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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6441944" data-attributes="member: 87792">This is to me utterly unsurprising.  You started with 2E.  And what you are saying is completely in line with 2E  However 2E is not and has never been 1E and 1E is not and has never been oD&D.  Zeb Cook's edition of D&D is not Gary Gygax' edition of D&D.  Most of the rules may overlap - but the reasons, the motivation, and the worldbuilding have all changed away from the original D&D.  And you are heading in to this conversation so far as I can tell treating 2E as if it is the One True Way D&D Was Created For.It wasn't.  2E was the Worldbuilder's & Storyteller's D&D.  This was a vast break away from the much more challenge focussed 1E in many ways.What I'm saying is that according to those who were there, oD&D (which predates 1E - AD&D 1E was as much a ploy to deny Arneson royalties as anything) was played primarily by wargamers in pawn stance.  D&D was a game written by and for tabletop wargamers but found the greatest success amongst the Science Fiction & Fantasy Fandom communities.  2E (after the removal of Gygax) was the point at which the Fandom community took over writing the rules from the wargamers.  It's also the edition that suggests the DM fudges the rules and is an outlier in a number of other ways.  (This isn't to say that 2E is the only outlier of course).With the exception of 4e it's often hard to spot how a given version of D&D is an outlier as what they've done is taken the way that D&D was being played or was intended to be played at that given point in history and re-written the rulebooks round that.  (4E is much less of an outlier than it appears - it's a near-ground up rewrite to the rules round one of the two late 3.5 playstyles, and the one that called back to rather than explicitly rejected Gygax' guidance).For the record, the Forge doesn't.  A much better understanding of its take would be to look at the tension between the playstyle the rules indicate and the courtly setting and move the mechanical incentives to match the desired playstyle.Again, this is a very 2E take.  In oD&D in at least one of the original megadungeons, the DM responded to the question of how the inhabitants of the dungeon fed themselves by inventing a McDungeon's and putting it on the 6th level, with prices in copper pieces.  It's only 2E that has a mandated ecology section in the MM - and that because this is one of the ways 2E is distinct from the rest of the D&D family.  If you read the 1E MM it's basically a list of statblocks with less flavour text than the 4E MM1.Not that anyone would assume that the pants hadn't come from somewhere, but there's no reason to specify it.  But I'm going to take you back to the earliest days of D&D.Very early D&D would be played as a troupe with more than one DM.  It was as much a game of skill in beating dungeons as anything and players would take their characters from DM to DM (which is why Monty Haul DMs were so reviled - they broke power curves and undercut other DMs).  This meant (a) that no one DM had control of the setting and (b) there were occasional continuity glitches as one DM's vision conflicted with another's.  Which meant that what was real in the setting was what had actually appeared in play.  Until the Lich is at least namedropped it doesn't exist.  If another DM takes the lich over for their dungeon that's what the lich does whatever the backstory you created for it says.Your way is very strongly associated with 2e and to a lesser extent 3.0 and 3.5.  It's not an invalid approach.  But [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s is closer to the way D&D was designed.  With worlds that grew rather than ones that were created in advance.  And worlds that grow in ways that surprise even the DM.We're getting into Doylist and Watsonian explanations again.  From the Doylist perspective you are absolutely right.  From the Watsonian one this is meaningless.  Conan-Doyle is not an in universe thing in the Sherlock Holmes stories.Yup.  And it's cutting all this off that bugs me.Likewise.Explicitly saying so in my case <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />For the record this isn't true.  About half the cantrips are attack powers.  You can also have things like Prestidigitatation and a tiny image.  And my second level Warlock managed Disguise Self and Silent Image.  I might think that 5e is half-hearted as an edition but that's not a valid criticism of it.OK.  But what game are we talking about?Indeed.  Being able to move with the expectation that you understand the universe is considerably less reality warping and immersion breaking than a spell that changes the laws of physics.And this again.  Either you have a massive setting bible (Harn), you can define NPC acquaintances, or in practice you know almost no one.  Majoru Oakheart (I think) mentioned that he always moves his PCs to an utterly new area - this is necessary for PCs not to feel amnesiac if the players aren't allowed to invent NPCs.That depends entirely on the Fate caster.  You can easily play a Fate character who's a Mage: the Ascension escapee and who uses Fate as Quintessence and who actually does know about their own Fate points.  You can also have a Fate character who took the consequence "Magically Exhausted".  Either works.Out of curiosity, which?  Because I'm fairly sure all the ones from Evil Hat grant the veto to the GM (certainly all the ones I've read).  And it's Evil Hat's system.Fate is pretty Trad.  It's no further out there than Unisystem or even Marvel Superheroes.Once more you seem to be someone who takes 2E as the baseline for D&D.  And it simply isn't.If you look at old school design, each dungeon had a level.  And monsters were measured by level which equates to the level of the dungeon.  It was fairly clearly laid out and the dungeon level should roughly match the PC level.  The PCs could tell when they were entering the wrong dungeon level (admittedly they needed to hot-foot through the wilderness because that wandering monster table was nasty).  The world was approximately split up by level appropriateness in the same way MMOs often are.  Building encounters for the PCs to face happened both in dungeons (which were a skill test) and in the Dragonlance AP (a core driver of 2E) - with adventures such as Queen of the Demonweb Pits going so far as to specify which spells didn't work in advance.  It's only the 2E world-sim school (as I said, an outlier in the history of D&D) that does otherwise.And both 3.0 and 4E suggested that not all encounters should be beatable.  The reason it doesn't look this way is that there was an internet outcry against the Roper in the bottom of the Forge of Fury and WotC didn't want to annoy the fans.</blockquote>

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