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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8673661" data-attributes="member: 82106">Not to disagree with you in the sense of 'what works' in your average fantasy campaign. OTOH I don't think anyone can really model the effects of things like magic on a society. We don't even know the parameters of how it works well enough to say much about that. I mean, lets imagine clerics. How much time and effort does it take to become one? Can anyone do it? What fraction of people can do it? Is there some sort of gated resource someone controls, like a holy altar or something, that you have to access to become a cleric? Is there a lesser NPC version of a 'cleric' that can cast some spells? Which ones? All of this would be critical to understanding how much access to clerical magic a town of 1000 people, lets say, has. The answer to this question probably has a huge impact on the social structure, demography, etc. of said town. D&D has basically zero answers to any of this, and thus there's nothing like a 'simulation' of a town that can happen WRT clerics! And this is only a small example!I mean, what DOES HAPPEN is that the contents and whatnot of this town is laid out in terms of what the genre expectations for a D&D town of 1000 people is, mixed with some setting derived stuff, etc. It is then simply assumed that this town 'makes sense' in terms of the 'laws of nature' that exist within the game and the setting. This is fine, its exactly what has to happen so we can play, and it is what creates the expected genre elements and all of what follows.I mean, you can go back to the early days of D&D and there were debates, even articles in various magazines and such, plus various amusing anecdotes and whatnot where people debated this stuff, or it was pointed out how ridiculous the genre assumptions were from any kind of practical standpoint (I seem to recall there were any number of Wormy, Snarfquest and Fineous Fingers strips that played on these themes). So I'm happy when a DM might answer "well, its this way because that's just how things are supposed to work in D&D!" Hey, great! I can even see why it can be desirable. At worst who has any business critiquing anyone else's genre assumptions in a totally made up self-referential genre like D&D?</blockquote>

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