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Old 09-02-2010, 03:12 AM   #19
silvarilon
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Join Date: Dec 2009
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Re: Veterans of Roleplay Intensive MUDs

Gotcha!

In fact, you hit on one of my own pet peeves too. Why do messengers even exist in D&D at all? Why don't the mage guilds just teleport the days mail to the other cities? Even if you've only got a fraction of the needed mages (say, one delivery each day, with seven cities you deliver mail to, you're still delivering the mail within a week. Much faster than (presumably) a messgener could get there by horse) - so you'd need an explanation. Maybe mages are proud and arrogant. But you still need to explain why the messengers don't sign up as apprentice mages. Or why the cities don't offer high enough fees to get past the mages arrogance. or...

And that's only talking about delivering mail! If a mage can make a magical whistle that is heard from miles away, why isn't that standard required adventuring gear? Heck, why is there even the concept of "an adventurer" or "levels" - that's just not how the real world works.

It drives me nuts when I read D&D inspired fiction, and they are exploring some cave and come across a magical fortress. YES, I know there is a spell to create that, and the insane wizard used it. But honestly, how many insane people really truly live in caves? And how many of them are able to become scholars at an exotic topic? And how many of those insane scholars will then take themselves away from society and any ability to learn more. It. Just. Makes. No. Sense.

*ahem*

Sorry.

So I guess I wholeheartedly agree. I just hadn't thought of it in terms of a category, I'd just considered it "well considered" or "badly considered" writing.

It's been something of a hobby for me to try to make my game internally consistent - we do have to break believability somewhat, because the players are the "special characters" - so even though only a small fraction of dead people are resurrected (in our setting) for the players characters, 100% of the time they get resurrected. Which leads to the unfortunate effect of them all acting like everyone gets resurrected. We have made "natural effects" of this, tough. For example, it's the church that does the resurrections, and they are extremely strict and picky about who they teach it to, to maintain their power. And they never, for example, resurrect someone that was legally executed for a crime.

The other way we've tried to make things sensible is to seriously limit the amount of magic that is handed to the players, and seriously limit the frequencies of NPCs with it.

Where I fall down, more than the magic, is in the believability of normal things. Players tend to be pretty accepting that it's possible to throw fireballs or summon skeletons. They rarely look too far, and see the seams where things don't quite fit together right. However, the ability to craft unlimited wheelbarrows? That seems to offend players more. "It's impossible to make that many wheelbarrows so quickly!" - they're right. But interesting that the one causes offence and the other doesn't.

But, yeah, since the game is political, we put a huge effort into enforcing consequences for player actions - which also includes things like law enforcement adapting to new abilities such as teleportation. (or, if teleportation is meant to be an old ability that the players are only now learning, we'd start with law enforcement already knowing how to deal with it before giving it to the players)

I tend to refer to this category of problems as "believability" - I don't care if it's realistic or not (it's not realistic for dragons to exist and breathe fire) - I care if it's believable that dragons fit into the world. If dragons exist, and can be tamed, then I would find it unbeliavable if armies didn't field them in battle, like elephants were historically used. So I'd want an explanations (dragons are pacifists and refuse to fight...) or I'd want that to be part of the game. If dragons are regularly used in battle, I'd expect the military medics to be good at treating burns and trauma from falls, and so on. - And I think those elements are really easy to build into the games, and adds a lot of richness. In this example, we wouldn't even need to put in an army or dragons. It's enough that a book that teaches a medic how to treat burns might come with an explanation that it's a military medic manual, and talks about how dragons on the battlefield lead to many burns and falls from height, and thus it explains how to treat them.

Interestingly, our game has *very* few mythological creatures. No dragons, griffins, etc. - there have been zombies a few times. Yet the players roleplay pretty well, and often play that their characters are superstitious, and believe in dragons and giants, etc. - it's nice, helps us make a world where it's believable that there are mysteries, and a zombie turning up is an amazing sight and not just "ah, the necromancer is at it again"
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