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<blockquote data-quote="Stalker0" data-source="post: 8492771" data-attributes="member: 5889">That is only true because of narrative &quot;conceit&quot;. The writers write the story in a specific way to ensure the mundane people &quot;matter&quot; to the story in an important way. And even then, its often more a framing of importance than actual fact.Take the Justice League cartoon as an example (a cartoon I think is fabulous btw). There are many scenes where you see the whole justice league fighting a bunch of supervillains. We see close ups of batman, the flash, wonder woman, all going to town. It gives this great illusion that its the whole league doing vital and necessary work. But the simple truth is....remove all of the league members except Superman.... and those fights would go exactly the same way. The narrative focuses on the lesser powered heroes to give them the feeling of importance, but at the end of the day....the plot would be exactly the same is superman just decided to handle it himself. Now there are some plotlines that do require the entire league, and they are great....but the vast majority of fights, the rest of the league could grab a chair and some popcorn, and let superman just handle it.So even when you have narrative control, giving full importance to &quot;mundane&quot; heroes can be hard. But dnd is not a scripted narrative, DMs only have limited ability to force certain plots. And so any power gap can be keenly felt. When two hours of the game is the DM asking the casters what divinations they are casting, what buffs they are casting, what is their familiar scouting, etc etc.... its hard to feel as narratively important when all you do is hit things really really hard.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Stalker0, post: 8492771, member: 5889"] That is only true because of narrative "conceit". The writers write the story in a specific way to ensure the mundane people "matter" to the story in an important way. And even then, its often more a framing of importance than actual fact. Take the Justice League cartoon as an example (a cartoon I think is fabulous btw). There are many scenes where you see the whole justice league fighting a bunch of supervillains. We see close ups of batman, the flash, wonder woman, all going to town. It gives this great illusion that its the whole league doing vital and necessary work. But the simple truth is....remove all of the league members except Superman.... and those fights would go exactly the same way. The narrative focuses on the lesser powered heroes to give them the feeling of importance, but at the end of the day....the plot would be exactly the same is superman just decided to handle it himself. Now there are some plotlines that do require the entire league, and they are great....but the vast majority of fights, the rest of the league could grab a chair and some popcorn, and let superman just handle it. So even when you have narrative control, giving full importance to "mundane" heroes can be hard. But dnd is not a scripted narrative, DMs only have limited ability to force certain plots. And so any power gap can be keenly felt. When two hours of the game is the DM asking the casters what divinations they are casting, what buffs they are casting, what is their familiar scouting, etc etc.... its hard to feel as narratively important when all you do is hit things really really hard. [/QUOTE]

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