How gloomy do you like your games, 10 being absolute grimdark...

How gloomy do you like your games, 10 being absolute grimdark? Which questionable themes you'd like to explore but unsure how?

It has ranges, from 3 to 8, with an occasional 1 or 10 thrown in.

I love to explore questionable themes, but I'm kind and gentle with my players, so I don't get to nearly as often as I like.

like 6-8 my dude
I like most stuff to be edgy and dark and discouraging but not so much that it's literally hell and any dreams of building or changing anything are absurd and hopeless.

I like my games dark with the caveat that they're tragic rather than edgy and that characters act like actual people rather than being shit for the sake of making a point

I don't really like it that edgy. I know it makes me sound like a big baby but if I see kids getting mutilated or something I just don't really wanna roleplay anymore.
HOWEVER I think a little bit of edgyness (or threat of edgyness) is required to make it feel like actions have consequences.

Nobledark at the worst. The bad guys can be really fucking bad, but there's always hope and there's always good people fighting them. They can fail, they can fuck up, they can make bad decisions, but the light of hope never truly dies and the pure of heart can win the day, even if it might cost them.

I know some people enjoy it, but pointlessly gritty stuff with characters dying all over the place just causes me to lose investment in what's going on super fast, while super dark 'everyone is a flavour of bad/no true heroes exist/everything is fundamentally hopeless' is just too bleak for me to be able to care about.

Like 3 or 4 max. I guess I’m more of a high fantasy fag. No matter how bad things are there’s always time for some comfy tropes

Maybe a 6-7.

Lightheartedness is easy, the players will make it. Being able to set aside some comedy and have serious moments is important, considering we'll never have a shortage of laughs.

11

I would say "like real life", but I'm not sure where exactly, on a scale from 1 to grimdark, real life would rate. is it a 5? how shitty is real life, exactly?

Depends where you live. For the majority of the global population it's pretty shitty.

Solid 5. I like my games to have a Gravity Falls feel. Fucked up things going on but the characters still crack jokes.

6

The human inability to be fully happy makes existence always cup half empty

Somewhere around -10. These days, I like cheerful stuff.

Questionable themes: What if the characters went on a picnic but the sandwiches got ruined?

Human happiness is kind of a bad metric because as you say, we're built to always be slightly unsatisfied with our current situation.

There was a weird bit of research a few years back. Doing interviews with people who just won the lottery and people who just lost the use of all their limbs, evaluating their happiness shortly after the incident, and then roughly a year later.

Shortly afterwards, as you'd expect, the people who won the lottery were ecstatic and the people who'd lost the use of their limbs were severely depressed. A year later? Even when the lottery winners were still rich and the quadriplegics hadn't recovered, their levels of reported happiness ended up about the same.

I like all settings because I'm not an unimaginative grognard

What was WHFB before the End Times? You know, the stakes are high and the darkness is overwhelming and a fate worse than death is always possible, but there are yet heroes left in man.

This.

While I put in my share of dark and gloomy and death and harshness I make it pretty clear the PCs can effect this world and make it better (or worse)

I think the Witcher series really impacted me because I like to lean heavily into the darker nature of reality and daily life for some places but it's pretty much skin deep.

>The gloomy and threatening city is just the surface it takes you less than 10 minutes of searching to find a jumping party rife with laughter and festivities.

Life is hard so people tend to party hard I guess.

I also don't acknowledge magic NEARLY as much as I should given its a pathfinder game, pretty much only falling back on it when I think to remember it and using mostly mundane explanation everything else

That’s not “we're built to always be slightly unsatisfied with our current situation,” that’s “baseline happiness is a thing, and it’s hard to change.”

I'm reminded of the Harmon quest episode where they dealt with a wizard who turned slaves into sandwiches.

A plot I actually really enjoyed because of the practically and combined hilarity of it

But the former is true, as a matter of evolutionary biology. We evolved to always be slightly unsatisfied, because that's a useful survival trait. It drives ambition.

I'm not familiar with that work, but I'm deeply, deeply skeptical. How do you test or measure "always slightly unsatisfied"? How do you determine its adaptive value? How do you determine the adaptive value of ambition, for that matter?

Depends on what game and story we are running. If we are running your generic medieval adventure I like the start of it to be 2-4 and slowly crank it up to an 8 and no more then a 9 long term. Then after the adventure slowly tune it back down to a 2-4 again for the new wave of heros with the villain that has fallen.

Depends

on

the

setting

>dotsfag is an idiot who can't read.

kys you cunt

I like it when things are heavy and grim, and everything seems hopeless. But at the same time I want the heroes to actually, y'know, act like heroes. The moment the "good guys" commit a genocide or rape someone I tend to lose all interest. So I guess Lord of the Rings is the sweet spot; there's some moral greyness but the heroes are still definitely the heroes and they're going to fight tooth and nail no matter how hopeless things get. Not sure what # rating that would be though.

At least a 4, but never more than an 8.

I tend to be on the 3-5 scale, but have always wanted to run something like Drakengard where it just gets ramped to fucking 11 in both grimdark and surrealism and see where the ride fucking goes.

>all these people ITT writing numbers without giving examples
am I autistic or is it difficult to tell what that means from the numbers alone

You can't read the fucking OP apparently

They normally start around 3 or 4, ya know most people will live a good life with occasional dips, the nobility aren't too tyrannical and most average crimes the guards can deal with. Than adventuring begins and it gets cranked up a point or two, with the hook being a solid 8 or 9
As for a theme, I've been meaning to try and do a counter-insurrection theme for my players.

>How gloomy do you like your games, 10 being absolute grimdark?
Generally the 3-5 range. I'm perfectly fine with heavier tones, but as a GM I'm not very confident in doing them myself.

>Which questionable themes you'd like to explore but unsure how?
I've always wanted to do some sort of campaign where the twist was that he villain(s) was some powered up isekai'd person. The intention therein being to create a sort of "Lord of the Flies" scenario taken to it's logical extreme.

Obviously I've been gun-shy due to the associated baggage with such a scenario, and (like I said earlier) being unsure if I personally could pull it off without it falling flat.

9, to make that left over 1 shine so much more brightly.

8 or 3 nothing really in between. I like a driving plot that I can get really invested in and I've never really been able to find it in the center of the scale.

You're saying the same thing, but with different words.

I'll soon try my first 5-6 wish me luck anons.

Usually I move between 1-2 with some Spikes to 3-4.

Vietnam/10

I live in Poland, and as a kneejerk reaction to D&D everyone only plays 10/10 grimdark because anything below is not true roleplaying and some fantasy fae bullshit.

After breaking out of that bubble I'm now unsatisfied because my favourite system is Ryuutama.

As a player I don't really have a preference for grimdark unless it actively is trying to kill my fun. I don't mind things being sad or terrible but I hate that meme idea of "you're a shit farmer in shit land and everything is awful for 'realism'" grimdark can eat shit.

When I run games there's generally some level of whimsy and fun even if it's serious, but it seems that if I run a game where the PCs are criminals things start light but spiral out of control at the end due to compounding choices that leave a lot of characters important to the PCs dead. Especially since my players keep bringing their character's families into their criminal dealings, and while I hate to be that guy who fucks with PCs for having families when you bring the family minivan to a run and beat a guy to death in it in front of a camera there are going to be consequences.

I....don't actually know. I've been playing more 40k recently, which is terribly grimdark, but also so campy about it it's hard to take seriously. So probably on the lighter end really.

This really depends. My absolute grimdark is very different from someone else's absolute grimdark. My setting with my current group is what I'd call a 2/10, but I have players who consider it a 8/10 or 9/10.
You're going to have to define the metric a bit more.

2 masked as 11

>2 masked as 11
So everything seems fine but its not? Or some darkness lurking in the background supernatural or otherwise? Cause I like the later

So basically all guardsman party?
>Set in the grim darkness of far future
>Team fights against demons and shit on almost daily basis
>It all comes off somewhat goofy and there's lots of good and nice moments for our characters peppered around all the horrors and CANNOT BE they witness on a daily basis, spiced up with some dark humor

Darkest Dungeon/10

2-3

saturday morning cartoon.

at worst, valkyria chronicles level.

It's not that I like my whole game to be gloomy, it can be pretty fun and sword and sorcery, but when the party has to do something akin to, say, participating in a war, I don't hold back.

Wars are not fun. They are brutal, gory, there is sometimes when a lack of morality exists among one or more sides. The descriptions get vivid, and sometimes, if unfortunate, women and children are among the casualties.

Pic related is my jam.

From 1 to 10 depending on the setting. Seriously, why would you do only one thing over and over again?

11 would be, paradoxically, a 1. So, happy, singing cannibals who cheerfully throw babies into the fire for Moloch. Severed heads/skulls sold at Hobby Lobby. Torture taught in middle schools. Garbage trucks stop every Tuesday to pick up the corpses. Demons are out of work - everyone is evil incarnate - there last bastion of torment is civil service or dentistry. Black is the new pink.

4-8. My typical settings are around 5, but the latest one I'm writing is a lot darker, since it delves into a gritty war.

>How gloomy do you like your games, 10 being absolute grimdark?
I'd say it depends on my mood really. My setting is basically multiple island where their base is their boat. I did once ask them to choose which character in the party they wanted to eat, or the character they had to take to the NPCQUESTGIVER. They ate the barbarian left arm, it was sufisant to hold their starvation for one more day.
>Which questionable themes you'd like to explore but unsure how?
Well I don't know. . .Maybe I'll try dilemn like in grecs myth once .

Where is 40k and 40k without the humour on the chart? I'd put that at 1 and 3 or 4 respectively.
Using that, my current main setting is about a 6.

5, I guess?
I'm mostly interested in having some mechs, getting some contracts, and all related things involved. Too happy-go-lucky and you can't really do the point of the game which is to fight. On the other hand I don't really want GMs turning every ejected warrior get tortured and/or rendered a fucktoy before being fed to space rats, either. At that point I question if this is just being an edgelord or if the GM is bringing a guro/rape magical realm to the table.

So long as it's not shitting all over the way the universe works or the established lore, I'd be happy enough just getting the chance to be a player for once.

The shit you described is required for even a 4 or possibly a 3 in my mind though.
This is why OP's question is fucking dumb. A 5 for one person is another person's 1 and another person's 10

7. I want a world fucked up enough that we're past the glorious resistance and into the dying of the light. I want to see people adapting to the world and the bits of brightness coming through as we find our equilibrium with the new normal

It can all vary. One guy could run the thing like a saturday morning cartoon, another very grim where the party knows it's going to die - it's only a matter of when.

...but like you said, without some criteria defining each step on the scale, it's all pretty arbitrary.

Do you have the source for that painting?

What setting would be a 10?

...

Requiem Chevalier Vampire

No way
It's metal and over the top and only evil people get to have fun but it's overall just too ridiculous to be actually grimdark

Anything from 4 to 8.