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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7893022" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm trying to make sense of what you're saying. And up until your most recent posts that was the best sense that I could make.But very little D&D play is going to stay at 1st level, and as the rules are presented an important aim of play on the player side is to go beyond 1st level. So the player knows that his/her PC is getting better, and generally in the fiction the PC is getting better.Even in default 4e - that is, 4e that uses the Monster Manual as written and the tiers of play as described in the PHB and DMG - a character isn't plausibly the best swordsman in the land until upper heroic. (Because at that point anything better than them is a paragon or epic tier challenge and therefore not, in any ordinary sense, "of the land".) But 5e is more "earthbound" and less fantastic in those ways than 4e which I think makes this harder.In 4e it's fairly easy to change the fiction away from those defaults - Neverwinter Campaign Setting does it one way (crunching paragon fiction into the mechanics of upper heroic tier) and Dark Sun a different way (extending paragon fiction into the mechanics of the epic tier). But 5e is less flexible in this respect also (and not accidentally so - it's a deliberate design decision to depart from the so-called "dissociated mechanics" of 4e).For "random town guard" substitute "kobold soldier number X" or "orc warrior number Y" or whatever it is. D&D - in its published rules, and published scenarios, very much pushes towards multiple combats with multiple nameless foes.But unless the GM (or player?) is manipulating those dice rolls then this can't be planned for, and can't really be built around. Because it's luck.If the narrative depends in part on rolling repeated 16+ against others' repeated 5-, I don't see how that is going to work (assuming the game sticks to D&D's resolution mechanics).I really think that you are not explaining how your vision of D&D play fits with such basic features of the system as characters gaining in level, multiple PCs who have different strengths reflected in different mechanical features of their builds, default lists of antagonists which consist primarily of mechanical specifications of said antagonists, etc.Even in 4e your vision would be hard to pull off. I don't see how it works at all in 5e. Especially when spells are factored in, which is something I've raised several times now <s>but you've still not responded to</s>.EDIT: Apologies, I saw this:I'm also finding this hard to follow. Most of it seems to be about NPCs, which is fine as far as it goes (what you say about doing NPCs primarily through GM narrative fiat is fine for (say) 4e D&D or Apocalypse World, but not for (say) Runequest or Burning Wheel). But I thought we were talking about PCs.If, in the fiction, everyone knows that great wizards can walk the planes, then how can a 1st level PC possibly present him-/herself as a great wizard? Your fighter example trades in part on the fact that combat is resolved by dice rolls (to hit, damage) and related mechanics (hp tallies) that don't correlate to anything particular in the fiction. But magic isn't resolved the same way (eg via Arcana checks).Again the version of D&D to get closest to what you're advocating here is 4e but even it didn't go all this way.</blockquote>

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