Why are so many GM's obsessed with gritty/realistic/grimdark settings?

>You know the gripe some people have when they see "medieval-level" societies with wizards where, if you followed through with what wizards can actually do, they shouldn't be medieval at all?
>Having a gritty/low-power setting averts that, which many GMs (and it's worth noting GMs are likely to prefer worldbuilding to many players, and are thus more likely to have that gripe) find pleasing.
Also a good point.

The people who complain about threads being old are one thousand times more annoying than the threads themselves.

No you can only discuss a thing once on a random anonymous image board that barely even saves the discussion. Then nobody is allowed to speak about it ever again .

>I'm trying to work out why this is
Different people like different themes of games based on a variety of factors such as fashion, popular media, what their friends are into, what people they don't like are into, etc.

Like all human social games, some people will try to manipulate their letter and spirit for personal satisfaction, be they players or gms. Don't play with assholes, play with people who realize and are interested in the cohesive collaborative group. Discuss themes, rules and intentions with your group before you start a campaign. Check that out on the regular, people's interests change over time.

also have you tried not playing D&D?

If you want me to finger your asshole, you need to pay me.

Same applies to escapist happy go lucky slice of life waifu simulator bullshit.

I'll run a noble-bright free game for a group that will work to make it fun. I've yet to meet an user who actually can though. And no, playing your fetish or self-insert does not make it enjoyable.

It is, however, enjoyable to let you make those characters, let you develop "deep" and "meaningful" relationships with NPC you think are cute, let you slip into thinking that your character is so awesome and important and successful and it's all because you're awesome at building characters, only to crush everything just before you climax. Nothing better in RPGs than to make you losers cry over a now useless character sheet. Feels so fucking good, even better than kicking out libcucks.

Nah, I hate these type of games as a GM and rarely support anyone who pull this kind of stunt. I also don't like 2deep4u telenova plots some adventure paths author like either.

It appeal to the edgy autistic crowd and god knows how big that is based on the profit of WH40K.

Like you said, my player didn't them as it annoys them to remember so many things when they just want to enjoy themselves.

It's not the Destination, it's the Journey.

And if you don't like it, there's always Baldur's Gate.

This is 100% me as GM.

6/10, you lost it at libcucks. You have to bust that out second post after you've drawn them in.

This is a troll post, but I kind of agree.

What GMs and players want are often two different things. Some people want a story with conflict, challenges and consequence. Others just want pure escapism and power fantasy. My experience is that GMs generally want the former and players want the latter.

I'm particularly interested in the real world medieval period and other historical periods. I know a fair bit about them, and I can very easily bring up flavorful details or describe the inner workings of a society, at least well enough to game in them. Therefore I am interested in fantasy games that are like the things I think are cool. It's pretty much as simple as that. My players haven't complained about it before. Sometimes they actually tell me I'm going too easy on them and need to include more "grit", which I personally think is a bit excessive but whatever, as long as they're having fun.

It's a backlash against modern games turning the PCs into demigods.

Some of us remember when the PCs would debate what to do about the large pack of orcs mid dungeon. Negotiate for passage? Hire one as a guide? Side with them against the gnolls so you can move their their territory and have an ally against the gnolls?

Now a days they just roll for initiative and cut them into pieces. There's no nuance to the games anymore because the PCs are too powerful and suffer no lasting harm, ever.

Thing is, I don't know if these modern grimdark players still know what to do with those orcs besides risking battle and running away. It's like they've brought back all the high lethality with none of the inventive clever gameplay.

>why do people like things i don't like

>why can't everyone like the same things instead of different people liking different things

>why can't everyone make games the way i want everyone to make games instead of telling me to go find a noblebright game if that's what i want to play

>i think, based on nothing, that it's secretly because they're lazy / bad / powertripping GMs and not because they like things i don't like

>i have conducted zero surveys to determine actual trends or actual opinions shared by majorities of actual GMs or players but i made this fucking gay thread about what i "feel" might be happening in the hopes that Veeky Forums will tell me i'm right and i can feel better

This is terrible bait user. I'm nearly insulted by how bad this is. Take this (You), buy some lessons and try to not be shit next time.

I think a part of running a darker, grimmer game is helping the players adjust to it as well.

If you just toss them in, and cackle as they get murdered, you're not being a good DM.

Gritty-ness, wound systems, realistic settings, these things all combat the murder hobo. If you have a bunch of murderhobo players you need to rehabilitate them or find new ones, and finding new ones is hard.

Ultimately, it's about bringing back consequences. Consequences forces the players to think about their actions. Risk vs reward. Morals vs the easy path. It's easy to be the Paladin when you and your party can kick a dragon around. It's much harder when two bad rolls can kill you so you need to contemplate if justice will ultimately be served if you help out some orcs so they'll help you reach the mcguffin without getting killed.

Some GMs can't stand the idea of players having options or, god forbid, exercising some semblance of influence over others.

And that is why you use skill based systems and not level based ones.

in DnD (yeah i know) and it's carbon copies you will run into the situation where the ork babarian with his claymor, who killed the fighter at level 1 ist now at level 5, only a nusiance.

I GM traveller and my games are 80 % of the time the drunken-space-pirate sort of fun whit engaging adventures about personal freedom and the power of friendship.
The remaining 20% are for stuff like slavery, human experimentation, cold blooded murder and the like and the player still can genuinely connect to that.

And i think that is mostly because the threats keep their size over the progress of the game. Sure your new ballistic vest can stop bullets a little better, but the security guard with his light pistol can, still, fuck you up if you are not carefull.

>With these mechanics allowing them to do so much more than ones that make it easy for players to heal, rest and advance in game.

Yes, that's part of it.

As a GM these mechanics add more ways to interact/threaten/kill PCs than the traditional monster or bandit.
When things like the environment and resources become a real threat to players, they're forced to think, instead of "I kill the problem and loot it."

I once had a group charged with defending a farming village that had become a way station for the local lord's fighting men. They spent their time setting and bolstering fence lines and trenches and training some of the local militia. They forgot the village was in the river lowlands and ended up losing the area when the advancing army wiped out the irrigation dams and flooded everyone out.

Some groups take to it, others just don't understand why they should be affected by: weather, hunger, prejudice, day/night, sleep, or even visibility (had a player that was furious when he found himself attacked during a moonless night without a light-source, and lost any resting bonus for the following day).

Because stories and characters are easier to relate to when they have problems that are easier to relate to.

Losing a friend for instance.
Low fantasy low power campaigns, this is something a character has to grow around, deal with, or if possible, prevent. This gives the characters a sense of real struggle.

If you are a high powered god, nothing can really bother you, and thus the story becomes boring.

Because if I don't make everything shit, they players would probably end up as the bad guys, and then get mad at being called bad guys.

And then they'd probably start killing people to try to salvage their reputation.

They've attempted genocide in the name of PR

I kind of agree, but it isn't quite so modern - the dark and gritty theme has been around for quite a while. I would say that it might be a reaction to the high and epic fantasy of LotR or early D&D (FR in particular).

GMs like setting consistency. The easiest settings to make consistent are the ones that run on similar rules to existing settings, so keeping power levels closer to the level of normal media is helpful.

Then for more experienced GMs who can explore the consequences of even small cities being home to at least one guy who can bring the dead back to life, they get to choose between deciding to ignore that and run a generic setting (boring for someone who likes worldbuilding) or to create something weird and different (tends to be poorly received by players, who have trouble figuring out how the world works, how their characters can fit into it, and how they can affect it). A grittier setting means you can add in just one or two weird magic things that make the setting different, and players will still mostly feel like they know what's going on and it won't be entirely a generic setting.

>a bloo bloo my actions have consequences
>a bloo bloo I'm not a comic book superhero from level 1 onwards

This is what you sound like.

>also have you tried not playing D&D?

He cant, because D&D is the only system that enables his powerwank bullshit.

That has nothing to do with anything, nor do gritty campaigns prevent characters from influencing the world. If anything it makes them more likely to.

In addition to this
for worldbuilding perspective, as a frequent GM, low power is often easier to build around from a pure gameplay perspective. In a world where people can't fly or teleport, I can protect something important by making it far away from the PC's base of support. By removing items like Bags of Holding and making encumbrance an issue, I can make them make difficult strategic choices about what to take and what to leave behind, instead of the vacuum cleaner dungeon crawls where they'll even take the wall mold. It means I can design a fortress without having to worry about scry and die tactics, and I could go on with more examples.

The more stuff the players can do, the more I as a GM have to plan around when presenting obstacles and possible solutions. I like to think of myself as good at this stuff, but I can't keep track of everything, and the more stuff there is available, the more likely it is that I'm going to overlook some power or ability that either wrecks their day or makes an adventure trivial, neither of which are good things. A low power campaign makes management of the game itself enormously easier.

...

No, it doesn't.

Yes it does. Without high power level bullshit characters will found their own strongholds and towns. Instead of becoming LE EBIN DEMIGOD despite having no divine lineage.

Run your own game then.

>why are so many GM's obsessed with gritty/realistic/grimdark settings?

Apparently you missed the 90's and 2000's grimderp shenanigans of nothing meaning anything and other-than characters, stories, and settings that focused on the dark, the dirty, the wrong, and the wicked because everyone stopped believing that there was any good in the world and all became useless cynics obsessed over obsessing about how everything they knew was all lies and life was just shit all because we figured out that there's no universal beacon of authority and there's no meaning, which should free them from the burden of feeling any particular way except how they want but they were all stupid anyway and never had any hope of being happy to being with.

It was only like, twenty (20) fucking years, I can see how that might have not caught your attention.

There is no correlation between grimdark and having castles and towns. Are you retarded?

Because gritty grimdark keeps murderhobo at a minimum, while putting a focus on story because the entire world will eat you if it wants to.

Grimdark is required to prevent a DND combat sim every night.

Player circlejerk "look how amazing i can roll dice and built this character off a 3.5 discussion board" is the absolutely worst type of character to make.

compound this with WHY NOT FREE MAGIC MCGUFFINS TO TRIVIALIZE ANY NON COMBAT ENCOUNTER? is the destroyer of creativity.

If your plain with your GM and say you want to do a combat sim, its really up to whoever is running the game to either do it or not.

Im more inclined to offer up a copy of Dyanasty warriors if thats the type of game they want to play, instead of me spending turns just putting more polished stones on the table so i can take them off on your turn.

Fuck players. You interact with my guards or you get murk'd if you think you can just strongarm a entire setting.

Fuck you OP for being that player. I know its you. How long did it take for u to get slowfall boots?

I don't care about this awful discussion but I need to know the creator of this genius image right now

>Early roleplaying games had all sorts of quirky simulationist rules but as they advanced they lost them for cleaner rules that favoured the players.
This is a misconception. OD&D was dead simple, far more than any modern edition, it just wasn't formatted or presented very well, which you can mostly explain as Gygax being in love with his thesaurus. That's why Basic is so popular with OSR types nowadays.

The resource management was a means to an end rather than straight simulationism, for the most part, as it was assumed that getting OUT of a dungeon, hauling loot included, would be a major part of gameplay. You can see this in how groups were expected to have a "mapper", that the main way of character progression was acquiring gold, the emphasis on traps, and wandering monster tables

lemuscle.deviantart.com/gallery/55675254/Misty-Roger-s-Neighborhood
I'm not ENTIRELY sure it's ironical

I think a lot of it is because most forms of fantasy alternate between zero-effort pulp followed by a wave of cynicism masquerading as maturity. Ergo, Game of Thrones bears a large portion of the blame.

The other half is that we're on the far side of a big shift in RPG demographics. 5e rules-as-written is a very different play experience than 3.PF rules-as-written and a lot of people are still adjusting to the shift, which leads to over-corrections both ways. Plus the hot mess created by people trying to play 5e but accidentally inserting 3.PF rules, but that's a different issue.

As far as a resurgence of interest in West Marches/Hexcrawl gaming, I think that has less to do with challenge mechanics and more to do with the fact that under 5e rules DnD is better equipped to handle those play types than it has been for decades, primarily due to bounded accuracy since 5e can keep areas interesting for longer and tolerate wider differences in player level and equipment.

Because their lives are too easy.

I don't think I've ever met anyone that actually played, let alone ran Traveler. Good on ya.