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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kraydak" data-source="post: 3964852" data-attributes="member: 12306">Actually, I think DnD societies being in dangerous locals makes perfect sense from a militaristic/security point of view (and yes, that sentence does sound weird).  While the topic has been debated many times, I come down solidly on the side of HLCs (high level characters) being the true powers.  It follows that nations will attempt to recruit and train HLCs.  Training HLC involves putting (dangerous) people to beat up in front of them.  Wiping out the goblins means you need to find another low level threat for people to grind xp on.  If you need to put a book of (somewhat editted) demon-worshipping rituals in peoples hands to generate an adventure for people to level on, you do so.But that might be a bit Machiavellian for your tastes.Regardless, and not on quote-topic, if PoL is to mean anything, you are giving up a lot of realism.  (the above holds only if both you want to keep standard DnD assumptions, like metal, and glass, and paper, and if you want the *aristocracy* to feel like the world is PoL).  For me, you'd give up enough simulationist aspects that the simulationist aspects become gamist: without enough realism, you don't have suspension of disbelief and you stop roleplaying as the world isn't "real" anymore.I'm not overly worried about that because I don't expect it to last.  I don't expect it to last because, even though it isn't a simulationist design choice, it isn't as a result a gamist design choice.  PoL feels like a return to 1st edition undetailed town+dungeon to crawl.  People have come to expect more from their settings because to run more than a dungeon crawl you need more details and a larger canvas.  PoL is subpar for political adventures, and is small for full out, large level spread campaigns.  In short, because of the campaign constraints that come with it, PoL fails from a gamist point of view (Blobs of light, on the other hand, do well).An important thing to realize is that DnD breaks down if PC and (friendly) NPC power levels diverge too much.  If the relevant NPCs are too powerful, you wonder why they aren't intervening.  Of course, they might have set the whole thing up to train new allies, but lets not continue that.  If the relevant NPCs are too weak, you can't have political adventures, and dungeoncrawls are either unmotivated, or you have the World Ending Crisis of the week syndrome.  As the PC powerlevel rises fast, you either need to have the NPCs gain levels at PC rates but all start at the same place (which feels *weird*, why should powerful people all start leveling at the same time) or you can change your NPC cast (which generally involves changing the scope or location of the campaign).  As changing the location of a campaign can be disruptive, you are best off changing the scope of the campaign.  Which is hard if you restrict yourself to small, terrified communities.</blockquote>

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