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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4162136" data-attributes="member: 47776">Well, given that the general status of D&D worlds sans adventurers taking specific action tends to be exactly "A great threat gathers, the existing forces of civilization are unable to beat it back, darkness conquers all, and evil rules the land.", I'd say that it's not so much poor design as default expectations.  In fact, many D&D worlds explicitly answer the question "Why hasn't Evil X destroyed the world?" with "It has in the past.  If you want to avoid the next generation of adventurers picking over the ruins of your cities and looting your dead for items, you'll stop it."Basically, as pointed out previously, a world in which there aren't immediate, dire, and (most importantly) currently-uncombated threats to innocent life and limb is both a non-stable world, and the default expectation of a D&D world.Besides, even if the expectation is that there are enough true-blue heroes to keep the darkest evil from destroying everything, the difference between survival and prosperity can be entirely based on how the local power structure treats adventurers.  Adventurers both perform valuable services and tend to result in a massive influx of wealth and coinage; logic suggests that a population center that explicitly errs on the side of making adventurers welcome and comfortable may well suffer problems from the morally-grey (and morally-black-but mostly-kills-evil-people) adventuring population, but the rapid response time in between orcs setting up a fort and raiding the roads and said fort being reduced to ash burnt too thoroughly to smolder, and according minimization of loss, will well balance it out.  Indeed, in a situation in which the marginal matters (such as when snubbing a single easily-offended adventurer can shift the economic balance of a region as he and his druid buddy decide to increase the food production of antagonistic states by 133%), "Yeah, he's an evil murderous bastard, but we're better off with him killing mostly them than they and him both killing us."To continue the metaphor, a nation with a high adventurer population is like a nation surrounded by other nations with distinctly non-Euclidian borders.  If a nation provokes you, you may well respond diplomatically, or militarily, if you are powerful enough.  However, this response costs you; responding to every border incident will bleed you dry.  It doesn't matter if the court wizard is level 15 and the adventurers making trouble are only level 10; yes, the court wizard will catch and trounce them, but not before horrible damage has been wrought.  And once adventurers get it into their heads that the only way to survive making trouble in your kingdom is to ensure that you and your political structure don't, you'll see a lot of minor incidents blow up horribly.  Unless your power differential is truly titanic (say, between that of the U.S. government and your average criminal gang), responding to every threat and provocation gets you...Well, to bring it back to the original example, it eventually gets you into a fight you can't win.  For all cases not N (where N = Pun-Pun), there is always a bigger fish: this applies to both states and individuals, and can be either.</blockquote>

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