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.

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 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.

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, 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 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 with crashed alien space ships loosely adapted from the Wilderlands of High Fantasy. I probably take cues from Wizard of Oz 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?