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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8137105">Normal D&D doesn't exclude 4E, but neither does a single edition define D&D (I can't take some rule from 2E or OD&D to show that it is a norm across editions). If something is present in 4E alone (and maybe it isn't, perhaps there are passages in other editions that support your point, and I just don't remember them or never read them), I just don't think it makes much a case for something being the norm. I think we'd both agree 4E was one of the more experimental editions. They definitely took some chances, and some of those things didn't make it into 5th. I don't play 5th though, so I can't say if this aspect of the rulebook is present or not (though speaking with my 5th edition friends, they seem to be playing the game more in the way I am talking about as the norm).I don't know where I got the idea this was a D&D specific thread. If we are talking more broadly, I still think there is a default assumption similar to what you find in D&D in mainstream play, but I also think there are much larger audiences doing different things outside D&D. I don't even really play D&D much myself. Most of my games are either one of my own systems (because I publish I have to spend most of my game time playtesting my own stuff), or something like Savage Worlds. When I do play D&D these days it is usually a retroclone or prior edition (5E just didn't click with me).In that passage Gygax is saying you allow it because it is possible (that is the whole point of "unless this is totally foreign to the area). The player isn't creating a bluff, he is able to put his stronghold overlooking a bluff, because bluffs are present there. And I don't think you can take a passage like this, dealing with the case of strongholds, and extrapolate that to the rest of play. Like I said, these games have gray areas. But gray areas and edge cases don't establish norms in other situations. It is pretty obvious what is guiding the GM ruling in that instance is whether something would plausibly exist in the area.Where I will agree with you is in the 70s no one was thinking about the stylistic lines that have been drawn on the internet (particularly in recent years). Gygax probably wouldn't have cared if you or I regarded something he did as narrative. Reading the 1E DMG, it is obviously not really a concept at the time (and I don't remember even encountering such ideas until the early 2000s myself.In terms of this specific point:This is why I mentioned gray areas. I don't think you are entirely wrong here, but I also think you are very much overstating the case and using things like exceptions and edge cases to paint things as being more widespread parts of the rules. Tables definitely varied a lot more back in the 80s. I don't dispute that. I think there wasn't really much in terms of homogenous play. And I think that was good. Now we have chunks of homogenization in the hobby. But I do think the idea that the player had control of setting material was pretty outside most of our experiences in the 80s and into the 90s. It certainly came up here and there, and as I said there were gray areas where you could sort of see it being negotiated (but I don't think people were even aware it was so). But again, just because something appears in the corner of the rulebook somewhere, that doesn't make it the standard way the game was played. I may well not notice, not mind, or enjoy something that appears as a minor blip during play. But if you make it more central its impact is going to be very different.</blockquote>

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