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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PaulKemp" data-source="post: 3768921" data-attributes="member: 2809">See, I find it persuasive and here's the reason.  In any given day, Elminster (or any high powered individual we'd care to name) sleeps, eats, hits the loo, smokes his pipe, prepares his spells, tends his garden, discusses the weather with friends, plays a game of chess, reads a book, and generally lives his life.  The notion that he dots around the Realms resetting hundreds of contingency spells, spends hours cutting through the defensive wards of hundreds of high level "evil" powerful beings so that he can scry them, learn of their plots, then generally foul and foil such plots is silly.  He's a man.  A powerful man, but a man nevertheless, with all that that implies.  I think we tend to regard NPCs like Elminster the way we might regard the POV character in a video game -- he never tires, he never eats/sleeps/relaxes, he never simply takes a moment to live, and his mind has limitless capacity for containing, keeping straight, and accurately evaluating information.  All of that is wrong.  He's just a powerful wizard with a big reputation.  The idea that he would constantly overshadow PCs is baffling to me.  Given his limits as a man and the enormous amount of activity going on in the world at any time, I find it highly implausible in most cases that he would have any idea what was transpiring with the PCs, even if their quest were a high-level one.  I take your point about an attack on the Weave.  Were that to occur, given the assumptions of the setting, I think Elminister might get involved at some point.  But barring that or an attack on Shadowdale, I just don't see him as much of a factor.   But I see the logic of this position applying to the PCs at any level in any setting.  Shouldn't the first level PCs feel helpless and stupid in stopping the rampaging troll in the city streets?  After all, the town guard with its fourth level sergeant, a man vastly more powerful than the PCs, soon will arrive to set matters aright.  If not him, then surely the senior priest in the local temple will manage affairs.  Perhaps the PCs should simply accept the fact that they are merely little fish in the big pond of the world and head back to their farms to till the fields.  All of this strikes me not unlike saying, "I don't want to adventure in the Young Kingdoms because Elric can kick my ass," same goes for Conan and his world, for Nehwon and Fafhrd and the Mouser, etc.</blockquote>

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