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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 4288667" data-attributes="member: 3887">I prefer a game which models the worlds found in adventure fiction and film, so a certain recognition of player protagonism is expected, no? Wasn't the recommended reading list they used to include in the DMG almost entirely fiction (and not history, ethnography, and comp. religion)?I always assumed that when people talked about D&D in terms of being  a simulation, it was as a simulation of stories, ie where the concept of the protagonist is key. This seems, well, traditional, to me. Look at how even AD&D recognized the protagonist/antagonist status; PC's got class levels while most other members of their race got at most 2HD, barring key opponents. This isn't new to the system. Nope. I see them as different out of necessity. Different goals/purposes. The problem is that antagonist abilities that present interesting challenges to overcome would be problematic as PC abilities. Given that, one could either declare the abilities off limits --with some attendant rationalization, of course-- for the PC's or remove them from the game entirely, and lose potentially interesting encounters. I choose to do the former. It's a bit of trade off. Who says anything about 'equivalent training'? What's verisimilitude-threating about the idea that some NPC's have spent their entire imaginary lives learning different imaginary things than the PC's? Things that the PC's might learn if an equal amount of imaginary time is spent? I imagine it's simply not practical game-wise for most players to play out their PC's 5 years of game time spent in a hobgoblin tribe learning their l33t boomerang tricks, or the next 10 as a thrall to the Absolute Evil learning the fine art of zombie hoard raising.Is believability better served by having all NPC skills/abilities/manifestations of wahoo acquirable by the PC's after a brief 2-week crash course? Skill acquisition in D&D is designed for playability and not simulation, after all. In some cases, doesn't effectively placing certain abilities outside the reach of the PC's enhance realism/verisimilitude/etc? Put another way, why does the presence of abilities that the players can't learn threaten S.O.D. but the ludicrous ease with which they can and do learn things not? Perhaps the spell requires 10 years worth of virgin sacrifices in order to cast. That seems genre-appropriate to me, and I prioritize genre-emulation.See, I just don't see what's inherently realistic about playing 'anything you can do I can do better'. The notion that PC's can master any skill/power/ability at all in a playable amount of time is a lot harder for me to buy into.</blockquote>

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