris24601;1034537Yet I can lay out a coherent framework for it in three sentences.

"A globe-spanning magitech utopia was destroyed in a cataclysm that wiped out 99.9% of the population, mutated many of the survivors into monsters and ripped open the barriers between worlds allowing all manner of alien horrors into the world. Two centuries later communities founded by survivors that have barely managed to hold onto iron age technology struggle to survive in a world transformed. Their best hope; brave heroes willing to risk the monster-haunted ruins beyond the safety of civilization's walls in order to recover the lost secrets and treasures of a bygone age; advantages that could mean the difference between civilization's survival and its extinction."

That was the starting premise for the setting of the game system I'm working on and while the actual development is now far more complex than what's written above (it now involves a series of successive grand empires and dark ages in its mythology; and just about anything from more than 200 years back is myth and legend; the recorded history referenced in the setting is all from after the cataclysm as is the count of years; BC (before cataclysm) and AC (after cataclysm). Population growth has been slow (about 1% per year) due to the depredations of monsters (which also keeps the population fairly urbanized... any community needs walls and guards if it has any hope of surviving for long). The biggest "kingdom" in the region started with about 3500 survivors (out of Pre-Cataclysm population of 3 million; they were some of the lucky ones) and has grown over the last 200 years into a population of about 25,000 people huddled along about 50 miles of especially fertile river coastline (a Mississippi, Amazon or Nile sized river). Five miles inland (less in some places, a bit more in others) the farmlands supporting the fortress city and towns that house what passes for civilization gives way to the overgrown ruins of the old Empire; often hidden by two centuries of vegetation except where all manner of monsters, brigands and barbarians have made the ruins their homes.

* * * *

Internally coherent settings aren't hard and they don't have to be all that complex; they just need to not pretend that the changes the fantasy elements make to the setting don't occur in a vacuum. Those settings that take even a little time time to account for these things are far less forgettable than "random hodge-podge of fantasy tropes #257."

And thus you reinvoke a long-standing observation about OD&D in particular - that it implies a post-apocalyptic, rather than "fantasy historical", setting. (Nicely done setting on your part, too.) The default D&D tropes just don't produce anything close to a "grafted on to history" setting.

Quote from: Chris24601;1034537Yet I can lay out a coherent framework for it in three sentences.

"A globe-spanning magitech utopia was destroyed in a cataclysm that wiped out 99.9% of the population, mutated many of the survivors into monsters and ripped open the barriers between worlds allowing all manner of alien horrors into the world. Two centuries later communities founded by survivors that have barely managed to hold onto iron age technology struggle to survive in a world transformed. Their best hope; brave heroes willing to risk the monster-haunted ruins beyond the safety of civilization's walls in order to recover the lost secrets and treasures of a bygone age; advantages that could mean the difference between civilization's survival and its extinction."

This wouldn't be coherent in D&D. You'd have to significantly change the rules...which is probably why you're doing this:

QuoteThat was the starting premise for the setting of the game system I'm working on

...rather than simply running your setting with one of the published D&D editions. Because if you've got even a couple miracle workers in town who can Cure Wounds and Cure Disease on birthing mothers and small children, population growth isn't going to be a problem. Neither is fielding a military force to eradicate monsters going to be tough if clearing out a kobold warren or two somehow makes you capable of fighting with the strength of three men.

D&D doesn't try to present an internally coherent universe. It was designed to play a game, and the original WoG, and later settings, were cobbled around it. Treat it as a physics/economics/social engine and try to derive what happens, and you get something insane. But not everybody wants to play in Crazygonuts Gonzo Land where nobody ever gets sick and you're not allowed to ever play N1 because it you can't rigorously adhere to world-building rules and arrive at a village with a 7th level wizard and a 5th level fighter that has developed a problem that a 1st-level party can solve.

People want to play D&D. So why shouldn't they?

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1034552This wouldn't be coherent in D&D. You'd have to significantly change the rules...which is probably why you're doing this: ...rather than simply running your setting with one of the published D&D editions. Because if you've got even a couple miracle workers in town who can Cure Wounds and Cure Disease on birthing mothers and small children, population growth isn't going to be a problem. Neither is fielding a military force to eradicate monsters going to be tough if clearing out a kobold warren or two somehow makes you capable of fighting with the strength of three men.

I'm designing a new system because I found a niche that isn't being well served that I think I can fill and I wanted to attach a setting to it and so I used the homebrew setting I came up with for a D&D campaign I ran as the start point.

There are plenty of spellcasters with cure affliction/wounds type magic... the low population growth is due to monster predation being more than kobolds (Hell, the kobolds are on civilization's side). 3+% Population Growth is great until you account for the hundreds of deaths to monsters averaged per year (normal years aren't that bad, but periodic massacres where whole towns of a 1000+ are being wiped off the map every half dozen or so years skews the average).

D&D makes a distinction between PC heroes and 0-level warriors (who don't improve with experience). The problems that need adventering heroes for aren't kobold bandits... its hyper-predators like ogre tribes, legions of the dead led by Death Knights, rampaging Chimeras and Hydras, Cambion Lords scheming to restore the glory days of the the mythical Demon Empire, etc.

0-level guards slaughtering a few goblins isn't gonna make them any better at surviving the type of threats adventurers undertake. People with what it takes to be a successful adventurer  are rare; elite special forces teams rare. The sum total of actual adventurers in that aforementioned kingdom is probably a dozen, including the rulers who are semi-retired adventurers themselves. The massacre at Ferrycross that left barely a dozen survivors out of a population of a thousand was just ten years ago. Stormhold (the former capitol of the region) was razed and sunk into sea due to a dark ritual just a half-dozen years before that. Civilization hangs by a thread and dark forces gather in the ruins seeking to snuff it out.

That's a setting designed to make the setting coherent with the rules. It's not hard and it helps more than it hurts (those who don't care if it's coherent won't care one way or the other while those who do appreciate it).

Crom's hairy nutsack.  Has ANYBODY read Dying Earth?

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1034807Crom's hairy nutsack.  Has ANYBODY read Dying Earth?

Who is still alive?  Good question.

Nope, I avoid most fantasy like the plague. I'd rather read historical fiction or straight history. I can stretch to some specific sub-genres of sci-fi.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1034807Crom's hairy nutsack.  Has ANYBODY read Dying Earth?

At least 10 times, some of them before I played D&D.  So you aren't the only one. :)

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1034807Crom's hairy nutsack.  Has ANYBODY read Dying Earth?

True. Dying Earth is basically the Ur-Example of a coherent D&D setting where its tropes all have logical reasons for existing.

There's been a thread over at TBP I've been reading with interest about the real-world origins and inspirations for all the different D&D monsters (in order of of appearance starting with the first OD&D material) and the pulps and genre movies of the era are easily the greatest contributor to its monster list (Tolkien's monsters were pretty quickly exhausted within the first OD&D material). So too I think it would be safe to say are works like Vance's Dying Earth are as, if not more, foundational to D&D as The Lord of the Rings ever was.

The massive perception that Tolkien was the primary source for D&D I think has as more to do with 3rd Edition deliberately aping the artistic style of "The Lord of the Rings" films because they coincided with the release of 3e and by the time 3.5e hit in 2003 the film trilogy was fully codified as that generation's "Star Wars" and D&D's artwork has never looked back (ex. 3.5 was where the default elves starting going from the short Peter Pan looking fellows to the tall and regal versions of Tolkien). The result has been that a lot of the stuff in D&D that makes perfect sense in the context of a world like the one presented by Vance doesn't feel like a logical fit with the setting of a more Tolkien-esque world.

The thing that never ceases to amaze me is how little historical/folk references seem to impact D&D. Even when some of the founders were wargamers, who you'd expect to at least have a basic grounding in it. Such as this not being the go-to reference for a "ranger":

(http://ushistoryimages.com/images/david-crockett/fullsize/david-crockett-6.jpg)

This was a period woodcutting backing up a folk tale about a historical figure.

Quote from: Kiero;1034857The thing that never ceases to amaze me is how little historical/folk references seem to impact D&D. Even when some of the founders were wargamers, who you'd expect to at least have a basic grounding in it. Such as this not being the go-to reference for a "ranger":

(http://ushistoryimages.com/images/david-crockett/fullsize/david-crockett-6.jpg)

This was a period woodcutting backing up a folk tale about a historical figure.

Yeah, but that's not actually Medieval*; Its David "Davy" Crockett (the image's name is 'david-crockett-6.jpg'). People don't think of 19th Century Tennessee and the Battle of the Alamo as particularly being a part of the medieval period... which is probably why it doesn't come up in relation to D&D.

This isn't to say the early Colonial period wouldn't make a fantastic basis for a D&D setting (the low population density with a few points of civilization in a vast, dangerous and largely unexplored wilderness; yet possessing technology far more advanced than the local population could produce makes a lot of sense if your default setting is a region of new colonies on a new frontier; you just need some ancient fallen civilizations who once resided in the region to fill it with dungeons and lost treasures and you're good to go).

It just means that the reason why that particular piece of art isn't the go-to for a medieval ranger is that the picture is depicting events from more than four centuries after the Medieval period ended and that the "period" artistic depiction; which is almost certainly NOT a woodcut, but a plate for a printed book; probably dates no earlier than the 1820's; its probably closer to five centuries after the fact).

* Other than the name, the biggest "tell" that its not Medieval is the use of perspective and shadow in the drawing, which didn't get figured out until the Renaissance. The fringe on the breeches are also distinct to the American Frontier as the design was adopted by trappers and explorers from the Native American tribes in the region.

Quote from: Chris24601;1034869Yeah, but that's not actually Medieval*; Its David "Davy" Crockett. People don't think of 19th Century Tennessee and the Battle of the Alamo as particularly being a part of the medieval period... which is probably why it doesn't come up in relation to D&D.

This isn't to say the early Colonial period wouldn't make a fantastic basis for a D&D setting (the low population density with a few points of civilization in a vast, dangerous and largely unexplored wilderness; yet possessing technology far more advanced than the local population could produce makes a lot of sense if your default setting is a region of new colonies on a new frontier (you just need some ancient fallen civilizations who once resided in the region to fill it with dungeons and lost treasures and you're good to go).

It just means that the reason why that particular piece of art isn't the go-to for a medieval ranger is that the picture is depicting events from more than four centuries after the Medieval period ended and that the "period" artistic depiction; which is almost certainly NOT a woodcut, but a plate for a printed book; probably dates no earlier than the 1820's; its probably closer to five centuries after the fact).

* The biggest "tell" that its not Medieval is the use of perspective and shadow in the drawing, which didn't get figured out until the Renaissance. The fringe on the breeches are also distinct to the American Frontier as the design was adopted by trappers and explorers from the Native American tribes in the region.

America doesn't have any medieval history of it's own (at least European-derived Americans don't, obviously Native Americans do), but my point was that you see elements of colonial history in some of the assumptions of how a setting should play. As you point out, a lot of those line up quite easily with the Colonial period, even while they make no sense for a historical medieval Europe (which was densely populated and well-travelled in many parts). You even have "lost civilisations" with places like Cahokia, or else the collapse of Central American civilisations.

What's strange to me is that their own history features so little when it's so readily available and full of use-able bits.

Quote from: Chris24601;1034845The massive perception that Tolkien was the primary source for D&D I think has as more to do with 3rd Edition deliberately aping the artistic style of "The Lord of the Rings" films because they coincided with the release of 3e and by the time 3.5e hit in 2003 the film trilogy was fully codified as that generation's "Star Wars" and D&D's artwork has never looked back (ex. 3.5 was where the default elves starting going from the short Peter Pan looking fellows to the tall and regal versions of Tolkien). The result has been that a lot of the stuff in D&D that makes perfect sense in the context of a world like the one presented by Vance doesn't feel like a logical fit with the setting of a more Tolkien-esque world.

That perception goes all the way back to when Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings were PC races, ie. decades before 3rd.  AD&D not only had Halflings, but three types of Halflings (which matched Tolkien's three types exactly), Elves were broken up into High Elves, Wood Elves, etc., Dwarves were basically the same.  You can argue similar ancestry for the dwarves, but you're never gonna shake the charge of Tolkien influence as long as you have small, fat, English peasants running around.

If anything, 3e tried to get away from that with their slender, criminal Kenderlings.

Quote from: Kiero;1034857The thing that never ceases to amaze me is how little historical/folk references seem to impact D&D. Even when some of the founders were wargamers, who you'd expect to at least have a basic grounding in it. Such as this not being the go-to reference for a "ranger":

This was a period woodcutting backing up a folk tale about a historical figure.

Quote from: Kiero;1034871America doesn't have any medieval history of it's own (at least European-derived Americans don't, obviously Native Americans do), but my point was that you see elements of colonial history in some of the assumptions of how a setting should play. As you point out, a lot of those line up quite easily with the Colonial period, even while they make no sense for a historical medieval Europe (which was densely populated and well-travelled in many parts). You even have "lost civilisations" with places like Cahokia, or else the collapse of Central American civilisations.

What's strange to me is that their own history features so little when it's so readily available and full of use-able bits.

Can you perhaps expand on this. I'm really not sure what your overall point is. As an American, I can say that I think* it I were inventing modern roleplaying games for the first time as an American in the 70s, and I were making it a swords&sorcery fantasy-enhanced version of medieval wargaming, I probably would have done very similar to what they did--made it in vaguely non-descript pseudo-Europe, an borrowing the vague-frontier aspects that they did. If I were to want to make something vaguely tied to early European American settlement or anything Native American-related, I'd probably make it into an 16-18th-century expansion for Boot Hill or the like.
*because of course I can't know

Quote from: Kiero;1034871America doesn't have any medieval history of it's own (at least European-derived Americans don't, obviously Native Americans do)

No, you've got it backward. European-derived Americans have roots in medieval history. Native Americans do not.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1034881Can you perhaps expand on this. I'm really not sure what your overall point is. As an American, I can say that I think* it I were inventing modern roleplaying games for the first time as an American in the 70s, and I were making it a swords&sorcery fantasy-enhanced version of medieval wargaming, I probably would have done very similar to what they did--made it in vaguely non-descript pseudo-Europe, an borrowing the vague-frontier aspects that they did. If I were to want to make something vaguely tied to early European American settlement or anything Native American-related, I'd probably make it into an 16-18th-century expansion for Boot Hill or the like.
*because of course I can't know

Especially after reading a lot of the S&S literature available at the time.

Quote from: Chris24601;1034405Not really. I just like logically coherent worlds.

If you want authentic medieval then magic needs to either be so rare (one-in-a-million) and/or subtle (akin to Coincidental Magic in Mage the Ascension... was it really magic or was it just fortuitous circumstance) as to not disrupt the non-magical social order.

It doesn't, though. In my world, magic is rare. I go by the old AD&D guidelines where only 1:100 people are capable of a class and level, and the great majority of those are fighters, followed by thieves, followed by clerics, followed by wizards. So maybe 1:1000 people are capable of being a wizard. I also follow the rule of thumb that only a fraction of levelled characters progress to each subsequent level. So there's one level 2 wizard for every 5000 people, one level 3 wizard for every 10,000 people, etc.

More importantly, the people drawn to become levelled NPCs are not normal. They're eccentric. Driven by extreme ambitions. They have their own peculiar agendas. The notion that spell-casting NPCs would be put to work building castles is a huge assumption that doesn't carry any weight in my campaigns. For starters, doing that stuff gives them no XP. Only venturing into haunted ruins and terrible lairs increases their power. So you have to be someone driven to explore haunted ruins and terrible lairs to be higher than 1st level.  The attrition rate for such activities is brutal. Of the ones who do survive a few levels, most retire to their towers and libraries to study the objects of their obsession. If any noble comes around telling them to use their arcane powers to devise public streetlights, or make tilling fields more efficient, the wizard will tell him to fuck right off.

Clerics are similar. Most priests have no levels - they're religious functionaries or lay priests. A few are touched by divinity. Their god has plans for them, plans that don't involve curing hunger or turning temples into medical clinics. If any benign deity tried to overturn the natural balance that way, the gods would war with one another. Death is as natural as life, fire as natural as wheat. Meddling in human affairs to that extent is a huge no-no for the gods, as almost every myth makes clear. No, clerics are blessed by their gods to go to dangerous places and do special things, not hang around towns curing broken ankles and gout. Abusing those divine blessings by yoking them to mundane tasks would surely rouse the anger of the sponsoring god.

Quote from: Haffrung;1034895If any noble comes around telling them to use their arcane powers to devise public streetlights, or make tilling fields more efficient, the wizard will tell him to fuck right off.

Also, the notion of "the wizard lives in a lonely tower far off in the desolate wilderness" is an old trope in folklore, LONG predating RPGs.  This is one reason why.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1034879if anything, 3e tried to get away from that with their slender, criminal Kenderlings.

Slight correction:  The 'criminal Kenderlings' was a player perception, and an amazing amount of local vitriol. Simply because quite frankly, people didn't like the change, they liked their roly-poly non-adventuring homebodies.  I personally liked the change, because I have a hard time seeing fat Hobbits going adventuring when they haven't been given an 'adventure coupon'.

The 3e Halfling are River folks, with some fantasy Gypsy, but mostly community oriented.  They have better than average luck and agility, but that's always been there.

Quote from: Haffrung;1034895It doesn't, though. Proceeds to show how, in a coherent medieval setting, spellcasters with any level of ability are both extremely rare and that those with any level of ability don't interact with the mundane world much at all.

I'm not sure why you think your examples disprove my point. If anything you've supported it... a truly authentic medieval setting only lasts if the PC spellcasters are both rare and have reasons to stay out of the way of mundane affairs (i.e. rare and subtle)

Note: Secret warriors who use skill and magic to battle against extradimensional incursions of monsters/dungeons into the mortal world while keeping the knowledge of their existence secret from the mundane Medieval world would also be a FANTASTIC concept to build a coherent D&D setting off.

Edited to Add: Actually, if you take that premise and the Colonial era setting and slap them together you get the Witch Hunter RPG by Paradigm Concepts.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1034907Slight correction:  The 'criminal Kenderlings' was a player perception, and an amazing amount of local vitriol. Simply because quite frankly, people didn't like the change, they liked their roly-poly non-adventuring homebodies.  I personally liked the change, because I have a hard time seeing fat Hobbits going adventuring when they haven't been given an 'adventure coupon'.

The 3e Halfling are River folks, with some fantasy Gypsy, but mostly community oriented.  They have better than average luck and agility, but that's always been there.

This is pretty much true, 3e Halflings are not Kender*. They are slender Halflings with favored class: rogue and themes of travel and adventuresomeness being added to explain why [strike]Hobbits[/strike]Halfling not pushed out the door by [strike]Maiar[/strike]Wizards or [strike]Wraiths[/strike]Wraiths somehow end up camping next to dungeons searching for fame and fortune instead of doing everything ascribed to their personality and goals.
*although I have to say fantasy Gypsy+thief has enough parallels to Kender that I understand the logic.

I also think part of the problem is that everyone still thinks that the Fighter is the 'everyman' class, not the Rogue/Thief.  Most don't realize the amount of training needed to be good with a wide array of weapons and armour, whereas the thief type skills can be picked up as you go along.  If you're lucky to not get caught.  To be a thief/rogue no one needs to be really taught.  To use a sword properly while in armour?  Years.

Quote from: Chris24601;1034909Note: Secret warriors who use skill and magic to battle against extradimensional incursions of monsters/dungeons into the mortal world while keeping the knowledge of their existence secret from the mundane Medieval world would also be a FANTASTIC concept to build a coherent D&D setting off.

It's also been the near-default since day 1.  There were elements of that in Greyhawk, and in virtually every referee-created world since 1972.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1034922I also think part of the problem is that everyone still thinks that the Fighter is the 'everyman' class, not the Rogue/Thief.  Most don't realize the amount of training needed to be good with a wide array of weapons and armour, whereas the thief type skills can be picked up as you go along.  If you're lucky to not get caught.  To be a thief/rogue no one needs to be really taught.  To use a sword properly while in armour?  Years.

I think the main thing keeping the rogue from getting that perception is their oh-so-specific backstab/sneak attack ability. If you swapped out that very specific trait for say "bonus feats" (or in 5e terms; gain Advantage on any check X times per long rest... or short rest depending on what you're shooting for) and say, better saves (since one of the hallmarks of the everyman seems to be their luck... which is why they're alive and generic bystander number 17 just got stabbed in the throat by the Orc raiders attacking the village) it might feel a bit more everyman-ish.

Quote from: Chris24601;1034931I think the main thing keeping the rogue from getting that perception is their oh-so-specific backstab/sneak attack ability. If you swapped out that very specific trait for say "bonus feats" (or in 5e terms; gain Advantage on any check X times per long rest... or short rest depending on what you're shooting for) and say, better saves (since one of the hallmarks of the everyman seems to be their luck... which is why they're alive and generic bystander number 17 just got stabbed in the throat by the Orc raiders attacking the village) it might feel a bit more everyman-ish.

'Sneak attack/Backstab' doesn't really need to be trained.  Here's the thing, the most common types of weapons that 'Rogues' use are knives and clubs, are rather easy to use for most humans, and stabbing someone in the back is more about surprise than it is about training.  Thrusting is easy.  Men do it all the time.

It's also misconception that every ravaging monster with a weapon is somehow a 'Fighter'.  Now, admittedly, Orcs are a warrior culture, meaning that everyone is trained to fight, everyone.  But that doesn't make them Fighters.

Fighters are special.  Why?  They're meant to be (originally) PC only classes.  Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, especially in AD&D (I'm planning a 5e game, using the old 2e FR-Waterdeep supplments, like Waterdeep and The North) they gave out the Fighter class like candy.  There's a petite club owner, who's an Adventurer/Bad Boy groupie with FIGHTER LEVELS in Volo's Guide to Waterdeep.  At best, she should have had a couple of Thief levels.  AT BEST.  But a lot of the misconceptions come from this belief that being a Fighting Man is naught more than brawling, sword swinging goon with no brain cell close enough to get to start the rubbing.  And that is just incorrect.

I'm not saying that fighters aren't special... I'm only saying that rogue doesn't really fit the everyman concept any better than fighter does because it does have specific types of training that is not common to all everymen types (not every everyman is good at stabbing people in the back... some would probably trip over themselves just trying, nor is every everyman good at sneaking around, climbing walls, opening locks or half a dozen other things depending on the edition).

I think Fighters, particularly in 3e, felt more like everyman because the sum total of their class features were "just what everyone else gets, only more of it."

I find it much more accurate to say that D&D doesn't really have an everymen class. Everyone is special in some way if they're a PC and so making an everyman character is more about how you present the character than which class they belong to.

The closest I've ever seen to a realized Everyman hero class in D&D was 3e's Factotum class. The real everyman class would probably be the 3e Expert (or the Unearthed Arcana expert from the Generic Classes option).

Quote from: Chris24601;1034954I'm not saying that fighters aren't special... I'm only saying that rogue doesn't really fit the everyman concept any better than fighter does because it does have specific types of training that is not common to all everymen types (not every everyman is good at stabbing people in the back... some would probably trip over themselves just trying, nor is every everyman good at sneaking around, climbing walls, opening locks or half a dozen other things depending on the edition).

I think Fighters, particularly in 3e, felt more like everyman because the sum total of their class features were "just what everyone else gets, only more of it."

I find it much more accurate to say that D&D doesn't really have an everymen class. Everyone is special in some way if they're a PC and so making an everyman character is more about how you present the character than which class they belong to.

The closest I've ever seen to a realized Everyman hero class in D&D was 3e's Factotum class. The real everyman class would probably be the 3e Expert (or the Unearthed Arcana expert from the Generic Classes option).

In MY experience, which is fully anecdotal, given media, novels, medieval 'thievery' (such as it was) says that the closest to an 'everyman' class is the Rogue type.  Simply because of how you acquire a lot of the skills.  But being a Rogue/Thief means you've decided to make that your 'adventuring career', so you picked up more skills to round it out.

What I mean is that from the Adventuring pool, there should be more Rogue/Thieves than any other class, simply because a lot (but not all of them) the skills can be picked up by just practicing what humans can do naturally.

Fighters, Wizards and Clerical abilities not so much.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1035012In MY experience, which is fully anecdotal, given media, novels, medieval 'thievery' (such as it was) says that the closest to an 'everyman' class is the Rogue type.  Simply because of how you acquire a lot of the skills.  But being a Rogue/Thief means you've decided to make that your 'adventuring career', so you picked up more skills to round it out.

What I mean is that from the Adventuring pool, there should be more Rogue/Thieves than any other class, simply because a lot (but not all of them) the skills can be picked up by just practicing what humans can do naturally.

Fighters, Wizards and Clerical abilities not so much.

Rogue and Fighter skills are both "what humans can do naturally". Rogue and Fighter classes both mean you're becoming very, very good at a subset of "things humans can do naturally". Because without training, humans tend to do rather poorly at it:).
And yes, thievery is very hard without hours of repetitive training. Pickpocketing requires hours of practice daily, same as top-level fighting skills.

About the only class which does "what humans can do naturally" is the cleric, the one who prays to a higher power to deliver him from undead, heal him and his companions, and so on;).

Quote from: Kiero;1034318I would have thought alchemists more likely to be hobbyist aristocrats, who make enough money from their estates not to have to worry about how to fund their researches, than some pauper with no other source of income. Or else someone with a wealthy patron who supports them, not dependent on shilling snake oil to wandering vagabonds.

Historically, it was more often the latter.

Quote from: Chris24601;1034405Not really. I just like logically coherent worlds.

If you want authentic medieval then magic needs to either be so rare (one-in-a-million) and/or subtle (akin to Coincidental Magic in Mage the Ascension... was it really magic or was it just fortuitous circumstance) as to not disrupt the non-magical social order.

Nonsense. In the medieval paradigm, magic was everywhere.
Yes, you can't have wizards throwing around magic-missiles and fireballs indiscriminately, but the supernatural (both divine and arcane) should be fairly ubiquitous.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1035590Nonsense. In the medieval paradigm, magic was everywhere.

But no one could say if the magic was being cast.  It looked like it did.  Magic has always been 'ritualistic'.  Hidden.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1035590Yes, you can't have wizards throwing around magic-missiles and fireballs indiscriminately, but the supernatural (both divine and arcane) should be fairly ubiquitous.

THINGS were magical, and IT LOOKED like spells were being cast, but nothing really overt.  Often, people made up stories about certain other people, just to get them in trouble or because they misunderstood situations.

You're not refuting Chris24601's point.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1035718You're not refuting Chris24601's point.

He never does. The only arguments he ever has are to berate anyone who disagrees with his "one true way."

The facts of the matter are that the people in the Medieval period were not at all the dung-covered superstitious illiterates that many moderns try to paint them as to pretend that mankind has made any progress at all beyond the technological. The primary differences were due to the need to overcome their lack of technology relative to modern day humans. For example, feudalism was almost entirely a result of lacking the rapid communication and transportation technology of later periods and the logistics of equipping a fighting man and making due with the best option available with the technology at hand; trains and the telegraph would (and did) render it utterly obsolete as a management system. Their magical equivalents; flight, teleportation, crystal balls, etc.; would have the exact same effect on a fantasy society.

The scientists of the day didn't believe the Earth was flat (they just rightly knew the circumference of the Globe was too big to reach Asia by sailing West without running out of supplies... and if there hadn't been the Americas there Columbus and his crew would have starved to death as they were past the point of no return by the time they spotted land and the expedition been nothing but a footnote). Galileo didn't get into trouble over his heliocentric theory; he got into trouble for refusing to let it peer reviewed before it was published (he was about a century behind Copernicus, an actual Catholic Priest, who published his heliocentric theories without any issue).

The medieval belief in magic wasn't anything more esoteric than that of any modern Christians believing that prayers asking for God's intercession can bring miracles. If you want to see what their magic looked like back then you can just go to any Catholic Mass where the Priest, acting in the person of Jesus, uses ritual to transform bread and wine into the true body and blood of Christ that the faithful then consume in order to have Communion with the divine. If you want to get more esoteric you can look at any of the other sacraments; invoked to grant protection from evil spirits, cleanse spiritual wounds or bestow authority over divine forces to those for who receive the sacrament; or to obscure rituals like exorcisms; rituals to cast out demons.

The notion that Medievals believed in witchcraft and burned people at the stake for it is nonsense... serious belief in the power of witchcraft as anything other than misguided, but powerless, pagan beliefs didn't crop up until the Protestant Reformation. There was the field of "natural magic" of course... but that was just early science; the study of natural forces we'd call astronomy, botany, chemistry and physics today. It was magic in the sense the the processes were not fully understood, but its effects could observed (unlike ceremonial magic) and duplicated and were not believed to involve spirits in any way.

Someone who could legitimately and reliably conjure up what we today think of as magic would completely transform the perception of society. A world where studying and committing to memory the right words, gestures and using a bit of bat guano could blow an entire infantry company off the map is not one that could ever be reliably medieval because it removes the primary basis for power in the medieval system (the dominance of heavily armored mounted warrior... and the wealth required to equip and train them) from the nobility and puts supreme power in a military sense into the hands of anyone capable of performing arcane magic to annihilate their enemies and against which armor is of virtually no help.

Only in a world where magic is little more than Catholic ritual and the study of early science could the armored and mounted warrior maintained their dominance of society. The mere existence of someone who could look like any other commoner, but who could armor themselves with magical force as strong as steel, pass by any guard invisibly and immolate a cavalry charge or the courtyard of a castle with a single spell is going to so radically tilt the balance of power in a civilization that it could not resemble anything like the medieval period... and that's before you throw in warriors riding griffins and wyverns into battle, hordes of goblins, orcs, ogres, giants, legions of the undead raised up by powerful necromancers and actual freaking dragons living out in the wilds.

I stand by my statement; any magic that isn't exceedingly rare (like one-in-millions rare; akin to the Saints who performed miracles during their lifetimes... who popped up at best once a generation or so and usually well away from civilizations) or incredibly subtle (either hidden by secret societies using MIB-style memory wipes or which operates more in line with coincidence or applied botany, chemistry or physics) is going to warp a civilization to the point it cannot be credibly called "authentically medieval."

Quote from: Chris24601;1035754I stand by my statement; any magic that isn't exceedingly rare (like one-in-millions rare; akin to the Saints who performed miracles during their lifetimes... who popped up at best once a generation or so and usually well away from civilizations) or incredibly subtle (either hidden by secret societies using MIB-style memory wipes or which operates more in line with coincidence or applied botany, chemistry or physics) is going to warp a civilization to the point it cannot be credibly called "authentically medieval."

Preaching to the converted, my friend.  But the Pundit has a game to shill.

More about those who run the D&D and less about the setting are those DMs who seem to think a level 15 player should simply walk into a dungeon. Then not look for traps, not look for secret doors, expect players to blunder into combat without expecting a attack from a npc or monster. While claiming that players no matter the level are "metagaming". As a character after a x number of ambushes, traps and finding secret doors/traps a character is going to know what too look for and expect. To some nope a level 15 character is supposed to be as wet behind the years level 1 character or players are cheating.

Quote from: Chris24601;1035754serious belief in the power of witchcraft as anything other than misguided, but powerless, pagan beliefs didn't crop up until the Protestant Reformation.

This is revisionist bullshit propagated by Newmanites who cherry-pick a few papal bulls and extrapolate that to all of Europe prior to 1519. Fact is, everything from burying an enchanted talisman in the garden to make your vegetables grow to feuding statues of the Virgin needing to be placated with regular offerings of garlands and vegetables, lest they cause miscarriages in the enemy town's women, was commonplace in Europe.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1035856This is revisionist bullshit propagated by Newmanites who cherry-pick a few papal bulls and extrapolate that to all of Europe prior to 1519. Fact is, everything from burying an enchanted talisman in the garden to make your vegetables grow to feuding statues of the Virgin needing to be placated with regular offerings of garlands and vegetables, lest they cause miscarriages in the enemy town's women, was commonplace in Europe.

Thing is, even that sort of 'magic' isn't all that impressive.  It's common and accepted, yes, but it's not world changing as real, D&D style magic is.  Imagine, able to know that God or Gods exist, that Demons are truly able to be summoned.  To be able to really spy on your neighbours.  And those aren't from the Evocation school blasty mcblasting.

And that's before getting into creatures that clearly fantastic and powerful.

Quote from: sureshot;1035807More about those who run the D&D and less about the setting are those DMs who seem to think a level 15 player should simply walk into a dungeon. Then not look for traps, not look for secret doors, expect players to blunder into combat without expecting a attack from a npc or monster. While claiming that players no matter the level are "metagaming". As a character after a x number of ambushes, traps and finding secret doors/traps a character is going to know what too look for and expect. To some nope a level 15 character is supposed to be as wet behind the years level 1 character or players are cheating.

It ties in with the belief that the Fighter is the everyman class (it's not, the Thief is.  You pick up how to climb and run and sneak around and hiding, while playing as a kid, for example.  There's a reason there were Knights and Squires attending them, as well as schools teaching weapon work after that, but none for being a thief or burglar after all), and to mention that the Fighter doesn't grow as much as most of the other classes in terms of power.  Yes, it often gets a good amount of hit points per level, but everyone does that, and if you're the old guys who absolutely love the randomness of rolling for HP, you can have sad cases where the Wizard is outstripping the Fighter in HP, because the poor sword-swinging bastard can't roll higher than 2 on his d10, and because he has a 14 Con, isn't getting a HP bonus in THAT version of D&D, or is only getting a +1.

And speaking of casters, they get access to higher level spells every two levels.  Level 2 spells at 3rd, 3rd at 5th so on and so forth.  Now that's not to say that the Fighter doesn't get stuff, like extra swings but by that time in the game, the Wizard can often STOP TIME.  And the ability to wipe out half a room of Kobolds is cute, but when a single Fireball can do that to Hobgoblins?  Kinda sucky comparatively.

So it often FEELS to some players that the game is always of being constant noobs, despite the fact that about 3rd level, the average adventurer is a veteran monster slayer, and often knows quite a few creature's weaknesses, even if they hadn't read it in a book somewhere before adventuring.

Quote from: Dr. Ink'n'stain;1031606Revolving Door Afterlife. I like the idea of bringing someone back, but it should be more than a resource drain.

In AD&D it was risky and could fail for various reasons. The person could fail their death save and just not be recoverable. gods could just say "No" and in some cases the dead could just say "No."

There was also the problem of actually finding someone high enough level, and willing, to cast it. Depending on the setting that could be a quest all by itself.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1031666Magic.

Village idiots.

To steer the thread back, a pet peeve I have is that we get entire races sorted into alignments all neatly. We have good and evil counterparts.

For example: humans and demihumans are (generally) good while humanoids or subhumans (?) are always evil; elves are good and drow are evil elves; orcs are evil and leonorks (from a third party product) are good orcs.

It gets pretty silly after a while.

What I meant with my 'Magic' was how most settings don't take it, especially the way it's done in D&D, into how it would change the entire world.

Quote from: Chris24601;1035754The facts of the matter are that the people in the Medieval period were not at all the dung-covered superstitious illiterates that many moderns try to paint them as to pretend that mankind has made any progress at all beyond the technological.

That's not what I'm arguing. I'm practically arguing the contrary.

QuoteOnly in a world where magic is little more than Catholic ritual and the study of early science could the armored and mounted warrior maintained their dominance of society. The mere existence of someone who could look like any other commoner, but who could armor themselves with magical force as strong as steel, pass by any guard invisibly and immolate a cavalry charge or the courtyard of a castle with a single spell is going to so radically tilt the balance of power in a civilization that it could not resemble anything like the medieval period... and that's before you throw in warriors riding griffins and wyverns into battle, hordes of goblins, orcs, ogres, giants, legions of the undead raised up by powerful necromancers and actual freaking dragons living out in the wilds.

All that you're saying is "standard D&D magic wouldn't work in a Medieval-Authentic setting". Yes. That's one reason why I wrote Lion & Dragon.

QuoteI stand by my statement; any magic that isn't exceedingly rare (like one-in-millions rare; akin to the Saints who performed miracles during their lifetimes... who popped up at best once a generation or so and usually well away from civilizations) or incredibly subtle (either hidden by secret societies using MIB-style memory wipes or which operates more in line with coincidence or applied botany, chemistry or physics) is going to warp a civilization to the point it cannot be credibly called "authentically medieval."

And yet Lion & Dragon proves you wrong.

Again, a world where there's no magic is not an authentically medieval world.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1037236And yet Lion & Dragon proves you wrong.

Again, a world where there's no magic is not an authentically medieval world.

If you think your RPG is actually authentically medieval despite having magic that actually works and folklore monsters that are real I don't think there's anything productive in continuing this discussion.

Belief in magical phenomena is one thing. Saying those beliefs had any weight beyond superstition, propaganda and teaching cultural values to the next generation is NOT authentically medieval because, and I don't know if this is news to you or not, magic and monsters aren't real. Including those elements as real automatically makes it fantasy and not authentic.

Quote from: Chris24601;1037270If you think your RPG is actually authentically medieval despite having magic that actually works and folklore monsters that are real I don't think there's anything productive in continuing this discussion.

Belief in magical phenomena is one thing. Saying those beliefs had any weight beyond superstition, propaganda and teaching cultural values to the next generation is NOT authentically medieval because, and I don't know if this is news to you or not, magic and monsters aren't real. Including those elements as real automatically makes it fantasy and not authentic.

Maybe it is authentic by the standards of what medieval people believed was true? Vaguely?

I am currently reading through Lion & Dragon and it seems clear to me that the milieu is similar to that of Ars Magica's Mythic Europe.

http://www.redcap.org/page/Mythic_Europe

Unlike Ars Magica, however, the magic is based on how people of that period supposed magic was conducted. Atlas Games attempted something similar with the addition of Hedge Magic, but the very existence of Hermetic Mages sidelined these more "historically based" practitioners.

Moreover, the focus in L&D is on playing within a medieval society rather than existing on the fringes, as it is in Ars Magica.

Runequest/Mythras also has a Mythic Britain setting which comes after a long line of historical-mythical settings like Vikings and Land of the Ninja.

Cubilcle 7 have Yggdrasil and Keltia based in Mythic Scandanavia: from their website

QuoteJust as Keltia is set in a mythic version of British history, where Arthurian legend and Celtic myth are real, so too is Yggdrasill set in a mythic version of Scandia, where Norse mythology is real.

Finally, regarding the tone of Lion and Dragon, I was reminded strongly of the wonderful setting for Dragon Warriors (i.e.Legend). Oddly, their magic using character classes are not really appropriate for the setting so I would definitely be tempted to use L&D if I ran a game in that setting again.

Quote from: Chris24601;1037270If you think your RPG is actually authentically medieval despite having magic that actually works and folklore monsters that are real I don't think there's anything productive in continuing this discussion.

A world that didn't have magic or monsters would not be authentically Medieval, because the culture wouldn't work.

QuoteBelief in magical phenomena is one thing. Saying those beliefs had any weight beyond superstition, propaganda and teaching cultural values to the next generation is NOT authentically medieval because, and I don't know if this is news to you or not, magic and monsters aren't real. Including those elements as real automatically makes it fantasy and not authentic.

That's a totally modernist conceit. Medieval people lived in a demon-haunted world.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1037277Finally, regarding the tone of Lion and Dragon, I was reminded strongly of the wonderful setting for Dragon Warriors (i.e.Legend). Oddly, their magic using character classes are not really appropriate for the setting so I would definitely be tempted to use L&D if I ran a game in that setting again.

Very glad to hear it!

Quote from: RPGPundit;1037626Medieval people lived in a demon-haunted world.

So did Roman Catholics in small town northern Wisconsin in the 1950s.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1031569Name something that's very common to find in a D&D setting that you really don't care for. And, if explanation is needed, why.

Geography.

Quote from: vgunn;1037650Geography.

Explanation is needed.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1037277Runequest/Mythras also has a Mythic Britain setting which comes after a long line of historical-mythical settings like Vikings and Land of the Ninja.

Cubilcle 7 have Yggdrasil and Keltia based in Mythic Scandanavia: from their website.

I have to say I really have always liked Avalon Hill's Runequest Europe 3e as a campaign setting, RuneQuest Viking as well. Mongoose republished both of those I beleieve...

Quote from: RPGPundit;1037866Explanation is needed.

I like my geography at least somewhat plausible. That doesn't mean it has to be normal and not every geographic element has to line up with the real world, but when it doesn't there needs to be some explanation of why. Rivers that flow uphill or start in the middle of plains, oddly placed deserts which are next to vast jungles. Lost cities within a few days travel of civilization, towns with no reason to be where they are, swamps without a water source. Huge forests on the rain-shadow side of mountains.

Mystara is probably the worst offender. Now, that doesn't stop me from playing--it just bothers me. I love fantastical geography--walls of fire reaching to heaven and things like that--but let me know the how/why it occurred.

Quote from: vgunn;1037933Mystara is probably the worst offender.

FWIW, Mystara is so notable an offender that it gets grief for it, so it is an outlier. All of the D&D geographies are somewhat off and weird, although I look at things like the 60-degree river turns as 'unfortunate shorthands of the medium, don't overthink it.'

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1037936FWIW, Mystara is so notable an offender that it gets grief for it, so it is an outlier. All of the D&D geographies are somewhat off and weird, although I look at things like the 60-degree river turns as 'unfortunate shorthands of the medium, don't overthink it.'

Agreed. I still love to play in some these settings and have no problem glossing over the issues.

Quote from: AsenRG;1035029... About the only class which does "what humans can do naturally" is the cleric, the one who prays to a higher power to deliver him from undead, heal him and his companions, and so on;).

... and who has no powers and just keeps the faith that whatever happens is God's will.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1037936FWIW, Mystara is so notable an offender that it gets grief for it, so it is an outlier. All of the D&D geographies are somewhat off and weird, although I look at things like the 60-degree river turns as 'unfortunate shorthands of the medium, don't overthink it.'

Greyhawk is pretty plausible as a Europe-like subcontinent facing east.  The only glaring anomaly is the map scale which is easy enough to ignore.

Eragon has the same problem.

Speaking of departures from physics, I take issues with the concept of antimagic and its context.

D&D operates on the conceit that the fantasy world operates according to real physics, then magic is crudely tacked on. This leads to things like magic and technology being separate and coextant.

The problem is that this is a purely modernist conceit. The pre-modern societies that believed in magic did not see it as separate from nature. To them, our technology would be magic. In fact, a universe with different physics that allows magic would preclude technology as we understand it.

This conceit leads to silly things like "magical beasts" being separate from (and smarter than) real animals, when medieval bestiaries made no such distinction. The manticore, for example, was believed to be a real and mundane animal that was captured by Indians and de-tailed for its pleasing voice. D&D makes it a magical unnatural thing with much higher intelligence and evil alignment.

Quote from: vgunn;1037933I like my geography at least somewhat plausible. That doesn't mean it has to be normal and not every geographic element has to line up with the real world, but when it doesn't there needs to be some explanation of why. Rivers that flow uphill or start in the middle of plains, oddly placed deserts which are next to vast jungles. Lost cities within a few days travel of civilization, towns with no reason to be where they are, swamps without a water source. Huge forests on the rain-shadow side of mountains.

Mystara is probably the worst offender. Now, that doesn't stop me from playing--it just bothers me. I love fantastical geography--walls of fire reaching to heaven and things like that--but let me know the how/why it occurred.

Oh, I see. I don't personally have any issue with that, but I bet if I was a geologist instead of an historian it would bug the hell out of me.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1038332Oh, I see. I don't personally have any issue with that, but I bet if I was a geologist instead of an historian it would bug the hell out of me.

Different physics and the whimsical gods that create them, except in Mystara where they prefer to identify as Immortals. :D

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1038103D&D operates on the conceit that the fantasy world operates according to real physics, then magic is crudely tacked on.

0e-3e do that; 3e probably the worst. 4e consciously avoided this trope and took more of a Runequest approach, with an inherently magical universe. 5e as usual is somewhere in between and can be drifted either way.

I think that the 'real world physics' thing was extremely variable and mostly focused in very isolated cases.

That the societal, technological, religious and other implications of magic, gods, multiple intelligent races and so on is never really thought through to its logical conclusion.
Nor is life in a world beset by hungry, nasty megafauna ever really thought through.
Nor the implications of alignment being a real and actual thing, rather than a matter of perspective.

A lot of things :P

D&D was written as "Explore the Fun House from Hell," complete with crashed flying saucers and bowling alleys for 100' tall giants.

People who want logical conclusions shouldn't play D&D.  They'd be happier playing a different game.

Another one:  low Strength, high Dexterity archers.  Wouldn't happen.  Real archers were known for their strength, which came from and was required for practicing drawing their bows.  To the extent that you can distinguish English longbowmen and Mongolian archers by their skeletons.

This one I assume is more emergent out of the way the rules work than it is planned in advance. Roll low strength, know strength penalties apply to attack and damage in melee, decide to make a character that hangs back out of combat and still contributes - I can see how it happens.  But we sure do run with it, to an extent that's ridiculous.  I know that strength bows are in the rules in most editions, but on the evidence it's not enough.

It doesn't help any that D&D kept the Tolkienism of elves being good with bows even while giving them a strength penalty and making them shorter and slighter than humans.  Those two things do not go together at all, but God forbid we give up a Tolkienism.

Oh for shit's sake.  "Elf shot" is 1000 years older than Tolkien, as is the notions of elves being smaller than humans.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1038804Oh for shit's sake.  "Elf shot" is 1000 years older than Tolkien, as is the notions of elves being smaller than humans.

Pre-Tolkien pixie elves might send you to sleep with tiny enchanted darts or arrows. Longbow-wielding elves are definitely from Tolkien, but Tolkien elves are taller and probably stronger than Men.

I always hated the notion that Magic and Technology are incompatible.

Quote from: GRIM;1038737Nor is life in a world beset by hungry, nasty megafauna ever really thought through.

I have a friend that is constantly grousing about all of the unfortified and undefended towns and villages that dot the hostile countryside in D&D worlds. He argues that they might do better relying on a few less wandering do-gooders and instead put their money into fortifications and militia. A recent example was in a module (Princes of the Apocalypse, IIRC) where the central town has no walls despite being built adjacent to a quarry.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1038846I have a friend that is constantly grousing about all of the unfortified and undefended towns and villages that dot the hostile countryside in D&D worlds. He argues that they might do better relying on a few less wandering do-gooders and instead put their money into fortifications and militia. A recent example was in a module (Princes of the Apocalypse, IIRC) where the central town has no walls despite being built adjacent to a quarry.

Yeah - even IRL villages in dangerous areas had palisades, towns and cities had stone walls. In modern Afghanistan a typical single-family farm/steading often resembles a small fort. Settlements IMCs have always been fortified since my very first GMing age 11, and I routinely have to sketch a wall round the village in umpteen published adventures.

Quote from: S'mon;1038856Yeah - even IRL villages in dangerous areas had palisades, towns and cities had stone walls. In modern Afghanistan a typical single-family farm/steading often resembles a small fort. Settlements IMCs have always been fortified since my very first GMing age 11, and I routinely have to sketch a wall round the village in umpteen published adventures.

Only towards the end of the Bronze Age along with the advent of civilizations, and city-states, with armies. Then settlements were also relocated to hilltops and high ground so enemies could be spotted before they became hazardous. That would be human enemies, on horses.

In Northern Europe Late Neolithic and early Bronze age settlements were typically sited in river valleys close to rivers, rich hunter/gatherer resources and fishing grounds, and later were typically situated on hillsides overlooking especially fertile valleys where grain and crops grew naturally well. These early settlements typically lacked walls, and while there is lots of evidence of hunting and early agrarian practices, almost none of these early settlements had evidence of large scale conflict or violence. Most people walked at this time as there is little evidence of having domesticated mounts, although early Europeans did have herd animals as well as pets. This changed after the 3rd millenium B.C. with the invasion of the aggressive horse clans from the East.

Quote from: GameDaddy;1038909Only towards the end of the Bronze Age along with the advent of civilizations, and city-states, with armies. Then settlements were also relocated to hilltops and high ground so enemies could be spotted before they became hazardous. That would be human enemies, on horses.

In Northern Europe Late Neolithic and early Bronze age settlements were typically sited in river valleys close to rivers, rich hunter/gatherer resources and fishing grounds, and later were typically situated on hillsides overlooking especially fertile valleys where grain and crops grew naturally well. These early settlements typically lacked walls, and while there is lots of evidence of hunting and early agrarian practices, almost none of these early settlements had evidence of large scale conflict or violence. Most people walked at this time as there is little evidence of having domesticated mounts, although early Europeans did have herd animals as well as pets. This changed after the 3rd millenium B.C. with the invasion of the aggressive horse clans from the East.

In a setting like the "Savage North" of the Forgotten Realms, you have an area that has been lived in for thousands of years, with the more recent human settlements still present for several centuries. All of this is being done in an area with aggressive barbarians (humans and orcs) and many other less numerous but more powerful creatures like giants (including trolls and ogres) and dragons (there are three detailed as being within a few miles of Red Larch). I can't see dealing with that for centuries without having settlements that can actually defend themselves against such hostiles.

Quote from: GameDaddy;1038909Only towards the end of the Bronze Age

Obviously I was talking about culture/tech roughly similar to that in D&D and similar RPGs, so iron age+, with horses etc.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1038930In a setting like the "Savage North" of the Forgotten Realms, you have an area that has been lived in for thousands of years, with the more recent human settlements still present for several centuries. All of this is being done in an area with aggressive barbarians (humans and orcs) and many other less numerous but more powerful creatures like giants (including trolls and ogres) and dragons (there are three detailed as being within a few miles of Red Larch). I can't see dealing with that for centuries without having settlements that can actually defend themselves against such hostiles.

Not a lot you can do about winged dragons, except have bows handy for the small ones, and usually they are rare enough that a dragon attack can be treated as a natural disaster. IMCs villages have palisades for protection against the ubiquitous orcs/goblins/hobgoblins/bandits.

Quote from: GRIM;1038737That the societal, technological, religious and other implications of magic, gods, multiple intelligent races and so on is never really thought through to its logical conclusion.
Nor is life in a world beset by hungry, nasty megafauna ever really thought through.
Nor the implications of alignment being a real and actual thing, rather than a matter of perspective.

A lot of things :P

The extravagant setting of Vampire Hunter D resembles what I think a logical D&D world would look like. The wilderness is full of extremely deadly monsters and humans live in walled settlements. Civilization is powered by super-science and black magic. Monster hunting is an established profession.

The only thing about this topic that gets my goat is the notion that there is a typical D+D setting. Even if you rely exclusively on commercial products there is a lot out there to chose from. And if you can be bothered to spend 2 hours thinking before you launch a campaign, the game can go any any direction you like. There is a lot I don't like about the tone and implied setting that seems to have gotten locked in through the 3E-5E era. But that era also coincides with the OSR, which has provided a vast diversity of alternatives. And my shelves are groaning with things written in the pre-3E period, when there was also a lot of diversity.

I think we can generalize the critique to it seeming that D&D worlds act like the heroes and the monsters they face are rare and unusual things that have come in from the far and away to bother otherwise sleepy, picturesque towns, but then make clear that they aren't.

Looking back at the LBBs, it doesn't appear that this is emergent from the game (although lack of specifically mentioning whether towns have walls means little, given how space-constrained the books are). Underworld and Wilderness page 24 (under creating baronies) does indicate that the existence of keeps is sufficient to keep monsters away from the 2-8 villages within 20 miles of the keep, so that might be something.
[block]
Clearing the countryside of monsters is the first requirement. The player/character moves a force to the hex, the referee rolls a die to determine if there is a monster encountered, and if there is one the player/character's force must remove it. If no monster is encountered the hex is already cleared. Territory up to 20 miles distant from a stronghold may be kept clear of monsters once cleared -- the inhabitation of the stronghold being considered as sufficient to maintain the monster-free status. Within each territory there will be from 2-8 villages of from 100-400 inhabitants each. [/block]*
*Edit: okay, what am I doing wrong here?

Overall, however, I think it might just have been how the average post-wargaming era (cue Gronan and discussing marketing to 10-14 y.o.s) gamer thought of medieval towns.

Thenkew, thenkew.  I just flew in from Simmerya, and boy are my arms tired.  Take my lich, please.

Also the understanding of how a castle was actually a place from which to project force, rather than a hole to hide in.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1039005Thenkew, thenkew.  I just flew in from Simmerya, and boy are my arms tired.  Take my lich, please.

Also the understanding of how a castle was actually a place from which to project force, rather than a hole to hide in.

Since palisade forts in the old west were usually a rest spot and staging ground for the cavalry, I always assumed as a kid that motte-and-bailey forts (which looked similar) were used the same way.

Quote from: Dave R;1038795Another one:  low Strength, high Dexterity archers.  Wouldn't happen.  Real archers were known for their strength, which came from and was required for practicing drawing their bows.  To the extent that you can distinguish English longbowmen and Mongolian archers by their skeletons.

Yeah, well, this could be rectified by making minimum STR requirements for effectively using a longbow. But I don't think that requirement would need to be extremely high, either. Just on the high end of average, maybe.