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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9595096" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I mean, I would see it as "okay...what do you consider to be non-magic, that is still fantastical?"Because the point of playing D&D is to play fantastical heroes. Whether they started from zero or not, whether they're Just Totally Ordinary Dudes And Anyone Else Could've Done The Exact Same Things or Absolutely Not Normal Dudes In The Slightest, whether they're gods among men or mice among lions, it's a fantastical setting with people facing beyond-normal dangers and, with wit and skill and grace, somehow managing to overcome them nonetheless, or at least going out in a blaze of glory, even if no one will ever know, or see.Even Gygax's gritty, amoral (verging into immoral!), selfish, backstabbing, money-grubbing, never-fight-fair, always-exploit-every-loophole style was still fantastical "heroes", it was just heroes more in the Greco-Roman sense than in the chivalric romance sense.And if they really, truly, explicitly just want to play a dirt-farmer from Terracolonium who farms dirt...then they don't even want to play a low-level character. They don't want to play D&D. The thing D&D is, the thing it has always been even across all the editions and all the stylistic shifts and all of that, is courageous people facing dangers too great for most men and hoping they'll come out on top. Some editions have made that extraordinarily unlikely, such that you play dozens or hundreds of characters before you get one successful one. Others have made this experience the bread-and-butter and aren't really interested in forcing players to "earn" fun gameplay. Others still have said "let us take care of the back end; your choices will be what makes the front end end up like that" (to varying degrees of success). Adventuring into the murder-holes and crumbling edifices and blighted lands, hoping to win something (fame, glory, riches, justice, influence, knowledge, whatever), is and has always been an essential part of the D&D experience. A player who does not want even the tiniest little bit of that is a player who doesn't want to play D&D. I'm not sure if there are RPGs out there that would truly cater to their preferences, but I wish them much luck in finding something which suits their tastes.</blockquote>

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