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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6590119" data-attributes="member: 42582">Upthread I asked for a clear statement of reasons for designing the left/right choice where the left choice looks reasonable, but if chosen is an auto-fail.This is one possible answer: the reason is to demonstrate to the players that things happen in the gameworld which the PCs have no control over.Now let's talk about how that relates to player agency. I would have thought that, virtually tautologously, it is antithetical to it.Agreed, but I think there is an interesting divergence of play preferences here.For some players, the fact that 2nd ed AD&D relies upon massive amounts of GM force, suspending/fudging the rules, etc to deliver dramatic fantasy play is a virtue. So 4e's innovations in this respect are actually setbacks.Whereas for others (and I put both of us in this box!), 2nd ed was deeply flawed, and 4e corrects those flaws.I think that  [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] is correct that this is a big split in the D&D base. I think ENworld is, by default, in the "2nd ed's features were virtues" camp, with a side-dose of "we prefer Gyaxian gamism", and the "4e-crowd" somewhat bringing up the rear.I never used Nentir Vale - as far as I can see from skimming over it in the DMG and Essentials books it's a pretty generic starting setting. In my game I used the equally generic map and key from Night's Dark Terror - both have forests, a river or two, hills, mountains at the edge of the map, etc.But the idea of PoL was important in my game. At Heroic and through the first half of Paragon, the fall of the Nerathi empire was a constant backdrop to the game, and gave context to events that I framed and to the way some of the PCs engaged with them. In the latter part of the campaign, those mortal events have been subsumed into (and in a sense become a local metaphor for) the bigger issue of the Dawn War, the failure of the Lattice of Heaven, and the seemingly impending arrival of the Dusk War.For 15 levels the PCs in my game never left that map - which is around 200 miles wide and 100 miles high - although they did traverse most of it. Because of the downplaying of exploration in 4e, and the more metaphorical/symbolic/thematic role the setting plays, it wasn't necessary to expand further, although if the focus was on world creation then it would seem rather contrived that so much eventful stuff happened in this rather backwaters region of the world.</blockquote>

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