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<blockquote data-quote="ruleslawyer" data-source="post: 2934919" data-attributes="member: 1757">Sorry to digress here, but:The (human!) old sagely hermit, the rogue, the damsel in distress, and the farmboy aren't &quot;ordinary&quot; in the context of a space fantasy universe populated with talking robots, weird tentacled monsters, and anthropomorphic hammerhead sharks?That's only half the truth. It's pretty standard in fantasy to make the protagonists identifiable with the reader; hence the reason why the central character of the Lord of the Rings is basically a short middle-class Englishman, the central character of Star Wars is a drag-racing farmboy, and the central characters of umpteen fantasy stories are people pulled from our mundane earth into alternate universes or distant times. Even Conan, dark and savage as he is, is a lot closer to us normal folk than the alien amorphous gods, weird monsters, and immortal sorcerers that he battles.Treebeard is about the most clearly labeled &quot;NPC/monster!&quot; character in LotR who isn't a servant of Sauron. King Kong also isn't really a PC, and isn't really in the realm of &quot;too much fantasy&quot; anyway; everything other than the giant ape is actually rather mundane or belongs in the same universe as Kong (one fundamentally alien to Ann Darrow and her compatriots). Willow is like Frodo; just because he has pointy ears doesn't mean he's less identifiable to the audience than Madmartigan or Sorsha; in fact, I have a lot more in common with a guy with a pretty normal day job and family than with a semi-criminal sword-wielding mercenary, even if the guy's short.That said, complaining that D&amp;D is &quot;too fantastic&quot; really stretches the point, IMHO. It's extraordinarily easy to leave out the stuff you don't like (monstrous PCs, weird templates, funky adventure locations) and have a standard Tolkienesque fantasy game with lots of humans, a few elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, and semi-unique monsters, and nothing else. The only elements of the fantastic that the game &quot;enforces&quot; (and even that characterization I'd take issue with) are class balance and, to a certain extent, magic item availability. Both of these can be tinkered with by altering the bonus structure (by, say, giving all characters nonmagical bonuses equal to those from Vow of Poverty or giving them Midnight heroic paths) or using Iron Heroes classes instead.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="ruleslawyer, post: 2934919, member: 1757"] Sorry to digress here, but: The (human!) old sagely hermit, the rogue, the damsel in distress, and the farmboy aren't "ordinary" in the context of a space fantasy universe populated with talking robots, weird tentacled monsters, and anthropomorphic hammerhead sharks? That's only half the truth. It's pretty standard in fantasy to make the protagonists identifiable with the reader; hence the reason why the central character of the Lord of the Rings is basically a short middle-class Englishman, the central character of Star Wars is a drag-racing farmboy, and the central characters of umpteen fantasy stories are people pulled from our mundane earth into alternate universes or distant times. Even Conan, dark and savage as he is, is a lot closer to us normal folk than the alien amorphous gods, weird monsters, and immortal sorcerers that he battles. Treebeard is about the most clearly labeled "NPC/monster!" character in LotR who isn't a servant of Sauron. King Kong also isn't really a PC, and isn't really in the realm of "too much fantasy" anyway; everything other than the giant ape is actually rather mundane or belongs in the same universe as Kong (one fundamentally alien to Ann Darrow and her compatriots). Willow is like Frodo; just because he has pointy ears doesn't mean he's less identifiable to the audience than Madmartigan or Sorsha; in fact, I have a lot more in common with a guy with a pretty normal day job and family than with a semi-criminal sword-wielding mercenary, even if the guy's short. That said, complaining that D&D is "too fantastic" really stretches the point, IMHO. It's extraordinarily easy to leave out the stuff you don't like (monstrous PCs, weird templates, funky adventure locations) and have a standard Tolkienesque fantasy game with lots of humans, a few elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, and semi-unique monsters, and nothing else. The only elements of the fantastic that the game "enforces" (and even that characterization I'd take issue with) are class balance and, to a certain extent, magic item availability. Both of these can be tinkered with by altering the bonus structure (by, say, giving all characters nonmagical bonuses equal to those from Vow of Poverty or giving them Midnight heroic paths) or using Iron Heroes classes instead. [/QUOTE]

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