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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9560560" data-attributes="member: 6801228">But what you are defining as "common-sense approach to self-preservation" is ignoring a significant number of factors. 1) Any PC, at all, would be able to live a wealthy middle-class lifestyle from level 1 and never go on a single adventure ever. Any fighter or Barbarian could be a guard or hunter, clerics can become powerful doctors, wizards and bards can sell their services. You won't be as wealthy as a king upon a golden throne built in an adamatine palace, but you can live as the middle class in any town or city you care to settle in. THEREFORE, if I truly wanted to take a "common-sense approach to self-preservation".... I'd never go on a single adventure. The entire basis of the game is built upon the foundation that, for whatever reason (and even by 3.X it really couldn't be wealth) you CHOSE to go and do incredibly dangerous things out in the world. 2) The game is not a physics engine. And this matters from the player perspective. You can think this is a problem, but any player with 30 hp can have utter confidence that being stabbed with a dagger is not going to kill them. In real life, in most fictional media, if a character was walking down the street and a thug pulled a knife on them, there is a chance that a single lucky stab could kill them. That is just not true in DnD, and it cannot be true in DnD, because otherwise combat would not function the way it is designed to function. And these two factors affect risk assessment. Sure, IRL I would need to approach any potential situation with a great deal of caution, because if I trip and fall the wrong way, I could die. But in a DnD context, at a certain point, a kobold with a rusty spear is not a threat, and treating it like a serious threat would not only be bizarre, but would break the genre conventions. But also, to the bolded... YES, you should have to proactively foreshadow most everything. You are literally the only connection point with the entire world, and you cannot reasonably account for everything that may or may not happen. You cannot model the world with 100% fidelity, and so you need to foreshadow so that the appropriate expectations and understanding exists between you and the players.Really? SO Merry and Pippin leading the Ents towards Isengard was them acting with a high sense of self-preservation? Actually, HOW many times did Merry and/or Pippin end up fighting with an army? I'm counting two each at least and I'm barely a tolkien fan. But let's roll back. What about Bilbo and the dwarves? Did Bilbo act with an abundance of self-preservation when he left his home to join the dwarves on a completely UNNECESSARY journey? And did they fully scout out every single location, speak to the locals about the threats they may face, go to town to buy additional supplies for the journey.... or did they largely just keep walking and keep an eye out for trouble?</blockquote>

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