Fantasy triggers

Gear being waaaay too heavy (especially armor) and waaaay too big (especially all sort of hammers)

>And in the end a loaf of bread costs 5 silver coins
user, hyperbole isn't an argument, it's you being a retard.

>Races are equal to cultures and said cultures are super-homogenous
>Absolutely no local variety
>Humans are the only race allowed to have less homogenous culture, but then it's still series of super-homogenous countries

>Setting has functional, easy to access and learn magic based on modular rules that can do "anything"
>Nobody tries to use it for anything at all aside weaponising it

>Hypnosis can force people to do something against their will

>Bears being underpowered push-over that is barely a warm-up for real fight

>Bears being one of the toughtest enemy you can face in the setting with fire-spitting flying lizards, functional magic, powerful undead and laser guns

>hyperbole
That's literally the price of bread in Arcona. And one silver coin is equal to 160 copper ones.

>immortal undead wizard
jesus, being a wizard wasn't special enough for you?

Gold coins less than 1/156th or 1/25th gold? Historically they were ~9/10ths gold with the rest being copper, so the value of 1lb of impure gold coins should be ~0.9lb of an ingot plus the cost of minting.

A coin that's 155/156 parts copper is a copper coin and should be valued as such.

>Cyberpunk 2020 lists the weight of a motorbike as 15kg in the main book so this isn't limited to fantasy games.
Screencap please

My mistake, it was the sports motorbike from Chromebook 3.

> Everything is basically European / Medieval fantasy
> Includes Weaboo Fightan man

Yea and a loaf of bread is 3.50 here, or 350 pennies.

>X is based off of Tolkien.
>While at most pertaining to the superficialities of Tolkien.

I think my favorite example is "Elves are master archers and that's why they're so deadly", because it's only the loser Silvan elves who use bows extensively in war, and it's explicitly stated to be the reason they run into trouble with things that their Sindarin and Noldorin brethren handle easily.

>Getting caught up on closely emulating "European fantasy" but overlooking the mummies and rakshasas and Cthulhus and sphinxes and djinni and so many other things to complain solely about some cartoon version of an Asian class that might as well be from anywhere for as rooted in Asia as it really is

>longsword
>picture of an arming sword
>bastard sword
>picture of a longsword

>Having a million races and sub-races for the slightest variation of fairy/elf/eskimo.

I feel this way about elves. Over the past 30ish years I feel like there have been way too fucking many varieties of elf in fantasy fiction and tabletop games.

If wanted a winged race in your setting, how about instead of sticking wings on an elf, you put some actual fucking effort in and maybe try to create something yourself? It doesn't have to be new or original, but I wish these people would just fucking try a little bit.

You can probably find a variety of elf for every climate and speciality. Warrior elves, magical elves, psychic elves, cold elves, fire elves, flying elves, underwater elves, storm elves, mountain elves, underground elves, forest elves, jungle elves, arctic elves -- name a place, name an occupation, there's some hackneyed bullshit zero-effort kitchen sink setting out there with some kind of elf fucking around in there!

Making something up is too hard, just slap a new coat of paint onto an elf and stick a prefix on there! Fucking done, now to become a best-selling author, let me just wipe my ass on these 300 pages and call it a novel.

i remember making a race of primitive elves NPCs a long time ago, they lived in a forest (totally didn't look like tarzan with pointy ears), only spoke some kind of old elven, had almost no understanding of magic but had innate powers that grew with age
i feel a bit guilty now

It's okay, we've all written shit like that before, and we've all thought it was the hypest and most original shit. People grow and change, and looking back on our mistakes and learning from them is part of growing.

Most likely a typo meant to be 150

To get technical, a bastard sword is a longsword, because the classification of swords at the time there was no such thing as longswords only swords. Bastard swords were known as one and half hand swords

That's fair. It's a minor trigger.

I legitimately like how WH Fantasy dealt with elves, where Dark Elves and High Elves are, at their core, just two different political factions caught in a civil war. And elves being as long lived as elves are, the civil war has lasted centuries.

Then Age of Smegmar happened ;-;

No problem with modern classifications though they have no excuse

Wood Elves don't really fit into this dynamic, except as the Colonists who were left behind because of the Civil War at home. This has happened in a few instances IRL with European nations.

>everyone wears drab brown and grey, even nobility and royalty

To be fair, Mediterraneans are gay as hell

you ain't seen nothing yet my dude

>Plate armour being super heavy and constricting
How would you like to see different kinds of armor balanced against each other? Maneuverability is the go-to tradeoff for extra protection, likely due to being straightforward and playing into the lumbering tank/agile rogue tropes. Would you just use the price of the armor? Focus on resistance against different kinds of damage?

>Plate armor used in tandem with shields
I think that armor for reducing damage and shields for deflecting hits is a fairly common mechanical setup, meaning that players who want to maximize survivability would be interested in doubling up. Would the idea be to have the resistance granted by the plate armor such that most hits were just negated, making the shield's added protection fairly minimum compared to the advantage of two-handing?

As long as the shield is quite small it's completely accurate to history and perfectly practical. But of course nobody goes for the buckler because they give less AC despite being fucking amazing IRL.

This is what made RuneQuest (6) great is that you could use a shield with arm/chest/head armor on he opposite side and have adequate protection on the side covered by the shield.

And since encumberance mattered for long term wear and when doing intense activity for a long time. You could really customize armor for the appropriate situation without a lot of mechanical bulk (compared to D&D obviously).

>And I don't care how far away it's been imported from an apple is not worth 5 gold pieces
This. How my wallet is supposed to look with this shit? Why a fucking dixy costs like it was made of gold? Why people still using gold as currency if it is inflated as shit?

>Leather armor adds dexterity or agility, cloth or being naked don't
>Mages are overpowered, but there are very few mentioned in history and political scene
>1 race, 1 country, 1 culture
>Light race and dark race calling themselves "light" and "dark" is beyond being retarded

>>Mages are overpowered, but there are very few mentioned in history and political scene
race, 1 country, 1 culture
>>Light race and dark race calling themselves "light" and "dark" is beyond being retarded
These are all sensible.

Age of Decadence was like this.

Vikings wearing biker leather kackets.

>>Ancient evil tentacle monster corruption
Bonus points if the game calls itself "Lovecraftian" because the monsters have tentacles.

>>Setting has functional, easy to access and learn magic based on modular rules that can do "anything"
>>Nobody tries to use it for anything at all aside weaponising it
This, so much. If magic is common, put some fucking thought into how that would change society beyond people just using it as flashier arrows.

I like how the trailers started with "In a world where the ancient evil never awakened...", then the plot of the game was about an ancient evil awakening.

>Everyone wears brown and black
>Armor is cut through like it was made out of paper
>Some generic super steel that's 50x lighter than regular steel but it's 50x stronger and it cuts through normal swords and blah blah blah it's so cool

I'm tired of all of this

>I like how the trailers started with "In a world where the ancient evil never awakened...", then the plot of the game was about an ancient evil awakening.
It tried so hard to be unique and subversive but it only conformed to standard fantasy tropes.

>Some generic super steel that's 50x lighter than regular steel but it's 50x stronger and it cuts through normal swords and blah blah blah it's so cool
I absolutely loved how GRRM did the same thing in his totally unique "deconstruction" of fantasy and a dagger made of the bullshit was stopped by Catelyn's hand.

nanomachines

they're so boring

>Missing the point this hard
Not even him, but do you have absolutely ANY idea about money minting?

>balanced
Here is your fucking mistake.
You DON'T balance them, but make it a linear progression, just like it did IRL.
No armour -> scale -> chain -> plate
The difference being price and the fact they could be further fitted for the wearer. After metallurgy advanced enough, there was absolutely NOTHING stopping everyone from wearing plate. The entire Late Medieval period saw entire armies in plate armour, because it was both good and affordable. The only reason it wasn't widespread a century or so earlier was the price.
So if you want to "balance" things (which is the most retarded approach in mechanics imaginable and my core argument against D&D and derivetives - especially since they fail spectacularly in said balance), provide a proper price. And make a mechanical difference between "one size fits all" and "custom made" plate.
Just making it shit won't balance anything

>a fairly common mechanical setup
From where did you get that?
Also, that's another utterly retarded crunch invented by idiots too focused on balance to apply logic.
A guy wearing plate and carrying a shield is close to invulnerable, and THAT'S THE FUCKING POINT. He can parry your attacks and bash you with the shield, while also wearing best body protection money can buy in case if he won't parry in time with the shield.
So your question is literally pointless, as you are looking for stupid excuse to apply "game balance" in the most retarded and obtuse way imaginable.
See a guy with a shield and in plate? Gang his ass! See a squad of such guys? Run like hell.

The biggest joke in game design is contradiction of shield evolution in pretty much all games. IRL shields were getting smaller and smaller and thus better at doing their job. Meanwhile, game design approach is that the bigger the shield, the better.
And who the fuck is going to lift and then carry a pavaise in size of a door?!

>I'm an unimaginative lazy fuck: The Confession
Thanks for sharing. Now we know.

>No armour -> scale -> chain -> plate
what about leather bronze iron and steel? (am I missing one?) How would you handle them with a linear progression like that?

Also what about wearing scale mail under plate mail? Mechanic wise how would you deal with it?

>Hypnosis can force people to do something against their will
I'm ok with this one because both I and one of my players have it as out fetish

I feel like Burning Wheel's Fight! subsystem does a pretty good job making bucklers useful. In Fight! every round starts with a positioning test, the winner gets to determine what range the fight takes place at, the further out from your weapon's optimal range you are the bigger the penalty you take to your actions. Larger shields give more bonus die to the 'block' action but also a larger penalty to the positioning test.

The positioning test is also why things like striking with the pommel or having a shorter side-arm is a good idea in that system.

>the value of 1lb of impure gold coins should be ~0.9lb of an ingot plus the cost of minting.
Isn't there going to be a cost associated with going from 90% pure to 99%, the same way you'd expect there to be a cost for going from 99% pure to 99.9%? Or is it easy to reach really high purity in metallurgy?

>barbarians are barely dressed nigger-tier savages

Bow damage should sensibly scale from both really, or rather it should scale from Str and your skill with a bow, especially in a system that doesn't do location damage - the more accurate you are, the more damage you will do.

Thanks user, this was bothering me too

>You DON'T balance them, but make it a linear progression, just like it did IRL.
>No armour -> scale -> chain -> plate
no thanks, we gladly sacrifice realism for the sake of variety

that's because games use longsword in opposition to shortsword

>>Races are equal to cultures and said cultures are super-homogenous
>>Absolutely no local variety
>>Humans are the only race allowed to have less homogenous culture, but then it's still series of super-homogenous countries
Jesus fucking Christ, this shit is so fucking annoying and so prevailing it makes me go berserk each time I'm playing with a new GM/group/both and they decide to just use the setting as presented in the book. For fuck's sake, this kills any joy or thrill of playing, because you know what's going to happen just by the fact the game says "NPC is an X", where X is any of the setting's race.

Hate it so fucking much I'm capable of qutting the group. I've once even thanked them in the middle of the game and left, stating openly that the setting annoys me and kills all joy of playing for me.

I was just referring to historical development of armour starting from the tribal clusterfuck until it went to plate. The better the metallurgy, the better the armour, it's that simple. Needham once made a pretty good socio-economical theory for why China went completely different and avoided anything further than basic proto-feudalism even before Confucianism came into play. His thesis being that due to developing crossbows (no, not the automated ones, that came muuuuuch later) early on, there was always a weapon at hand capable of piercing all existing forms of body protection, so you couldn't just be a mighty lord in mighty armour policing over unarmored and underarmed peasants, because they would turn you into a pin-cushin in no time. The brilliance of the thesis is that the more dig-outs are made, the more it is confirmed, while it was Needham's wild guess in the late 40s.

And about scale under plate (the fuck is plate mail? you mean the armour between proper plate was fully developed and only bits of plate armour were applied to chain?): what kind of protection you want to get from it?
What you put under plate is either thick linen or thin leather, probably both. Not for protection as such (that's what the outer layer of plate is for), but to get a cushion against impacts on the plate. It dampers the hits you receive and reduces/removes bruises and abrasions.
So scale woudn't make much sense, because:
1) you would have to cram it somehow and somewhere
2) the goal is to get damper for blunt trauma, not another layer of anti-cutting defense

Please explain us how the fuck this adds any form of variety?
Because I'm probably missing some step between having few types of armour accessable and the lack of variety.
If you are running a setting where plate is expensive, the price works as the variety factor, since you won't be able to afford it anyway
If you are running a setting where plate is common, then there is no "variety" by default.

And to elaborate, since I've run out of space:
If you have a setting that has alongside in the same culture and region for no reason at all armour that covers dozen of centuries of development and somehow co-exist, then your setting is shit, you are shit and you should feel bad about it.
It's like you would have in the same setting a handcannon, a wheellock and a Winchester rifle and then said "hey, it's for variety!"
Or galleys, clippers, steamboats and nuclear subs, all used by the same "country", because apparently the setting needs variety.

The moment when chain and plate co-existed was a very short-lived one and didn't last even a century. Chain "thrived" in Eastern Europe, especially in Rus lands, for a bit longer, but that came from low urbanisation and poor technology. Once they've get access to better shit tech-wise, they've "jumped the gun" from shit-tier chain to late Renaissance plate and nobody looked back, only to drop armour like everyone else when guns rolled in.

Jesus, how generic can a setting be that you're dropping a group in the MIDDLE of a session? Did a dwarf introduce himself as Alebeard Goldaxe or something?

Close. Aside being so bland it made vanilla tasting like rainbow, players basically picked the example characters and made cosmetic changes to them, then ignored roleplaying aspect completely. Two of them, who were supposedly the most experienced, were rather talking in what they character are doing than performing the action in-character or even phasing the dialogues. So it was shit like "I talk to him about the benefits of our plan" rather than, you know, explaining the plan and its benefits.
The moment GM started to butcher Scottish accent when we approached the most generic imaginable dwarven blacksmith, all bets were off.

So it was a combination of very bland setting and abysmal group.

One thing that can help is simply replacing the suffixes for sub races with place names.
Instead of an wood elf, the shady guy is the bar is just an Tanmaar elf, from that cold place in the North, were they run naked through the woods like idiots for their summer festival. You noticed because he's wearing a pendant of their boar god.

Try to talk you GM into putting just a little bit more work into the world and things become much more enjoyable. If they won't/can't, then you're probably a bad match for the group.

I've found a better solution - I'm running games myself and when I feel the players get the hang of the setting and how things go, we start taking turns at the GM helm. Makes things playable and interesting, without forcing me to be a forever GM.

And changing names doesn't really change the problem, user. It's more about "every wood/Tanmaar elf is a slender, but boastful and shady archer that lives in a forest and wears his hair in braid" Total population: 200 million, spread over 4 continents and 10 different climates. Variety: 0.

You know, how the stereotypical dorf is Not!FilmGimli. Every single fucking one of them.

>If you are running a setting where plate is common, then there is no "variety" by default.
...unless chainmail allowed for more maneuverability according to the rules.

>It's like you would have in the same setting a handcannon, a wheellock and a Winchester rifle and then said "hey, it's for variety!"
but D&D and the games that emulate have just that and are very successful doing so.
protipp: fantasy is build on top of myths from different eras (beowulf, nibelungen, roland, king arthur, robin hood, etc). you can cry foul about that till the cows come home, it won't go away.

Rotating GMs is actually pretty great idea for that stuff because everyone will have slightly different take on the different archetypes.

Though what I was more aiming for was not making different sub-races in the first places. You have elves and in the various places they live in different cultures have formed. Of course once you have a defined group of people there is always the danger of turning them into a stereotype, but the only real way around this is showing variance among different group members. And that can be difficult if you 40 different races in the setting because don't have time for that many characters.

So it's probably better to put some thought into your game rather than copying the common parts from what you already know. And that's basicly true for every point mentioned in ths thread.

I've got two words for you:
Reading comprehension.

>protipp: fantasy is build on top of myths from different eras (beowulf, nibelungen, roland, king arthur, robin hood, etc). you can cry foul about that till the cows come home, it won't go away.
Not him, but who are you quoting right now?
Because you've just made a claim that doesn't need to stick to absolutely nothing. You can make a fantasy setting that won't even touch the subject you've listed, avoid the whole issue and still being a fantasy setting.
In short - you are a fucking imbecile.

I don't. If I apply races at all to the setting (and it's not about HFY bullshit), there are rarely more than three. I put entire focus on culture and/or nationality, then spread them over local varieties and put religion focus on it too, if that applies. In the end it's like the game takes place in Balkans: everyone is human, but they speak 10 different languages, have 8 different culture groups, 15 countries, 4 religions and then there are of course the guys behind that mountain range.
At this point nobody even notices the fact there are no races, because they are not needed for anything. And you can still throw in a hefty dose of races anyway, but the setting itself has the focus and tones spread differently, so you don't need to have Race Of Desert Nomads, because you have that covered by three different culture groups within single race living in that continental mass, each of them different than the other two.

tl;dr - races and especially subraces were stupid design decision that came from the early 80s hard-on on making everything into rigid classes and races.

>office drone elves
>monkey code elves
>japanese salaryman elves
>hobo elves
>altright/neonazi elves
>antifa elves
>gutterpunk elves
>brutalist elves
>postmodernist elves
>art deco elves
>mall elves
>underground parking lot elves
>public bathroom elves
>skyscraper elves

>Ancient evil tentacle monster corruption
But it is one of the best concepts.

>>japanese salaryman elves
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a manga for that.

Also, Shadowrun has most of those listed. Which is part of the reason why I dislike the setting so much - it's neither good at doing cyberpunk, nor fantasy.

>>Races are equal to cultures and said cultures are super-homogenous
>>Absolutely no local variety
>>Humans are the only race allowed to have less homogenous culture,

that's what happens when people try to "be creative" and "put a new spin" on traditional races like elves and orcs. in the end they turn them into just a specific type of humans who look a bit different. With orcs typically being just barbarians, but green and with a snout, and elves being hippies but with pointy ears.

I think that this can work, but only to certain scale. Have you ever played HoMM3? Not the entire M&M setting, but the one specifically from HoMM3.
The key to the success and why it worked as a setting, despite being pretty riggid, was combination of few factors:
1) Relatively small size of the continent
2) Serious geographical barriers all over it
3) Borderlands between different biomes and climates, changing hands on regular basic
4) Low population density in general
5) Biological barriers between all species
In the end, you had a setting where the strong differences made sense without looking retarded and still providing some variety. Meanwhile most TTRPGs instead have MASSIVE world and still zero variety occurs.

Areas being homogeneous makes perfect sense, and if anything, the heterogeneous mix so prevalent in things like Golarion is completely fucking absurd.

That being said, the lack of local variation is bullshit, but understandable because often, a setting or area is only described in broad strokes. Most GMs or storytellers just suck at filling in the specifics.

Now, every race aside from humans being homogeneous, however, is complete fucking horseshit, and makes me want to beat shit with a mallet, and triggers me enormously. But to add to that, so does the fact that every fucking subrace that exists of a given non-human race have oddly specific and sometimes wildly different racial abilities - for example, Ghostwise Halflings are fucking telepaths, and Drows are super-magical fucking übermensch despite really just being fancy elves. Meanwhile, wildly different human ethnicities across the entirety of the globe all have the same statblock.

Genuinely infuriates me.

>Areas being homogeneous makes perfect sense
On a scale of, say, 50km radius - maybe. If the region in question has proper geographical boundaries and relatively strong seat of power, multiply by 3.
But it doesn't apply when it's a size of half of a continent. And that's what happens in most of games.

I think they fit in fairly well; they're essentially just another (more isolated) political faction. I liked it even better when Sea Elves were a thing, and represented traders, corsairs and colonials of the elves, and were essentially the neutrals in the dark elf-high elf conflict, despite living primarily on Ulthuan.

Today, they're mostly clear-cut homogeneous factions and, frankly, pretty boring. Age of Smegmar was a blessing in disguise, a cutoff point that meant GW couldn't fuck the setting up anymore.

Alas, it was not meant to last.

That's also how pretty much how I handle races in my setting, but because of some bits of quasi-meta narrative more races have been forced in.
Started with humans-only, then two magical fuckups created more, bringing us to ten races if we're being generous. But most are just mutated by said magical fuck ups and in the process of dying out.

But this is were it comes down to execution.

You just pulled those out of some modern fantasy setting, didn't you? I have harpies as a race low in population and they are in conflict with a bunch of small people adept at earth magic and building underground cities in the same mountains the harpies claim.
The harpies have a reason to be a different race: their tribes and cultures are strongly influenced by the events that mutated them. But the "dwarves" are just another human culture and so they aren't burdened by the usual sterotypes. I don't have much about that culture, that's better than having that part of my world dictated by someone else.

And just as I'm writing this I noticed that they absolutely cannot be dwarves or gnomes or whatever: The entire area is surrounded by mutant beast people, so a dwarf culture would be humanized anyway as they become our view point among the stranger creatures.

Unless you apply and enforce public education, combined with set of citizenship policies and in certain circumstances - religious-related laws, you can forget about getting a homogenous region bigger than, say, few counties. Fucking France, out of all places, wasn't even speaking the same language until Louis XIV spend half of his life on pushing very strong policies toward enforcing Parisian French and then it took another century for them to finally start taking effect.
I don't want this to come off as smug, but I feel there is a historical reason why Americans suck so hard at making variable settings: they never experienced anything like that themselves. It was always the same central government, always the same official language and active policies to reinfoce it (along with policies to supress any form of variety, be them natives, Cajuns, Spaniards and Latino or the incoming immigrants) and being a product of a modern world, rather than gradual evolution over centuries. So when they make a game setting, they apply this mentality of unified country to a world where it makes zero sense.

No it wasn't. Age of Decadence has magic, tons of it, and it fueled all sorts of magitech, including sci-fi-esque magic. But nothing in it suggests that it wasn't magic. They literally made contact with the "gods" using pure fucking magic at first, and magic was around for centuries or millennia before the war.

No idea how I fucked up that formatting, the part about harpies and dwarves obviously belongs to the first post.

Case in point: I live in southern Germany and have relatives living that far away. I can barely understand them.
Two cities away in the same state there is so much weird food that can't go into tavern because I have no idea what's on the menu.

>rapier
>picture of a cutlass

Oh, I mean, obviously theres a great deal of local variance, but it's still fundamentally homogeneous. The parisians still recognized the people and the language outside of Paris as French and frenchmen, or "of the people". This goes again, time and again, throughout most of history and most cultures.

But homogeneous in the sense of being near-identical? Nah, fuck that. If anything, homogeneous Europe as it was had all the diversity they ever needed, as evidenced by literal millennias. This historical context is today lost on a lot of people, who think that if something ian't wildly foreign and exotic, it is somehow badwrong and 'too' homogeneous. Hell, even the U.S. had what you describe (if perhaps not as drastic) a mere century ago, and the regions were rather different in a lot of ways not immediately obvious at an casual glance.

So yeah, I agree; I just meant that the lack of that local variance is understandable, because often a larger region or state is described superficially. Same way we describe Ancient Greece, with it's very homogeneous population, without going into the specifics of each region or city state, which could be extremely and wildly different.

But don't get me started on the idea of 'Common' in things like D&D. Pisses me off to no end. People can barely read & write, yet the entire world has adopted esperanto as a merchant language, whether they're merchants or not.

Silesian here (or as the currently rulling party calls us, "hidden German option") and everyone outside about 30 km radius from my city is already a "gorol", or Not-Silesian. Meaning they can't understand me when I use my language.
Keeping it food-related: the real jokes comes from the fact the same name means two completely different and unrelated dishes, so a shitload of outsiders end up eating dumplings with gravy rather than pasta if the menu is in Silesian.

>Bow damage scaling off dex when it should be str
How to spot someone that doesn't know what he's talking about. I hate how realism-fags completely go overboard with their notion of archers being some horrible mutants of walking muscles with completely wrecked spines.

there's a korean webcomic that does this in a way I like.
Most magic is combat oriented, and they need it since they're surrounded by mosters.
But there's also restorative/healing magic and creation magic, which can create and modify objects.
And those who can use creation magic are super rich and powerful, and the technology of their worlds is based on creation magic, in fact their whole society needs creation magic to function. Without it they'd be able to only live as hunter gatherers, with it they can build cities that can rival our world cities.

>On a scale of, say, 50km radius - maybe.
Much larger areas than that have been principially homogeneous even without any kind of unifying state apparatus. Local cultural variance, however, is a completely different issue.

Inb4 /pol/ shitters notice you talking about population homogeneity.

user, remember D'Artagnan? You know, the 4th of the "three musketeers"?
He's constantly referred as Gasconian. And it doesn't just mean he's from south-western corner of France. It means he speaks language barely related with French and doesn't even consider himself a Frenchman. Gascon itself is in a size of your medieval fragmentation duchy.
So it's not about slight accent variety like in modern times, but not being able to understand each other. Kind of how Chinese works - everyone use the same written Chinese (at least on mainland), but they SPEAK over a dozen of different dialects that are utterly incomprehensible. And each of them has a variety of sub-dialects that also are incomprehensible, often now even following similar grammar patterns.

I've practised archery when I was a teen and the requirement to even get into the team was to perform a series of lifting exercises. Half of the people who wanted to join the team were unable to draw the bow on first trial.
So nice knowing you prefer some retarded fanfiction of how bows work, introduced to the hobby by bunch of idiots who never shot a bow in their life and added it for "balance", rather than realising bows are HORRIBLE as a weapon and require to be strong. Not muscleman strong, but definitely with properly build.

>Bows being fired like machine guns and doing crazy trick shot shit

Well, you're objectively wrong. That's how it was actually done.

youtube.com/watch?v=BEG-ly9tQGk

Anybody wielding daggers upside down

Oh hey, that faggot.

Unless you have solid geographical boundaries, you can forget about keeping homogenous culture in pre-modern times on local level. Especially if it's some sort of borderland.
Do you know before institutionalised and widespread education became a thing, the "borderlands" in cultural sense were spread (depending on geography) 50 to 100 km on each side of the border? So you have a complete mix of languages and often ethnicities. It's like this user said: it's the lack of historical perspective that leads to the bland and unified settings in games.

He's going to war against terrible fashion.

This is why in my normie kingdom I have everyone use some kind of light crossbow or hand crossbow when it comes to utilizing ranged. Only some rangers or trained veterans make use of a longbow.

These threads are good if only to allow me to look at my setting and do self-critique on what can be changed and done better.

>This shit again
Ever heard that saying: one swallow doesn’t make a summer?

This is the exact same reason why I always stick to them. It greatly helps to fix things you often didn't fully realised, even if you might notice yourself something is off.

See, this is why you explicitly state or at least heavily imply that the metal being used in your world isn't iron or steel, OR do to how forging/god of the forge works you have to make armor super thick and unnecessarily heavy.

That way, you can have super heavy armored warriors who can barely move and lightly armored fast warriors. Or you could just play with non-autistic people. Fuck 'realism'.