Hmm.  I did some work on this before.

from here.

Setting Expectations-Something is perceived as marvelous or unusual in the way it stands out from the rest of the world. When I took classes in fiction writing back in the dark ages, they cautioned against everything being the biggest, strongest, coolest...in Setting design, the strongest sense of wonder is created by creating a realistic, baseline expectation of normalcy.
If you numb them with superlative experiences, the set piece won't have the same effect.

Quote from: flyingmice;788695SOMEBODY's been watching Guardians of the Galaxy!

-clash

Aye  ...love that movie

Quote from: jibbajibba;788653But your descriptions cover real world logic. You have small areas of farmland but you have a logical reason - druids that make the crops grow kill the druids and one presumes the city will starve ... Problmes only come when everyone is blase about magic and accepts it as the norm but there is no impact on the setting.

Exactly.

A frequent argument I get into involves the degree to which magic changes society.  My stance is that generally, it shouldn't: the rules governing magic, in most game systems, is too restrictive to have widespread magical technologies.  But beyond that, the game companies don't believe it either.  However much a strident faction claims otherwise, and with very few exceptions, published game settings don't work that way.  Crops don't come from druids; farmers are depicted as working the fields.  Swords don't come from a magical assembly line; they're forged on anvils by blacksmiths.  People don't live in ten-story apartment blocks wrought by magic; they live in the sorts of places a 14th-century Burgundian would recognize.

But if you've actually thought this through -- and thinking through EVERY change, because JibbaJibba highlighted the problem every Magical Economy GM ignores -- then sure, more power to you.

Quote from: Will;788697I learned back in college that one of the worst mistakes a DM can do is say 'oh, make anything, I'll make it work.'

It comes from a boundless optimism in creativity and player freedom. While it doesn't invariably lead to a train wreck, it makes it veeeery likely (and it's also a good sign the DM is probably newish)

One of the things I really like are the increasing prevalence of games suggesting parties be made collaboratively, where players actually talk to one another and try to build starting relationships.

It's not a new idea (I mean, I'm pretty sure Ars Magica at least brushed on the idea back in the 90s, just off the top of my head), but it seems to have more visibility nowadays.

I am actually less keen on colaborative party building as i want the characters to live in the world and not to be together because they make a consistent party.

However, i often imposs quite tight restrictions. You are all members of the Harne embassy party, you are all travelling with a trade caravan. Etc

I enjoyed Pratt's Well of the Unicorn, and also the Incomplete Enchanter; De Camp's Lest Darkness Fall, and also the Fallible Fiend; Anderson's Broken Sword, and also Three Hearts and Three Lions; Eddison's Zimiamvia trilogy, and also the Worm Ouroboros; Kurtz's Deryni, and also Bradley's Darkover; Witch World and Earthsea, Nehwon and Hyperboria and Poictesme; the Dying Earth, the Earth of Count Brass, the Urth of the New Sun; the Princes of Amber and Chaos, the Lords of Creation, the Jack of Shadows.

There's a problem, I think, only if "the setting" is arbitrarily limited to one planet (perhaps one continent), and a remarkably prosaic one at that. That seems to be the fashion in D&D lately, but it was not so back in the day.

Otherwise, internal consistency is applicable only to the extent there is an internal in the first place (and I do favor places having their own character, as opposed to a universal monoculture). Earthly examples can be informative illustrations of general principles, but fantasy - at least as much as science fiction - is primarily about "what if", not what has been.

Quote from: jibbajibba;788642Now as I have noted many times I love to ad lib, but when I do that I always start with the setting basics in my head. Playing for 35 years and the fact that my academic choices largely followed my RPG interests means that I can imagine a world whole cloth in moments. It will be cliched to a degree but real. A desert land made up of city states and nomad raiders, an archipilago of islands populated by warrior poets, a mountainous kingdom locked in a 100 year war between different castes of dwarves. These ideas spring unbidded to all out minds and create almost instant settings all you need to give them the touch of authenticity is some grounding in Geography, Anthropology and History and a good memory.

Just to add a bit of finish for this, a simple random table of Natural Resources, randomly placed within the borders of a kingdom... Could be as few as 1d4, or as many as 1d20 natural resources. This will determine alot about trade and economic development in the setting Jibbajabba is describing.