Hairfoot said:It often seems that way, because their are many large cities and the sourcebooks tend to focus on them to the exclusion of wilderness ecologies. In fact, FR is very much a points-of-light setting.
Take a look at the main map. On the trails represented by dotted lines, a day's travel by horse & wagon covers (by my calculation) only two dots. Most of the vast distance in Faerun is unpatrolled and uncontrolled by any civilised force, especially in areas like the Western Heartlands.
Zurai said:If the roads are teeming with monsters such that they're completely and totally impassable, as you state, the world is completely untenable. Trade cannot exist, which means each settlement has to survive on its own natural resources and knowledge. Bronze wouldn't exist because copper and tin don't generally co-exist, steel would be limited to a handful of settlements at best, and most settlements would be using copper or bone/stone weapons. Cities would be absolutely impossible due to lack of food (cities must import food to be viable - if the wilderness is too dangerous to travel through, it's much too dangerous to farm). Settlements without viable weapons and armor - bronze or steel - would be so much chaff to even a single powerful monster such as a troll or manticore, let alone the local tribe of orcs or goblins. We wouldn't have so much "Points of Light" as we would "near-total darkness with maybe one or two pinpricks of light".
Stogoe said:I agree, that was unhelpful and insulting, not to mention almost certainly false. And even if Irda Ranger has an advanced degree in population biology, who cares? Fantasy. Roleplaying. Game. 4e has deliberately chosen a 'gamist' approach rather than (IMO) mind-numbing 'simulationsim', and I couldn't be happier.
Primitive Screwhead said:As long as most folks are ignorant, and scared of, of what happens just over the next hill, you can have a PoL setting.
. . .
I think as long as you have a setting reason why adventurers can walk into a population and have an adventure seed waiting for them to protect [some of] the huddled masses..you have a PoL game.
Wait. Huh? I don't follow.Kraydak said:What he said. PoL annoys me. It:
a) is purely gamist in that it:
b) works well for low-level dungeon crawling but it is an inferior choice because it:
c) works poorly (not impossible, just poorly) for anything else...
Zurai said:If the roads are teeming with monsters such that they're completely and totally impassable, as you state, the world is completely untenable. Trade cannot exist, which means each settlement has to survive on its own natural resources and knowledge. Bronze wouldn't exist because copper and tin don't generally co-exist, steel would be limited to a handful of settlements at best, and most settlements would be using copper or bone/stone weapons. Cities would be absolutely impossible due to lack of food (cities must import food to be viable - if the wilderness is too dangerous to travel through, it's much too dangerous to farm). Settlements without viable weapons and armor - bronze or steel - would be so much chaff to even a single powerful monster such as a troll or manticore, let alone the local tribe of orcs or goblins. We wouldn't have so much "Points of Light" as we would "near-total darkness with maybe one or two pinpricks of light".
Kraydak said:What he said. PoL annoys me. It:
a) is purely gamist in that it:
b) works well for low-level dungeon crawling but it is an inferior choice because it:
c) works poorly (not impossible, just poorly) for anything else...
ThirdWizard said:Only because, I think, people are completely misrepresenting what PoL is about.
PoL is one of those things D&D is saying "Yeah, this is how games have worked in practice all these years, so we're going to drop the pretense, embrace it, and work with it." Basically, PoL is what D&D has always, in essence, been about. It is Keep on the Borderlands. It is wild tracks of untamed lands rife with adventure. It is most definitely not "If the PCs go a mile away from town at first level, they're dead dead dead!" which some people seem to be making it out to be. It exists to facilitate adventure, to emphasize danger, not to create a morass of death a mile from town square.
PoL is exactly what it says. It is points of light in a dangerous, unknown, land. It isn't all scared townsfolk huddled together, too terrified of the beasts that lie outside their firelight to look up away from their own feet. It isn't humanity's slow desperate struggle in vain not to be destroyed by the horrors that are daily culling their numbers. Sure, maybe in some places it is. But, this isn't the norm. This isn't what every settlement lives with in their daily lives. People are pushing way too hard on this, going too far. You don't have to go that far.
Indeed. People kept telling it to WotC since their first article about their new PoL concept, WotC just ignores itZurai said:If the roads are teeming with monsters such that they're completely and totally impassable, as you state, the world is completely untenable.