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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sacrosanct" data-source="post: 6372995" data-attributes="member: 15700">I never said the game has to model reality exactly.  I said running the game world like a living world is more realistic than changing everything to cater to the players.  There's a HUGE middle ground between running a fantasy game realistic, and modeling reality exactly.I find your reasoning here extremely weak as well.  By your logic, since the world has goblins, elves, and fireballs, anything should go right?  The players shouldn't expect gravity to be present.  Nor should they ever expect to eat and be hungry?  Need sleep?  And who needs clouds in order to rain.  Don't expect breathable air either.  No?  That means you yourself are enforcing some sort of realism.  We all use realism in our games as a assumed baseline.  Why should something as fundamental as basic world ecology suddenly be thrown out the window because "fireballs"?Catering to the players gives them an entitled feeling.  It sets the expectation that I mentioned above--that they will always be at full resources before a tough battle, and that they don't ever have to worry about risk assessment when exploring.You also never answered by question.  Why do you even play the game at all?  Why not just do combat encounter after encounter and skip the entire exploration part? Or if you're going to wave your DM hand and all monsters that aren't a challenge any more suddenly cease to exist?  If you mold your entire campaign world around what happens to be a tough encounter for whatever level the PCs happen to be at the time, and allow them to reset every time, why not just play "Arena D&D" instead?The DM was originally called the "referee" for a reason.  You create and/or control the game world, this is true.  But the players should have the freedom to explore that game world how they see fit.  Yes, sometimes that means a level 1 party might stumble upon a clan of ogres in the mountains because they decided to go up there anyway and not the way of the official plot path.  The ogres were always there.  They don't suddenly disappear because the PCs aren't high enough level.  Just like the caves of goblins don't suddenly disappear because the PCs are high level.  What you're doing by catering to the PCs is taking away their choice, in effect.  A choice to make risk assessments.  A choice to experience encounters that aren't all the same, "Well, here we go again.  We know we'll win, and use X amount of resources doing so.  Let's get it over with."  You're creating a situation where players assume all encounters will fit a certain mold, and they won't experience the feeling of never knowing if that group of X shouldn't be tangled with, or are just doing their normal daily routine and you stumbled upon them, creating a potential for additional game plots to be revealed.If I knew that I'd be at full resources before every tough battle?  That would be incredibly boring to me.  Some of the most memorable battles in my 30+ years of gaming were when you were down to almost nothing and still managed to emerge victorious, either by direct battle or coming up with a creative way to come out alive (desperation breeds creativity).A DM running the game world as it would actually run logically, regardless of the level of PCs, is not metagaming.  Changing the game world to suit the PCs is.  See my referee comment above.</blockquote>

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