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Old 07-15-2019, 10:58 AM   #35
Black Leviathan
 
Join Date: Sep 2018
Default Re: Pros and cons of dungeons for hack and slash roleplaying

Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Thayne View Post
Heh. Immutable? At least for a party without special abilities? I take it you guys have never had a group of PCs ask if they can take a pickaxe to a dungeon wall.
Sadly no. I find that Hack & Slash RPGs tend to take that kind of initiative away from players with a combination of rules that don't really support leaving the path and play that doesn't reward good problem solving. At best players will move furniture or set traps so they can rest in a room. We end up with a lot of circumventing the path in Dungeon Fantasy where people will try to talk out problems rather than stab them or actually consult with experts before going to the dungeon to understand what they're dealing with. It actually will sometimes put a bit of strain on the genre.

[/QUOTE] but it often makes for a better game if you first decide what you want the world's "present" to be like and then go figure out a point of divergence that will give you that.[/QUOTE]

I think we're sort of apples and apples here. You'll have to backtrack a bit when you build the history of your world to make it what it is no matter what you start with.

All I'm suggesting is that a game world like D&D is a genre rather than a setting. It puts elements in the construction of the world that exist solely to justify it's mechanics and it does it a lot. So you end up having to frustratingly scratch your head any time you wander too far away from the town that is unsettlingly well-stocked for adventurers but doesn't have any infrastructure for a market or a church or anything traditionally found in a medieval town, or the path that has evenly spaced encounters but no explanation of why someone would blaze a path there, and an elaborately constructed facility in the middle of nowhere that never really makes sense.

So start with a world that already works. For most Fantasy games my working model is Late Medieval/early Middle Ages Netherlands and Germany. Then bolt on the elements you want to add, guilds of magic users, Polytheistic temples for Greek-like gods, evil cults, conspiracies, monsters. And fill in the spaces between. Rather than inquisition hunting pagans they hunt cults of evil gods and maybe bully small towns into worshipping their God. Magicians become a sort upper class that rivals the power of the clergy because of their importance in technology and military use. Dependent on the level of magic in the world some technologies are replaced with magic or have never existed. But otherwise the broad strokes of that original world are the same.

Now if I have a question, I have a functional copy of the world I can reference to build the answer. If I want a plot that involves the ink-maker's guild and I don't know how an ink-maker's guild would work I can Google everything about middle-ages ink making I need and then adjust that information for the breaks I've made in the world, so rather than using exotic floral and root dyes, ink makers use magically dyed pigments, the Light and Darkness College guild is tied to Ink-making.
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