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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5521578" data-attributes="member: 42582">As I hope my posts on this, but moreso on other, threads have made clear, I'm a huge fan of 4e's approach to setting - especially as elaborated in Worlds and Monsters (one of the better GM books for 4e, a lot of which, in my view, should have been included in the DMG).One thing that I like about it - certainly not the only thing, or even the primary thing - is that it's deliberately crafted to serve as an evocative backdrop for fantasy adventure, rather than an incipient source of game elements to be manipulated alongside the game mechanics. (Most NPCs not having stats is just one aspect of this. The magic item "economy" is another.)So for me it's not that it makes the handwaving easier because it's got rid of permanent spells (everburning torches are still on the equipment list, for example) but rather that it's been designed from the ground up to be used as this sort of backdrop. And the game mechanics on the whole support this, by not encouraging players to make that backdrop part of the (quasi-)mechanical techniques of play (no domain rules of the classic sort, no crafting skills to create an economics or trading minigame, no animal breeding rules that push things in a similar direction, etc etc).And just to avoid any unintended inferences being drawn - a world that is a backdrop is not a world that is unimportant or shallow, or merely colour. I take it the LotR is sufficient proof of this. It's rather that the game is about heroics which engage the gameworld as a source of theme and value and stakes for adventure - not as a matter for demography and sociology and economics and calculating the optimal tax rate to set in order to maximise production of heavy cavalry from my horse-breeding villages.Well I think handwaving of all sorts is required. Though in the case of everburning torches, it's the sort of handwaving where we just don't ask why they aren't on the corner of every city intersection. Whereas in the case of non-magic effects it's the sort of handwaving where reaching consenus at the table as to what happened in the fiction is part (if only one small part) of the fun of playing the game.</blockquote>

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