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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5764871" data-attributes="member: 82106">There are a bunch of ways that these things work. It is just that they are all part of the game world, not hard-coded mechanics I'm expected to follow, which I actually like much better. Land, and all the other possible social perks you can get in my world, are largely either intangible or non-fungible. You can get a house, but the world isn't a cash economy. It involves being able to get the rights to a house. You COULD do that with money, true, but you probably cannot sell that house. You have it because you established rights to it, got a deed from the local head honcho, convinced the community the house is in that it is a good idea for you to have it, etc. I'm also not too worried about money. It is VERY hard for PCs to have enough of it to even bend the game. With rarity in place maybe with a large pile of gold they can get some items that are almost as good as what they're likely to find tomorrow in some monster lair.The other thing is that organizations and social connections are IMPORTANT. When the secretly evil priest of the local town accuses the PCs of devil worship to pin his deeds on them and get them run out of town they better have the credentials to avoid a mob with pitchforks and torches. If they want to learn the secret technique of the Rangers of Otillis they'll have to join and do the deeds that make them worthy of being Knights who are allowed to learn that technique. On the flip side if they ARE Knights of Otillis then there's going to be some adventure where having 10 Rangers come in the backside of the orc lair and draw off most of the guards is the only way they're going to successfully pull off an assault. Buy in really requires world depth. IMHO it always did. A world that is a thin backdrop to a bunch of series of encounters isn't going to do that. This is one reason why I mostly just continue to use the setting that I invented way back when I was 15 years old. There's just a vast depth of that kind of thing. A character can become friends with some old PC from the 1980's, join organizations, discover lore piled on top of lore, and just generally be part of what is as close as anyone can get to a living world. I'm sure using really well-established commercial settings can do a lot of that too. You just have to chase down a lot of material from many sources with say FR that has been put out over the years. I'd use that kind of setting, but I just don't need to because I happen to have it already. Of course I have had groups that could care less about all that and just hack their way through combat-heavy adventures too. Even then you can do things to encourage all kinds of OOTB thinking. The fighter takes the choke point, but there's another way around. Can the players figure out a way to block it up? Maybe destroying a pillar will cause a collapse, or whatever. Make things TOUGH too, so it isn't a matter of 'winning easier', but a matter of you need some edge to survive, or need to be clever to accomplish some valuable goal. Complex and interesting situations breed more crazy solutions to problems.Once I had a guy standing on a platform resting on a giant ball of rock and he could roll it around squishing characters and pushing them around. So the rogue whipped out a grappling hook, snagged him and pulled him off it. That's a small example, but what I find is that fairly plain cut-and-dried situations usually get straightforward solutions. It makes sense, the PCs standard abilities are well suited to generic situations. They aren't well suited to a lot of the "real world" where odd problems and strange situations come up often.</blockquote>

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