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Fantasy RPG settings are usually a well crafted affair with distant cities and intricate politics. The scenery rolls out before you presenting you with idyllic grassland, deep woods and jagged mountains. You can see the smoke rising from the hearths, you can smell the horses and general low tech lifestyle… then you introduce the players and the DM…

Roleplay is one thing and Rollplay is another. To Rollplay all you need is a vague excuse to kill the next thing coming and some dice and structure to decide if it works or not, roleplay is almost a breed apart.

To put it plainly, the problem I’m pussy footing around, if you’re in a fantasy setting then play as a fantasy character and not Neo with a new wardrobe!

How many times have you heard characters discuss and intricate plan and decide to meet somewhere in an hour? How the dickens are they going to know when an hour has passed? There are no watches, clocks are rare and inaccurate (often the characters are going for precise timing) and why would they be referring to such small pieces of time??

DMs often write long campaign designs with things happening in the background, different adventures to go on and so on. One thing that they forget is that in that kind of time period (fantasy seems to me to be replicating the period where knights were the pre-eminent force on the battlefield) waiting a year wasn’t uncommon. Waiting a minute was.

Travelling times are an issue which to my mind is at the heart of the fantasy genre. Pick up a few fantasy novels and nine times out of ten there’s usually some long journey involved. In fact it’s a bit of a joke when you consider things like Tolkein and how quickly Frodo got back from Mordor compared to how long it took to get there. Many books have more high adventure involved in crossing the terrain than they do when the characters eventually arrive and in some cases the journey is the entire point of the book! So why is it then when you come to roleplay in a fantasy environment, all anyone wants to do is skip the journey?

I’ve seen instances where almost the entire campaign is one long torrent of teleportations, portals and mystical happenings just to get you to the action quicker. It’s no wonder that D&D tends to break down into a game more about maths and how to accumulate the largest bonuses when you never have to worry about transporting all the stuff you want to bring or concern yourself with how comfortable your character would be travelling for 3 months with nothing to wear but full plate armour.

Another thing, what’s with the magic item systems in most of these games? Efficiency was barely a concept in those days so combining disparate powers into utility items seems a little counter convention but realistically the worst thing about 90% of the magic items and magic itself in these systems is that it’s so homogenous. Think about this in terms of old world culture. Nowadays two pints of Stella will look identical, the glass is homogenous, the design of the glass is the same, the chemical contents of the glass are identical to all intents and purposes. Would two pints look the same in what 1650? Is that being picky? Well in a rollplay game yes it would be but in roleplay? Not at all.

You see the reality around you is not made up of over-arcing concepts and structure but rather the smell of rain, the colour of the sky, the sound of traffic in the distance. Reality is the combination of a million details. If you are to suspend your disbelief and truly roleplay then the details must be looked after. That’s not to say they need listing or used as a stick to stop people making use of their modern day perspectives but it does mean that every once in a while your characters should have to sleep rough, every once in a while ensure their diet consists of gruel and water… If they’re supposed to be middle ages kind of character then give them the middle ages instead of some weird place where the only difference between the sword coast and california is people ride around on carpets not cars…