Why chose between low and high fantasy? What's drawing you to one or the other?

Why chose between low and high fantasy? What's drawing you to one or the other?

Mid fantasy

>low fantasy

Helps me make the world feel a bit more grounded for the players and helps establish some more personal stakes. Also allows for an easier time with keeping the party from trying to do much shit.

>high fantasy

I'm a sucker for grand scale and I think fantasy should look fantastic. It helps make the party feel more like they're having massive adventures than just mucking around in the mud.

Personal favorite? Go from low to high fantasy steadily over the course of the game.

I guess I like low fantasy because magic ought to feel unusual and rare. Mystic artifacts have meaning and every enchanted sword has a name and a past. Once magic becomes ubiquitous, it changes or loses meaning. In storytelling, I prefer heroes who overcome problems using ingenuity and guile, rather than waving a wand to make the problem disappear.

>Personal favorite? Go from low to high fantasy steadily over the course of the game.
God tier here. Maybe they can't break the griffon that has been terrorizing the mountain towns and make it serve as their mount when they first start out. But man when they finally bridle it and ride it into battle its great.

I don't really have a preference, I just don't like goofy shit. DnD magic, for example. Whether a setting is low or high fantasy WHICH IS NOT THE SAME AS LOW OR HIGH MAGIC, FUCKIN NEWFAGS doesn't matter to me as much as how they're executed.

>Low or High Magic
I'm curious. Explain to me how this is different from Low and High Fantasy. Can you have a High Magic, Low Fantasy setting?

It's called D20 Modern

In most forms of fiction I prefer low fantasy, characters with limitations are more relatable and keeping the supernatural rare and mysterious makes it much more interesting. Games are different however, they largely consist of combat and you need magic and monsters to make it interesting.

Shadowrun

>Games are different however, they largely consist of combat and you need magic and monsters to make it interesting.

No, you don't.

High fantasy is when you use a secondary world, low is when you don't.

Magic is totally disconnected with this axis.

So if I'm understanding this correctly:
Hi Mag/Lo Fan = Urban Fantasy
Hi Mag/Hi Fan = Epic Fantasy
Lo Mag/Lo Fan = Medieval Adventures/Dark Fantasy
Lo Mag/Hi Fan = Gods and Monsters/Tolkienesque/Arthurian

High Fantasy is necessary in the average game because players burn through worldbuilding too quickly when playing the DnD way (which is only a few steps removed from murderhobo). When villains can't be allowed to live, intimidation never works, the world can never stay as it is if the way it is is bad, you scope has to creep to keep puttng obstacles in front of the players. The power creep of DnD and similar games also contributes to this.

Low fantasy is an attempt at getting away from this on the part of the GM, but is by its nature incompatible with most players' outlook on tabletops. Generally they just turn into more violent, brutal games that never last.

>Can you have a High Magic, Low Fantasy setting?
Low Fantasy: our world, with fantastical elements
High Magic: very powerful and/or prevalent magical elements

So those two things can combine without contradiction.

Agreed. It's like saying that a sci-fi game needs psychics and aliens to be interesting.

>Hi Mag/Lo Fan = Urban Fantasy
>Lo Mag/Lo Fan = Medieval Adventure
The time periods here don't matter. You could do a high magic + low fantasy game set in the past. Likewise you could do a low magic, low fantasy game in the present or the future.


>Lo Mag/Hi Fan = Gods and Monsters/Tolkienesque/Arthurian
Arthurian legends are typically set in the real world, though some interpretations take so many ahistorical liberties that they might as well be another world.

>implying time period has anything to do
>implying dark fantasy needs to be low magic
>implying Arthurian legends are not set in the real world

Low fantasy is more familiar and keeps everything grounded, it's hard to fuck it up and keeps you immersed.
High fantasy barely has any internal consistency and it's easy to break the world with a simple spell that nobody thought to use it in a certain way, yet I do prefer high fantasy where everything is fresh and new.

I like reasonable or plausible fantasy, that's it, it does some kind of sense, if only in the setting, and people are mostly people, and be that I mean even if they can chanel the power of the gods, a stray arrow could kill him. I like congruency I guess. Congruent fantasy doesn't have that much of a flair tough.

Low Fantasy worlds are more satisfying to create, but unfortunately they make for boring combat encounters and convoluted plots.

It's a million times easier to build a satisfying session with magic monsters, powerful wizards, and deep dungeons than it is to build one where every encounter is against a collection of normal human soldiers.

High fantasy can overdo the magical elements to the point that non-magical characters get muscled out of the narrative, and its harder to give people believable lives and professions if "lol a wizard did it" is literally an answer.

A good example of this is star wars. Star wars is fantasy in space. the main saga movies are high fantasy, and as such always focus on jedi jesus spess magic. Stuff without jedi, like rouge one or the 1st Dark forces are my favorite because without the jedi, nothing over shadows the cool working-class aliens, or the delicious early 80s tech aesthetic blended with ray-gun camp. you also get to see how the empire bickers with itself, without vader cowing them into submission every scene we can actually watch the admirals bicker and jockey for position as they inadvertetly give our heroes windows of opportunity.

None of that is on screen in any of the main saga, luke/anny/marysueface just let the Buddhist space magic give them an answer, and I find that way less interesting.

You don't need them per se, but variety is the spice of life. I wouldn't mind a game with nothing but bandits and mostly human armies, but I would also like games with more monsters and creative use of the more humanlike ones to spice it up.

Basically if you told me that the only games I'd be able to play, for the rest of my time playing, would have bandits and wolves, I'd just stop playing. That's not going to interest me for more than a few games.

I find it harder to create suspense, mystery, minor horror and other elements that require feeling powerless and/or helpless in high fantasy. Also means when things get weird they really stand out instead of being just a little off

I'd avoid low fantasy for the same reason I avoid hard sci-fi.

It tends to draw in autists who barely understand the mechanics they obsess over, setting feel too constrained by what the GM thinks is possible rather than what is actually possible, and too many retards conflate "realism" with "you cannot do anything cool and if you do, it'll cost you so much shit that it's not even worth doing."

The problem is not that you don't need monsters (you don't). But that you don't need combat at all.

Sure, you could run a political intrigue game, or something to do with economics, but usually TTRPGs seem to involve some manner of combat. Most people I know just play D&D since that's the most popular and well known.