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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5961595" data-attributes="member: 42582">By "heroic fanatsy" I mean fantasy fiction in which the protagonists are motivated not by mercenary reasons - the desire to kill and loot - but by values - the righting of (perceived) wrongs, honour, justice etc. In the context of D&D, this would be PCs who fight goblins not to rob them, but to proect the world from them.Here's one example of the conflict between heroic fantasy play and classic D&D play: players who are playing heroic PCs will not ignore wandering monsters, because (presumably) wandering monsters are as dangerous and wicked as placed monsters. This means that, in a heroic fantasy game, wandering monsters will not play the mechanical role they were intended by the game designers to play (as indicated by Gygax in his PHB - he instructs would-be skilled players to avoid wandering monsters because they carry little loot).The Hobbit is not about amoral treasure hunters, and I'm a little surprised anyone would read it that way. The dwarves' claim to the treasure is based on ancestral heritage, not "finders keepers", and the book ends up as a morality tale, in which the lust for treasure leads to wrongdoing and suffering.Read the Grail quest as a story about loot is a little odd also. It's a story about redemption.REH's "The Tower of the Elephant" is a tale about a protagonist motivated by loot, but even it ends up being a type of morality tale. Classic D&D can't easily produce even this story, because in the end Conan misses out on the treasure - as a D&D character, he would earn no XP for it.I've recently re-read Moldvay Basic. There is quite a bit of detail on how to design and stock a dungeon, handle wandering monsters, etc. There is nothing about how you might set up and run a game based on the struggle against a dragon tyrant (or any other sort of tyrant), in which treasure is acquired not by looting it but by being gifted it by mysterious forces (hermits, Elrond, whatever), and the like. Henchmen are covered in the DMG2 (companion rules) and Mordenkainen's Magnificant Emporium. There are no rules for it in the PHB.Rulership and leadership is covered via the Paragon Path and Epic Destiny Rules. You become a leader of armies by taking the Knight Commander paragon path (PHB). You becme a ruler by taking the Eternal Sovereign Epic Destiny (MP2?).Page 37 of the 4e PHB tells me this about dwarves:More so than most other races, dwarves seek guidance and protection from the gods. They look to the divine for strength, hope, and inspiration, or they seek to propitiate cruel or destructive gods. Individual dwarves might be impious or openly heretical, but temples and shrines of some sort are found in almost every dwarven community. Dwarves revere Moradin as their creator, but individual dwarves honor those deities who hold sway over their vocations; warriors pray to Bahamut or Kord, architects to Erathis, and merchants to Avandra—or even to Tiamat, if a dwarf is consumed by the dwarven taste for wealth. Dwarves never forget their enemies, either individuals who have wronged them or entire races of monsters who have done ill to their kind. Dwarves harbor a fierce hatred for orcs, which often inhabit the same mountainous areas that dwarves favor and which wreak periodic devastation on dwarf communities. Dwarves also despise giants and titans, because the dwarf race once labored as the giants’ slaves. They feel a mixture of pity and disgust toward those corrupted dwarves who still have not freed themselves from the giants’ yoke—azers and galeb duhrs among them.Moldvay Basic doesn't give me this sort of information about what it means, in the fiction, to be a dwarf. It tells me that dwarves are stubborn, practical and love hearty meals and strong drink. This is a bit of colour, but it does not locate dwarves in any sort of mythic or heroic conflict.I don't know how many are, but clearly some are. It's the whole premise of Dragonlance, for example.</blockquote>

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