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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4017723" data-attributes="member: 42582">These posts, plus others by you AND by some of your opponents, seem to rest on dubious philosophy of history.When you consider that the D&D gameworld is a fantasy world, with many powerful non-human actors, that philosophy of history becomes even more dubious.For much of European intellectual history, the default assumption was the opposite of yours, namely, that things had been utopic in the past, and were in the process of getting better.At other times and in other cultural traditions, assumptions about eternal cycles of progress and decline have been the norm.So I don't personally see the great difficulty of positing (as W&M puts it) that PoL is an ancient world, in which empires have risen and fallen, and (presumably) will continue to do so. Even epic adventurers presumably can only delay the inevitable (although the more hubristic might assume they can permanently hold back the darkness - this in itself makes for a good theme to bridge campaigns between 30th level and 1st level play).Not much play time, perhaps. I'm guessing that the DMG will have some useful and interesting things to say about how players and GMs can negotiate the passage of ingame time in order to prevent the verisimilitude-destroying phenomenon of zero to hero in 30 game weeks.</blockquote>