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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7664971" data-attributes="member: 42582">Iosue, that's a really great post. Thank you very much!I'm mostly curious about the fourth option that you didn't quite describe there - the spending of the inspiration is pure metagame (so no diligence in describing it in the game fiction), but the earning is handled in the sort of way you see in a game like Burning Wheel or Fate - earn Inspiration for playing your personality traits in a way that drives the game forward, generates complications, etc.For me, this is one of the strongest parts of 4e (which I called out on the current "best thing from 4e" thread"): the combination of PC build mechanics, plus the default setting from the Monster Manuals, means that play travels along a very recognisably D&D trajectory - start in a village or small town dealing with kobolds or goblins (or swarms of rats), then as you gain levels start to deal with heavier hitters like gnolls and ogres and eventually trolls, then as you enter paragon tier leave most of those behind (except as minions) and encounter drow, mindflayers, giants etc (which can also mean travelling to the Underdark, or to the Elemental Chaos), then at epic things transition again, as the most powerful demons and devils and their overlords come onto the radar as the appropriate antagonists - and epic destinies link their antagonism to the personal trajectories of the PCs ("Now that I'm a demigod, of course Orcus is sending his most powerful demons to hunt me down!").Of course this trend can be bucked in various ways if a GM does a lot of re-skinning or levelling up or down (in my own case, I levelled up Frost Giants to make them an epic threat, though I did also have some backstory to explain why the giants were powering up).And part of the premise of the Neverwinter Campaign Setting is to compress a whole Heroic through Paragon story arc into the mechanical space of Heroic tier (so you get re-statted mindflayers, aboleths etc as Heroic-tier opponents).And then Dark Sun is its whole own thing, which I don't fully understand (but which has Sorcerer Kings as it top-tier opponents) but - if I were to run it - I think would run using 2 or 3-level steps (as I don't think it has the fictional or mechanical meat to flesh out a full 30 levels worth of adventuring).Despite these various exceptions, I find that default trajectory - the fiction of the tiers reinforced by the way monsters, treasures, traps etc are written up in the various source books - is a huge strength of 4e. For me, it's really been the payoff, in play, of what Worlds & Monsters promised.I was wondering if 5e has any sort of comparable take on "the story of D&D". I'm pretty sure it will be different, because of bounded accuracy in combination with the monster-spread-by-CR that you described.</blockquote>

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