Just how "real" do you try to make your settings?

Real enough to make the players feel at home, but completely unreal otherwise. For me, roleplaying is all about exploring crazy ideas and original concepts.

No, Dwarf is better.

But dragons are no animals.

What are the Chaktas and why do they need fixing?

Here, and behold a relic of a bygone era, back when we could get along by hating something else beside ourselves:

1d4chan.org/wiki/Chakat

No one should wonder about what kind of taxes High King Peter is implimenting on his animal subjects. In truely fantastic settings I believe that the best way is to try to create hero stories, with arcs aping fairy tales or legends. The stories of Koshchei the Deathless, or the Odyssey are excellent starting points.

For more low fantasy grounded works you can focus all you like on politics, trade, taxes, imperialism, the horrors of war and clashes of culture. But for those works its harder to integrate large magical beasts and powerful magic.

The big problem with this is that you're not an expert in every field know to man. You WILL make mistakes, and BIG ones that you don't even notice.
It's a useless pursuit. You can make it as realist as you want, but you shouldn't make it realist for the sake of realism.

>Goddamn housing prices in rainbow valley are high

They're just Sphinxes with ridiculous lore.

I'm hammering out some alt-history WW2, so I'm trying to work in enough realism to make it feel like that era, but I feel like there also has to be some wiggle room for the more fantastical elements.
I am not looking forward to converting the Aegir Fleet to World War 2 era ships.

Actually, a Morganite campaign for free market in Narnia sounds pretty hilarious.

i tend to be realistic as long as it doesnt fuck with rules or fun

>dwarves are
All suffering from black lung
>elves are
Retarded or unimaginably better than humans. They live for hundreds of years, either a 200 year old elf is about as competent as a 20 year old human in which case they learn extremely slowly or a 200 year old elf has 30 years of special forces combat experience and three doctorates.

they work adequately enough in more grounded fantasy if they're toned down a bit in overall magic because there's less competition and kept sufficiently rare and mythological

That or they work fantastic as victims of the "march of progress", think the PotC scene with the dead kraken.

Magic is simply another law of physics, just a highly unpredictable and misunderstood one

Want to know something funny about chakats? They're a lovecraftian mangling of something that existed in D&D for over a decade before they were spawned from the abominable mind who thought them up. In fact they may even have been inspired from them.

I present to you the Wemic. It's a cat taur people from Faerun. Created in 1982 for a supplement to AD&D, they were fully added to D&D in 1983 with the Monster Manual II. To fix chakats all you need to do is ignore them and go back to playing D&D. Pic related is from Monsters of Faerun for 3e.

Dwarves are blind as a subterranean race that doesn't have light to see with, have good hearing and tremor sense, and do not do forging as caves don't have much flammable substances without being very hazardous to live in.

Elves are long armed with dense muscles for moving among trees and never developed agriculture as a purely hunter-gatherer society that depends on the local ecosystem to survive.

something I tried with elves is to give them absolutely no concept of education
this slows down their progress significantly as they can't build on past achievements but still allows them to compete given they live a long ass time so an elf actually has the time to reinvent the wheel.

While this is a way of doing magic, it's far from the only way. More metaphorical and abstract magic which isn't 'logical' in the way we think of things can be fascinating in its own right.

Not very. The moon (well, one of them) is an all-powerful lich's phylactery that was hung in the sky in far eld times by magical proto-gods. Reality is no fun.

...

it says no multi-track drifting right in the image you goon

There is explicitly no Multitrack Drifting. Your choices are Bad and Worse. He even disallows you to kill yourself.

Honestly I feel like elves should be the generalists with their chaotic nature and long lives.
>Elves live for hundreds of years
>Tend to get bored of the same job after a few decades
>An old elf might be the apprentice to a blacksmith half his age and 120 years later teach his former master medicine
So elves might have skills in tons of categories but they are averse to mastering anything fully and what they do master they tend to forget the finer points as they move onto other jobs. Sure your party wizard may have been a master blacksmith 240 years ago but he has forgot the finer points, he can still fix a blade just fine but he can't make a masterful sword from scratch.

After all can you imagine doing your current job for the next 750 years?

What did I do to find myself stuck in this hypothetical greentext moral quandary, anyway? If you're gonna slap more rules on me I want some context.

Save the dwarf because fuck questfags, when it comes to dating go elf and and treat her like crap until she breaks up with me, it worked for plenty of other girlfriends when I got tired of them.

could be interesting if Elves had virtually endless lifespan, but only sufficient memory to remember a good 150 to 200 years of it
they constantly need to make a choice what is worth remembering

Guy who made the original post here.

The idea was to bisect all the skubjects of Veeky Forums and personify them through two of the worst waifus ever created, then balance it by making them have some of the worst personality traits and habits imaginable.

Basically Towergirls, except one you hatefuck, the other you just hate, and have the pleasure of seeing them dead.

Well it is theorized that humans perceive time as going faster as they age because they compare all time they are experiencing to their previous experiences. To explain it more simply when you are 6 years old a month is 1.4% of your entire life up to that point, a pretty big chunk, when you are 40 a month is just 0.21% of your life up to that point. Maybe in order to perceive time properly immortal and pseudo immortal beings have to regularly "prune" memories from time to time, perhaps entirely unconsciously just forgetting something just like how you might forget your third grade thanksgivings play.

So the elf may be 600 years old but he only has 100ish years of memories. Sure he never forgets basic math or how to talk but after 400 years he may completely forget the name of that human woman he fell in love with and married at some point. The only reason an elf remembers his family is because he interacts with them regularly and is thus reminded of them, the elf who befriended the great human hero long ago completely forgot about him and only has vague memories of their adventures "I remember we fought something big and lizardlike probably a dragon, and the bad guy had a name that sounded angry lots of Ks and Xs in his name."

Overall I like the idea of making elves and other races more alien in terms of psychology, allows the chance to make other races seem like different races as opposed to agile humans with pointy ears who don't age or short hairy people who live pretty long.

also an interesting conundrum that comes from this: their personality could undergo utterly drastic shifts throughout their lives to the point the person they were 5 centuries ago can hardly be called the same as they are now

so what do you do with someone who committed a great crime they can no longer remember commit nor the experiences that drove them to be capable of committing it
and perhaps elves would have somewhere along the line invented a magical way to store memories of great importance for later review, but if they've forgotten all context about those memories, how do they view them?

>could be interesting if Elves had virtually endless lifespan, but only sufficient memory to remember a good 150 to 200 years of it

The Prince of Nothing and The Aspect-Emperor books have this.
Elves have two interesting things about them, from what I remember:
>they can't read 2D
Their art is all 3D, and they can't properly write down and read.
>they get mad as they get older, because memories blur together
Their elders find someone they trust to spill knowledge into, so they can remind them. When this human memory bank dies, they need another.

Now I read this a long time ago, so maybe I am remembering it badly, but it was something like that.

Not at all. I try to make them believable.

Read enough about reality and you'll see plenty of unbelievable stuff, like pic related, ming troops using triple-barreled arquebuses as shields and the utter dumbness of the first battle in WW1. I've reads decrying how "unrealistic" it was in how the germans walked in close formation towards the machineguns. 19th century Tactics against 20th century technology.

However, the same reading gives you plenty of support material for your fantasy. It's incredible how chinese city wall architecture has the techniques and proportions one would think appropriate for dwarfs. If you take away the curved roofs, many people won't notice the difference.

I don't, really. It's high fantasy, bordering on epic fantasy, trying to have realism and reconcile it with the more ridiculous aspects of the setting has been attempted, and every time I tried to do it, it just felt jarring as fuck.

Internal consistency, yes. Realism? Naw. I don't feel like the latter is that important compared to the former anyway.

Consistency is miles more important than realism. It really doesn't matter what crazy shit you put in your setting so long as it's internally consistent. And I suppose as long as the writing is good. As someone once put it, people will suspend their disbelief for the impossible, but not for the improbable.

I honestly already did that, inspired by a movie about an immortal man.

Reading the dragon example is this "realism" or "internal consistency"?
Because things can be reduced to "this amount of mass can fly based on that wingspan, thus I should be able to make a flying armored car with a few parachutes and extra engines". If you say no, you aren't internally consistent, unless the dragon has those extra mechanics.

That is, anything "unrealistic", so not properly explained, the players can turn into "not internally consistent" by rationalizing and emulating it.

its not an uncommon theme in stories about immortality
however that shouldn't stop anyone from using it, like another user said it gives otherwise relatively humanlike immortal creatures a more unique feature
its vastly more interesting than immortal supermen elves anyways

>also an interesting conundrum that comes from this: their personality could undergo utterly drastic shifts throughout their lives to the point the person they were 5 centuries ago can hardly be called the same as they are now
Elves view their past and future selves as entirely separate entities from their present self and Elven law takes into account that belief focusing on immediate punishment for crimes (generally the death penalty, banishment, or fines) as opposed to prolonged punishment. By imprisoning or enslaving a man for his crimes you are imprisoning his future self who is innocent of wrongdoing. To elves imprisoning someone for crimes is like imprisoning a man who committed murder as well as his sons and grandsons.

But if I'm playing dnd how can I get off on how much I hate furries?

could be neat as this innately puts conflict in their relations with other, less long-lives, species

...

I suppose that's realism, or at the very least an attempt at explaining the inner workings of the setting.

You can't spot whether something is consistent or not with a single situation, you need several.

For example it would be inconsistent if you explained at some point that dragons need to eat trees to breathe fire, then dozens months later you make a desert dragon(with no trees for miles around it) spit fire, because you forgot that dragons in this setting worked differently than other ones.
That'd be internally inconsistent.

You can also for example, make it a rule that every red object in the universe has faster velocity than other colored ones, or that holding your breath lessens your gravity by 10x or other wacky rules that aren't realistic at all. Being internally consistent means keeping track of these rules and making the world and its citizens ALWAYS follow that framework, and live accordingly to it. Don't just dump the info on the player once when it's convenient , like make sure every archer has red arrows, every carriage is being painted red, most messengers are red-skinned, etc.

>RED GOES FASTA
>everyone suffers from high blood pressure
>a bullet entering a body will accelerate instead of decelerate and kill as many people behind the guy
>red wave spectrum moves faster, frying people's brains

i absolutely agree

>red wave spectrum moves faster

It's already the fastest, that's the reason why people get the impression that red is faster, and it's the reason why the color red stands out first in the eyes(and is such used to draw attention to important stuff), since it's literally the first color to be perceived by the brain.

Blue is the slowest wave by the way. It's why the sky is blue, it's the last color to pass through the atmosphere. And probably why its effect is calming.

Right, I mean that it moves the fastest, faster. Because this new world is the same as ours, except red is faster.

Hit the dwarf with the train. They'll be fine and I get to have both.
Only an idiot would choose anything else.

Eh

Magic is kind of a clause to prevent exactly that, though. The dragon is inherently magical and passively channels that magic into downward force to give itself vastly more lift than would otherwise be possible for it's frame.

But I feel like if you ever actually need to directly state that to your players, then at least one party has fucked up. Like, it's a given that the world operates by magic and not on the laws of physics as we know them, so internal consistency is a strange issue because explaining exactly what is and isn't possible would take the magic out of it. So you keep that shit in your head and leave the wonder in place.

I'd hit one with the train and go beat the other to death with the lever.

DUAL TRACK DRIFTING

>date elf
>kill dwarf

elf>dwarf

So would then going under a dragon cause you to be crushed by the pressure? The shadow of a dragon being the scariest part of it, felling trees and destroying homes? Mite be cool, but also easy to "hack".

And when I play I always ask how things work, so that I can craft those bag of holding/portable hole guns and such.
Whats the point of a world with high magic if all we do is throw fire at people and stab with swords? Engineers gotta engineer.

I absolutely disagree.
In Lord of the Rings, by not telling us what Gandalf can do, and what he can't do, the author leaves us wondering "why didn't he do X". We must know where the limits are, and this is easiest done if we know how tings work.
Else...
>why didn't the king pay clerics to resurrect his son
>why didn't the blind guy go downtown to where the healer sells cure blindness scrolls
>why don't all soldiers get into this bag of holding, catapult it, and run out to take the castle
>why don't the peasants capture the troll that regenerates, and cut off limbs from him to have endless meat

And so on, and so on.
Thats why Wheel of Time has bad magic, and Mistborn has good magic.

Dwarfs are blind and resemble anthropomorphic bats or moles. They use spears rather than axes, as they would be superior weapons in narrow corridors.

Point by point

1. Elf, barely.(Amelia or Naga, fffff)
2. No points, Im more into Exalted ever since 2e.
3. Dwarf
4. Dwarf
5. What do they post, exactly? /pol/ is basically an ideological arena. No Points.
6. Elf. Don't care for GURPS, but glad she's willing to try new things.
7. Apathetic. No Points
8. See 7.
9. Elf.
10. Elf Domme. The world needs more of this.
11. This is like Sophie's Choice.
12. I wanna /ss/
13. Elf. Don't wanna chance a Dickbag Rogue.
14. Don't know, no points
15. Ditto.
16. Don't care, no points.
17. That's what i'm trying to do.
18. Dwarf.
19. Elf. I can tolerate TBBT in small doses, though I will refer to it by making a rasberry noise.
20. Elf.
21. Elf.
22/23 no points.
24. no points.
25. Potter was overrated.
26. Apathy.
27.apathy.

Elf 8, Dwarf 3.

The tone of the work also has an influence on how well their magic systems function in context. The LOTR is a good example of a dissonance between tone and systems in play

>Pixies are probably a species of an insect.
>"I'm 50% ovipositor!"
...You realize that only makes my dick harder, right?

Okay, fine. The dragon is telekinetically moving it's own body.

>I can craft those bag of holding/portable hole guns and such.

You're the sort of person who I absolutely hate DMing for. This doesn't make you a bad person, just somebody with a vastly different playstyle that is completely irreconcilable with my extreme narrativist/character-focused approach. My players take it as a given that I won't shut down the occasional shenanigan as long as they don't overdo it, because they know that whacky exploitation of world mechanics that I didn't have time to autistically scrutinise in search of loopholes will just cheapen the narrative we've all worked hard in crafting.

So 'Magic' Handwaving is my get-out-of-jail-free card, but I never actually have to use it because it's basically MAD, and the players understand that.

Incidentally, that sort of thing is also how you get Tippyverse, or products along those lines, and Tippyverse-thinking is cancer. Taking some things for granted is necessary.

>Whats the point of a world with high magic if all we do is throw fire at people and stab with swords?

Because high magic provides a much more efficient framing mechanism for mythical heroism. That's pretty much it, at least for me.

>plenty of other girlfriends when I got tired of them.
You must be such an alpha, positing that on Veeky Forums

Nope, I'm too self conscious to break up with women so I just act like an ass hat until they do it. Also I tend to date unattractive women anyway, not alpha just petty and childish.

>Okay, fine. The dragon is telekinetically moving it's own body.
It's actually creating more lift and "UP" with the elemental air energy flowing through its blood which infuses the flesh of the body. All dragons have elemental energy flowing through their bodies thanks to the Draconis Fundamentum. This organ sits near the heart and infuses the blood with elemental energy leached from the various elemental planes via micro portals which suffuse the organ.

It's what fuels their breath weapons, magical abilities, metabolism and ability to eat just about anything, and other such things.
Organ number 7 in this picture.
Brought to you by the Draconomicon, the preeminent title on all things draconic.

So we hunt a dragon to gain elemental portals and become rich. Okay.

Unfortunately those microportal are rather delicate. They require a near constant supply of blood and electrical stimulation from nerves to remain open. Soon after death these micro portals close off, but the already extant elemental energy remains within the organ. Basically, if you can harvest it quickly enough and preserve the organ, it would allow you to open a portal to an elemental plane much easier, replacing certain expensive reagents.

In size these portals are on the order of a few millimeters at the largest, even in dragons of great wyrm size. On average they are usually a few micrometers in size.

One famed professor is said to have reopened these portals in an experiment that unfortunately resulted in his disappearance into some other realm, but all attempts at replicating the revivification of the organ have failed. We did gain a new understanding of elemental portal dynamics though.

...

Wow, zach has really declined. It's incredible how much of a dumbass he can be while still acting "smart".

>it's already the fastest
>Blue is the slowest wave
THE SPEED OF LIGHT IS CONSTANT JESUS FUCK ON Veeky Forums OF ALL PLACES YOU SHOULD KNOW WHY FUCKING FASTER-THAN-LIGHT SHIT IS SCIENCE-FICTION LIKE GODDAMN

Wavelength and frequency interval, ya git.

move.loveisover.me/foolfuuka/boards/d/image/1368/75/1368750357780.png

When you get this mad, you should check to make sure you're not stupid first.

And when multiplied they result in the same speed. What exactly are you trying to say?

hot

...

On a less spergy note: this would actually be an awesome explanation in the red-is-faster fantasy world.

tax plans

Sur-"real". That's enough.

If it's alive, it's an animal, or a plant. Dragons are not plants. They are alive.

not sure if trolling but I'll post a simplified diagram anyways

On that list, you can easily determine that a dragon is an animal, because all the others are absurd.

Wouldn't the death penalty also be the murder of their "son" and "grandsons"?

Most of those other things I wouldn't classify as "alive". But I'll grant you, I forgot fungi.

>THE SPEED OF LIGHT IS CONSTANT
The *maximum speed of light is constant
Light can slow down depending on the medium, it's the reason why we have things like pic related
I mean, this is physics 101, you should know about refraction

Anyway, we're talking frequency speed here, not distance speed

fuck you my dragons are slime molds

>D&D
>Dragon have sexual urges ALL THE TIME, and breed with everything they can polymorph into. Social skills arise from swaying other creatures.

>Pixies
>We have at least three different type of Pixie-Pixies I can think off the top of my head, excluding the fact they come the large sub group known as fae. A: Which type. B: Fae don't give shit about your biology since they develop and change due to literal common belief in nature.

>Unicorns
>Yep. Likely true. Why do you think they only give rides to Pretty White Rich Girls?

Man who ever did that scientific observation is shit at his job.

The light doesn't actually slow down, it just doesn't move in a straight line in such a medium.

>Implyng an immortal won't get really bored and start trying new things

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light#In_a_medium
>In a medium, light usually does not propagate at a speed equal to c; further, different types of light wave will travel at different speeds

I typically make everything as real as possible*, assuming that I can handle the workload of keeping track of stuff.

I also warn the players in advance what the expectations of the campaign are, what my GMing style is, and ask them what they'd like to see and what their preferences are and try to ensure everyone is on the same page. Whether they want to play a group of goody two shoes, evil cultists, gang of cutthroats, or robinhoods, I'm cool with that. As long as they understand they have to work together as a group.

So for the fantasy game I'm running now (which is in something similar to 9th-10th century northern Europe analogue) encumbrance, fatigue, tracking resources used like rations and water, wound healing, poisons, diseases, and so forth. This ensures that strength and constitution are valued even for mage types that don't feel like they need it, survival and cooking skills are valued and considered to acquire alternative sources of food and water, healing and protective magics are considered, and the idea you can't just carry everything you want with you at all times so there's some choice and consequences.

Religion is a BIG thing in the setting, so all the religions are very fleshed out including their holidays, festivals, sacrifices. Superstitions are rampant, magic is feared, and so forth.

Politics of the setting is also somewhat fleshed out. They're aware of a few nearby wars, rebellions, trade disputes, and a hereditary crisis in one of the kingdoms.

Languages and cultures are also pretty fleshed out, so it's important to understand how villagers in the middle of nowhere will react to foreigners who speak with accents and so on. Adventurers are frowned on (as possible military deserters) until they prove themselves or acquire some sort of reputation for doing something good for the people, otherwise they are assumed as extremely unconventional weirdos who value gold and themselves over home and family.

>Just how "real" do you try to make your settings?

I try to model it after the standard set by the Witcher and Monster Hunt Series.

In the sense that magic or some other paranormal/outside source can certainly be the "why", but it can't be the "how".

I just make it so elves aren't immune to senility.

I'm not so sure I agree. Shadowrun's dragons are all about policy minutiae.