Yeah, I know. I was just lamenting the passing of an era when EN World wasn't like that.
I've been posting on EnWorld for more than 10 years now, and I could probably count on one hand the number of times I posted a thread asking for help or information and actually got a useful response. And really, few even get a response at all. I try to answer every 'Help!' question by a noob that comes along in some fashion, but I know of no era at EnWorld where there were actually a large number of helpful posters - and the one poster who I could reliably count on for at least advice and sympathy, and one of the few other posters I noted trying to help everyone, and probably the best content provider EnWorld ever had was driven away. So, the closest I can get to understanding your complaint is the post Raven era.
Well, I would. That's why I asked.
You are in much the same boat as me then, except I'd usually phrase this as more, "Can you think of interesting ways for a PC to screw up innocently that would have world altering consequences?" And, had I, I'd probably only gotten you as a respondent.
I take your point. They're not the kind to be worshipped, but small gods--yeah.
No, my point is precisely that they would be worshipped. Coming from a 21st century Anglosphere perspective, most people's understanding of religion is unconsciously Protestant Christianity, and so the phrase 'god' invokes in the mind unreflectedly the attributes of the God of Abraham with the vast gap between mortal and immortal that implies. Virtually everything about that understanding is wrong for the typical D&D campaign world, starting with such unconsidered assumptions that 'faith' has anything to do with normal religious experience or is central to the acts of the clergy. Equally bad, and particular to this case, is the assumption that pretty much everyone only worships a single god whose attributes and beliefs are most closely aligned with their own, and that it is wrong to worship gods whose attributes aren't aligned with your own, and that only the 'gods' are worthy of worship. This is nothing like ancient polytheism. Your average polytheist worshiped pretty much all the gods to propitiate them, quite apart from whether he 'loved the gods'. Likewise, your average polytheist might happily be simultaneously offering worship to high gods like the Olympians, low gods like that old Oak tree on the edge of his property (a hamadryad, also a god), the stream that passed by his farm (surely a god, every nymph is a deity), his personal household deity (essentially a fairy or similar spirit in modern terms, perhaps a brownie in D&D terms), his own ancestors, and his king and would not differentiate between them as acts of worship. This idea that the gods are jealous and demand you don't worship things except themselves, is pretty much again, straight out of the assumptions of Judeo-Christianity.
Actually, I'm glad you pointed that out, because I do try to evoke a folk/fairy tale feel for my campaigns. Maintaining the verisimilitude of such a game requires a different set of expectations.
I admire the fairy tale feel. It's the verisimilitude I'm questioning because you have unreflected on D&Dism ('It's a monster, kill and loot it!') mixed in with your fairy tale. I'm also skeptical under the circumstances of describing the actions as 'dumb'.
Some mightier and many nastier, but much of the conflict has been in thwarting schemes, rather than conquering opponents.
I'm gathering at the time that wasn't clear to the players.
The only people likely to know what the goings on were and what they meant would be true neutral elven druids (and not especially high level, generally), who were more likely to take a long a long view and let nature sort itself out (which it was doing). Somewhere along the way, the popular view of druids seems to have become one of protecting nature, but they seemed better suited (being uniformly neutral) to be impartial caretakers. So it was with this setting.
I'm good with all of that and agree with the assessment of impartiality, but I just don't see how in this case you can call them 'caretakers'. I still think the Druids should have been their observing and offering up worship to the nature spirits. If they choose not to intervene in the PC's blunder, citing their impartiality, that would be one thing. In this case though, they can't claim impartiality, only that they were uninvolved. And in any event, if you didn't feel that was appropriate to the setting, it still wouldn't have made the player's actions 'dumb'. You could only make that assessment if the Druid was there, and despite his best effort to warn the PC's, they decided to start killing things anyway.
Truthfully, I don't understand why so many veteran DMs want to protect new DMs from making mistakes. We all became veteran DMs by making mistakes and learning from them.
For my part, it's because first, while experience is a good teacher, sometimes having someone more experienced lead you through it is an even better teacher. And secondly, because my observation of the EnWorld boards is that many young DMs are seldom aware that they've made a mistake or a potential mistake. Often I see posts on the boards by young DMs complaining of table problems that have arisen or difficulties that they find themselves in, and they don't see how they got where they got to. My purpose in this thread was less to correct you, than it was to reinforce the warning to younger readers who might come upon this thread and think, "Cool!" (which it is), "I'm going to do something like that!", without realizing how IMO you only avoided disaster by a bit of luck and the grace of some rather understanding players. That, and to back Janx up after you called his claim that this sort of thing represents a potential mistake, "Nonsense." There is IMO nothing nonsensical at all about that claim. Young GMs in my opinion are far too quick to declare that the player's uninformed decision making was 'dumb' and that whatever random screw that occurred afterwards they deserved, without spending time considering how as the only window that the players have on to the world, the burden of ensuring that the players are making reasonably informed decisions falls on the GM.
Your story struck me as equivalent to, "The PC's came to an unmarked intersection. They could go left or right. The players choose left, and so the whole world paid for it. Boy aren't they dumb. Do you have in similar stories of player stupidity to share?"
One simple proof of this would be the following story:
"In one game, the PCs came across some twig-like people, about a foot tall, dancing in a circle around a snow-golem.
Figuring (correctly) that the creatures were animating the golem, they stupidly decided to wait and see what would happen. Then of course three rounds later the giant snow golem animated and nearly killed them, forcing them to flee.
Turns out later that the twig-people had been performing a ceremony to stop change of season from winter to spring. So spring didn't happen and the weather cycle got ALL screwed up.
Fixing THAT particular problem was quite a quest in and of itself."
