It's not medival times

Greetings!

Since the devs provided a new and shiny functions to let the community share their thoughts and ideas, I'd like to take the opportunity to grace this blog function with the occasional thought, idea, random bits and bobs sufficiently interesting enough to be mentioned. I am having a hopefully more elaborate piece of writing pipelined, and I hope that once the new functions seem to work out alright (and my writer's block is gone)  I can get to that.

It's not medival times (and why I am happy about it)

One thing I love about writing speculative fiction - be it for my characters or for other stories outside of Layonara - is the setting: its creation, development and advancement. Maintenance and track-keeping are just work (wiki software, mindmaps, flow charts and other things come in handy in my experience) that needs doing, part of the craft.

Layonara, in its current incarnation is a fantasy setting run on NWN which restricts how well the player and GM can "see" the setting; mechanics are the medium for the setting. Layonara is a medival, fantasy themed world where some parts are less medival than others (I am looking at you, Clockwork Academy), providing the participants plenty of room for their creativity. The charm comes from the possibility to have an epic sword fight atop a gnomish airship and not from a more realitic, say, combat system. Sure, it doesn't hurt to know how things actually might work realistically, but it saves a lot of headaches if one finds a nice balance.

And here's why:

That's right. Knights in full armor, gripping their swords at the blade. Possibly, they will be wrestling soon. Or using the sword to trip their opponent. It's a good thing that NWN doesn't allow for all fancyness, even if there's loss of realism and hilarity (the epic fight between the paladin and the black guard comes down to a  nasty wrestle for the upper hand) there is a gain in headache-free time. While the setting certainly may allow for "realistic" combat between two full armored knights or combat with shield and sword, and while it even might be in the "good to know" category, the mechanics don't. The only downside I can see is a possible lack of good rp before, during and after fights. And that blades used in two hands might not necessarily be slow. Also, the settings allow for abilities which render certain parts of "realism" null and void - the Al'Noth. It might be a bad idea to be in full armor and get hit by flame of electrical effects for example.
The existance of magic removes the "medival" part and inserts "speculative" fiction, toppling over attempts to introduce overtly large portions of realism. To a writer who lies daily, very complexly, and at great length according to William Gibson, that's the air you breathe (and too much realism is the big stone on your feet that tries to drown you). On the other hand, "real" sword fencing looks quite awesome actually...

Source of the picture: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jagiellonian_Ms.Germ.Quart.16_%28Gladiatoria%29_9v_-_Longsword_in_armor.jpg