One mechanic to fix RPG spellcasting

(Or, well... it's an untested work-in-progress idea for fixing the things that usually irk me about it, personally.)

Magic has to be constrained, obviously, to avoid just having an instant win button that any wizard can press at any time.

Fantasy game designers usually accomplish this by giving spellcasting certain factors:

• Limited uses (in the form of spell slots, power points, consumable resources, etc). Book-keeping, yuk. You also need to stretch to find a good in-world reason for the limits to exist and the character to be aware of them, so immersion doesn't break.
• Spells of different fixed power level. Usually these have to be unlocked. If only one high-level spell has some effect, then you'll never have a lesser magician who has a knack for that one spell, or can even use it. Different fixed power levels pairs with limited uses to have several consequences:
• Even more book-keeping (bleh).
• Spells often just succeed, or have a single opportunity to resist, because it sucks to have a valuable resource just do nothing.
  
• Strategic choices usually become obvious (and therefore boring). You might straight up stop using your weakest spells.
  
• If spells have different power levels and are only rate-limited then a spell can be exactly as powerful as you can bear if a wizard wants to cast it their allotted N times per day, every day, including in downtime. Get it wrong and some spells are too weak to bother with; others break the game. Usually both, and it gets worse the wider the range of power levels.
• Jarring styles of play. The wizards have expendable resources and an incentive to use them in overwhelming bursts and/or to solve every problem, as much as possible, and then switch to 'spell recovery mode' (usually rest). This doesn't apply to other characters (or it gets awkwardly levered in by giving them inexplicably rate-limited mundane powers).
  
• Quick casting. It's bad enough in D&D-likes, where most spells take six seconds to cast. That's on the shorter side of what I'd prefer. In more granular games like GURPS, they're often cast even faster.
  
• Not much ritual. If there's a big slow evil magical spell happening, it's almost always a plot point rather than a mechanically underpinned option, let alone the primary method of spellcasting. In a lot of the genre fiction, spells are cast over long periods, either building and building in power/effect, or building towards a moment where they take effect! I really like the feeling of this, and almost never see it in a RPG.
  

I think these four aspects are worth changing for their own sake. It's worth noting that they also lead to a 'best practise' which I dislike:

Bum-rush the wizard

The RPG spellcaster in combat is unarmoured or otherwise fragile, and makes up for this with a limited number of extra-powerful hits which they deliver quickly and at range without cost, and can usually snipe a specific target and/or affect swathes of foes at once.

That adds up to a nearly universally optimal strategy: bum-rush the enemy wizard. Expend resources or open yourself to risk in order to take out the spellcaster early; it'll be worth it.

This is made worse by the usual mechanical parity of NPC/PC spellcasters (a satisfying and useful part of most games which I'd like to keep). The strategy is also optimal when it's creatures fighting a PC party with spellcasters. Enemies either bum-rush the PC wizard or are complete idiots. The best you can do is switch up those two options, sometimes making it unpleasant for the PC wizard player and sometimes boring the whole group with stupid enemies.

Here's my solution so far.

 

One unified mechanic which solves all my problems

A spell has fairly minor base effects which always apply, and a buffet of advanced effects.

If you're not already casting a spell, you can always try to cast any spell you know. You must continue casting it if you want the effect to continue (no check) or build (requires check).

When you cast a spell, its base effects take place. When you continue casting a spell, you either maintain it, or you try to make it more powerful by adding an advanced effect. You can do this each round, for most reasonable definitions of 'round'. Each time you want to add an advanced effect to the spell you are casting, you must make an appropriate check, which becomes more difficult with each effect added.

If you spend a round winding down a spell you're casting to end it, there's no risk at all. If you choose to stop casting it abruptly, there's a small risk. If you're forced to stop casting by some interruption or injury, there's a moderate risk. And if you bite off more than you can chew with advanced effects and fail the spellcasting check, there's a high risk.

The more risk, the worse the potential outcomes when the spell ends, and the higher the weighting towards the worse outcomes. The spell might just fizzle or have some cosmetic effect, but then again it might lash out at or turn on the caster, or run horribly rampant. These effects could be generic, tuned to the spell, or both.

The more skilled at wizardry you are, the more likely you are to succeed on your checks, and therefore reduce the risks you face by casting a more sophisticated spell.

Examples

The mage's change spell only makes her target look like a frog, at first. As she adds more and more advanced effects, they become the size of a frog, and then become a frog, and then start thinking like a frog. By adding other advanced effects, she can make the spell last – first an hour, then a week, then permanently – even after she stops casting it.

The wizard raises a wall from the ground at the heel of his staff. As he walks, it follows in his tracks. He puts more effort in, and it changes from packed earth to sandstone, and then to granite. If he risks enough advanced effects, he can make it higher and thicker, or join it up and add features to turn it into a building, or make it last well beyond the time he spends casting. A skilled wizard with patience and a tolerance for repeated small risks could make a whole stone fortress, a little section at a time, and only have to renew it (say) once per year.

The warlock starts casting a spell to call lightning down on the enemy camp. Clouds gather, roil, and darken as she casts. If she releases it immediately, it will have no effect, but as she continues casting, an ominous glow signals more and more charge is gathering. The choice of when to actually bring the lightning down is a calculated risk. Wait too long, and it might lash out at her!

The evil cultist starts conjuring blood eels directly from the bodies of the victims. Over time, more and more of them exsanguinate, and the blood eels grow larger, more numerous, more self-directed, and roam further from the caster. If he doesn't want to push his luck, he can then maintain his swarm of eels for as long as he keeps casting.

Outcomes

So how about those desiderata from the start of this post.

Limited uses? Nope.

Spells of different fixed power level? Gone.

Quick casting? Not if you want to accomplish much!

Not much ritual? Effects build as the chanting continues, which is the key part; see also Possible Extensions, below.

The "bum-rush the wizard" strategy? Still useful, for PCs and NPCs alike, but not a no-brainer. When the wizard starts casting, he's not particularly dangerous. If you let him keep on casting, he eventually becomes very dangerous indeed ...unless he overreaches and destroys himself! We have arrived at "actual decision-making", the backbone of TTRPGs!

Corollaries:

• Casting a spell is a risk, so spells can be powerful and yet not rate-limited. Just play out the spell each time, to see whether something goes horribly wrong. The more powerful the effects you're invoking (and thus the more potential to 'break the game' when done over and over), the more likely you are to suffer catastrophe.
• Note that this requires negative outcomes to have actual major impacts, not just be slaps on the wrist. Otherwise you end up with a long, slow cycle of spend-resources-to-make-resources-to-fix-the-harm-which-occurred-while-making-free-resources-etc. It's going to work best in games where healing is neither easy nor quick, and where character death is a possibility.
• Character improvement for magicians is easy. You can take whatever approach you want with learning/acquiring spells or specific advanced effects, specialising in spells, etc. The main improvement is just in spellcasting skill: a better caster can reliably get more spell effects before something horrible happens. This is skill-system-independent, with one exception: casters shouldn't get so powerful that they can do magic without risk (except possibly for the weak base effects of the spell, which might be safely freely repeatable if that won't damage the setting).
• Certain styles of spell, with quickly-achievable instant fixed effects, wouldn't work very well with this. Your words of command, snap featherfalls, reflexive shields, wizard knocks/locks cast while fleeing, etc. But I'm confident that every interesting spell can be made more interesting with effects that build and layer.
• I expect this to work very well with progressive status conditions, Pathfinder-style. Binary save-or-suck is often a problem with magic systems. "Spells get more powerful as the casting continues" fixed that pretty directly.
  

There are games that have elements of this mechanic – the GLOG's wizards, which I like; games with spells you pump up over time like GURPS Dungeon Fantasy; that one Conan game with open-ended / modular casting; any game with spell mishaps. I haven't seen anything exactly like this, but if I'm reinventing the wheel, please let me know.

Possible Extensions

Off the cuff, ideas for advanced rules:

1. Capacity for the caster to change the spell they're casting on the fly by relinquishing specific advanced effects they added previously, lowering the check difficulty.
2. Extensions for counterspelling / duels of wizardry.
3. In some styles of game, advanced effects might be improvised rather than listed for the player.
4. Rituals involving long timespans and more casters: Increase the time requirement for each 'stage' of the spell, multiplying by some factor or by the number of casters. Get a benefit like reduced risk or easier checks for adding advanced effects.
5. Maybe everyone can do magic; the specialised wizards are just the ones who are good enough to do it with advanced effects and lower risk.
   
6. If you really wanted, you could add complexity back in by giving each advanced spell effect a numeric power level, and a corresponding increase to check difficulty.
   

Fantasy pseudo-anachronism part two: Aetheric boogaloo

Following up on yesterday's post, here are some thoughts on pseudo-anachronisms that didn't end up in the main article.

Additions

First, there were a couple of pseudo-anachronisms I had intended to mention. Nice beds with mattresses and pillows are major investments, certainly not something every person owned, even when they're just pallets made from straw sitting on the floor. (If you think a bed is expensive today, consider that it would have been a large fraction of a house's value in many pre-industrial places and times.) Also, inns for travelers to stay in. Inns were only common on major roads, pilgrim and trade routes, and in cities and market towns. The chances of a random village having an inn would be close to zero, even a village in the middle of civilisation. And even in a reputable inn, it would be a luxury to get your own private bed that you didn't have to share with a couple of strangers or traveling companions, let alone getting your own private room!

To have nice beds and pervasive inns in our fantasy world, we need a reason to have a culture of travel, in particular to non-notable destinations. We also need a cheaper way of making sleep furniture – maybe some ancient artefact has been churning beds out at a rate of fifty per day for thousands of years, or maybe there's a widespread plague of puffball pigeons (all feathers and no flesh), or maybe when a domesticated slime dies it dries up into something superficially like a beanbag chair.

Second, reader Lauren suggested the addition of "well-lit rooms after sunset". It's true! If you've tried to light a room with candles before, you've found that candle light is really very weak. Any kind of fire doesn't, uh, hold a candle to electric lighting. Lauren also pointed out that many modern people are used to the ambient light pollution of a big modern city; complete darkness is very disorienting. It's hard to keep your balance standing up in true darkness, let alone move around, but TTRPG rule penalties are often just a slap on the wrist. As with many things, inconvenient truths get handwaved away unless they provide excitement in the game.

I think well-lit rooms at night is particularly common in visual arts and film, where the viewer's ability to see most of the shot is pretty much the most important thing.

So 'convenient modern lighting' is a fantasy pseudo-anachronism. It's one that any number of fantastic technologies could solve (glowing magical crystals, cold-burning lanterns, the ubiquitous luminescent dungeon wall fungi, minor spells and charms, enchanted or holy candles, unusually bright domesticated fireflies, rushlights from the will'o'wisp marshes, whatever). Think carefully before making it a solved problem for the common person, though: clean, cheap, portable, bright light like we have at hand nowadays is a powerful technology. It takes terror away from the night and eclipses and deep dark caves. It drastically changes warfare. It changes sleep patterns and therefore labour patterns and local economies. It removes a constraint that can serve to drive gameplay.

Missing technologies

Rarely, fantasy takes things away from the generic 1300s-to-1600s technological milieu, rather than adding pseudo-anachronistic technologies.

For example, central heating, chewing gum, concrete, contraception, ice skates, and lighthouses were all invented thousands of years ago. I've seen a setting where characters in a snowy town had no way to cross a lake which froze every winter. And there's no excuse for not having a lighthouse guarding the dangerous shoals near a major wealthy port city. Some of the others aren't likely to come up, depending on what kind of ground the fantasy is going to cover.

Complex financial instruments, too, are fairly old (the word "credit" appeared in English in the 1520s, and at the time English-speaking states were economically a bit of a backwater; I don't know much about the history of banking but I would be surprised if continental Europe didn't have entrenched banking and other institutions in centuries prior, and the Islamic world and the East earlier still). I think sometimes TTRPG settings leave out promissory notes, banknotes, loans and interest payments, insurance policies, and so on due to a false perception that these are modern innovations.

The elephant in the room in this regard, of course, is gunpowder. Cannons were widespread in the West from the start of our supposed fantasy technological band, and early man-portable guns were in use well before plate armour reached its apogee. In China and its neighbours, gunpowder had been used for at least five hundred years prior to the period, initially as an incendiary weapon.

There are good reasons for not wanting gunpowder in a setting, reasons which have been discussed to bits. Everyone reaches a different answer to the question (some, possibly, because of misapprehensions imported from modernity about how powerful, fast, cheap, light, or accurate an early gun could be; I personally don't think preindustrial firearms being 'too good' is an adequate reason to exclude them from a fantasy setting). Gygax was notoriously against gunpowder in D&D, going so far as to say that the laws of physics in his fantasy universe were such that chemical reactions were weaker. I don't think that's a great solution, because it's both underspecific and implies weird knock-on effects.

If we want a world where 'black powder' gunpowder was just never invented, is that historically plausible? On the face of it, no. It's three ingredients, of which sulphur is very common in nature, charcoal is an incredibly important part of metalworking technology, and saltpeter can be refined from fairly common mineral deposits or bat guano. Additionally, 'classic' fantasy has early chemist analogues trying things out (I think modern fantasy has sadly transformed the word 'alchemist' to mostly mean 'magic potion-maker', rather than 'a philosopher obsessed with the idea of attaining physical, mental, and spiritual perfection via a mixture of study, experiment, religious ceremony, allegory, chemical means, mystery cults, etc').

But what that argument overlooks is that having access to magic might impede the development of gunpowder weaponry. Early experiments with explosive or incendiary mixtures probably wouldn't have been (a) taken as far, (b) seen as something remarkable, or (c) suggestive of exciting military applications, if two streets over from the workshop was an academy of war wizards suiting up for another day of hurling explosive fireballs, turning city walls to mud, and setting things on fire with their minds. Even assuming magical arts were at the time in their infancy rather than developed, they would have a competitive advantage due to their comparative versatility. So, inverted pseudo-anachronism: Solved.

(Conversely, if you wanted to take it in the other direction, and have gunpowder keep up with or surpass violent forms of magic, a world with fantasy materials might have better ingredients for a propellant. Materials that were more common, cheaper to make, easier to discover, safer to store, produced a more powerful reaction, burned smokelessly, negated the sound of their own explosion, or whatever.)

Pseudo-anachronistic systemic technologies

There were a few technologies I left out of the first article because they are more processes than inventions.

1. Classic fantasy has machines but no factory mass production.

There's an artificer, wright, engineer, or (sigh) 'alchemist' who makes devices. There's steam power, clockwork, waterwheel power, or complex systems of gravity power or compressed springs powering elaborate mechanical traps. There might be non-magical 'automata'. Sometimes it's almost a genre shift into steampunk or clockpunk. Sometimes it's subtle: the dungeon gates open and close with the right series of lever pulls and Detect Magic doesn't turn anything up, but further details about the mechanism aren't forthcoming.

Luckily for our settings, there are major societal factors necessary for factory mass production to flourish. It's not enough to have the idea and the metalworking skill. Labour must be at least moderately expensive (compared to thoroughly pre-industrial eras, not compared to today). There has to be the wealth and systemic control to acquire, move, and stockpile large quantities of raw resources. There must be pretty good ways to transport input and output goods. There must be at least a little hint of standardisation in the cultural zeitgeist. Things must be sufficiently peaceful and stable locally that the wealthy feel confident investing huge amounts of capital starting up a new kind of business whose nature is that it must be continually fed or suffer major costs. And it probably helps if there are enormous costly wars going on in the background to drive both demand and development.

Two thousand years ago, the Ancient Greeks had clockwork, a simple steam engine, and Heron of Alexandria described mechanical automata and a vending machine (a coin-operated mechanical holy water dispenser). But the conditions weren't right for industrialisation: It wasn't Steam Engine Time.

Still, if you want to play it safe, consider adding a rare, non-scaleable magical element to the setting's contraptions (some bit of fantasy metallurgy or alternative physics power source or unique irreplaceable artefact).

2. Classic fantasy implies advanced food production.

My impression of the typical TTRPG fantasy milieu is that even small settlements have great numbers of skilled workers outside the fields of food and textile production. Compare that to almost all preindustrial places and times, where the farmer-to-specialist ratio is somewhere between 90:10 and 99:1. The implication is advanced food production technology, but this is seldom directly shown.

There's two avenues to resolve this. You could say there's an enormous spiderweb of little farming hamlets and fishing villages, mostly ignored by the setting focus, diligently toiling to feed and clothe themselves and send their crop of food or textiles to market to pay their taxes (or send them directly to the tax collector, in less moneyed societies).

Or you could add the milieu-appropriate equivalent of spray pesticides, antibiotics, massive greenhouses, John Deere tractors, chemical fertilisers, advanced irrigation, and GMO crops. Let's say that stirge blood repels all insect larvae, and breaks down into a decent fantasy fertiliser. Water mages harness tiny elementals for drainage and irrigation. Weather witches work the weather. Migrating flocks of giant eagles regularly fix the soil nitrogen. The obsidian bullock pulls a plough slowly, but forever, night and day, without needing to eat or drink. A growthstone is costly, but all plants within two leagues of one grow at twice the rate, so you just have to keep up with the weeding. The peaceful living dead keep birds away for a while before degrading and nourishing the loam. And to cover gaps, the magic temple is happy to dispense endless miracle bread to the sufficiently needy.

3. In classic fantasy, big things don't decay.

Speaking of nourishing the loam... In the real world, everything is subject to entropy. Even stone degrades over time. There are startlingly close to zero stone buildings whose original roofs have stood the test of centuries. Earth settles, tunnels collapse. Most metals corrode. Wood rots or gets eaten, even in the dry. And – you know where I'm going with this – dungeons aren't usually well known for being dry. Ancient megastructures like lost castles and sprawling dungeons are sort of a fantasy anachronism, in that they are basically supernaturally well-preserved archaeological sites. In our world, furnishings and materials in them would be rotten within years, everything mechanical would have completely seized up within decades, the entrances (at a minimum) would get thoroughly sealed by a bunch of debris blowing in, and eventually the structure's integrity would fail.

This is of course no fun. Luckily there are plenty of possibilities. Lingering enchantments. Automata or invisible demons or extensions of the Gygaxian 'cleanup crew' which eat dust and grit and drifts of leaves. Magical materials that don't corrode or rot. Something to bear in mind is that most of these anti-entropy fantasy technologies are going to be valuable to people in the world, so by adding verisimilitude to your dungeons and ancient monuments you are also adding stuff that people are going to want to mine/harvest/tame/imitate and put in their own homes.

4. Classic fantasy makes outdated arms and armours contemporaneous with later ones.

Okay, this is mostly just a pet peeve, but it's close enough to the topic for me to justify cramming it in.

Particularly in the case of armour, your generic fantasy setting offers armours from radically different warfare/civilian contexts (almost always getting the armour itself wrong, but that's another story) as if any of them could be reasonable choices. In practice, people going into battle wore the best armour they could afford, perhaps modulated slightly by considerations of comfort. Let's look at mail vs plate, which is the biggest example (apart perhaps from 'leather armour' which is somehow both protective enough to sometimes be chosen over metal and quiet/fast to move around in; yeesh).

If a setting has the technology, expertise, and capital investment to make plate harness, then a fully protective suit of mail (hauberk including coif + aventail + chausses + gloves etc) is strictly worse than a suit of plate armour: the mail is either heavier or much thinner (because of ring overlap!), and more expensive (it takes more labour to make and rivet the large number of rings than to shape the smaller number of plates, and both are kinds of skilled labour!), and less protective (because mail flexes at points other than the joints!), and no less encumbering (assuming the plate armour is properly made, you can't do yoga in it, but that's about the limit of its limits).

The only advantages you could argue for mail are that it's slightly less hot to wear, due to its breathability (except, it tended to be worn over thicker clothing), and that it's easier to don and doff (definitely true: maybe twenty or thirty times faster, and you don't need assistance from a servant or colleague). Did both mail and plate exist at the same time? Sure; transitional armours increasingly covered the body with plate and retained mail at the tricky gaps (goussets, and then just voiders). Should a setting book place 'full plate' next to 'chain mail' and 'leather clothing armour' as options that just have different tradeoffs? No way.

Can we find a good rationale for having mail hauberks in the same setting as sophisticated high-coverage plate armour? Only, I think, at places and times when expertise in making armour plates is tightly controlled and/or slowly leaking out into the wider world. The only good reason to offer both these armours as reasonable options to player characters is if the massive difference in time to don/doff them is actually going to matter in play, and this must be the way the opportunity cost is framed instead of nonsense like 'plate costs more than mail' or 'plate is heavier than mail'.

This all applies to some extent to weaponry, too: fantasy TTRPGs love big lists of weapons from across many centuries, and some of them ought to be modeled as strict improvements of others. And to weapons platforms, like the chariot, which was thoroughly superseded by horseback riding, but still pops up in fantasy from time to time. Also the galley, which has three core assets (incredible maneuverability, naval ram, and capacity for beach landings) and three core drawbacks (high crew requirement, low cargo capacity, and relative fragility), but I've seen settings which included galley-like ships to evoke an Ancient feel while managing to ignore all of those factors.

Arms and armour are the products of a continuous technological competition – hence the term 'arms race' – and classic fantasy almost never includes what you would actually expect: weapons and armour (and tactics, troop formations, earthworks, etc) that are specifically designed for fighting giant enemies, invisible enemies, winged enemies, hordes of extremely small enemies, enemies that can't be cut or pierced, enemies that are slow but kill with a touch, and so on. Instead, at best, real-world weapons are used against them in novel ways. This is one of the few areas where fantasy actually needs to make more stuff up.

Pseudo-anachronistic societal features

Finally, I'm going to briefly go over a few things that aren't technologies. They're arguably pseudo-anachronistic, but are beyond the main scope of what I've been talking about with and frankly would need a whole series of articles to get into, and touch on topics which deserve a deep and sober treatment. For many of them I also think they could have become widespread features of societies earlier in our history, they just didn't happen to do so.

Actually, in an attempt to rein in my impulse to go on typing for hours, I'll switch to bullet points. These tropes show up in 'classic' fantasy quite often:

• General stores and grocery shops. Pretty modern idea.
• Lots of off-the-shelf products rather than things being custom-made, commissioned, or at least assembled on the spot. Historically, if you wanted to buy a knife, you'd likely visit a blade seller (who sells blades bought from a blade maker), and a hilt maker, and possibly even a separate knife maker to join them together if neither of the first two offered that service, and then you would go somewhere else to get a sheath made for it. If you were rich, you would possibly have any or all of those parts made to your preferences, and then might visit yet another craftsperson specialising in decorations (embellishing, engraving, insetting, etc).
• Civil police forces, or town guards who for some reason serve as constables. Not completely unheard of historically, but you're more likely to run into the local aristocrat's enforcers, or a town militia/guard with strictly military responsibilities, or just three people (a reeve, a coroner, and a magistrate) to be the law system for an entire shire, county, or small fief.
  
• Minor professions inexplicably organised into guilds; guilds that lack a religious/charitable structure; guilds operating like labour unions rather than corporations trying to suppress competition; guilds envisioned by people who learned the word from MMOs; guilds for major military technologies that really ought to be state-controlled... I could go on. I usually just shake my head and assume the word 'guild' is a spotty translation from the invented language the characters are speaking, not meant to bear any relation to the real world.
• The (correct, to be clear) modern perception held by almost all individuals and even by most states that war is bad.
• The notion that a war is likely to be for some abstract goal of 'power' or to extend a ruler's 'reach' rather than for territory and loot. In a world where land equals wealth, a successful war is a financial investment with a huge payoff (things like holy wars, wars of succession, etc, notwithstanding).
• People (correctly, to be clear) being viscerally and morally repulsed by what we now call war crimes and torture 'even' against 'the other side'. It's a depressing reflection of how groups of people operate that this is only a modern concept.
• Modern principles of individual liberty and rights, personal equality, and other individual rights. Anyone with basic knowledge of history knows that these were incredibly hard-earned and we are lucky to mostly now live in societies that have them at least in principle. It's not clear whether fantasy imports these because we're so immersed in them or because it's not fun to play without them.
  
• People living without major societal obligations and without a rigid societal, contractual, or familial relationship with the people ruling them. e.g., vassalage. I think fantasy settings tend to just pay lip service here, because it's not fun to have to bend the knee to your 'betters'.
• Conversely, in some settings, absolute tyranny existing unchallenged. Arguably more historically plausible, but even more plausible would be: the lieutenants and rich vassals think the rulers have far too much power + the rulers think they're giving up too much power and are trying to claw it back + there's a backdrop of masses of poor tenants and peasants desperately trying to get their established rights upheld. See e.g. the Magna Carta.
• (Pseudo-)democracies where everyone is franchised.
• Large numbers of empowered women with equal rights and with societal roles overlapping with those of men (or without distinct societal roles). Again, to be clear, a good thing, but rare historically. I have absolutely no expertise here but I usually see an explanation for how the systemic oppression of women came about that goes [average male physical strength advantage + power derives from strength-based violence + societies were more likely to succeed when the powerful set the rules + people tend to support existing rules (or, successful societies encourage supporting existing rules) → men seize and then hold and maintain power almost exclusively]. The good news is that you can excise this from a fantasy world by having magic more powerful than strength, or by reducing biological differences between the sexes, or by having interventionist gods who support equality, etc.
• More generally, no bigotry, slavery, or systemic prejudice. Sometimes this is because everyday common people are space aliens, by which I mean they aren't under-educated, clannish, selfish, fearful, violent, and ignorant of the wider world. Sometimes people are portrayed plausibly but intolerance magically doesn't happen at a wider scale. There are good and obvious reasons not to want bigotry in your setting or to confront it in your games, but (and now this list is just making me sad) pervasive intolerance has historical verisimilitude. Yeesh. How about we say that the fantasy world's populations are massively cosmopolitan, driven by ancient diasporas of hundreds or preferably thousands of peoples; everyone looks different to each other, even very locally, and innumerable culture are constantly blending. Or maybe we resort to magical divine intervention again to fix things.
• Speaking of which, there's the trope of 'everyone's religious beliefs are strictly compatible'. In a classic TTRPG fantasy, the gods definitely exist, everyone agrees on what they're like, everyone mostly agrees on their names, most people worship a single god even though there's a pantheon, and nobody is erroneously worshipping a god who doesn't provably (or provably doesn't) exist. This has always been quite funny to me. Maybe I'll write an article about interesting alternatives.
• Immortality as a desideratum only of evildoers (e.g., liches and sorcerer-kings). Likely imported from major modern religions; I don't think many nonreligious people are keen to grow old and die. The trope is kind of compatible with there provably being a good afterlife, but that's not always the case in a fantasy world, especially when you're not one of the tiny number of people with a divine magic pipeline.
  

There we go. If you think I missed any notable pseudo-anachronism, leave a comment!

Brigands and bandits and corsairs, oh my

Differentiate your criminal malefactors!

You may not know it, but terms like 'bandits', 'outlaws', 'pillagers', 'highwaymen', and so on all mean different things. If your party is going up against violent robbers and criminals in your game, make sure you know the difference, because a freebooter isn't a pirate if they're from your kingdom, and a footpad shouldn't necessarily be treated as if they were an outlaw.

All kinds of criminal malefactors are more likely to be found where there is weak state administration, rough terrain, and recent or nearby war.

BRIGANDS

Brigands are highway robbers - people who steal from travellers on roads, usually by force and/or intimidation. They usually operate as a gang and are commonly deserted soldiers.

Footpads are brigands on foot.

Highwayman are brigands who are usually mounted and - being able to roam widely to find targets and escape consequences - less likely to be part of a gang. Carjackers are modern highwaymen who steal cars.

Expected TTRPG PC intervention: kill or drive off brigands in self-defence; round up and capture or kill brigands if approved by the authorities or in weakly governed/lawless areas; otherwise drag them to justice

PIRATES

Pirates are brigands of the seas - people with ships who steal from other people with ships, almost always by force and/or intimidation. Using a ship they can make off with substantially more cargo than a land brigand.

River pirates use, and target, boats rather than ships.

Expected TTRPG PC intervention: kill or drive off pirates in self-defence; hunt down and capture or kill pirates if approved by the authorities or on the open seas (depending on setting); otherwise drag them to justice

FREEBOOTERS

Freebooters or 'privateers' are people who pillage, plunder, raid, or capture the ships of other states, using their own ship - often a warship. Freebooters mostly attack merchant ships.

They are not technically pirates - they have been given license to act by their own state, either by blanket order, or by issuing something like a personal 'letter of marque' - an official commission authorising their actions. But another state's freebooters may be considered pirates and/or outlaws.

Corsairs are historically French freebooters.

Expected TTRPG PC intervention: kill or drive off freebooters in self-defence, and take their stuff; capturing them and dragging them to justice may be preferred in some settings

OUTLAWS

Outlaws are, literally, people who are officially outside the law. Outlawry is conferred as a criminal sentence or decree. An outlaw does not enjoy any of the legal protections of the law, including against killing. This opens outlaws up to mob justice, extrajudicial killing with impunity, and so on.

An outlaw might turn to brigandry, piracy, or marauding (if they weren't already).

In some contexts it might be not merely lawful but praiseworthy to kill an outlaw.

Outlawry is a form of unpersoning; in some contexts to give an outlaw any kind of support is illegal, akin to 'aiding and abetting'.

A desperado is a particularly bold or dangerous outlaw.

Expected TTRPG PC intervention: unlike with brigands or pirates, dealing with outlaws does not require - and usually cannot involve - any legal mechanisms. The unambiguously worst legal status has already been inflicted on them. The authorities are fine with a group of PCs doing anything to outlaws except tying them up and dumping them on the courthouse steps for 'justice'. There is no more justice to be done. This is something that can be hard for us modern people to understand: The law has no more official business with them.

BANDITS

The word 'bandit' is a little ambiguous, usually referring to a brigand but sometimes to an outlaw or a marauder.

MARAUDERS

A marauder is someone, usually an ex-soldier, who roves the countryside looting, plundering, pillaging, and sacking (related words which mean to unlawfully seize and/or destroy property). This is usually accomplished with or accompanied by violence, sometimes extreme forms like torture or terrorism. Marauders usually work in groups to accomplish this.

A marauder might also be called a plunderer or pillager.

Expected TTRPG PC intervention: kill or drive off marauders in self-defence; round up and capture or kill marauders if approved by the authorities or in weakly governed/lawless areas; otherwise drag them to justice

RAIDERS

Raiders are those from a culture/society/state in which raiding other cultures/societies/states is permissible, who do so. 'Raiding' here means travelling to a population centre to loot/plunder/pillage/sack as a marauder does. Raiding sometimes also has connotations of enslaving people.

Expected TTRPG PC intervention: raiders from other states usually don't enjoy legal protections; typically the expected thing is to kill them (reactively or proactively) in defence of the state and its people

THE MORE YOU KNOW

What does a lawful good paladin do with a brigand or pirate? Capture them to be tried. What does a lawful good paladin do with a raider? Dispense swift death. What does a lawful good paladin do with an outlaw? Well, now they have to decide what's 'good'.

Encumbrance: Shifting the Burden

Character encumbrance has long been a hot-button issue in tabletop game design circles. Part of this is because in our time-starved modern lives, players have a bias against bookkeeping of any kind.

Another part, I suspect, is mis-calibration of stakes (the short version: tracking encumbrance necessitates genuine character choices and can result in more interactions with the game world, e.g., through hiring and managing porters and mule drivers, rewarding players for considering ship passage for long journeys, and so forth. But it doesn't do much more than that).

Once you're past the 'should we even bother to track encumbrance?' stage - and to be clear, I think tracking encumbrance benefits all but the most rules-light of roleplaying games - you come to the 'how do we track encumbrance?' stage. And there are, as far as I can tell, two main approaches here.

The first, default, approach is to use weight, summing the weight of each item carried and comparing the total to rules for maximum weight or weight penalties. It's simple, but it's a lot of (also simple) maths, which can be a deal-breaker for some even in the age of omnipresent computing. It also doesn't model bulk, and requires the GM to constantly adjudicate the exact weights of new items.

The second approach is to use abstract item slots, often as a proxy for both weight and bulk. You can carry N significant items, where 'significant' is loosely defined, and N is fixed or character-dependent. Most frameworks further prescribe that particularly heavy items take multiple slots, light ones stack into a slot, and so on. This is both easy and plausible, and requires less GM adjudication.

I think the second approach is better, but that there's something fundamentally missing.

An aside about bulk

Consider a really long wooden plank, say a three-metre-long 'two by four'.

• A bundle of five such planks would weigh about 15 kg, and you would struggle to perform basic movements while carrying them. Forget being able to quickly turn or catch a ball, let alone vault a fence or climb a wall.
• Compare a mail hauberk and coif, which also weighs about 15 kg. With the right belt and straps to support its weight, you barely feel that weight. It makes almost no difference to movement.
• Per the the US Army Field Manual (1990), the recommended load for an American soldier (who we might consider as our 'fit and healthy character' default) is 31 kg (69 lbs), including what they're wearing. In practise, this rises to more than 50 kg (110 lbs) in the field. So it should be trivial to wear 15 kg of mail armour; at the same time, it should be extremely awkward to carry 15 kg of long planks, and make many tasks essentially impossible.
  
• Lots of tabletop games can involve carrying awkwardly shaped items from time to time: polearms, long guns, ladders, wizard staves, downed comrades, big coils of rope, small creatures, the occasional piece of looted furniture.

So bulk has to be a factor. Why doesn't the abstract-item-slot work, then?

Encumbrance means two things

When we're talking about character encumbrance, we mean two different things.

• Over long treks, encumbrance is how much weight and bulk your character can carry without becoming fatigued.
• In short bursts of skilled exertion (like fights, climbing, avoiding traps, and so on), encumbrance is how much weight and bulk your character can carry without being impeded.
• (There's also the separate question of how much you can lift and carry over short distances/periods if you really have to, but games usually do include specific rules for this)

Long/strength/fatigue encumbrance and short/quick/impede encumbrance are very, very different.

Over long distances (say a day of walking), a moderately robust character can carry 15 kg in a backpack and another 5 kg of clothing and miscellanea, no problem. The exact same character, in a fight or keeping their footing on a ship in a storm or otherwise needing snappy movements, ought to be severely disadvantaged compared to one not wearing the backpack. And disadvantaged compared to a character wearing that 15 kg as armour.

Ask a HEMA practitioner about fighting while carrying something big enough to change your centre of balance (especially if it raises it or moves it laterally away; a backpack does both). It's a nightmare to deal with!

When it comes to both long/strength/fatigue and short/quick/impede encumbrance, the difference between your typical fantasy character and a medieval knight on campaign is that the knight has a coterie of dedicated servants to haul things around for him: pages, squires, swains, manservants, sarjents, standard-bearers, chamber servants, etc. Not to mention having a warhorse, a riding horse, and a packhorse, as well as possibly some pack mules or donkeys. The fantasy character has the same amount of stuff and, in most games, carries it personally and fights with it on their back.

So a game needs two subsystems: one to deal with how much you can carry over long distances before tiring (long/strength/fatigue encumbrance), and one to deal with the impact of equipment load on tasks that requires speed, agility, balance, and deftness (short/quick/impede encumbrance).

 

Do you really need both subsystems?

Most games will let you have a backpack (or the fictional fantasy medieval equivalent of a modern backpack) that you can remove and drop when you need to move quickly. A common house rule in practice is to go as far as to assume that you always drop your heavy load in appropriate circumstances with no words exchanged(!), and because of that, you're never penalised by it(!)

But there can be situations where that's not possible, because you're flying or carrying an unconscious comrade or suddenly ambushed or whatever. Those situations aren't even that uncommon. So there's a need for rules to cover them.

Also, in general, shrugging off a load takes time, even if you have a fictional fantasy medieval equivalent of a modern backpack, and that's time you could otherwise spend acting.

Also also, dropping your gear creates a new target (unattended equipment).

Also also also, there are some common tasks which I suspect are being done 'fully loaded' even though they really should be affected by short/quick/impede encumbrance: sneaking, searching for traps, defending against surprise attacks, fleeing, posturing against a possible aggressor, etc.

 

What I'd like to see, part one: Bulk vs weight

Awkwardly sized and shaped objects need something to set them apart from heavy objects, even if it's just a multiplier to their perceived weight (2x effective weight for awkward objects, 3x for really awkward objects?). This certainly applies to quick, deft movements, but arguably also to carrying things long distances, so the multiplier could be a general one: bulky and awkward items just 'count as' a greater number of items.

15 kg of worn mail is trivial in almost every circumstance. 15 kg of long planks (or bundled spears, or sacks of coins) is all of your attention and all of your arm strength, all of the time, and a sacrifice of your ability to do anything by reflex other than 'dropping these heavy objects'.

 

What I'd like to see, part two: A separate subsystem

Encumbrance systems in the current zeitgeist, such as abstract items slots, work really well for the question of endurance, i.e., for long/strength/fatigue encumbrance. But those systems range from 'far too generous' to 'entirely inadequate' when it comes to impeding movements during short bursts of skilled exertion, i.e., short/quick/impede encumbrance.

Carrying more than you can physically bear should make you exhausted and sore over hours of travel, i.e., convey a physical malus. And carrying enough to impede you should make you clumsy and slow at those moments when you need to be deft and fast, i.e., convey a malus to many task outcomes (such as a penalty to certain dice rolls).

From the point of view of verisimilitude, a character ought to be stacking more and more penalties the more weight and bulk they have on them. In the interests of smooth gameplay, though, you're probably looking at having a few 'bands' of acceptability or detriment, where the 'default' in a fantasy setting would comprise armour, a couple of weapons, and a bandolier or belt pouches; you would then adjust based on deviations from that norm:

• You should get a hefty bonus on most physical tasks if stripped down to basic clothing (so a rogue takes just their clothing and a small pouch of tools to climb roofs and break into houses; a fighter best shows off their prowess when fencing with sword, buckler, and jerkin, but it's not in practise it's not worth the risk of going completely unarmoured).
• You should get substantial penalties if you're carrying even a portion of your full 'travel load' (bedroll, a week's food, toolbox, belt lantern, backup weapon, bow, spellbooks, and so on).

And crucially, the maximum load a character can comfortably carry long distances must be far higher than the maximum load which they can carry while moving in quick bursts without penalty.

 

Consequences

I haven't tried playing like this, but I'd like to.

The consequences I predict are a greater sense of verisimilitude, an amount of grumbling from players commensurate with their not getting any in-world benefit out of it, greater attention to base camps and supply caches, less 'we buy one of everything' at the first treasure windfall, much more hiring of hirelings, and a rise in value of extradimensional spaces, levitation, all-terrain vehicles, and other utility gear.

 

Addendum 27/05/2023: The above of course applies to traditional roleplaying frameworks. I think that in games which veer away from "roleplaying game" and into "collaborative storytelling", rules like "you are carrying whatever is dramatically appropriate, if reasonable" (or more structured variants of that) are perfectly good solutions.

Scattered thoughts on old-school play

I'm always interested to read about the roots of the modern tabletop roleplaying game. It usually leaves me speculating how things might be if history's quirks had tilted in a different direction.

    QUESTIONS

What would modern games look like if Arneson hadn't been developing Civil War / Napoleonic naval wargames and thinking about ironclad ships having an armour 'class' against guns? A player being upset about their character getting one-shot by a troll gave us the concept of 'multiple hits', and thence the nearly-ubiquitous 'hit points'. Even there, except for another quirk of history, the default might still be the original Arnesonian system where hit points are fixed and characters only get harder to hit. Or maybe we'd have wound systems, something GURPSy, something WFRPy, who knows?

If Braunstein games hadn't been deemed a 'failure' by their creator, would tabletop roleplaying have sprung from there? If Kriegsspiel had become a big civilian fad, would tabletop roleplaying have developed from that, a hundred years early? If 'player character' wasn't a term of art, would it be 'avatar' or 'incarnation' or 'paper man' or 'general'?

If the Outdoor Survival board game hadn't come out when it did, would early gaming have used hexes at all? Would we expect gritty cartography and actual navigation, wargames style? Or a higher level of abstraction than hexes?

What if we didn't have Hammer Horror imports, and a ton of Christian motifs over a paper-thin veneer of polytheism? What if Gygax hadn't changed the "curate" class to "cleric", or "cunning" to "wisdom"? What if the thief hadn't become the fourth character archetype?

    THINGS LEFT BY THE WAYSIDE

It used to be that fighty characters (fighting men) developed superpowers that were social in nature. There was just SO MUCH advanced play based on retainers, hirelings, kingdoms, armies, that is unusual in modern tabletop gaming. In fact, a brief rant:

For the last few decades the big roleplaying games have made combat the focus of play at all levels, and have usually made combat mechanically complex, so it takes a lot of time at the table. The consequence is an imperative that all characters be equally good at fighting. I'm sad to see the fighting man's initial niche gone. I'm sadder to see their higher-level niche - all the charismatic leader stuff - wither on the vine too. Did players stop enjoying that? Did GMs not enjoy running that? Or was this change led by designers dropping frameworks that seemed non-essential to play?

So now any default fantasy game is full of mages who are exactly as good in a fight as the mundane fighting specialists, and then have a wealth of straight-up magical powers and things to do outside fights. (I realise this is not a modern complaint.)

There are some weird dynamics in (many) modern games. A lot of the big, sweeping differences between character types have disappeared. In the big name games, an enormous ecosystem of small quirky differences have sprung up, alongside a focus on the character rather than the experience of play (some people have some derogatory names for this). Your typical character can do a dozen well-defined fiddly little magical/mystical/supernatural things from backgrounds and races and classes and feats and archetypes and so on. I play a few games and hear about many more, and almost never encounter a mundane fighter. Certainly not one whose shtick is military command. Funny to think that the 'Loyalty Trait' was an integral numeric score in original D&D.

So was 'Ego', come to think of it. Magic intelligent weapons were a big deal. Mostly swords. Swords with alignment, swords that cast spells, swords that spoke more languages than anyone else in the party. Swords with more (or more meaningful) tiers of intelligence than player characters had.

Everything is subject to fashion, I suppose. Reference frames shift. Standard modes of play shift. What was 'The Dungeon' is now 'A Megadungeon', and not just because a roomful of monsters is ten times more likely to be approached with combat (which in turn takes ten times longer).

    SEEMINGLY MISPLACED FOCUS

I am puzzled by a trend in modern roleplaying games publishing. I keep seeing them focus and double down on two things that are very specifically NOT a roleplaying game's forte:

1. In many games, writers try to make narrative, story arcs, linear plots, character beats, etc, a huge deal. This is an import from non-interactive media that has never made sense to me. It's harder to have them than not have them, and there's no payoff for that: it makes things less fun for the players (in my experience, at least). People have complained about 'the railroad' for close to fifty years yet I still see it loom in every other published adventure.
2. Many tabletop game designs develop complex mechanics and dice maths, the kind that a computer would handle really well, and then focus on squeezing and contorting all roleplaying situations to have the GM use those mechanics and math (exactly like a computer game would do). Arguably the tabletop role-playing game's only advantage over other games and interactive media is that it is fundamentally adjudicated by a human referee, yet there seems to be so much drive towards treating GMs like machines. Maybe I've had bad luck with what I've been reading lately.

    SETTINGS

Whenever I read old-school play notes I'm struck by how much of a classic medieval-Renaissance-saga feel they tend to have. Not in the sense of being actually authentic to any particular time period, but they don't seem laden with modern sensibilities that I see baked into games and settings.

Modern defaults for a fantasy setting which I regularly notice:

• There is a market economy, everyone uses coins, and every settlement has shops selling many ready-made goods
• Many leaders rule by the will of the people, not by force or threat of force
• Some kind of competent police force exists
• Everywhere is cosmopolitan, and people are upwardly mobile
  
• Every settlement or person in a game has to be something to be interacted with, and if it's not then it's a 'misdirect' or a 'red herring'. Even though it's verisimilitudinous to have three dozen villages between a town and the next point of interest, few GMs mention those, possibly because their players would for some reason feel obliged to explore them for hours and hours
  
• The average person (let alone player character) has all the freedoms of someone in a modern industrialised western country, and few of the responsibilities or obligations common in a less libertarian society
• People value the kinds of things they value in modernity
• Large towns nestle up against tracts of wilderness that would be useful farm land. Corollary: settlements are scattered everywhere, far apart, relatively undefended from monstrous threats, magical disasters, and banditry. If you read about some of the lengths people went to historically when faced with the 'threat' of mundane wolves, people being blasé about ogres in their environment is jarring
  
• Religion seldom comes up in every life, rather than being central to absolutely everything, despite most settings having plenty of evidence of real afterlives and divine powers

Obviously not all these elements are strictly modern notions; obviously we're talking about fantasy to begin with; obviously plenty of games and settings DO try to evoke a pseudo-historical feel, but it's still striking to me.

It's convenient to have these notions baked into a setting. It makes it easier for players to get into things. I wonder if that's the reason, or if players and GMs are just unaware of what things are like in an era without mass communications, powerful centralised government, widespread secondary and tertiary industry, etc.

    FINAL THOUGHTS

...On the other hand, tabletop roleplaying games are bigger than ever this decade, and I am as pleased as punch that the gates are wide open. It is my genuine hope that people are finding games and styles that work for them.

As Dave Arneson wrote shortly before he passed, "Work with what works for you."

Melee combat abstractions: Time

Games necessarily use abstractions. Abstractions are neither good nor bad, although there can be good or bad implementations, and when choosing levels of abstraction for different elements, there can be good or bad choices.

Some things true of pre-modern armed combat which might not be obvious to everyone are:

1. When combatants are in reach/measure, strikes can be delivered very fast, and 
2. Combatants can spend a lot of time out of reach/measure, sizing each other up.

Many tabletop game designs get this backwards. There is almost never an incentive to stay just out of fighting range. And strikes in reach are either

1. Modelled individually, in which case the system almost always permits too few of them; or
2. Modelled abstractly/collectively, which usually works better.

But in both cases, game systems tend to neglect the necessary corollaries.

What do I mean by that?

Strikes modelled individually

Go and watch a video of HEMA sparring or historical fencing and count the attempted strikes. For a competent fighter using plausible weapons and trying to defend at the same time, you will see upward of two strikes per second. For a skilled fighter using a quick weapon like a one-handed sword, you will easily see four per second.

GURPS at least comes close to getting this right (depending on choice of rulesets). But its one-second-action time scale is still not fine-grained enough to properly model individual strikes!

Strikes modelled abstractly/collectively

A lot of games use one resolution mechanism (like an attack roll) to model a section of combat, summing up a series of attempted strikes.

Games like modern DnD and its various clones and pseudoclones claim to do this: one attack (or two or three, for skilled fighters) in six seconds represents a more complex section of combat. The claim doesn't hold up, though.

If an attack roll represents a series of attempted strikes, there are at least four important corollaries, which apply even to unskilled combatants:

1. It must be possible for on-hit effects like poison or sundering to be delivered multiple times per turn, even for an unskilled combatant;
   
2. It must be possible to (sometimes) hit multiple different foes in one turn, and increasingly likely for larger power disparities;
3. At a point in battle where a character finds themself in front of multiple helpless foes and no other threat, it must be possible to stab all of them - certainly at least six per turn;
   
4. Where a magical item or something similar delivers an effect on an object it hits, it should do so numerous times for every attack roll, to represent all the parries.
   

In general none of these are true for 5e and comparable rule sets.

(As an aside, the one attack roll representing numerous attempted hits clearly doesn't apply to ranged attacks, where one piece of ammunition is consumed per shot; there are other bigger problems with timing there, at least in modern DnD, where a windlass crossbow can somehow be shot and spanned in six seconds but throwing two throwing knives that are already in your hands takes twelve seconds.)

Is there a solution?

At least three that I can see. You can have an even more abstract set of rules so that none of these things even come up. You can change to a preposterously fine-grained time resolution. Or you can model multiple strikes with a single resolution mechanism but take pains to get all the corollary rules right.

I personally favour the last option. Abstract semi-tactical combat is fun. But it's really common in fantasy gaming to have a blade-breaking sword, or be faced with magically incapacitated foes, or be playing an extremely skilled fighter against a very large number of very weak foes. These kinds of cases should be supported!

Fantasy setting peeves: Coda

All too often in audiovisual media covering a historical or historical-fantasy setting, peasants are depicted as wearing ill-fitting, ragged, crudely-made clothing to show they're poor.

But this is a world before automation. That means four things: labour is cheap, people make and repair their own stuff, more stuff is made locally, and stuff is expensive to produce.

...So there's no reason for peasants to be wearing ill-fitting clothing. Cloth is expensive - having loose-fitting clothing (pleats, gathers, ruffles, etc) is a sign of wealth, not poverty!

...And there's no reason for peasants to be wearing ragged clothing. Nobody is so pressed for time that they can't have ragged edges repaired, when it's all but guaranteed that there's someone who stitches within spitting distance. Tears tend to get worse, wasting cloth, and again - cloth is expensive.

...And likewise there's no reason for peasants to be wearing crudely-made clothing. A ton of people are going to be competent in simple tailoring. Even when the economy is relatively monetised and goods are traded at market.

It shouldn't take more than ten minutes of thought - or a quick phone call to a domain expert - to get at least a veneer of verisimilitude. This is low-hanging fruit!

Four kinds of fantasy setting peeves

Personally, our peeves when it comes to the tropes in fantasy books, TTRPGs, and shows can be reduced to four categories. Our favourite works are those that are careful about all of them.

Category 1. Yes We Are Super Pedantic.

Armour made of interlinked rings has a name. It's 'mail', not 'chain mail'. If you want to be period-appropriate, you might say 'maille' or 'mayle'. Armour made of thin lames of metal has a name. It's 'lamellar armour', not 'splinted mail'. The preposterous place we're in with pervasive fantasy armours that are mis-named or just plain stupid can be traced back to Victorian antiquaries and burgeoning medievalists like Grose and Meyrick. They chose to use 'mail' to mean 'metal armour', contra its historical meaning, and invented a bunch of armours (banded mail, tegulated mail, splinted mail, etc) that are historically unattested!

A gorgon is a mythological monster or demon from ancient Greece with a visage that turned people to stone. Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa were the names of the three gorgons. Medusa, and in later stories all the gorgons, had serpents for hair. Medusa was the only mortal gorgon. Having 'medusas' and then unrelated 'gorgons' is like calling countries 'australias' and then saying that the word 'countries' means 'sports teams'.

Historically, alchemy has been more about enlightenment, spiritual refinement, and purity of the self, than it has been about mystical proto-chemistry.

Necromancy means getting information from the (spirits of the) dead, not animating dead bodies.

...And so on.

Category 2. No Thought Given to Consequences.

'Fantasy' doesn't mean 'anything can happen at any time without underlying rule or predictable reason'. That's a description of a dream sequence, or certain strains of postmodernism. Sometimes we get peeved by encountering medieval facades with no real thought given to the consequences of having magic and monsters.

Even something as seemingly essential as the towering stone castle is the product of social and political forces: castle building is a consequence of a fractured state that lacks strong central coordination, instead delegating power to local or regional leaders willing and able to use violence to maintain control. Those leaders build castles (i.e., fortified residences of local elites often used for administration including taxation) to (generally) shore up their vulnerabilities and (specifically) as a vital defence against their nearby peers, in a context where land is wealth and the central state isn't powerful enough to police them.

Castles exist in those conditions as long as there are the resources to make them, and as long as there aren't technologies that can trivially defeat them. Note that castles were replaced by star fortresses in the era of powerful artillery. Lots of common fantastic elements can defeat stone walls at a distance or under cover of stealth: flight or levitation, rock-to-mud or other transmutations, giants or other really big creatures, instantaneous travel, earthquakes, and powered-up versions of mundane siege attacks, like tunnelling, throwing big rocks, or inflicting plague or demoralisation. Such elements entail fewer castles - or none, if they are sufficiently available. Maybe star forts are the way to go in this particular fantasy setting. Or bunkers. Or enormous moats. Or maybe magic is the only defence that works.

Of course, if fantastic elements make it easier to build castles, that provides an impetus in the opposite direction. If good permanent masonry can be conjured by any town magician, then yes, castles might be everywhere despite being permeable to magic... but also, every town will be furnished with multiple curtain walls, aqueducts, tall stone buildings, stone roads, and so on.

In general, every fantastic element in a setting needs to be considered in terms of: how does this affect the overall milieu? If every other mage can send a magical message a hundred miles and every town has at least a couple of mages, what does that imply for a ruler's ability to receive information, wage war, and administer the state at a distance? Because it's sure not governed by the speed of a messenger on horseback any more.

Category 3. Assumptions Based on Modern Culture.

Writers all too often take for granted that some aspects of a free, capitalist society will just show up in a setting: a cash economy, an absence of individual obligations to people higher in the pecking order (or a lack of a pecking order), freedoms of speech and movement and so on, and a modern sense of morality where things like 'don't torture animals' and 'don't execute prisoners' are obvious rather than a weird joke.

Obviously some of these things are desirable to have in a setting just so that readers or players won't be icked out. And obviously if a game or novel requires its audience to pursue a comprehensive course of historical/sociological/economic study before they can engage with it, that game or novel is limiting itself in a pretty major way. But if a setting has these things, it should have a reason to have them. It's not actually that difficult to do - 'gods literally exist, they desire these things for a reason X, and they have worked to implement them by means Y' gets you most of the way there in one sentence. Our peeve is when the world is 'modern Western civilisation with the serial numbers written in Blackletter' and that's just ...how it is. The average powerless pre-industrial commoner can go where they want, choose where to work, says what they want to who they want, has money and spends it, doesn't live in fear of the powerful, and is a devout utilitarian ethicist. Without any of the necessary structures to enable that.

Category 4. Maladaptive Feedback Loops.

There's something that's happened since the dawn of TTRPGs. Game masters - or players - excise the parts of the rules they don't like or don't see the need for. The least popular rules get ignored, popular house-rules spring up and pass on, and in the worst case, poorly-laid-out rule books result in certain good ideas just never making it to the table. Popular voices spread their own gameplay changes through the hobby - first through magazines, then blogs, now social media - and widespread changes in gameplay result.

Later generations of designers create new editions of old games, or make their own new games, based on the way they remember playing or the way people seem to want to play. The feedback loop completes. Some innovations are for the better, but useful material is also lost.

And so you get big successful games about delving into dungeons with whole books oriented towards game masters which somehow forget to teach said game masters how to properly run a dungeon delve. Or sections on realm management which boil down to 'wing it', where bygone editions had exceptional rules for that baked in. Or wilderness survival rules so brief and generous that choosing the right starting character negates any possible wilderness survival gameplay.

Well, so what?

In our own work, we like to put together material that bears all these things in mind. We said 'peeves', but really, it's about forming a cohesive, interesting whole that won't turn off a reader who knows too much and doesn't expect too much out of a new reader/player who's coming from a different genre, style, or expectation.