KarinsDad said:
You keep using words like clever for this.
It is not especially clever at all. There have been a lot of points of light campaigns and for simplicity purposes, ones where the good races get along.
Points of Light is a very old RPG concept. Many of the original mid 70s to early 80s campaign settings were PoL. Sure, 4E appears to be putting a heavy "all races kumbuya" spin on it, but that is not really very clever. It is a metagaming concept that flies in the face of plausibility.
For me, at least, it doesn't fly in the face of plausibility - I think there is just enough background sketched to sustain verisimilitude. Furthermore, that background explains the presence of adventuring locations of the classic D&D sort.
Without knowing which 70s to 80s campaigns you have in mind I can't comment on them. But I'm not familiar with any other published D&D gameworld (and I'm including earlier worlds like Greyhawk, Lankhamar and the Known World here) which simultaneously:
(i) explained why D&D-style adventuring sites exist;
(ii) offered a rationale for the existence of adventuring parties that are very diverse in background yet loyal among themselves and motivated primarily to adventure as a group;
(iii) allowed those adventurers to be plausibly characterised as heroes rather than mercenaries or murderers (either of which would do for Conan);
(iv) did not push play in the direction of social/political play.
Because of that I'm calling PoL clever. Maybe I'm just ignorant.
As I said earlier, of course its metagamed. That's the point of designing a gameworld - you design it to support a certain sort of play. I'm not saying (for example) that it's better than Glorantha. But it is better than Glorantha for playing D&D in. Glorantha is designed for a very different sort of play, and in particular to explore the tension between religion and humanity - as a result, Gloranthan play does not so much push in the direction of, but virtually mandates, social/political play.
KarinsDad said:
Why can't strange (or even non-strange) towns be a place for adventure?
No reason. But if you treat all cities as potential adventure sites (as many fanstasy RPGs do)
and you use advancement rules anything like D&D's (as many fantasy RPGs do)
and you have simulationist rules for keeping track of the time passed during action resolution (as D&D and many other fantasy RPGs do) then you may have trouble avoiding the 1 month Epic syndrome.
I assert that it is a positive virtue of PoL that it seems designed to offer a way of avoiding the syndrome, by denying the first of the above 3 premises.
If you want a lot of city adventuring, fine. I do, and so do my players. But then you have to find some other way of solving the downtime problem. As a GM, I have constant trouble with it and my players can't really help me out, because the negotiations required smack to much of verisimilitude-spoiling metagame to them.
(As a paranthetical note, W&M also discusses the in-between places, like Hobgoblin patrols or roadside Dragons, who are not automatically hostile but not PoL either. I think these will be the main targets of the new social challenge mechanics.)
KarinsDad said:
Actually, until it is given a rationale, it's not straightforward at all. In other words, a new rule just because it is a new rule. Crunch with no fluff. And, not necessarily intuitive crunch. For example, does the Elf give the bonus if he is unconscious? Until the specifics are actually explained, it is merely a new rule with no "better" about it than any other old or new rule.
I think we need all of the data before we can support this particular rule as a good rule.
Maybe they'll address this, maybe not. Either way I'll cope. After all, 1st ed AD&D gave an elf a 1 in 6 chance of noticing a secret door (or perhaps a concealed door - I can't remember which) simply if passing within 10' of it. The rules didn't say whether or not this benefit was still enjoyed by an unconscious elf, or a blindfolded elf, or an elf wearing a helm with no ear or eye holes. I worked around it then to - and of all my objections to the 1st ed AD&D game system, this is not one of them.
KarinsDad said:
Trade comes with enlightenment and safety.
<snip more controversial anthropology>
Foreigners should be distrusted (especially Tieflings).
There are a lot of historical examples of trade without enlightenment and safety (eg seashells that end up in highland areas, ivory that makes its way from Africa to Britain, etc).
Also, I don't know why Tieflings count as foreigners. The backstory is that they ruled an empire on whose ruins the current towns and cities are established. So they would seem to be locals to me. (I don't know whether the designers see the potential parallel, but I'd be pretty sure they don't want to introduce anything analogous to European anti-semitism into the gameworld - what would it add to D&D play?).
More generally, even if I accepted your anthropology as accurate (which I don't, really) why should the gameworld behave the same way? This is a world with many non-human, long-lived players (Eladrin, Elves, Dragons and perhaps most importantly Gods). Human society has been shaped in a larger context. The designers expressly state their desire to move away from a real-word inspired, human-dominated world (around pp 12-17 of W&M) and the existence of these non-human players gives them licence to check anthropology at the door.
If you want to play a game that explore the sort of anthropology you are interested in, wouldn't something like Conan, or perhaps RQ, be more to your taste than D&D?
