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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6531203" data-attributes="member: 4937">I have no idea what the people are expected to run/play.  I can only draw upon the traditions from which the various features of D&D are drawn to try to have some understanding as to what the world is like assuming that the assumptions are factual.  I try to make my world coherent within its own assumptions.Ok, sure, I know people generally behave that way.  But to me that's a really weird assumption.  That assumption isn't grounded in the assumptions of the setting, or in historical beliefs, or in mythology, but in a modern world view that things like Bigfoot perforce must be rare, else they would be observed all the time.But that was hardly the beliefs of people who actually believed in fairies, who did not believe fairies were some far away remote and rare being, but something real and present with them.  The Greeks didn't believe that there was just a nymph here and there, but well everywhere.  Yes, they may have thought something like harpies or cyclops were to be found a bit farther afield in places a bit harder to the power doesn't detect giants or magical beasts that I can tell.  Even today, if you do historical research regarding your own town or city, and ask the question, "What places in town are considered to be haunted?", you'll likely come up with dozens of answers (I did this once thinking about setting a Wraith game in the 'real world').  People who believe in ghosts don't just think that ghosts are found 1000's of miles away.  They think the world looks like, "I see dead people...All the time. They're everywhere."  Heck, when Homer tells a story about what the world is like, he doesn't even put the gods only out there at a distance, but has them interacting with mortals both openly and in disguise all the time.And without a single doubt, the D&D default setting as presented is far more pervasively magical than even the myths of the real world.Isn't D&D's default cosmology just such a setting?  Or at least, isn't it generally said to be and described to be just such a setting where the supernatural is pervasive?  D&D has been set in settings like 'Masque of the Red Death', where the supernatural is an invasive force and not necessarily present everywhere, but that's the exception rather than the rule.  The usual setting is more like Forgotten Realms, where magic does in fact pervade everything.To the extent that I think you are right that the designers didn't expect people to run/play something like I just described, it's because they don't expect GMs to use any technique other than 'small world'.  That is to say, the expectation of the average professional designer is that  since the only things that can be included in a published adventure are those things that are really important, then those things are the only things that actually exist.</blockquote>

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