DF: Does the world matter?

[Tinman]

I guess it depends on the group.
I know my group wants me to at the very least have nations & major cities. Have some sort of political/social structure.

[ericthered]

Its all about how the players engage with the world. Which often has little to do with how well the world is built. If the world is not relevant to the plot, then world is not relevant to the game. Its only if the world effects the PC's lives that they will care about it. And so the GM has a great deal of ability to control whether it matters or not.

I'd say that pure DF in its tongue in cheek form doesn't have a world that matters, but that mode is really for purists, and it can be a lot of fun for players and GM to add a world to it.

[trooper6]

I normally run Fantasy (that may have dungeons) rather than Dungeon Fantasy.

The two times I ran DF, the world didn't matter at all, because there was no world. The DF realm was the virtual reality for the cyberpunk hacking team. So it was only a dungeon they dungeon crawled (in order to successfully get the data)...there was no world.

[Johnny Angel]

It depends...


My default answer is to say "yes, it matters," and "I'd still like the world to make sense even in a DF game." On a personal level, one of the issues I often ran into with D&D was that the fluff of the game didn't make sense in the context of how the game mechanics worked.

("Uh, so, the king has an army of elite guards, but he's hiring 4 random people to fight the ogre on the edge of town?" "Well, okay, so now we're at a level where I can single-handedly defeat the entire army of elite guards, so why should I care about following the law?" "So. . . the Solo monster dragon, the main villain of the adventure, is the most feared monster in the land and entire nations fear him, but we annihilated him in like three rounds of combat. . . so one-sidedly that he didn't even get to perform an action?)"

I don't need things to make sense on some grand scale like a Coppola movie or be perfectly realistic, but at least allow me to believe in what is going on without needing to ignore too much of my own brain.

That's the default answer.

If the intent of the game is pure hack'n'slash or pure dungeon crawl and beer & pretzels style gaming, I'm completely fine with the world being a vague concept. I can have fun with that style of game. It's not my preference, but I can enjoy it and participate in it.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Tinman

I guess it depends on the group.
I know my group wants me to at the very least have nations & major cities. Have some sort of political/social structure.

Yeah, I make those, but my players like to develop the cultures of some of these places in directions I never thought of, particularly in areas that aren't "medieval/renaissance Western Europe" flavored.

[Varyon]

I favor humanoid opposition over monsters, and am inclined to make the opposition make some sense (when I ran the Kobold Manor example dungeon in D&D 4e, I added in barracks, animal pens, a kitchen, a larder, etc), so I tend to prefer having a world. That said, I'm not that great when it comes to NPC interactions outside of "aggressive negotiations," so the world ends up being mostly fluff for the characters to kill people and take their stuff.

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I favor humanoid opposition over monsters, and am inclined to make the opposition make some sense (when I ran the Kobold Manor example dungeon in D&D 4e, I added in barracks, animal pens, a kitchen, a larder, etc), so I tend to prefer having a world. That said, I'm not that great when it comes to NPC interactions outside of "aggressive negotiations," so the world ends up being mostly fluff for the characters to kill people and take their stuff.

A monster with two legs, two arms, and equipment you can use is still a monster.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I favor humanoid opposition over monsters, and am inclined to make the opposition make some sense (when I ran the Kobold Manor example dungeon in D&D 4e, I added in barracks, animal pens, a kitchen, a larder, etc), so I tend to prefer having a world.

I remain delighted when I find a map with toilets on it. Skyrim continues to pay off in this regard because pretty much every place with people in it also has a bucket to crap in, often with a book next to it to read. And sometimes a healing potion.

I keep putting them in on everything I do because, well, everyone needs to poop. And in Dungeon Fantasy Land, there could be a poop monster in the septic tank.

Originally Posted by Varyon

That said, I'm not that great when it comes to NPC interactions outside of "aggressive negotiations," so the world ends up being mostly fluff for the characters to kill people and take their stuff.

Many animals (and thus I presume many monsters) also keep middens, where they poop and dump food waste. That's half a fluff detail, but when you're talking monsters prone to biting off large parts of people and swallowing them whole, casting or poop (or half-eaten carcasses) can come with treasure. And then the wizard with Squeamishness and Greed has to make some really tough decisions :)

[Tinman]

Originally Posted by Johnny Angel

It depends...


My default answer is to say "yes, it matters," and "I'd still like the world to make sense even in a DF game." On a personal level, one of the issues I often ran into with D&D was that the fluff of the game didn't make sense in the context of how the game mechanics worked.

("Uh, so, the king has an army of elite guards, but he's hiring 4 random people to fight the ogre on the edge of town?" "Well, okay, so now we're at a level where I can single-handedly defeat the entire army of elite guards, so why should I care about following the law?" "So. . . the Solo monster dragon, the main villain of the adventure, is the most feared monster in the land and entire nations fear him, but we annihilated him in like three rounds of combat. . . so one-sidedly that he didn't even get to perform an action?)"

I don't need things to make sense on some grand scale like a Coppola movie or be perfectly realistic, but at least allow me to believe in what is going on without needing to ignore too much of my own brain.

That's the default answer.

If the intent of the game is pure hack'n'slash or pure dungeon crawl and beer & pretzels style gaming, I'm completely fine with the world being a vague concept. I can have fun with that style of game. It's not my preference, but I can enjoy it and participate in it.

I fully agree with this! Johnny, you said it & explained better than I could.

[Ulairi]

Originally Posted by Johnny Angel

It depends...


My default answer is to say "yes, it matters," and "I'd still like the world to make sense even in a DF game." On a personal level, one of the issues I often ran into with D&D was that the fluff of the game didn't make sense in the context of how the game mechanics worked.

("Uh, so, the king has an army of elite guards, but he's hiring 4 random people to fight the ogre on the edge of town?" "Well, okay, so now we're at a level where I can single-handedly defeat the entire army of elite guards, so why should I care about following the law?" "So. . . the Solo monster dragon, the main villain of the adventure, is the most feared monster in the land and entire nations fear him, but we annihilated him in like three rounds of combat. . . so one-sidedly that he didn't even get to perform an action?)"

I don't need things to make sense on some grand scale like a Coppola movie or be perfectly realistic, but at least allow me to believe in what is going on without needing to ignore too much of my own brain.

That's the default answer.

If the intent of the game is pure hack'n'slash or pure dungeon crawl and beer & pretzels style gaming, I'm completely fine with the world being a vague concept. I can have fun with that style of game. It's not my preference, but I can enjoy it and participate in it.

When I've run D&D and those types of games, there is usually a reason the King with the Elite Guards needs the PCs to do the job. They have a piece of information about it. I've never had trivial things been that high of an interaction. I don't think that's a D&D fluff issue but a DM issue.

I tend to run all of my games as Westerns no matter what the setting. The PCs are in boomtowns or villages that don't have a ton of law. That's why they are hiring the PCs. Or they are on the frontier and there is a scarcity of law. Once the players move into the cosmopolitan areas the types of things they are doing there is different. They are trying not to get shanghai'd more than anything, if that makes sense.

But I agree with you that I want the game to make sense within the context of the game world. That's why I've always viewed game rules as not a way to "tell a story" but more of the world's physics.