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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shilsen" data-source="post: 4003647" data-attributes="member: 198">I think some may have understood it just fine and just disagreed. As noted above, I think a lot of people got that. And some people choose to not have their settings work that way. Since there is not one single monolithic kind of fantasy, nor one particular kind that D&D is usable with, that's just one way of doing it. It's just as easy to make the major arc of division between good and evil age, gender, education, religion, or simply individual personality.They can be. And similarly, some species can simultaneously represent overall traits of progress and forces of destruction.If the DM so chooses for that setting.If he said "can be" instead of "is" and "could" instead of "should", then he'd be more universally correct than he is in the quotation. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Only for his game and some other people's. There is nothing which makes the philosophy espoused in the quotation any better than most others, especially from a gaming viewpoint.That's highly simplistic and reductionist, IMNSHO. A game can be fantastic and about heroism while also being about existential ennui, self-doubt and lust for super-powers. A game can certainly be about fantasy and heroism in a world where humans and their allies do not play the roles the quotation suggested. And, of course, since there are a myriad different functional definitions of fantasy and heroism, the game can be a whole lot of other things. I've run games where the setting fit Gygax's quotation. I'm running a game right now which diverges drastically from it.The various segments of the quotation are also not necessarily or inextricably interlinked. I'm running an Eberron game right now which is certainly heavily fantastic, and where the PCs are certainly heroic in the sense of putting themselves at great risk to protect the populace and the world around them. But this occurs in a world where humans and their allies are arguably as great a cause of the world's ills and a source for evil as other 'monstrous' creatures. The setting just came out of a huge century-long continental war which was mostly about human nations fighting each other, and caused more devastation than any monstrous force has in millennia. The PCs have got a very detailed look at exactly what evil lurks in the hearts of men. And now they're about to try to save the world from a gigantic invasion by insane forces from beyond (basically, Cthulhu is coming to Eberron), which will require the forces of humanity to work together to fight. So, in the same campaign, there's the conception of humans as creatures which are nowhere near predominantly good, but there's also the conception of these not-so-good creatures having to fight evil of a kind they have never dreamt of. It's not an either/or proposition, as the quotation (and your post) seems to imply.There are more things in D&D, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.</blockquote>

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