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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4114791" data-attributes="member: 47776">Gods are NPCs.  You can hunt them down, beat them up, and intimidate them into telling you the truth.  Good luck that whole enshrining the mechanics of the universe on the man behind the curtain.*sigh* Because we, as you might notice, are discussing D&D.  We are not discussing Robert's Homebrew of D&D.  The RAW is the common ground we share and generally take for granted when discussing a system.  Moreover, the mere fact that there is such discussion on the topic shows that unlike Death Doesn't Inhibit Actions or Cleave + Bag of Rats, there is no clear consensus on particular applications of this rule being bad and wrong.Allow me to educate you.Realism is a measure of how something measures up to reality.Verisimilitude is a measure of how something measures up to expectations of a given reality, not necessarily the actual one.  A generally-shared expectation is that abilities based on skill and talent don't run out the way abilities based on resources that need to be renewed do.  If the idea of learning how to trip someone in combat, doing so, then being unable to do so later on until a specific period of time has passed, then being able to do so again until you actually do with no confounding factors like fatigue or relative capacity of your opponent does not strike you as a poor simulation of skill-based abilities, that is fine.  But if it does, then rules that make skill-based tripping work a set number of times in a given time period are not verisimilistic.  Add a general expectation that skill is actually chi manipulation and not really a measure of knowing how to do something, and it's verisimilistic again.Likewise, make the rules the universe is trying to simulate "Whatever the DM wants to happen happens, regardless of past experience.", and you have achieved perfect verisimilitude; it's just that playing in such a universe is of little interest for many of us.  For me, the funnest part of D&D is adding individual bits of awesome to the world and watching them interact and fight it out.  I think that the ability of a ruleset to lead to interesting places not anticipated by the original designer to be a feature, not a bug, and I think that if you're going to permit resurrection but disallow it under certain circumstances for plot reasons, you should time out, explain you are altering the rules of the universe to allow / disallow resurrection in this instance, and run with it.In the first option, it seems that if the old age restriction got removed (which I imagine it would, since it was a simulationist-emergent rule* and 4E doesn't like those), then it seems that snagging and subverting a destiny should be the first thing you do upon hitting paragon level.The second case obviously doesn't apply, since the destinies were all specifically stated.  I was also working from the SWSE destinies, which can be clearly identified in-universe from the way the world bends around specific, enumerated goals.*I used to be severely annoyed about the die-of-old-age-inherently rules.  Why was it necessary to enforce such lifespans?Then I read the old write-ups of the FR NPCs and realized that the old age rules were a way of permanently separating Elminister and his ilk of been-everywhere, done-everything, you'll-never-be-as-good-as-I-am-ever NPCs from the continuity of RAW.Plus, it's another reason to shoot for lichdom, and any rule that adds more liches to a campaign setting is a good one. I disagree.  I actually agree with the 4E tiers.At Heroic tier, you follow the rules of the world.  Ressurection is serious, scary stuffs, beyond your ken.At Paragon tier, you can bend around the rules slightly.  You can journey to the underworld, and make a bargain with Hades, and hey, that's a 43 on your Perform check, so you have his approval...under these conditions.At Epic tier?"...he punched out Charon, seduced the shades of thirty different women, swam the Styx while carrying three amphora of wine, drank the wine, sought out Eurystheus's father and murdered him again, shattered Sisyphus's boulder with the explanation 'Yeah, Dad can be a real dick sometimes.', and then stole my dog? On a dare?"</blockquote>

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