Quote from: Daztur;1049251Which is why setting material that supposes that standard PC-style adventurering bands (as opposed to mercenary or trading companies) are a recognized social institution. It's like running an A-Team campaign and having a list of crack commando units sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit listed in the fucking phone book. Really makes me cringe. Either have the PCs be part of some kind of normal historical group (drinking buddies of the local iron age warlord or whatever) or have them be a weird one-off exception in the world.

I think this is one of those cases where if you inspect it closely enough, traditional D&D tropes made sense very early on, but a lot of them carried on without the assumptions that made them reasonable (in no small part, I'm guessing, because a lot of people don't really care if the tropes hold up under intense scrutiny any more than it matters to them if the D&D world economy makes sense, etc.). In a Dying Earth-inspired pseudo-frontier western, you can have a society which the social norm is diligent hard work and making a living as a dirty farmer taming the untamed wilderness and it making sense that those people for whom that lifestyle is a bad fit would look to the hills potentially full of [strike]gold[/strike]fabulous artifacts of a lost civilization. In that context, it's fairly reasonable that said society would expect a certain percentage of their young folk to try to make a living in that divergent endeavor.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1049437I think this is one of those cases where if you inspect it closely enough, traditional D&D tropes made sense very early on, but a lot of them carried on without the assumptions that made them reasonable (in no small part, I'm guessing, because a lot of people don't really care if the tropes hold up under intense scrutiny any more than it matters to them if the D&D world economy makes sense, etc.). In a Dying Earth-inspired pseudo-frontier western, you can have a society which the social norm is diligent hard work and making a living as a dirty farmer taming the untamed wilderness and it making sense that those people for whom that lifestyle is a bad fit would look to the hills potentially full of goldfabulous artifacts of a lost civilization. In that context, it's fairly reasonable that said society would expect a certain percentage of their young folk to try to make a living in that divergent endeavor.

Indeed, the classic D&D tropes work a lot better if your setting is some combo of Wild West meets Sci-Fi Post-Apocalypse (of the "sufficiently advanced technology" variety) with some medieval trappings ladled on top... or, more simply, Thundarr the Barbarian.

My campaign world is pretty much exactly this (magitech utopia wiped out in an arcane cataclysm 200 years prior that wiped out 98% of the population and mutated half the survivors into hideous monstrosities like trolls and orcs... isolated pockets of civilization, many who survived because of access to some piece of pre-cataclysm magitech or architecture, are only now becoming stable enough to look beyond their immediate survival to the monster-haunted and ruin-filled wilderness that surrounds them and prospects of the resources (including lost magitech) that might make the difference between extinction, mere survival or being able to thrive) and the tropes work beautifully.

Quote from: Chris24601;1049455Indeed, the classic D&D tropes work a lot better if your setting is some combo of Wild West meets Sci-Fi Post-Apocalypse (of the "sufficiently advanced technology" variety) with some medieval trappings ladled on top... or, more simply, Thundarr the Barbarian.

My campaign world is pretty much exactly this (magitech utopia wiped out in an arcane cataclysm 200 years prior that wiped out 98% of the population and mutated half the survivors into hideous monstrosities like trolls and orcs... isolated pockets of civilization, many who survived because of access to some piece of pre-cataclysm magitech or architecture, are only now becoming stable enough to look beyond their immediate survival to the monster-haunted and ruin-filled wilderness that surrounds them and prospects of the resources (including lost magitech) that might make the difference between extinction, mere survival or being able to thrive) and the tropes work beautifully.

I really like this approach.  I like my settings similar to this without the magitech.  Just pockets struggling to survive in a ruined landscape.  Whatever the small groups find in the ruins can improve the chances of survival of the village/town.  But it's really dangerous out there and only a few are willing and able to brave the adventure.  Strangers are almost always viewed with suspicion.

I don't really try to justify why the setting is the way it is. There is a pseudo-medieval fairy tale land and right next to it is a wild west pulp frontier. There are ruins of past civilizations, crashed alien space ships, living dungeons and spawn points. There are coal towns build around living dungeons which have economies based entirely on delving into the abyss to acquire the resources and relics it produces from nowhere. Monsters (including human bandits) are produced from nowhere by spawn points, sidestepping the ethnics of killing people or having to worry about the impossible ecology of a death world. The party are either murderhobos who plunder the frontier, questers who rescue princesses from dragons, members of a temp agency who perform odd jobs like "kill ten rats", or oscillate between these.

Quote from: Narmer;1049472I really like this approach.  I like my settings similar to this without the magitech.  Just pockets struggling to survive in a ruined landscape.  Whatever the small groups find in the ruins can improve the chances of survival of the village/town.  But it's really dangerous out there and only a few are willing and able to brave the adventure.  Strangers are almost always viewed with suspicion.

Just to clarify, when I say magitech; I mainly mean magic items that magic as understood by the PCs is incapable of reproducing (but which were able to be produced by the 'magitech' utopia that preceded the current age). Some might be more techie-looking than others (ex. the Apparatus of Kalwash and Iron Golems), but mostly I mean things like magical weapons and armor (particularly those with extra abilities), flying carpets, teleportation circles, etc.

Thus, as befits the classic D&D tropes, if you, your patron or your community wants or needs a particular magic item (or lost spell) then you're going to need an adventurer to go out into the monster haunted ruins and find it for you because the knowledge of how to actually build one from scratch has been lost.

It also plays a role in explaining why certain species exist in the world; an empire that existed before the magitech one specialized in a type of magic called Biomancy and played mix-and-match genetics with all manner of creatures; creating things like minotaurs, centaurs, gnolls, lizardmen, wyverns, griffins, etc. as slave labor and/or as living weapons.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;1048730Warhammer Dwarves are Orcs are supposed to be caricatures. That's pretty much the point.

Is it? I haven't paid a lot of attention to Warhammer, but I liked the flavor of a lot of what I did read in, er, the unofficial fan-made adaptation-to-GURPS of WarhammerFRPG... that is, the magic system for dwarves looked interesting, but I can't see putting up with having them all be played as cliche` drunkards with pseudo-Scottish accents - that just sounds terrible.

Quote from: Skarg;1049493Is it? I haven't paid a lot of attention to Warhammer, but I liked the flavor of a lot of what I did read in, er, the unofficial fan-made adaptation-to-GURPS of WarhammerFRPG... that is, the magic system for dwarves looked interesting, but I can't see putting up with having them all be played as cliche` drunkards with pseudo-Scottish accents - that just sounds terrible.

Yeah, Warhammer Fantasy (and 40k, at least in origin) is pretty much a deliberately cliché-ridden satire. In its defense, I think that's actually to its strength as it twists the concepts enough to create humorously interesting conceits of its own.

Quote from: Chris24601;1049490Just to clarify, when I say magitech; I mainly mean magic items that magic as understood by the PCs is incapable of reproducing (but which were able to be produced by the 'magitech' utopia that preceded the current age). Some might be more techie-looking than others (ex. the Apparatus of Kalwash and Iron Golems), but mostly I mean things like magical weapons and armor (particularly those with extra abilities), flying carpets, teleportation circles, etc.

Thus, as befits the classic D&D tropes, if you, your patron or your community wants or needs a particular magic item (or lost spell) then you're going to need an adventurer to go out into the monster haunted ruins and find it for you because the knowledge of how to actually build one from scratch has been lost.

It also plays a role in explaining why certain species exist in the world; an empire that existed before the magitech one specialized in a type of magic called Biomancy and played mix-and-match genetics with all manner of creatures; creating things like minotaurs, centaurs, gnolls, lizardmen, wyverns, griffins, etc. as slave labor and/or as living weapons.

Ahh, thanks for the clarification.  Then what you described actually sounds pretty much what I like.

Quote from: Narmer;1049519Ahh, thanks for the clarification.  Then what you described actually sounds pretty much what I like.

Yeah, I get the confusion because some people use the term to refer to modern technology powered by magic, but technically the term is more about magic being used AS technology (i.e. studied and applied in practical and repeatable ways) and that's essentially what the magitech utopia did. They had sufficiently mastered arcane magic to the point that mass production of all manner of magic devices to make one's life easier was the norm. There was an entire network of teleportation circles running on a hub-and-spoke schedule akin to modern airline model. Crystal balls functioned the way we'd use voice chat. There's some magic quill in D&D that duplicates any text it touches onto a clean page... Welcome to Arcane Kinkos, etc.

All that got blown to bits by the Cataclysm so while there are all sorts of items that can do those things out there in the ruins, the knowledge base needed to actually reproduce all but the most basic items has been lost (for reference... imagine how many technologies we'd lose if the global population dropped from 7+ billion to just 70 million tomorrow with no rhyme or reason to who perished and who was spared).

The fact that the largest city in the region (population 15,000) has a functioning teleportation circle is a HUGE deal because, even though the few addresses they have (they were at a spoke, not a hub) no longer work (another city about a week's travel upriver found the remains of theirs, so its likely whatever one they had an address to was destroyed) its address can still be used to perform teleportation rituals (which can be performed anywhere by someone skilled in the ritual) TO the portal in the city, meaning that while it might take time to get someplace, getting BACK is easy (and thus causes much of what is unearthed by adventurers in the region to end up in the city before it goes someplace else).

Thus, you have a logical reason for your "city of adventure" whose major industry is actually catering to adventurers and selling off what they bring back.

Quote from: Chris24601;104917690+% of human populations in medieval society were peasants/serfs tied to the land and forbidden to own weapons or armor. The clergy were largely tied to their parishes/diocese and the nobles had to manage and protect the the land they swore their oaths to their overlord for in an area before rapid communication was possible. Other than a once in a lifetime pilgrimage or military campaign few of these people traveled more than a league or two from where they were born.

The lifestyle to which the typical D&D adventurer belongs in actual medieval society would that of the outlaw which, by definition, fell outside the social norms of human society. At best in late medieval times they might qualify as a mercenary company... which was barely a step up from banditry in terms of society unless they had a current patron for their services.

Humans as a whole AREN'T adventurers or heroes. That's one of the reasons we tell stories about those few of us who are. Human heroes and adventurers are probably about as rare among humans as Drizzt is among the Drow. They are the 1-in-a-million exceptions that prove the rule.

We've had this nonsensical conversation before. So this time you're not just wrong, you're boring.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1049367Have you actually read D&D Dwarf or Elf lore?  Dwarves are often clannish traditionalists with a comfortably (for them) rigid caste system that one is born in and is expected to be happy and who shun the outside world.  Meaning the average Dwarf is going to look at an adventuring one like he's a freak that needs to leave.  Now.

Non-Drow Elves are no less restrictive, despite their flighty, 'free love' and generally nice seeming demeanor, they prefer their own kind and view outsiders with distrust and benevolent contempt (kinda like the Japanese, actually...  Huhn...) and anyone who wants to leave is often seen as a wayward child that will grow out of it.  They might indulge it, but they'll never approve of it.

And someone already explained Hobbits, who I will never understand the appeal of.

Do you want to know why the 'Adventure Coupon' style of adventure resonates so much with a lot of gamers?  

Because by and large, humans tend to not really be that adventurous.  We, like Hobbits, prefer to stay home where it's safe and comfortable, but can be roused to action when something big and major happens, thus 'The Adventure Coupon'.

By definition, Player Characters ARE the 'special snowflakes' of the Fantasy genre.  They go where most of their own kind never will.

My point stands.

There's still a big difference than that and having every fucking Drow PC being a dual-scimitar wielding good-aligned total-reject from everything his society stands for.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1049762We've had this nonsensical conversation before. So this time you're not just wrong, you're boring.

Translation: I can't argue with anything you said (just like I couldn't last time) so I'm just going to insult you because my fragile ego can't take admitting I might be wrong about something. Maybe if you didn't keep spewing the same tired OneTrueWay arguments I wouldn't have to keep repeating the same facts to refute them.

Oft repeated facts ARE boring. That doesn't make them any less true or not the best tool to refute a faulty (and oft-repeated) argument.

Quote from: Chris24601;1049778Translation: I can't argue with anything you said (just like I couldn't last time) so I'm just going to insult you because my fragile ego can't take admitting I might be wrong about something. Maybe if you didn't keep spewing the same tired OneTrueWay arguments I wouldn't have to keep repeating the same facts to refute them.

Oft repeated facts ARE boring. That doesn't make them any less true or not the best tool to refute a faulty (and oft-repeated) argument.

Here is an article with sources debunking the stereotype that medieval people rarely traveled. In fact, the middle ages saw a boom in transportation.

EDIT: And here is an entire essay with citations.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1049807Here is an article with sources debunking the stereotype that medieval people rarely traveled. In fact, the middle ages saw a boom in transportation.

EDIT: And here is an entire essay with citations.

Just glancing at these articles it still seems that only a small portion of the population traveled significantly or regularly.

I've always been enamored by plant/fungi or insectoid/mantian races but I can't see how to play one in a setting.