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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6862287" data-attributes="member: 87792">And thank goodness it only made the occasional nods to going down that rabbit hole. D&D has had time to do this if it wanted to - but it didn't want to. That way lies Harn and the ability to only play in a single setting - and more to the point a game that bogs down and clogs up every time you try to do anything.Alternatively that way lies GURPS which does that sort of worldbuilding far better than D&D can short of a rewrite from the ground up that makes it look as if 4e didn't touch any of the sacred cows. Once you've got the abstractness of hit points in a system you've thrown away world building unless you're running a setting where everyone has force fields - or a setting that's meant to work the way Order of the Stick does and is incestuous on the rules. And this sort of nonsense is what Gygax was warning against in his repeated rants against "realism" in the 1980s.Quite the reverse. Early D&D's presentation with the random weather charts was all about setting challenges and having strange new places for the PCs to rob and loot. It works so well because there is no attempt to simulate an actual world - instead it's an attempt to create interesting places and not look too hard at how they work. D&D 3.5 has 33 skills before you count the craft, profession, and knowledge skill families. In practice this meant that you were incompetent at 25 to 30 of them - but each of them has a number.Yay! D&D 3.0 continued precisely in the traditions of its forebears. Where with the exception of 4e every single PHB has been approximately 40% full of spells. Where you don't lose skills by not excercising them and going to the gym doesn't do a hell of a lot (unlike e.g. GURPS). Instead if you want to get better at any skill you chose to name depending on your edition your best option is either to kill monsters or take their stuff.Your entire argument here is that D&D has never been something it never tried to be and something that when people suggested Gygax resisted vehemently and with very good reason. And when people tried to change this D&D found itself overtaken by a game that wasn't D&D.Given the riots over 4e... You can do that in games like Dwarf Fortress because a computer handles the mechanical overhead for you. You can do that in games like GURPS because they default to the same thing - and GURPS has an intricate collection of advantages.3e encourages murder-hoboism because 2e broke the XP rules by removing the XP for GP rules in place of something sillier (XP for behaving like a class stereotype).On the contrary. Showing worldbuilding rules in the PHB would mean that it is implied that you play in a certain very narrow subset of worlds. It narrows the world, it narrows the game, and it puts off a lot of the more creative players even as it engages a few.If I trusted WotC a worldbuilder's guide might be a good idea. But making D&D into GURPS is not the way to go.</blockquote>

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