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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7192781" data-attributes="member: 71699">My reading of the discussion is that this comes down to a philosophical point. When we take Tolkien's view, where we value consistency and think of our fantasy worlds as having a life apart from their authors, we envision that the mechanics must supervene on the world. That is because if something happens in our world, and our world is somehow independently alive, then everything else in our world must react consistently. It might be that we assert that cultists are frightened of settlers, so the hamlet is in no danger. If so, then that applies everywhere there are cultists and hamlets. Consistency in this context is not concerned with insisting on whether we like apples or pears, rather it is concerned with saying that whichever we choose we must apply and stick that. If we choose pears, then wherever there are pears we covet them and wherever there are apples we dislike them.Another approach is to treat the fantasy reality as arbitrary and whimsical. Cultists are frightened of settlers except when they are not, and no consistency applies to when they are and when they aren't. I believe players do better in worlds that value consistency. My observation is that players treasure consistency, in fact. They love persistent details. They enjoy being able to work things out and turn out to be right sometimes.It's not clear to me what you mean by this. DM fiat aside, a Shield spell is cast with a Reaction no matter who the DM is. That's a basic assumption of the game: it's why we part with good cash for hundreds of pages of mechanics.This point might be tautological. You seem to be saying that "deadly" has no meaning in terms of implications for players. Given deadly has no meaning, it can't mean anything to have any given number of deadly encounters in our world. Taken to absurdity for the sake of the argument, 1 deadly encounter for our level 4 PCs is the same as dropping 20 deadly encounters together on them. Is that what you are saying? Is there some set of deadly encounters that you admit is meaningfully differentiated from another set, or are all sets of deadly encounters the same: implication-less?</blockquote>

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