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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9560995" data-attributes="member: 6801228">And IME wealth is the absolute last motivator for most of my players. Even when they make wealth motivated characters, they make them with the intention that that is a character flaw they need to overcome.Those Corollary motivators are the PRIMARY motivators for most of my games. Even the Fame and Glory motivation is something I've seen, never for a long-term political gain, but for "I want to be known world-wide, like Heracles or [insert other character]"That is not the design of the game. You trying to make it the design of the game does not change how the game was designed. And the abstraction of HP is key to my point.Except my entire point is that IS NOT what the character would do. John Wick doesn't go into the nightclub full of mobsters with nervous trepidation because he honestly believes he is going to die. Neither does James Bond. Neither would Conan entering a den of thieves. These people are not actually scared for their lives, they do not actually believe they are going to be killed in the coming fight. And mid to high level PCs are the SAME WAY. And while you may WANT a flatter power curve, you cannot look at the current design of the game and honestly think that a single kobold is a serious threat of death to a full hp PC past level 2. It just isn't. A dozen of them might be a threat, but that is the weight of numbers. And that makes sense, because it isn't the individual strength that matters at that point.Your job to tell them about it? No. Your job to foreshadow it? Yes. Especially, again, if the point of telling them about something is to tell them not to go there yet, you need to accurately foreshadow the threat. And this isn't a matter of describing it better. You can't know if the shortage of wool in the western kingdom changed the merchant routes which pushed a merchant eastward, where he saw a herd of owlbears fleeing the forest to the south, which was only possible because the normal fog that rolls in from the lake didn't roll in that morning, because... you can't do that. Just as an IRL example, thing that happens ALL the time. I recently joined a forum site, where I learned about a book series from the 70's. Then, I was watching a new youtuber who was in no way connected to that forum or the subject matter of that forum... who referenced the exact same book series. And again, this happens constantly. Because the world is massively complex and intersecting. And you can't actually model that in the game. So, it is always preferable to create coincidence on purpose so that people can learn information, instead of deciding that there is no way they could know about something.Not stay far away from the fighting where a catapult couldn't accidentally crush them?See, but calling that stupid (less than stellar wisdom) just makes my point. Those stories were not told because the characters proceeded with an abundance of caution, measuring every step they take against a potential horrible end. And that's why we like those stories. That's why we want to recreate them.And that was what made the adventure story. That's what made it popular and allowed Tolkien's works to proliferate. Removing that factor entirely defeats the entire thing that caused Tolkien's works to inspire DnD.</blockquote>

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