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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6531870" data-attributes="member: 4937">First of all, you aren't denying my assertion that Oerth, Faerun, Aebrynis, Athas, Krynn, Planescape, or Realmspace is a setting that is pervasively supernatural.  You are just deflecting and saying that as you envisioned them, they don't seem like what I described.  And in certain cases, obviously they aren't.  Athas is a supernaturally dead world, the victim of a pervasive magical apocalypse - so we wouldn't expect it to be full of animist life in its present state.  But Sigil in Planescape is even more pervasively alive than what I described, as presented in the books and in games like Planescape:Torment.   In the situation I described, the animist beings are present, but largely hidden and sleeping, so that while present you don't normally encounter them.   But in the Outer Planes, the spirits aren't just present, but awake and - for lack of a better word - mundane.  Nonetheless, the degree to which the animist nature of the world is highlight may very somewhat from setting to setting, all of them basically have the same assumptions.  As someone else pointed out, familiars would generally ping on such an ability, and they are in most settings rather common place, as rare is the setting for D&D where a hedgemage or minor hermit sage doesn't exist in practically every hamlet and village - if only for gamist needs at a minimum of providing someone to identify magic items and similar services.  What I just described is in the context of my game play, just background on the setting.  It comes out in various small ways, but you don't normally see it highlighted in published works any more than you see discussion of the role of oozes in ecologies, or the pervasive presence of crickets.  There is a vast body of things that perforce must be true about the setting if it is as described, that aren't generally explicitly discussed because there are more pertinent bits of information that have to be communicated to run the game.  If you only have 32 or 64 pages of text to get your point across, you don't talk about the ghost unrelated to the story that appears only on nights of the new moon during the spring and forces her 'lovers' to dance all evening and disappears at the cock's crow - even though it can be presumed that in any setting where you have ghosts, such things exist, because such things exist in ghost stories that inspired the ghosts.When I say "small world", I use it in a very specific sense, and you clearly aren't understanding it.  The "small world" technique is a conscious or unconscious technique where you appear to give the players free will to roam wherever they will and do whatever they want, but in point of fact their actions are actually highly constrained because the only things available to investigate (and to do) are those few things you consider important to the story you want to tell.   A group that chooses to not investigate those important things, finds that it can do nothing so the choose is either do what the DM wants us to do, or be bored.  This can be done artfully or artlessly.  Done artfully many groups will never realize its a "small world" and will instead get the sense that its large and vibrant, solely because the small area they explore is lavished with detail and the things to look at are so interesting they never thing to look elsewhere.  DMs adopt the small world technique either consciously, or through unconscious habit.  It's essence is, "The only things in the world are the things that I prepared."  If you are using the small world technique, everything I described about the pervasive magic of the world is a distraction that you don't want to raise because it derails the plot on trivialities unimportant to the adventure.  And that's all well and good and is often justifiable, but what I've discovered is that many DMs have only played in a "small world" style, and so unconsciously come to assume that only what they've prepared or only what is prepared in the adventure they bought actually exists.  That is to say that they come to believe that the 64 pages of text they have represents basically everything there is to know about the immediate setting, and instead of seeing the text as merely a summary of the important points with everything else left to their imagination, they see the text as the bible for all that is and whatever isn't mentioned doesn't exist.  That can also happen simply because if the PC's do go looking off the page or off the path, DMs without experience painting as they go can panic.  I certainly did at one time.   In my first attempt at DMing, my players tried to leave the B2 wilderness map.  I panicked and invented a impenetrable glass barrier that prevented them from leaving the map, and had a magpie come and tell them to go the other way. The actual experience of play is that monsters are common.  Try to walk anywhere and you'll find some.  Presumably, monsters are actually more common than that, since the only ones you actually encounter tend to be ones that want to fight to the death rather than hide or run away.</blockquote>

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