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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9613588" data-attributes="member: 6790260">It is generally not "heroic", in the sense of a tale focused on the doing of great deeds and the people who do those deeds, to spend significant amounts of time on activities like:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Ensuring you have enough food to eat, water to drink, etc. If doing so is in fact a stiff challenge, it portrays the characters as too feeble to be truly great, and instead barely scraping by. If it isn't a particularly difficult challenge, it instead feels like busy work, which isn't any more "doing great deeds"-y.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Finding shelter against the elements on the regular, not just when specifically delving into harsh and unforgiving territory. This is a bit looser because bravely delving the depths is a pretty established heroic act, but again, if you're needing to put in major effort merely to potentially have any kind of place to sleep, that is certainly gritty, but it pulls away from the doing-great-deeds emphasis and toward the ordinary and plain. Less epic adventure, more barely-surviving hobo.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Evading hostile denizens/wildlife. Some amount of "evade the wildlife" is perfectly fine; we sort of expect that, because smart heroes pick their battles and don't just throw themselves into danger willy-nilly. But when it becomes a "you MUST avoid conflicts you haven't won before they started", again it pulls away from the heroic experience, because it makes the characters feel fragile, weak, and easily killed, rather than hardy, strong, and ready to challenge great threats.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fending off serious danger from (relatively) small threats. It's heroic to assault a dragon's lair and the kobold warren that serves said dragon. It's less heroic to stumble upon a kobold warren while doing something else and needing to turn around or avoid the warren because that's a genuine existential danger, it pulls away from the heroic experience because...well, it feels like you're basically saying "nope, can't do that, a small band of kobolds is just too dangerous for us". It's fine for a heroic experience to begin with small and weak opponents (how many games, tabletop or video game, begin with killing rats in absurdly spacious sewers?), but if that remains your focus across a broad swathe of the campaign, it no longer feels like a heroic experience in most cases, and instead feels like weak fools scrabbling in the dirt for pennies.</li> </ul>There might be other examples, but those cover the basics I think. It's an important issue, the feeling that you're a Big Damn Hero that isn't afraid of a little peril, and having too many (or too severe) things that drag the camera back down to dirt level will tarnish the heroism and turn the experience into gritty survival rather than heroic derring-do.</blockquote>

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