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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8495076">Some thoughts on points of light. Obviously this is just my point of view from my neck of the woods playing D&D from the 80s to the 90s (and pre-internet that varied a great deal), but when they introduced the whole points of light thing, I had a very negative reaction to it (it was one of the elements of 4E that just didn't land well for me). I just never ran D&D as anything resembling points of light. I mean there might be wilderness to cross, there might be distant civilizations and cities to find, but points of light seemed very artificial to me. Not like it was an attempt to emulate something like frontier movies, but like it was just a product of putting game considerations first and creating the flavor from there. I am not saying there was zero western influence on D&D, just that I never saw it or ran it in a way that felt like the points of light structure. And when I did try to connect points of light to real world history, my mind went more towards ancient cultures setting up colonies (like Greece and Phoenicia----Carthage started as a Phoenician colony as I recall). Not saying points of light was bad. I just didn't find it fit what I was doing with my campaigns the new edition rolled out. My campaigns did have wilderness, but the people and monsters inhabiting them were more like germanic and Scandinavian tribes. And the 'frontier space' was more like regions between empires (not even necessarily uncivilized, just maybe different from what the players were used or places where existing law had less reach). And again, I think a lot of time people confuse content for message in these discussions. D&D is a game, and the conceit of the game has worked well for people over the years (whether that is venturing into the wilderness to adventure or venturing into dungeons). I am not particularly worried about the impact of killing evil orcs for instance in a game (however I would be worried if I were in a game and there were clear racialist themes being used: like some kind of blood and soil message or what have you). But a setting with evil monsters, even if those evil monsters are drawing inspiration from real world history and literature, I just don't really see an issue with that.</blockquote>

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