DF: Does the world matter?

[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.