That is not a true description of D&D as I play and experience it. Nothing in the guidelines pushes me towards the ordinary - for instance, Moldvay Basic tells me that a fighter can be Hercules and a magic-user Merlin - and I don't GM a game involving primarily treasure hunters, and haven't for over 30 years.
Likewise. And given that a fifth level 3E wizard can use more magical power in a day than Gandalf does in the Lord of the Rings as a whole, the idea that PCs are meant to be ordinary is one I find to be against the letter and spirit of D&D as written.
But this actually isn't true. There are plenty of people in Australia who can get cabinet ministers on the phone if they want them. That's not true of me, but there are some current and former members of Parliament whom I can walk up to and expect to have them interact with me.
I'm going to emphasise this. First, MPs run
surgeries - if I need to reach an MP who isn't mine I can. Monarchs have audiences - and certainly within the Anglo Saxon traditions for Britain any peasant had the right to appeal right the way up at fairly short notice (if they could find the King), and one of the stories I was raised on involved a peasant shaming a king who brushed her off to go hunting. This changed towards the late middle ages as populations got bigger (and was well and truly gone by the 30 years war), and peasants were a class above serfs.
Any king who rules as well as reigns that is impossible to reach by their subjects is one who's courting guillotines.
It's never occurred to me that it is a character flaw for a player to prefer to play a game involving royalty rather than peasantry.
Agreed. Or that even if you are playing peasants in a Low Fantasy setting that's not an active dystopia seeing the monarch is impossible rather than simply risky. (Of course the Rennaissance and the 30 Years War/English Civil War are definitely dystopian periods).
Not quite. The assumption is that, if the players and GM get out of whack in respect of these things, the GM's view is not automatically to be preferred. (This will come up again below, in the context of action declarations and resolution.)
The GM has the loudest voice, but certainly not the only one.
And finally, notice how the issue is resolved of whether or not the PCs can goad an evil advisor into attacking by way of taunts and more-or-less veiled threats to out him: namely, the dice are rolled and the attempt resolved! This does not pose any threat to the consistency of the gameworld. How is the gameworld less consistent because it does rather than doesn't contain a taunted and provoked advisor?
To put it simply, it
isn't.
That, to me, is an awful piece of design in terms of anything realistic to the characters.
A Thief goes to pick a lock. Sure she could study it for a while and *maybe* get a vague idea of how tough the task might be (easy, moderate, hard, fuggetaboudit), but to know the exact DC? No.
The thing is that two pieces of information are sufficient to get the 4E DC. The level and whether it's easy, medium, or hard.
Absolutely not. Attacks and HP are abstractions of what really happened - what really happened is a tired elven ranger finally spotted a fat rabbit and shot him with his bow. The attack roll and HP are abstractions of the "reality" that only apply "onscreen". They are not intended to be the physics of the D&D world - again, the designers of 3E would agree with me on this, and I believe Cook has said as much.
Indeed. As I read the 3.5 rules, hunting small game is explicitely included within the bounds of
the survival skill. Any interpretation therefore that changes it so they are not is directly contrary to both the rules as written and the rules as intended and so is a house rule. There's nothing wrong with house rules - but if your house rules change the letter and the spirit of the rules in the way in question then you should accept that what you are talking about is your own rules and not D&D.
That's a problem you have, though, not a problem with the rules. You've decided, arbitrarily, that Skill Checks cannot result in dead things, and that it is cheating if they do. You have then insisted that this is RAI - which it most certainly is not.
Indeed. It's a straight up house rule. Survival allows you to provide food and water by
hunting and foraging. Any interpretation of Survival that doesn't allow for hunting for food is directly contrary to RAW. And I'm curious what the point of Profession (Hunter) is...
As for to hit rolls and hit points, they are a map as to what is going on in the game world. But the map is not the territory. And contour lines on a map mean there's a hill, not that the terrain is flat with lines running across it.
And I wish [MENTION=17106]Ahnehnois[/MENTION] would stop talking about his personal and idiosyncratic interpretation of 3.X as if it was the whole of D&D - or even entirely representative of 3.X.