Quote from: daniel_ream;771566Screw wiggle room, I want fantasy worlds that are actually fantastic for a change.  Things like Inverse World, or Sundered Skies, or World Tree.

You know what, leave magic right out of it.  I'd be happy with a ringworld.  SUb-creation delenda est.

You can do that but why would a fantasy world look just like an ordinary world but with all the stuff that makes the works work replaced by magic?

Make a world inside a giant orange, make a world make up of pockets of shadowy ether tied together by living chains of monkeys but creating a world that looks just like our world and feels just like our world but you can have ice fields next to tropical jungles because magic is a bit crap.

Quote from: everloss;771703Sorry, I'm still not seeing how that is not something to take care of in pre-game prep, rather than plan for it months or years in advance during initial setting design.

There may be some sort of disconnect, so I will attempt to better portray my position.

Here is what I usually do: At the end of the last session, the players stop at the base of a mountain that a large band of bandits is using to terrorize the neighboring areas from a fort just above the tree line. Two sessions ago (about a week in-game), the first snow fell and has been off and on since. The upcoming session, they want to avoid the trail the bandits use and instead scale the mountain and attack the bandits in the cave about a quarter mile up a sheer cliff face. Between last session and the upcoming one, I determine the following: The wind is blowing at whatever-mph (enough to cause penalties to climb) , it's lightly snowing (more penalties), and with their climbing equipment (if any; there's always that one guy), it will take them whatever-many hours (I don't have a number off the top of my head; that's what rules are for) to climb the cliff at a relatively safe pace. Every hour, you have to make a skill check.  Or, they can wait 3d12 hours for the conditions to clear up (more random encounters).

Of course seasons exist in my games. Day and night are there too. I don't even see how that could have been misinterpreted.

I consider creating Jet Streams, an El Nino, La Nina, a Polar Vortex or two, solar and lunar cycles, position in the galaxy, etc, to be tiresome and not important at all to my games. And certainly not important to creating setting, unless it directly and noticeably influences game play or is the focus of the game. For example; if the world's weather is controlled by storm giant god and defeating it will end the devastating storms that constantly ravage the world.

Or, if it rains anvils from the sky whenever the three moons are in alignment directly above the planet, which happens every 3 months; that would be something you need to come up with in setting design, and track it as the campaign goes on. Or if the fifth high tide brings with it crabmen, this would be important to keep track of if the players are on the coast. Otherwise, why keep track of it?
What I don't think is necessary is the level of detail for what is described in Bat in the Attic's post. I consider those to be mundane subjects that distract from more important aspects of designing the setting.

(Sorry if this was rambling or incoherent. It's been a long day)

The answer is accept Earth norms then you can handwave it.

Air currents or ocean currents only matter if you change the norms. So if in your world there is a mountain 100 miles high the gods live on then that should affect stuff it will create air currents it will have implications. If your world isn;t a planet its a plate with a 100 mile high mountain in the middle that is awesome but that ought to affect stuff. What does the Sun do? travel overhead in an arc? What keeps that working? Without a horizon have people developed superior optics to send instant messages 1000s of miles?

We take a bunch of stuff for granted that relies on certain base settings of the position of earth & Sol in the galaxy, the composition, etc etc . If your world sticks to these norms you can handwave all the nitty gritty stuff with common sense. If your world varies greatly in a way then handwaving can create unforseen circumstances.
The obvious answer is to keep it all normal but its not always the answer you are looking for.

Quote from: everloss;771703

The ultimate reason why I would even entertain the idea of wind and water currents is simply because having those established gives me a baseline. From that, I can go ahead and plot out pretty sensible ecosystem locations. Established wind and water currents can also influence where objects (players and their stuff/stuff they want) will most likely get moved to by natural forces. Again, that's only if I really want to get into that level of natural detail for world building and want some sort of model consistency. I could very well just handle it with arbitrary decision making and that'd be completely acceptable.

Quote from: jibbajibba;771706[...] but creating a world that looks just like our world and feels just like our world but you can have ice fields next to tropical jungles because magic is a bit crap.

I don't think you're getting what I'm saying.  I don't want world(s) that look and feel just like our world.  I want fantasy worlds. Hyperborea, Middle Earth and Fake Europe have been done to death. More Scientifically Accurate Hyperborea, Middle Earth and Fake Europe isn't going to help with that.

I think there's an odd disconnect in the OSR where people will pish-tosh any suggestion that dungeons should make some kind of physical sense or obey basic logistics (a.k.a. "what do they eat and where do they shit"), but the second the PCs step outside the dungeon entrance everybody has to be James Lovelock.

Quote from: daniel_ream;771722I don't think you're getting what I'm saying.  I don't want world(s) that look and feel just like our world.  I want fantasy worlds. Hyperborea, Middle Earth and Fake Europe have been done to death. More Scientifically Accurate Hyperborea, Middle Earth and Fake Europe isn't going to help with that.

I think there's an odd disconnect in the OSR where people will pish-tosh any suggestion that dungeons should make some kind of physical sense or obey basic logistics (a.k.a. "what do they eat and where do they shit"), but the second the PCs step outside the dungeon entrance everybody has to be James Lovelock.

No I get what you are saying. I am saying most of the time people don't do that they have a "just like earth" world but with lots of crappy geography and then they handwave the currents being wrong or their being no actually effect of having 3 moons etc etc...

If your world mirrors earth just use the earth standard for this stuff and you are golden.

If your world is totally alien then knock yourself out except where you want it to mirror earth and then pay it some thought. All the winds are senient demi-gods, great. All the sea currents are caused by Poisodon, great. A mish mash of that and incorrect geography with no explanation might end up having unforeseen effects - like currents opposing the rotation of the planet, deserts in the wrong place, etc etc.

Quote from: jeff37923;771450Dragoner's got a solid point, though. A good magnetosphere comes from a rotating magnetic core and without that the ionizing radiation from the pimary star will strip the atmosphere right off a world even if there is a huge amount of it. It just takes a longer or shorter amount of time, millions instead of billions of years.

If you are doing hard science fiction, it becomes vital.

Okay: ionizing radiation strips the atmosphere. But, since it is not scientific realism but science-fiction, what if the planet was terraformed, and then populated with a custom biosphere? (I read elsewhere on the forums, that someone made calculations about giving the moon an atmosphere with having ice asteroids crash on it, and he claimed it wouldn't take thousands of years, but could be done relatively quickly.)  I guess it would comply with suspension of disbelief based on superficial planetology knowledge huh?

Quote from: Turanil;771782Okay: ionizing radiation strips the atmosphere. But, since it is not scientific realism but science-fiction, what if the planet was terraformed, and then populated with a custom biosphere?

Yes, stuff like that could be done, terraforming, and if not creating a dynamo effect, then to have an artificial magnetosphere generator. Spacecraft as well could benefit from a magnetic radiation shield. The idea of using real world weather for planet building is good, but also far more complex environmentally. For example, the Amazon Jungle is fertilized by the dust storms from North Africa, dust that is ocean sediment from millions of years ago.

Quote from: jibbajibba;771735A mish mash of that and incorrect geography with no explanation might end up having unforeseen effects - like currents opposing the rotation of the planet, deserts in the wrong place, etc etc.

I can't think of a single group I've gamed with in thirty years that would notice that sort of thing, nor care.

And even if they did, "the gods made it that way" has worked for every single pre-Enlightenment culture on Earth, so it's good enough for a dungeon fantasy campaign.

One of my personal bugbears is gamers who simultaneously wank on about "immersion" yet have no trouble importing vast amounts of anachronistic knowledge about general science into what is ostensibly a medieval pastiche.  Pre-Enlightenment sailors, merchants, alchemists, and chirurgeons have had various models of the natural world that we know know were crashingly wrong, but that worked well enough for their immediate and daily experience.  

A fantasy world need not match modern notions of planetology perfectly as long as it works well enough for the people who live there.

If that works for you and your players that's totally fine, but I'm admittedly obsessive when it comes to figuring out these sorts of things. And getting into the physical rules of a setting helps ME as a GM get into the setting more. And me getting into the setting more means I can in turn get players into the game.

Quote from: Turanil;771782Okay: ionizing radiation strips the atmosphere. But, since it is not scientific realism but science-fiction, what if the planet was terraformed, and then populated with a custom biosphere? (I read elsewhere on the forums, that someone made calculations about giving the moon an atmosphere with having ice asteroids crash on it, and he claimed it wouldn't take thousands of years, but could be done relatively quickly.)  I guess it would comply with suspension of disbelief based on superficial planetology knowledge huh?

Well, how long do you want the atmosphere to last? Long enough for the terraformers to get a good investment on their work or just long enough for the planetary roofing company to cash their check?

How much or how little science is in your science fiction is up to you. I've just found that the more scientifically accurate, the more plausible, and thus the more playable.

Quote from: mightyuncle;771827And getting into the physical rules of a setting helps ME as a GM get into the setting more. And me getting into the setting more means I can in turn get players into the game.

Well and good - prep is play, after all[1] - but why do those rules need to match modern notions of planetology and geography for a fantasy campaign?  

The Floating Forest is no longer on speaking terms with gravity and so rocks of various sizes drift at various heights from the ground and the larger ones have permanent temperate forest biomes.  Gravity and biology Do Not Work Like That in the real world, so no rock surfing for you.

The Godscar is a blasted badland, flat to the horizon save for drifts of gritty, scouring sand and skin-blistering aridity.  It's not in the rain shadow of a mountain range; it's like that because it's where the gods Dux Falcor and Grolm Ascendant annihilated each other at the head of their respective divine armies a thousand years ago, and the Omnis Pater decreed it should remain as such for eternity as a warning to gods and mortals alike.  But climatology Does Not Work Like That, so no sifting for lost divine artifacts for you.

Seriously, when did slavish devotion to James Lovelock become the be-all and end-all of setting creation?  The Land of Oz and Glorantha must give people fits.



[1] Well, for some people.  I long since stopped caring about detailed prep, but it's personal preference.

This is turning into badwrongfun-ism rather quickly. As I've stated previously, if someone wants mythical explanations for their gameworld, great! If they're consistent with a set of physical rules (which certainly don't have to be based on physical geography or even Newtonian principles) then even better. The only potential problem I see is that when new physical rules are established by a setting and aren't made consistent, unexpected consequences will occur. Maybe that's an ideal, and it would certainly be great fun in certain ways (a truly chaotic setting for instance), but sometimes it's just easiest to go with a fairly stable model as a base.

I think a lot  of people missed the distinction between fantasy and science fiction I made earlier.

Quote from: jeff37923;771916I think a lot  of people missed the distinction between fantasy and science fiction I made earlier.

The only reason I even mentioned anything upthread is that if I am doing something sci-fi I prefer it to at least have a little scientific reality so was wondering if that planet would possibly happen. As for fantasy? Who cares because it's fantasy.