Do you prefer high fantasy or low fantasy in your games?

What the fuck?

I generally prefer high fantasy. The games I run are very player focused and I like my PCs to be people of real significance, given both personal power and the ability to change the world around them, in lesser or greater ways depending on the game.

I like conflicts to be over the top, awesome and extravagant affairs instead of brutal knife fights in the dirt.

Entirely personal preference, nothing wrong with people who prefer grittier stuff, but it just doesn't do it for me.

I like to keep things a bit more grounded because it makes things more relatable and keeps the supernatural more mysterious and respectable.

High. I like my fantasy weird and fantastical, and tend to find that low fantasy errs toward GoT ripoffs.

When I was younger, I loved High fantasy settings with lots of magic and outlandish races all melding together. My friends and I had this setting that was composed off 30~35 different playable races and a huge number of homebrew classes that all seemed to be some variant of "battlemage".

Nowadays, I prefer the opposite. I like settings where humans are the only playable race, and where the classes aren't absolutely defined. The older I get, the more I seem to enjoy this type of setting.

My current campaign setting is basically "Not-Europe" with a few mythological creatures sprinkled in on a rare occassion. My players seem to enjoy it. I think a lot of settings hide behind a lot of fantasy lore to negate the lack of interesting conflict in the world's actual story. In some cases it's easier to say, "Evil magic did it" than it is to explain why one group of humans hates another group of humans, and why that started a war.

Low Fantasy. I like to see heroes struggle with everyday issues and problems instead of just magic-fighting a mile above the heads of normal mortals.

Agreed. Low Fantasy should not mean Berserk.

See, low fantasy for me always means something similar to The Witcher series.

>I like settings where humans are the only playable race
I've banned elves from my settings because players just straight up can't be original when making them. They always turn out to be Dirk Lonewolf, Master of Edge.

High fantasy, largely because I like powerful and ubiquitous magic.

I like low fantasy and science fantasy best.

High fantasy, always.

?kcuf eht tahW

This is what grinds my gears.
Low fantasy shouldn't have to avoid weirdness, and extravagance, and should definately not aim to be gritty and edgy.

Conan is low fantasy, Solomon Kane is low fantasy. Van Helsing the Universal movie is low fantasy. Yes they all have fantastic monsters, sorcerers and magic. No neither has Rape McRapeson the child fiddler as BBEG.

Low fantasy is about things being cohesive and following a set nature: "You can raise the dead at will, period", is high fantasy. "You can project your conciousness into a dead body if you enter a specific trance caused by the ingestion of these herbs and you lose control of the dead body in question if it doesn't have a head", is low fantasy.

Hindu mithology is high fantasy, Bloody Mary is low fantasy. It's not about there being or not being magic and supernatural elements, it's about wether magic is "lol I can do whatever I fucking want at will" or if it "makes sense".

This confuses me. High fantasy does makes sense, it's just by a different set of rules, generally more metaphorical or metaphysical.

I once hear someone compare high/low fantasy to prog rock and heavy metal.
Yes both may be talking about a viking's journey through the monster-filled ice wasteland. But prog rock tells the tale esoterically and not necessarily in any discernible order, while heavy metal does it descriptively and emotionally.

I mix both into the same setting, being gritty one moment, and epic the enxt

I like high-magic, high-stakes epic adventures. I think planescape is my favorite setting in D&D.

That doesn't mean things can't be "gritty" or the players can't feel low-powered, but everything's relative. Getting dragged into a dark corner of Sigil and shanked is a very real concern, just as running out of money and getting stranded in some shithole plane where you need to deal with unfriendly locals and an asshole pitfiend who runs the place.

You can only deal with annoying peasants and greenskin hordes so many times before being a little jaded about the whole thing.

I do like both with leaning a bit more towards the high when it comes to the mythos and legends of the world while the moment the players are in is fairly low fantasy. That way, i get the players not going bloody crazy about being more powerful with magic stuff and instead get crazy with something that allows me to create NPCs

I like my fantasy to be scifi with magic instead of lasers and psionics.
Ironically I don't like scifi very much.

I dislike both because the concept is as pretentious as every other divide trope that exist such as martial v caster

My DM prefers high fantasy, but only if it is out of the hands of the players

You sure contributed a shit ton to this thread and humanity at large.

Well if it's already shit then what's left? These divides as hard set rules is pointless to me and stifles imagination.

Using them as a jumping off point to determine what sort of world/setting you want to make is fine but now they are seemingly codified into sacred cow status.

Are they hard set rules that people use to create things, or do people create things and then find that they fall under one category?

[Spoiler]It's both, and that's fucking fine. Dial the pretension down, step off the soapbox, and take your head out of your ass.[/spoiler]

There isn't any.