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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4040777" data-attributes="member: 2067">My answer is in a league with Kahuna Burger's. The believability of a world hinges on consistency, and if things outside the direct actions of the PC's are inconsistent with the direct actions of the PC's, it does all those things, for me, that Celebrim summarized above.I have much less of a problem with the world not working like the Real World. I can accept that some few elite and blessed people (e.g.: those with high levels) just aren't going to die from simply falling out of their saddle, even though, in the real-world, such a thing is impossible. It is more believable for me to embrace a world that is heroic at all times in the game, rather than to embrace a world that is run first by the rules of narrative convenience, because narrative convenience in the context of the game is highly unsatisfying for me for reasons I've definately gone over. D&D, for me, is not a storytelling game, any more than Scrabble is. It's not a simulation game any more than Monopoly is. I don't need it to simulate a realistic world, or to simulate narrative. I need it to evoke a genre, that is, heroic adventure, in the context of a game, that is, with rules. Part of the way it does that is by making high-level characters near-godlike in their actual power, not just, IMO, by giving them more storytelling or world-emulating powers. Hit points don't go away when the camera is off any more than the ability to cast fireball goes away when the camera is off. I don't see hit points as literal physics, either (no D&D scientist could discover a thing called a Hit Point, though they certainly could note that more experienced warriors are capable of enduring pain that would end the lives of others). For me, that's part of embracing a fantasy world. Goblins and dragons and people who can bend physics to their will and clerics who can raise the dead and warriors who can survive things that would kill a lesser mortal. None of these things are narrative devices, they are all permenant features of the world. The D&D rules certainly support this interpretation what with 20th level commoners and NPCs gaining XP and all. If the stipulation falls outside of what the mechanics describe, it breaks consistency, which breaks believability, and leads me to loose trust in the DM, which results in a poor game for me.</blockquote>

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