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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9691822" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well, at least for me, it's because that situation is simply more realistic than the alternative. But if you'd like my reasoning, it is as follows.Consider the fiction used in pretty much every other edition besides 4e regarding how most spellcasters, but most specifically Wizards, acquire new spells. That is, we are told that the spellcaster acquires these spells through practice, experimentation, training, etc.--but this is functionally never shown. For essentially all groups, this process is 100% completely handwaved; it is presumed to have occurred in all the zillion moments we say nothing about because they weren't particularly interesting. I am not critiquing this practice, to be clear; I am simply noting that we accept this declaration, sight-unseen, simply because we are told it and see nothing which grossly disagrees with it. AIUI, even in 1st Edition (or is it OD&D?), where a Magic-User's spells are by default randomized, this randomization is meant to cover the explicitly asserted but also (almost always) completely unseen experimentation on the MU's part.Now, consider the life of an adventurer, going from not-quite-green-anymore to transplanar adventures (the usual shape of a 1st-level-to-somewhere-in-Epic game, albeit not the only possible one). Here, two things occur. First, we actually DO see this character forced into situations where they have to do things they aren't very good at. Paladins needing to Stealth. Wizards needing to Intimidate. Clerics needing to lie through their teeth. Etc. Further, we know that these characters interact with one another, share information, and develop a variety of incidental awareness and skill. Unlike the previous, a good portion of this...let's call it "practical experimentation", actually does occur proverbially "on camera". So it is reasonable to assume that a significant portion also occurs "off camera". The small but subtle effect is there, the imprint of weeks, months, years of adventuring.Characters do not somehow mystically get better. Their whole lives are defined by struggle against danger after danger after danger. They learn a lot of things in those contexts. That learning is often only barely enough to help, just a little, against the newest holy-FECES-what-is-going-on adventure they've gotten sucked into, but if they happen to need to do something in a much more...let's call it "passé" setting, they've learned a thing or two because that context is now old-hat to them. Such learnin' won't make much of a difference when storming the Nevernever Fortress holding the chrysalis of a nascent Primordial/Shadow-Feylord hybrid that means to erase all of existence through corrupting the dreams of mortals, or whatever other adventure that is actually going to interest(/challenge) a party that has reached low Epic tier. But it'll make rather a noticeable difference if that same party needs to sneak into the basement of an otherwise-ordinary merchant who happens to have the key to said fortress but isn't willing to sell.</blockquote>

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