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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6659744" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I guess I can imagine that scenario, though its not one that has actually ever occurred to me in the past. Well, once my sister made a 'test of heroes' scenario, which was in 3e, but in 4e you might do it with scaled level DCs, where the test wasn't "can you pass the challenge" but was more "will you make the heroic choices". Its a pretty niche application of the rules in any case.Yeah, in truth there's some mixture of things going on. In terms of fiction there are a range of blizzards. In the real world you might have a blizzard in Vermont where a bunch of snow falls and if you're outside in it you should be equipped, but any hardy adventurer will just bed down. If they have to push on, maybe they might get lost, but even low level PCs could survive there, vs the blizzards that happen on top of Mt Everest that routinely kill off dozens of highly equipped and trained climbers and might well be a paragon challenge to survive, vs the side of Pemerton's Obelisk of Ice, which could kill an epic hero.So, I could say "yeah, I have these mountains on the map, and its winter, and I gave the PCs a reason to go up there, lets hit them with a blizzard and lets make it the storm of the century, paragon DCs for paragon PCs. Its not that the world is built around the PCs, but we're telling the tales of heroes here, not of the guy that walked up the mountain on a sunny day and back. If the players want to forgo being heroes and just climb in the sun, well, why even play that with rules? Its fine to have things that are already scaled where say "the dragon is way to powerful for you to defeat" but see my comments below about that...We all did this from day one, and this is one of the things that drives me nuts in these discussions is that there's a vocal element of DMs who INSIST that there's this 'unicorn' of "true sandbox play", which really just doesn't exist. You always arrange the world in some fashion that it can be presented to the players in a graded series of challenges. The first thing Dave Arneson did when he built the first dungeon was establish the convention that deeper levels equaled greater danger. Come to a stairs and you have to decide, do you go for the bigger treasures, or do you stick to the level you're on now and hope to get stronger first? Of course there are games that are 'undirected play' where maybe the PCs are allowed to just wander into the dragon lair at level 1 and get eaten, but if they pay ANY attention they'll surely see clues, and the kobold warren is surely more accessible to them than the dragon lair. No DM wants to waste table time setting it up otherwise, unless he's just a sadist, and he won't have players for long! So, I don't object to the sandbox terminology, but its clearly not what some people try to pretend it is. Nor IME do DMs really live by some sort of hard-core ethic where when the players got into deep water through no fault of their own that its just all tough luck. In some sense every DM except the sadist who wants the level 1 meat grinder, has somewhere in his agenda the story of mighty heroes who actually made it, and so every DM is in some sense an advocate for the PCs. DW just makes this utterly explicit, which is a great reason to play it.Exactly. Think about it this way, in 4e EVERY SINGLE GAME ELEMENT can be assigned unambiguously to a level and that assignment is pretty accurate. That was a really significant advance, and one big reason I personally am not fond of the idea of DMing 5e is I'm not giving that up.</blockquote>

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