D&D is what happens when you put pulp novels in an idea collider. The really big influences are Conan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian and Tolkein, which are themselves very different styles, but there's also a magpie effect where anything that Gygax read and thought was cool got added in.
Expecting "realism" and coherency from a fantasy world destroys the fantasy. But somehow projecting realism onto fantasy is a popular activity for fans.
D&D's main setting is built as a kitchen sink with tons of weird conflicting ideas happening at once so that people can exclude whatever parts they want to create their coherent setting. You want to do a vampire story? A tolkien-esque quest? Steampunk? Wizards of the Coast is happy to sell you rules for all of that.
This is the core weakness and strength of the Forgotten Realms. It has everything but if you think about it nothing makes sense. Paizo did the same with Golarion, probably because they saw that the versatility of settings like FR more than make up for the lack in coherency.
verisimilitude, not coherency. The real world doesn't appear coherent, why would a fantasy one. The consistent application of style and rules- that gives verisimilitude, and that's what counts.
It’s a popular activity because you aren’t being graded or financially incentivized to make it all work seamlessly. You’re playing make-believe with your friends, so if you want to project some realism into your game because that just sounds like a fun idea, well then you can!
As long as everyone is on board you can kind of do whatever the hell you want, like playing with legos and toy cars and whatever else is on the ground as a kid. I’d venture to say it’s also why “rule of cool” is so popular. Sometimes you just want to do cool/funny/etc. stuff and D&D told a lot of people “hell yeah get after it.”
By the time the original D&D books came out, the Blackmoor campaign (that inspired the original game) already had crashed spaceships and trans-dimensional travel.
There are a lot of authors and RPG creators who create coherent fantasy worlds. I feel it is mostly just a matter of preference and I can enjoy both. Worlds without internal consistency like Discworld and worlds with internal consistency like Amber or any of the many worlds created by Sanderson. Excepting realism does in no way destroy the fantasy, in a world which was created with a focus on consistency it only makes it easier to play RPGs since you can use the already existing rules to easily make up new things.
But of course if you expect consistency where there is none to being with you will likely be disappointed.
It's fun to see Amber described as internally consistent, but it seemed to me obviously built as an onion of lies and most of that onion was built a layer at a time seemingly by the seat of the pants for what would be most jarring/weird/fun at the given part of the book where Zelazny thought he needed a big twist and/or gut punch to the current protagonist (and by proxy, the reader).
Perhaps that's partly why the attempt by a different author to build prequels failed so spectacularly, too, because it assumed too much the world was internally consistent and so was boring and didn't reveal anything truly new because it wasn't really trying, it was just playing out the obvious consequences for if you believed in some of the consistency of the previous books. I suppose that it didn't really understand the onion it was trying to emulate and that there should have been a lot more lies and a lot less consistency.
(ETA: It's also why sadly it felt like the last five books were all gearing up [often literally, new equipment every stage like levels in a videogame] for a war that will now never happen, because we don't know with who and for what reason or why because the lying protagonist wouldn't tell us, probably because Zelazny hadn't yet figured it out either and was waiting for the right moment to strike in the books that would have followed in some other timeline freer from cancer. I do still wonder where those books would have been leading. I don't know the author that could answer that definitively for us other than Zelazny.)
Discworld runs on Rule Of Funny just as much as Roger Rabbit does, but the author was very good about continuity so there were rarely noticeable direct conflicts.
Agreed, that's what I mean! For a series that runs on "Rule of Funny" (or as Granny Weatherwax would put it, the "story") it's all surprisingly consistent. I'm not saying there aren't inconsistencies, but far fewer than one would expect from comedy literature.
You just made me realize that what made the latest Dungeons and Dragons movie so fun is that it cribbed a lot from Discworld. It has an irreverent sense of humor but never sacrifices the consistency of its world for a cheap joke.
I find the strongest differences are between early and later Pratchett, but there are big streaks of consistency across novels, especially within a "sub-series", e.g. all the Watch novels, all the Witches novels, all the "industry" novels, etc. Even they are often consistent across subseries.
That's why I think Discworld is surprisingly consistent, all things considered.
Depends on what type of realism you are talking about. The details are very scant on for example how Shire is politically set up and how the farming in general work and supply lines and all such things.
There's actually a staggering amount of thought and detail in the logistics of Middle Earth, but you have to dig into a wide variety of sources to access it. These details informed his story but didn't make it into the plot of LOTR, for obvious reasons. "In Deep Geek" is one youtube channel I enjoy for learning about
things like Aragorn's tax policy or the economics of the Shire, if you have a an interest but lack the time/obsession to piece it together yourself.
The details may be scant but you can see the outlines of history there. Tolkien doesn’t invent social structures, he adapts European history and only uses the elements he needs.
So why are Bilbo and Frodo not spending all of their time on fields? Why are they not starving when coming back? What do the other hobbits trade food for, is there some trade for metal implements or something?
Because they are landed gentry. The Gamgees and other working class hobbits do the field work. Bilbo was wealthy even before his adventure. Pippin and Merry are also members of the aristocracy. Farmer Maggot was something more or less like a yeoman farmer.
The Shire is, in basically every respect, including its economics, an idealized version of the English countryside.
Apart from Sam, who is a peasant, Gandalf, who is a demigod, and Frodo, who is landed gentry with close familial ties to the local aristocracy, everyone in the company is an aristrocat: Legolas is the son of a king, Pippin and Boromir are heirs apparent to the local representative of the absent king, Aragorn is pretender to the throne of said king, Merry is heir apparent to the second most important local ruler after Pippin's father, and Gimli is a member of Durins house.
I just got around to reading Howard's Conan stories a year or so ago and was surprised how much it felt like just reading a novelization of a D&D adventure. It feels like a much bigger influence then Tolkien, where the influence seems limited to borrowing some races and creatures.
I remember when our group in the 80s tried to play Chivalry. 5 of us peasants got slaughtered by an armed guard. Sounds about right for accuracy, but it was not much fun at all.
Expecting "realism" and coherency from a fantasy world destroys the fantasy. But somehow projecting realism onto fantasy is a popular activity for fans.