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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grendel_Khan" data-source="post: 8673756" data-attributes="member: 7028554">I think an important factor in all of this, that I haven't really seen discussed yet (apologies if it is) is whether the PCs in a given D&D campaign are supposed to be relatively unique in the world. Or are all of the rules that pertain to their level-based progression just an attempt to simulate what anyone can do, provided they kill some number of kobolds during their adventuring career?I think this is relevant because it gets at questions like:-Are the rules simulating how just anyone fights a dragon, or how the literal greatest heroes ever to walk the planet (for the last hundred years or so, at least) fight a dragon?-When putting on our simulation hat as well as our worldbuilding goggles, do we need to think about how widespread magic effects the world? Or is the wizard PC in your campaign more like Gandalf--one of so few wizards you can basically count them all on one severely injured hand? If the PCs are unique, and magic is extremely rare, you can set aside a lot of simulation questions, and treat magic as something more mysterious and outright miraculous.-Is it an explicit part of the fiction that the PCs are violating Newtonian physics, much like the monsters they deal with, because they're inherently supernatural beings? That includes the fighters and barbarians. How else do you explain so many of the feats in 5e, and the Flash-like flurry of greatsword attacks a higher-level PC can dish out, momentum and gravity be damned?To me, the idea that 5e is just passively modeling or simulating the entirety of the world, with no differentiation between the PCs and everyone else, seems ludicrous. No matter what you're playing, you're doing Earthdawn stuff by 3rd level, just without the premise to explain why. And it's not like 5e provides you with some sort of chart (that I've seen) showing how a typical NPC progresses through levels over the course of their life, and it doesn't do the previous-edition thing of assigning levels to blacksmiths and such. It's a game filled with rules that pertain to what amounts to superpowered individuals, without really explaining how those superpowers strain or break the larger simulation. It's a game about the PCs as ubermensches. That it steadfastly won't provide a default setting that makes that clear doesn't change anything.To me, that breaks any simulation approach in half. It's as realistic as a cape comic, meaning as realistic or unrealistic as the genre tropes and traditions you feel like applying during a given story arc. You know how people argue endlessly about whether Batman can beat Superman, trying to combine comic book lore and logic with real-world back-of-the-napkin calculations? Same thing here. 5e is wild, superpowered mayhem that emulates its own, oddly unique genre, and spits on your attempts at simulation. If you want fantasy simulation, try something else.ETA: [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] addressed this, and more efficiently, while I was writing this, by referencing 4e's framing. But I think the question stands: What do you think 5e is simulating? If you think it's simulating a generic fantasy setting, I disagree.</blockquote>

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