For sure! And that scarcity of resources and failing supply chains is a GREAT setting for questing!

A couple thoughts occur:

• If you wanted to justify big cities in wildernesses, you could use the prevalence of monsters to do so. Say it's just too dangerous to have small villages, and everyone has to spend the night in a walled town/city for their own safety.
• I'm pondering how magic could effect this, too. You might have a whole Town in this ecosystem replaced by just a single wizard, who's willing to magic up complex tools or luxuries in exchange for an exorbitant payment from the peasants.
• A lot of fantasy settings are lowkey post-apocalyptic, inspired by the Dark Ages and/or The Black Death. You may encounter isolated Villages that are struggling to scrape by as their Town got wiped off the map, or isolated Cities crammed full of starving refugees that fled their Villages.

Now you've inspired me. I should make a character who's 1 level in sorcerer, the rest in wizard, and the premise is that they set out to prove everyone wrong that they're not just going to rely on their inborn talents and they're ready to do the work!

"Selectively simulationist" is a great way to put it. I think everyone falls victim to that from time to time and I'm definitely stealing your turn of phrase.

My current game might be helpful, but it will require a little context to explain and work to adapt to your purposes.

All my games take place in the same world. The last game was a pirate campaign, and, by the end, the players were legendary pirate kings (queens, nonbinary monarchs) that ruled the seas.

That leads to the setup for my current game: Sea travel is impractical and dangerous. A land route to totally-not-asia would be great, but none is currently known, due to a thought-to-be-impassible mountain range between there and here. The Explorers Guild is offering bounties on both a pass through the mountains and a viable charted land route to totally-not-asia. The players (and their rivals!) take a dangerous sailing journey around the mountains, to explore the jungle on the back side of the range and try to find a pass from that angle.

EDIT: They're incentivized to work with the locals, because pissing them off would make a potential trade route dangerous and therefore worthless.

There are some formats where inventory management becomes interesting again. We tried doing a Hexcrawl earlier this year and there was a lot of interesting gameplay to be had in the risk/reward management of how many supplies they wanted to carry vs how much they wanted to invest in pack animals, limiting their ability to carry loot back, carrying this vs that, guessing how much they'll use before they can resupply or where future resupplies might be, gambling on whether to press forward and risk running out or turn back, that kind of thing. It's just the more currently popular adventure structures right now (eg linear or branching narratives) where inventory tracking is superfluous.

Atheist lich that wants to live forever because he doesn't believe in an afterlife and isn't bothered by eating souls because he doesn't believe they exist.

Not recommended. People can and do crib the kinds of things you're likely to have around you. It can narrow the field of guesses more than you'd think.

Basically what diceware does. It's just that humans are really bad at picking random words ("banana" is over represented, for instance) that's what diceware helps with.

This is what you get for making me admin, I've gone mad with power, muhahahahaha!

crimes o-o

See what you do is, you put the peasants in a circle and have them pass a magnet to eachother. Put a coil of wire in the middle and you've got infinite free energy!

I still play D&D...3.5.

Google drive for notes, DungeonFog for maps.

Absolutely. I like talking about design with people perhaps too much!

Hey, sorry for the delayed response, I have been traveling.

That rule originally came from when we were a much busier subreddit. I recognize it's harder to really be "active" now, with so few threads. If they want to try to be a part of the community, I have no objection to them making a post about their game. No specific definition of what "active" means in terms of number of comments or anything, we'd just like to avoid the kind of drive-by spam of "buy my game kthnxbai"

21 people sharing 2 toilets?

Can't recall things you never knew.

Hm. Well, don't feel obliged to hew to existing genre definitions.

Also, I'd still urge you to sit down and make a list of design goals, eg what you like about the experience of playing war games or ttrpgs, and then make rules to match, rather than starting with making the rules or choosing which ones to duplicate from existing games.

Your character doesn't know that information.