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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8227166" data-attributes="member: 42582">We agree in part and disagree in part. I agree that it's at the rarer end of things. But I think that's because terrain being about player exercise of power via the PC rather than about a challenge for the player to solve via the PC is relatively rare. But one could imagine an extension/development of Gygaxian play where the exercise of that sort of power would make sense at low level - for instance, if the starting idea for the campaign (or a campaign fragment) is the Orcish attack upon the PCs' village, then it would do no harm to the integrity of the campaign to let the players design the village, subject to some obvious GM stipulations like no 12th level MUs, no in-place anti-tank defences, etc.To go off on a bit of a rant: I think we can see a recurrent phenomenon in RPGing, where approaches and techniques that had a rationale become fetishised and locked-in even when that rationale is no longer being served. I think a certain sort of approach to GM control over "worldbuilding" is an example of that, where there is a bit of world that shouldn't and isn't going to serve as a challenge to the players, and yet the GM insists on hidden-map-and-key unilateral authorship of that bit of the world.I'm not a Gygax-can-do-know-wrong fan, but I think he clearly had a good sense for game play and while he may have contributed to some of the dogmatism that we see today I don't think of him as having been a victim of it himself.I don't have a "Gygax number", but when I read the PHB and DMG I don't see any discussion of the fiction or the story. Whereas I do see discussions of sensible techniques for hidden-map-and-key play, and valiant if (in my view) somewhat unsuccessful attempts to extend the idea to non-dungeon contexts like cities and other planes.Pages 111 and 118, on integration of experienced or new players into an existing campaign and non-standard magic items. The advice is to be careful about magic items on existing high-level characters coming in from other campaigns, and doubly so in relation to non-standard ones in respect of which the default approach should be to forbid them. There is no discussion of integration of non-standard spells that such characters might bring with them, but I think the same reasoning should apply.Again, we can see that the concern is not with creative integrity but rather the integrity of the milieu as a context for play, and in particular appropriately challenging play.</blockquote>

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