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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Theo R Cwithin" data-source="post: 5045186" data-attributes="member: 75712">Capping D&D's level advancement is hardly "draconian change".D&D is a set of rules, and nothing more.  It does a particular fantasy genre that models growth from weakling to power quite well, but that is not the only thing it's capable of.  Any "conceit" beyond just the rules is something each player puts there himself.  Granted, that something is very often some cultural expectation of what D&D "is", but at the core, it's still just the rules.  I largely agree, but I'd wager that quite a few gamers just don't have the luxury of seeing it as a screwdriver versus hammer sort of distinction.  To my mind, D&D is more like a Swiss army knife: not the perfect tool for most jobs, but a pretty good substitute in most situations.D&D is very popular compared to other systems.  Many, many casual gamers aren't even aware that other systems exist, or don't want to bother learning a new set of rules, or shell out for another set of books.  If I want to maintain a group of such gamers, I need to get creative. Fortunately, D&D presents a flexible system that lets any group play a fairly broad range of power levels without having to learn a new system.  By doing something as simple as limiting the starting or stopping levels, and adding a ton of fluff, the look and feel of the game can change dramatically: play up to heroic tier for "grim'n'gritty" or play "superheroic" if that's what you want.  Nothing (not even in the rules, btw) says you are required to play across all the tiers to play "correctly".  And that's very good thing, indeed.One thing I keep away from is the notion that my group is slaved to some designer's intentions or some pseudo-philosophical notion of what constitutes "appropriate gaming".  Honestly, I think most designers would be tickled to learn their ruleset gets mileage beyond the original intent.  And if by some twisted accident of ego someone is offended by such an idea, well they can kiss my sweet candy a** <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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