Realism- Why do we care?

Why does so much of Veeky Forums act as if realism is always a virtue? This is something I've seen happen a lot, and discussed a little, but I figure it's worth really getting to the bottom of.

In some settings, if you're going for an authentic historical setting, something mundane and contemporary or hard sci-fi then sure, realism is an asset.

But high fantasy? Soft sci-fi? Gratuitous action movie styled campaigns? Why do you need to worry about realism in any of these, and what does it actually add to your game?

Of course you need a certain baseline for the setting to be recognizable and understandable for people, but people seem to go way, way beyond that extremely frequently. Why can't a Dragon just be a giant, fire breathing lizard? Why do you need to explain how they fly, or how they breathe fire? It's obvious from the start that the setting of the game doesn't obey the same laws and restrictions as our real world, so why attempt to make it do so?

This can have more insidious effects, too, like the arguments people make that magic should always be more powerful than martial abilities. In a fantastical setting, the limits of human capability are entirely up to you to define. If you have spellcasters capable of amazing things, then why can't someone strong or skilled enough divert the course of a river with brute strength, or cleave off the top of the mountain?

Help me understand Veeky Forums. Why do people keep worrying about realism in places where it just seems completely inappropriate?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato
twitter.com/AnonBabble

>Veeky Forums is one person.

>I take a shit on the kings head
>XDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

It isn't, but focusing on realism does seem to be a very common view, even in places I wouldn't otherwise expect it.

...What?

Because suspension of disbelief isn't infinite, and some groups like thinking in-depth more, and if the world doesn't hold up to a high logical standard at whatever level the party thinks on, it feels too "gamey" and fake, and people stop talking in-character and start arguing OOC and it all falls apart.
Obviously different groups require different levels of realism, and will accept some things more readily than others, so the challenge is the balance. If somebody just asks out of the blue "how the fuck do a reptile breath fire" and gets annoyed by an answer of "magic" then they're just being an ass, but more often than that it's a case of, say, a dragon can breath fire fine but is killed by a fireball to the mouth.
Internal consistency is what people really mean by "realism", if you play with autists who overthink everything you may need to either spend nine ours doing up magical quantum phyisics, or not play DnD, but if you play with n o r m i e s you'll probably be fine with rulebook level realism.

Verisimilitude precipitates immersion. Failing that, internal consistency will also work to keep up immersion.

Nothing that happens in the game need to be realistic per se, but it does at the very least need to *feel* plausible in the given situation.

This is why you see people getting up in arms about potatoes in medieval settings. Potatoes are a game changer in terms of agriculture, and you can't expect the classic population dynamics of medieval society to stay the same under such a change unless you explicitly explain why that doesn't happen. There's nothing stopping you from inventing some arbitrary explanation for that case, but if you leave it unexplained then it just doesn't feel right. It's simply not consistent under its own logic.

I guess the odd thing is when I compare it to old school mythology. For the longest time, you didn't need to explain who the Gods or Heroes were, or their explicit powers- They did impossible things because that's what they could do. The monsters worked similarly, and it was more about the themes of their conflict and the various epic deeds than examining exactly how the particular nuances of divine/heroic/monstrous power functioned.

They know what's up.

I'm more concerned with the internal consistency of stories and worlds in roleplaying games. Things can be as wild and out-there as the creator desires as long as a consistent set of rules and premises becomes clear, so I know in which ways I need to suspend my disbelief.

Some people do take things much too far. There's the idea of enforcing "historical accuracy" in settings which bear only the most superficial resemblance to any part of the real world, and that can force fantasy worlds into some very narrow constraints which are often unnecessary. I think it also drowns those worlds into obscurity by reducing variation between them.

And if I'm being completely frank, some things do not matter so much. If an author says "there are spaceships which travel between planets, within a few days to a few months generally depending on distance", then I'm happy with that. I don't care about which molecule or field or quirk of physics propels these vessels unless that becomes important to the story; the rule has been made, and now I can simply bear it in mind as I follow along.

Scientific rationale wasn't as commonplace back then, and ALL religious mythology involves ridiculous bullshit that people believe because for most of history they would be literally put to the stake if they didn't.
"Wait, how did zeus get a woman pregnant when he's a swan? Was his semen human semen? Did he have a human dick?"
"Shut the fuck up or we'll kill you"

In short, it's autism.

>All
I want realism as far from my games as possible. In a busy afternoon my friends and I could do enough to fill a decent campaign complete with combat not chained to dice.

Can you go further into the potato thing? I guess I just find it odd, since it's the kind of thing that would never bother me. If I see potatoes in a fantasy setting but the nature of agriculture isn't different, my first thought wouldn't be 'This is wrong' but 'Huh, something must be different to allow this to be present without changing the nature of the setting', and I'd probably leave it at that. I'd only really ask for an explanation if it was in any way relevant to the events of the game.

Generally speaking I care less about "you can't do that, it's not realistic" and more about "why can't I do this? It's perfectly realistic."

>"Shut the fuck up or we'll kill you"
Yeah, no, that pretty much never the case anywhere. First of all, you're equating skepticism with outright heresy, which only the most fanatical extremists would see as being one and the same, and people like that were pretty damn rare through history.

Even just going by your example; atheism, or at least denial of the classic pantheon wasn't too uncommon among ancient Greek philosophers, people whose opinion was highly respected at the time. Priests and highly religious populations might see skepticism as dangerous, it wasn't something you'd be punished for aside from being ostracized.

Try actually reading about history next time. It's usually more accurate than wild conjecture.

what these guy said.

It has to do with immersion. Something every gm should strive for as much as possible. The farther from reality a game takes you the harder it is to relate. It is very subjective.

I have a hate for teiflings. I know its a meme here but i really can't stand the fact that they are in so many settings. Why well when I play Sir Gunther 3rd duke of Luca (human) and then here comes the edge lord him self it shatters immersion for me. Sure you could have a whole background on why they are in the game and how but that is really not enough when the half-orc is the hated character but the bastard son of Satan is okay. Another words when X does not equals Y but equals Q for a dumb or bad reason it kills immersion.

...But that doesn't seem to have anything to do with realism? It's just your personal preference.

>Help me understand Veeky Forums. Why do people keep worrying about realism in places where it just seems completely inappropriate?

Veeky Forums doesn't typically complain about realism and neither do a lot of other critiques and creators of fantasy material: they complain and criticize "Consistency".

The best example I can think of is that Samwell from Game of Thrones, despite his many adventures, trials, and tribulations is still fat and this is often deflected by the phrase, "you can accept dragons, but a fat person is too much?" The problem with this statement is it confuses a complaint of consistency with one of 'realism', like maybe you're doing. Nowhere is it imply or entail that Samwell is a magical being whom can stay perpetually fat and doesn't need to eat or shit or whatever, Samwell is a normal Human being: he needs to eat, he needs to drink, he needs to shit, etc.. So when he's banished from his high-class life style and thrown into more resource restrictive, physically demanding, environment, we'd obviously imagine him to become less corpulent.

Consistency is king in fantasy, user.

>...What?
lol It's a game. Stop taking it so serious. I just want to shit on the king's head.

>Half-Orcs deal with constant racism and difficulties because of thier race
>Teiflings, literal demon spawn, are fine though and socially accepted everywhere without any consequences.
It'd break my immersion too.

I think what OP is trying to say is that a world can be fantastical so long as it's internally consistent.

You're just creating an ad absurdium reduction of his argument by suggesting that without realism anything goes (such as shitting on the king's head).

Think, however, of your dreams. Believe it or not, but your dreams are internally consistent, everything "make sense" within the context of the dream, even if none of it made sense in the waking world.

In other words,
>lel I am shidding on da king'gs ead XDDDDDDD
in an inaccurate strawman of OP's argument.

Is that how tieflings in any setting which includes them? I've never seen one like that.

It is according this anonI couldn't say if it's a regular thing. But it'd rustle my jimmies if it happened in a game I was playing.

Realism is easier to do well if you're not an autist

It really does depend on the setting, because I expect more realism from something that presents itself as hard sci-fi than something in the vein of John Carter. But even stories set in bog standard reality often bend the rules for the sake of a good story. I think a lot of people see something that is "inaccurate" and jump on it because it seems like the author or GM didn't do enough research, which is sometimes true. But there's also a lot of cases where things are deliberately changed because they just make the story flow better, or because it just suits the tone. I'm not going to start screetching about police shows where the detective gets away with a lot of stuff that would get them fired in real life because it's usually to make the story more fun than actual police work. That goes doubly in a tabletop game where the DM is improvising a lot of stuff on the fly and needs to keep everything flowing.

I'd also distinguish between situations where the author/DM/whatever breaks their own rules, and situations where a person assumes rules and then assumes they have been broken. For example, if the author establishes that resurrection is impossible, then resurrects his characters anyway because it's convenient, that's shit writing. But if you have something like "oh, the mountains here aren't realistic" - it's much less important, partially because it's not relevant to the plot, but also because no rule has been established that tectonics in the setting work in a particular way. I think that stuff doesn't bother most people but there's a minority who care very passionately about it.

I agree with you. Internal consistency is important for me to enjoy a game.

I disagree with OP's claim that "realism" is the antithesis of internal consistency.

Verisimilitude is probably a better term(despite largely being considered a synonym.)

>I disagree with OP's claim that "realism" is the antithesis of internal consistency.
I'm not sure that's OP's claim at all. user is making the argument that things can be internally consistent without needing to justify things to our modern, scientific sensibilities, saying for example,
>Of course you need a certain baseline for the setting to be recognizable and understandable for people, but people seem to go way, way beyond that extremely frequently. Why can't a Dragon just be a giant, fire breathing lizard? Why do you need to explain how they fly, or how they breathe fire? It's obvious from the start that the setting of the game doesn't obey the same laws and restrictions as our real world, so why attempt to make it do so?

They are shund and hated also but so is and half-orc. It is an inconsistency. Imo because this is all subjective. The rape child half orc would be hate were the tiefling would get a quick smote.

If you explained why the dragon can fly the players could cripple the dragon by using there knowledge of how the dragon functions

But it has wings. That sort of assumption is intuitive, obvious and simple enough for anyone to understand without overcomplicating things.

>Veeky Forums doesn't typically complain about realism and neither do a lot of other critiques and creators of fantasy material: they complain and criticize "Consistency".
I have no job and read this board obsessively, and from my own observation this assertion is completely wrong. Veeky Forums frequently makes no distinction between realism and consistency whatsoever, and is often unable to tell the difference between realism and consistency in the rare event that someone brings it up. Discussions are overwhelmingly conducted in terms of real-world analogues, and assertions that a fantasy world might operate differently from the real one are usually ignored or ridiculed. The main exception to this general trend lies with discussions of magic, wherein the assertion that magic doesn’t have to be realistic is generally accepted but frequently accompanied by the claim that the actions of martial characters don’t need to be realistic either.

Veeky Forums‘s emphasis on realism is often disproportionate and, ironically, applied without any particular underlying logic. To an observer who isn’t especially interested in fantasy, it seems bizarre; Veeky Forums frequently fixates on things like potatoes or realistic armor and neglects
things like sumptuary laws or sanitation systems. (Note that, for example, sanitation and potatoes are roughly equally related to internal consistency and roughly equally irrelevant to the events of your average game.)

This is sometimes elevated to the point where realism and attention to detail become the main qualities by which a campaign or setting is judged: a good campaign is one that features a period-accurate account of 14th century dentistry, regardless of its other qualities. The most notable extension of this line of thinking arises whenever people collectively agree to neglect some “realistic” thing on the grounds that roleplaying it wouldn’t be fun.

I’m not the OP, BTW.

>Why do you need to explain how they fly, or how they breathe fire?

Because it helps to understand the things we're working with, just like in real life. If a dragon breathers fire because of X, can we recreate X in another way. If not, why not? Maybe the player is interested in crafting a glider from the dragon's wings and needs to know what he'd need to make it happen.

The more a world and its rules are fleshed out, the less you get into the situation where someone needs or wants to know something, and the only answer you can give is "lol I dunno."

I mean it depends on the thing you're explaining, if the dragon fly thanks to magic, suddenly an anti-magic field will ground it. That or if the dragon uses a gland in it's throat to breath fire, stabbing it in the throat would prevent it from breathing fire. Essentially having a more fleshed out setting gives the players more to work with

>D&D
>realism

just take away the character sheet of anyone at your table who bitches about realism and rip it up because magic doesn't exist in reality.

because realism is an easy troll topic. That is literally it.

In reality, all the actual game players of Veeky Forums are significantly more neutral and able to deal with variances in their gameplay style than the never-gamers that are here entirely to shitpost and argue.

Well, it's obvious that the dragon flies because of it's wings. Any peasant will tell you that.

But why it breathes fire is a question for the natural philosophers

What if one of you're players in a natural philosopher or even just a dragon slayer? Then wouldn't they know why a dragon breathes fire?

is a*

>Why can't a Dragon just be a giant, fire breathing lizard?
Because they are usually sentient.

>why attempt to make it do so?
Because there are always reasons for why they happen. For example, dragons are magical beings that are a magnitude above the usual races of the world. While most settings still follow real-world physics they also break them from time to time with such things as different planes of existences or an ancestry that dates back to a, literal, reality bending god/goddess.

>Why do people keep worrying about realism in places where it just seems completely inappropriate?
Because inside the setting it is entirely appropriate because it is the reality that THEY live in. It is THEIR characters reality, and there is a reason behind all of it.

>Then wouldn't they know why a dragon breathes fire?
Depends if this knowledge is known in the setting, how rare this knowledge is, and if they have met the requisites to know it. If so then they should obviously know it.

Why is that an issue? Because you dont know as the DM? Look it up online depending on setting youre using. It doesn't tell you? Then find one that does and pick the one that fits your setting the best.

How hard was that?

>because magic

Dragons fly because they eat a caustic combination of minerals.

Goddamn children never watched flight of dragons.

We don't, and as a question spoken into the void I answer you thus:

People in general don't understand the difference between realism, verisimilitude, and consistency.

Then you agree that the DM needs to have an explanation?

People do imo but will ignore it for the purposes of shitposting

Basically, any realism argument can be summed up as "shitposting specifically to shitpost"

Yes. Be it from having some innate ability to channel the elemental plane of air in some way that is inexplainable to those that cannot do this, "fuck you" physics inherited from the deity that spawned them from long ago allowing for them to lift their gratuitous weight with just wings, or some other way.

It doesnt have to be something that an anti-magic field can stop, it can simply be something that just is.
>"B-b-but I cast an anti-magic field and if they are using some alternate planes forces it should be able to cancel out."
>Wrong, their has been no mages of the past who have been able to decipher an anti-flight field for dragons as their mixture of planar and deified abilities is not one that the magical community has been able to decode into spell form

You're the DM, you have total and absolute control. Just dont be a "because magic" asshat and leave it at that.

Fuck all of those explanations.
"ah, antimagic can't stop a dragon's flight, because dragons fly on majesty, not magic."

2 things, value and immersion.

1. The reason you dont understand is because you dont value realism. You may never understand if this is true. Some preferences are arbitrary and based on simple "taste" (like how some people just dont like sports. You cant convince someone to like them, they just dont). So people that see realism as a virtue seek it out because it fits their taste. I value it so highly I cringe at invites to high fantasy campaigns.

2. An entire lifetime built up of heuristics and understandings of how things work on planet earth means putting things in a similar understanding creates a sense of connection... a "I've experienced that too" sort of feeling that makes people more connected to the game. Having never experienced a dragon flying above before, its hard to imagine and comes out fuzzy and unrelatable, but if a parallel is drawn to something a player has experienced, it creates a connection that draws them into the experience instead of leaving them alienated.

>literal gods who can say "fuck your reality" to anything if you were in the same room
>"Fuck all of those explanations."

It's a thing that can easily happen in universes with actual deities. Whether you like it or not doesn't matter, it's a reason that is completely acceptable within the realms of the world's logic. Deal with it nerd.

Not the same user, but: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato
>Famines in the early 1770s contributed to [the potato's] acceptance, as did government policies in several European countries and climate change during the Little Ice Age, when traditional crops in this region did not produce as reliably as before. At times and places when and where most other crops failed, potatoes could still typically be relied upon to contribute adequately to food supplies during colder years.
>Potatoes yielded from two to four times more calories per acre than grain did, and eventually came to dominate the food supply in Eastern Europe. Boiled or baked potatoes were cheaper than rye bread, just as nutritious, and did not require a gristmill for grinding. On the other hand, cash-oriented landlords realised that grain was much easier to ship, store and sell, so both grain and potatoes coexisted.

>because dragons fly on majesty, not magic
Are you about to bitch about an eternal plane of fire and how it contradicts the laws of thermodynamics next?

I gave you a much better explanation.
I will now replace whatever you think is the explanation with my own in YOUR OWN SETTING.

I don't see how positing that dragons fly via pure power of majesty has anything to do with complaining about elemental plains of fire, or indicates -any- care for the laws of thermodynamics.

A blanket antimagic field is bullshit and if your game has it, just change the spell.

Unless your setting is just real life, magic is going to be a lot more mixed up in average daily things.

Antimagic isn't that much bullshit if your entire setting doesn't run off magic.
That guy flying around shooting laser beams? He's running on the power of a yellow sun.
Or hot bloodedness.
Or the power of friendship.
Or the universe equation.
Or a jetpack and lasers.

>>Wrong, their has been no mages of the past who have been able to decipher an anti-flight field for dragons as their mixture of planar and deified abilities is not one that the magical community has been able to decode into spell form
That's dumb.
If the reason is "magic" then "anti-magic" should fuck it up.

...

That's why the reason is majesty.
Or the earth's yellow sun.

Isn't that irrelevant to the person you're replying to?

>explanation
You just said that they do this because they just do. Thats not an explanation, user. Being able to channel deified ancestry or the plane of air is an explanation albeit a very general one.

You can attempt to replace something all you want, but just because you gravity doesnt matter because of a "I reject your reality and substitute my own" attitude without any sort of spell or fail safe to ensure not-death isn't going to matter when you take 300+ damage from walking off a plateau. Same with dragons and monsters. You may think up whatever you and your character believe but in the end when it gets you killed at the worst or laughed at at best you got no one to blame but yourself.

Not all of us jerk it over making the most realistic setting OP

I for example throw in tonnes to Saturday Morning Cartoon and Comic Book bullshit that can often appear to be anachronistic and usually tells the laws of physics to go fuck it's own mother, but I make sure it is consistent with the rest of the setting and the characters that use or create these things

Literally takes three sentences and is internally consistent.

>majesty
Tempted to make a
>It's majesty, I don't gotta explain shit.
Also all kings and queens can fly in setting.

Better quote from the same page:
>In Britain, the potato promoted economic development by underpinning the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. It served as a cheap source of calories and nutrients that was easy for urban workers to cultivate on small backyard plots. Potatoes became popular in the north of England, where coal was readily available, so a potato-driven population boom provided ample workers for the new factories. Marxist Friedrich Engels even declared that the potato was the equal of iron for its "historically revolutionary role".

user, being so majestic you can fly IS an explanation.
It's as or better an explanation than magic.
At least majesty is a real thing that they are using in unrealistic ways, as opposed to magic which is ENTIRELY fictional.

That person ask an user to go further into the potato thing.

>all the kings and queens can fly
All the MAJESTIC kings and queens.
That fat fuck on the throne of widdersmire can't fly for shit, and he regularly starts wars because of it.

Into why it mattered to them, not the explanation of the mechanics of its affect on agriculture.

>If the reason is "magic" then "anti-magic" should fuck it up.
You're dumb. You are assuming that magic on the material plane is the same as magic that comes from an alternate plane of existence or from an ancient bloodline traced back to gods. It may work in ways that mages of the material world cannot fathom or currently know.

If you meet an island of people who are colorblind to the red/blue spectrum and try to bring those concepts to them they would say "That's dumb" because they already have their colors, their words for them, and its what they 100% know and are completely incapable of understanding your apparent unkown colors.

Simply saying "but it has magic in the name" is dumbassery. Stop being a dumbass.

This is fundamentally the issue.

No one gives a fuck about realism, they just want their wish-fulfillment fantasy to cater to their own personal view of reality. It's literally that simple. They just want their escapism to be a world where they can eat their cake and have it, too. Where they can enforce the 'realistic facts' of reality that are demonstrably unstable or untrue while hiding beneath a veneer of 'historical accuracy', which inevitably slides into 'internal consistency', which, also inevitably, slides into 'no u fgt'.

It's a bunch of little shits who can't handle the fact that reality is inconsistent, almost empty of absolutes, and doesn't reflect the values they want it to. That's it.

Sound like a right place right time deal. Without the potato, no industrial revolution, and if the potato had come earlier, it wouldn't have necessarily meant an industrial revolution.

Congratulations! You've just summarized every historical turning point ever.

No thing is ever just one thing.

Even without an industrial revolution, potato leads to population explosion leads to SOMETHING. Maybe an excess of unmarried young men in a polygamous society leads to a political revolution or an exodus of raiders that prey on surrounding countries.

This would make a lot of sense. Especially given how often people default to 'This is wrong' rather than 'things must work differently'

>Why does so much of Veeky Forums act as if realism is always a virtue?
We're making up fantasies out of nothing but words and imagination. If there's not some fucking consistency then it turns into a bizarre fever dream and everything breaks down.

It sucks that tabletop is such a shit medium for displaying bizarre fever dreams.

NO THING was great.

Consistency is not the same thing as realism

No, but it's what people usually mean by it.

Why the fuck do we wonder why dragons can fly when Quetzalcoatlus, a gigantic pterosaur with a wingspan of over 10 meters, actually existed in real life?

Oh hey, it's you again, the retard that wanders into D&D threads and acts superior after losing an argument.

>Not reading the thread before posting
its like you want people to reply to you or something

Autists have a really hard time with conceptualizing and suspension of disbelief.

Please compare the two things, and figure out why what you just posted is completely retarded.

This maybe a bit off topic and should be post in worldbuilding thread, but I always wonder why people in a fantasy world with actual obvious gods and hells would act evil, or at least, why isn't there a big different in culture and value?
If there are actual gods that will judge your every actions and thoughts and there is hard, solid definition of "good" and "justice", PLUS ensuing there is an afterlife that will punish all evil doers that may last for eternity, just why not every individual and civilization work their whole life to please the gods?

Thank you. I post this all the time and no one seems to get this. Imo I think if the gods where a know thing it would be 24/7 worship. The only two ways to play this out would be make the gods like geek gods where they are more really powerful beings then Omnipotence. the other is make the gods seem dead or no direct influence allowing humans to question the existence.

or the third for some people in this thread "lol fucking magic bro"

>but I always wonder why people in a fantasy world with actual obvious gods and hells would act evil,
But is it obvious? Not to the average person. Remember, this a realm that doesn't have a school in every town where children spend most of their day learning stuff from people who have spent decades of their lives painstakingly researching things. This a medieval peasant realm where your average person learns about the surrounding region from talk with neighbors and merchants, and whose knowledge of the afterlife and these gods is his local priest, who may or may not be a spellcaster.

The gods while real, are content to hid away in their realms of power administering the aspects of reality they rule over. They've got better things to do than come down and talk to your average peasant about the afterlife. Your average merchant or peasant has as much knowledge of these realms of evil and good as we have of the local weather taking place on Venus, not much. And what they do know has been handed down from others on high and comes by word of mouth, pretty much like actual religions nowadays.

And you forget that there are evil gods and demon lords and so many others out there ready to muddle the issues and knowledge to gain that little bit of a foot hold to fuck people over. So everything devolves into a likeness of our world, but with the background being very different.

Adventurers are not the norm. Their powers and abilities are not the norm. Their travels and encounters are not the norm.

And having access to the meta knowledge of the realm by dint of being able to read it all handily put together in an easy to access book is not the same as what your average person will know.

Real people who 100% believe in Gods still do bad things

believe =/= know

True believers would disagree

>I have magic
>I have a counter to that
>NUH UH, MY MAGIC UNCOUNTERABLE BECAUSE OF REASONS

Because this hobby attracts autistic people.

Look at the potato shitposting up in this thread, and you know what I mean. Apparently elves, dwarves, dragons, and wizards aren't enough to break immersion, but a fucking tuber is.

And no, you're not wrong by saying that 'verisimilitude' is a good thing, but you and your autism go far beyond that. No, potatoes did not change that much about the medieval European socioeconomic system nearly as much as the Black Death, which killed half or more of the fucking population. Retard.

What do you mean by "realism"? I just ask that rational creatures act like rational creatures

Anti-magic field should be very destructive to everything inside. Most worlds with magic have races explicitly created by existing gods, magic is literally everywhere. A regular human inside a magic field would grow weaker over hours and days, stop experiencing emotions and turn into a husk that quickly falls apart into dust. Souls are literally magic, why else would all the evil outsiders want them?

I heard this explanation done several times in terms of D&D:

Gods exist, but there is not a single one that controls ALL afterlife. If you follow an evil god, you are bound to have a high standing in the afterlife if you please him, the same with a good god, just change the flavor.

If you follow a bad god and at some point defect to a good one, most likely the good one will never hold you in a high regard as someone that was always good. And the evil one will surely think lower of you than someone useless that always had followed him.

In conclusion, the mistake you make is mixing some aspects from common modern religions, like christianism, in the sense that you think the good gods decide peoples fates, with a pantheon in which gods can freely interact with the mortal world.

Anti-Magic should not exist in a fantasy setting for this exact reason. This is honestly the biggest reason why people on Veeky Forums keep fucking up when it comes to basic understanding of fantasy worlds, and why these types of arguments continue to happen.

I honestly don't understand how people can't get this shit through their thick skulls. Simply put; Fantasy worlds are not real world + magic on top of it. Magic is not some extra additive thing you can just put in or out of the world.

The laws of physics do not exist in these worlds. The rules are entirely different. Dragons do not fly because of their wings and 'special minerals' or even a magic force. They fly because the original God of Fire that created them gave them that ability to be his messengers and warriors.

You do not cast an anti-magic shell to foil an enemy Wizard. You wear a gordian knot tied around your shield so that his spells get confused. You do not disable a golem through casting a meta-magic spell, you disable it by wiping off one of the words inked onto its clay body.

Stop being stupid. Fantasy is fantasy. All immersion stems from that.

>my fantasy is better than yours
>stop having badwrongfun

Exactly. This is the right approach to any fantasy world, especially tabletop.

Feel free to pick up outdated philosophical concepts if you want to flesh anything out in more depth, like alchemy or humors. Yeah, if you cut that dwarf he's got blood and bones inside but really on a deeper level he's made of elements of water, earth, fire and air and given the divine spark of life. Maybe an evil alchemist/wizard has been searching for this divine spark, and kidnapping random people in order to render them down to basic elements, here's a free mid-level dungeon full of elementals for you!

realism is good because it's logically and internally consistent. Obviously. The real world is logically/internally consistent, so something that mirror's it is also logically consistent. This doesn't mean that you can't have consistency without realism. You absolutely can. But at what price?


Let's take a fairly mundane example: a high fantasy setting that's rather noblebright. The population is educated, the streets are clean, the kings are (almost) always fair and just, and life is for the most part good and fantastical. Now, ask yourself, how did this come about?

You now have a dilemma on your hands. Do you explain how all of this is consistent with their tech level, and talk about the king's tax policy and the skill of the nation's bureaucracy and civil services? Or do you just handwave it away and say that it's fantasy or magic or magitech or different laws of physics or whatever?
Do you go into so much detail that it becomes boring, or do you go into so little detail that you break the immersion? There is rarely any middle-ground in these types of dilemmas.


But, inject a bit of realism into your fantasy - just a bit - and you find that all of these problems readily evaporate.

What system does this actually work in?

/thread faggots