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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8827337" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I'm not particularly interested in PCs being particularly exceptional actors in the world. Or, if they are, then I generally want them to belong to a class of exceptional people that is larger than my 4 players, and I need to figure out what impact that has on the broader setting. What is exceptional about them, how do other people using PC progression affect the world, and so on. If they're quite rare, then adventurers are probably a national resource and a lot of effort is going to be put into cultivating them.Wizards, for example, are conceptually constrained if it's not a broadly available skillset. You can't really do magical academies, but you could focus on a more archaeological tradition of digging up ancient scrolls, or perhaps a lone scientist doing practical experiments to learn new spells. That kind of exploration about what any given mechanic means to the broader setting is you know, half of what I'm here for.What we're really arguing about is the direction of the arrow in the fiction&lt;-&gt;mechanics relationship. I'd prefer a game that derives its fiction from its mechanics entirely, and feels the need to make a mechanical change if the fiction isn't as expected because of them. I point towards early Eberron material for this a lot, particularly the discussion about the impact of magecraft, a spell that provided a bonus to skill checks, and served as the basis for the industrial revolution in the setting by speeding up crafting times significantly under the 3.5 crafting rules.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 8827337, member: 6690965"] I'm not particularly interested in PCs being particularly exceptional actors in the world. Or, if they are, then I generally want them to belong to a class of exceptional people that is larger than my 4 players, and I need to figure out what impact that has on the broader setting. What is exceptional about them, how do other people using PC progression affect the world, and so on. If they're quite rare, then adventurers are probably a national resource and a lot of effort is going to be put into cultivating them. Wizards, for example, are conceptually constrained if it's not a broadly available skillset. You can't really do magical academies, but you could focus on a more archaeological tradition of digging up ancient scrolls, or perhaps a lone scientist doing practical experiments to learn new spells. That kind of exploration about what any given mechanic means to the broader setting is you know, half of what I'm here for. What we're really arguing about is the direction of the arrow in the fiction<->mechanics relationship. I'd prefer a game that derives its fiction from its mechanics entirely, and feels the need to make a mechanical change if the fiction isn't as expected because of them. I point towards early Eberron material for this a lot, particularly the discussion about the impact of [I]magecraft[/I], a spell that provided a bonus to skill checks, and served as the basis for the industrial revolution in the setting by speeding up crafting times significantly under the 3.5 crafting rules. [/QUOTE]

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