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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zurai" data-source="post: 3959433" data-attributes="member: 52324">You're misinterpreting Points of Light. The darkness is absence of information more than a black hole. Going through unknown lands isn't a guaranteed death sentence like you describe, just inherently dangerous. You're also forgetting that nomadic societies tend to have higher ratios of combat capable people to non-coms. What may be an unthinkable journey for the village of Thorn Hollow, population 200, with no one really trained to do more than farm or herd, is routine for the Hawk Brothers Band, population 50, of whom all but the very young children are trained in using bows and spears and how to ride horses.Heck, the 50 person nomadic group could likely conquer the 200 person village without losing anyone.Don't forget that the monsters have to survive the wilderness, too. Goblins and kobolds are, by default, wimpier than commoners. How is a goblin or kobold clan supposed to survive at all if the wilderness is unerringly lethal? Answer: the wilderness isn't unerringly lethal. It's just unexplored and therefore dangerous.Another key factor of a Points of Light campaign is population density (amazingly, what this topic is all about!). PoL, by its very nature, requires a very very low population density. If there are too many people per unit of measure, they don't have much to fear. A city of 100,000+ people could probably even repel a dragon attack. Points of Light is characterized by handfuls of very small, very isolated settlements separated by vast amounts of unknown lands. Those are the two key things. The unknown lands don't have to be Toxic Jungles ala Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind to support a Points of Light framework. Just being unknown is scary enough. People are most frightened by what they don't know. When you were a kid, was it the darkness itself that scared you, or was it that you couldn't see anything, so you could easily imagine scary monsters that only came out at night?It's the same principle in a Points of Light campaign. Fear of the unknown, punctuated by the occasional goblin raid or rabid dire owlbear, are more than enough to keep populaces isolated and afraid. You don't have to have a monster population density rivalling that of ants in the Amazon - in fact, that's counter-productive because it removes suspension of disbelief. If the monsters in the wilderness outnumber the humans huddled in the villages by huge numbers, and they're stronger and bigger, why do humans even exist? The monsters would have long ago removed them. There needs to be a relative equilibrium, with the monster side weighted slightly heavier than the civilized side so that there's work for PC heroes.Now, to tie that all back into nomads: Nomadic peoples are generally organized in smaller groups than settled peoples (by necessity). Small groups that move constantly through dangerous but not lethal lands have existed throughout the entirety of human history up until the modern age, and on every continent save Antarctica (and Australia? I don't know much of the native history of the land down under). They survive by having a higher ratio of combat-capable citizens and by actively scouting to avoid or, if necessary, eliminate dangers before they are encountered by the non-combat portion of the band. Those exact same principles work fine in a Points of Light setting. Instead of the majority of the populace being pure-class Commoners or Experts, they're Commoners or Experts with a level or two of Warrior, and they act in an organized manner using scouts and professional warriors rather than relying on passive defenses and half-trained militias.I'm not debating that a nomadic society would have it easier than a sedentary one. Quite the opposite, in fact; historically, nomadic populations were much smaller than sedentary ones, in large part because the way of life was inherently dangerous. I just contest that it's impossible for a nomadic society to exist in a Points of Light campaign. They should be rare and have a small population - but, conveniently, that happens to fit both the Tolkeinesque AND Sidhe elves perfectly.</blockquote>

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