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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Galloglaich" data-source="post: 5333025" data-attributes="member: 77019">Well, I think maybe that is part of the problem with how 'tight' DnD has gotten in it's last two or three incarnations in the pursuit of 'balance'.  I'm by no means trying to start any edition war nonsense here, but somewhere along the line the game changed to start to build-in expectations of a certain type of play, and that is a bit of a problem for me.  I think DnD is the 'gateway drug' of RPGs and should be fairly generic or at least grounded in the literary fantasy genre.I don't think 1E DnD was hard wired for high - level / high - magic play (i.e. mandatory Resurrection).  We didn't always play high-magic type games when I was into DnD in high school and in the Army.  Sometimes we did, sometimes we went off into low fantasy or historical or Lovecraft or mythological based games.  To me AD&D was flexible enough (maybe due to being pretty broken) to accommodate all of those styles of play.  Maybe that changed somewhere along the line, I don't know exactly when, but as a gamer and an industry writer I can say it certainly got harder to move out of the main current of the game at all in more recent years.  Not impossible, but harder.  And at the same time, that current got narrower; more complex and less realistic and more inflated in terms of Magic and player power / expectations. Someone upthread (scribble?) was using a term 'FUNdane', I think that is basically the same idea I'm describing of 'bending rather than breaking reality'.  One always needs to make a few adjustments to 'reality' in a Fantasy or Sci Fi genre, whether for an RPG game or a Computer game or a movie or a TV show; and when you are doing it consciously and for a purpose I think it works.  But the problem for some of us comes when it starts to generically drift, unconsciously if you will.   When you are getting a whole lot of 'FUNdane' all over the place which isn't well thought out or even planned at all, or even necessarily Fun, the whole ground under your feet starts to shift into "Mansquito" territory and the only way to know what is going on is to be already deeply embedded into the cliches and worn out tropes of the genre.   Which even some of us who know them are burnt out on.  I think a lot of the yearning for balance or even people complaining about realism is a matter of players not trusting their DM's, which is an entirely different issue... A good DM is really a prerequisite for a good RPG!  I don't think you can fix the rules of a ROLE PLAYING game to handle a bad DM.   I really don't think you should try to either, it will become an adversarial game by degrees, and a board game in the long run.Some people may like this trend, which is fine.  But in response to the OP, some people like a grounding in something from the real world, whether that is History, Martial arts, Mythology, or a well established Literary genre.  The underlying core assumptions of a Fantasy RPG are going to be based on some elements of all of the above.  Given that they are, and we know we are going to be living with them in any game regardless of the level of abstraction, the argument seems to be whether this grounding should be done carefully and with some effort, or haphazardly.So are we basing our game in the Odyssey and Gilgamesh and the Norse Sagas and Talhoffer and Musashi and the Brothers Grimm and Tolkein and Jack Vance, or are we basing it on some TV shows, a bunch of old RPGs, anime and fan fiction and computer games that nobody even remembers any more?  I guess that is the choice.I personally would at least like to have the option of the former rather than being forced into the latter.  I think that is what a lot of people, at least those who aren't struggling with a bad DM, mean when they say they want some 'realism' in their game.G.</blockquote>

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