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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6662091" data-attributes="member: 82106">As you yourself said, I only addressed DCs, or the fiction attached to them. If I was going to make a grittier game, say one of a dark doomed world, fated to end, I could do a lot of things. I could really push the concept of POL, so the 'points of light' are VERY far apart, so much so that you can't even find another one without great trouble, and they are almost mythical places to each other. The gods pretty much seem not to even care about the world anymore, only a few relics of their power still exist. The PCs would progress, yes, but always hunted, always one step behind in any attempt to stave off the doom of the world. They would become powerful, but always overshadowed by the mighty heroes of ages past, who's traces they sometimes stumble across amidst the ruins of long-dead kingdoms and cities. The opponents they would face would always be powerful, deadly, and merciless. Most scenarios wouldn't involve 'winning', but just staying alive and maybe accomplishing some bare minimum goals that would provide only a tantalizing glimpse of some hope, which would be snatched away before too long. Epic could be handled a few ways. You could break with the tone and present the world as having hope reborn, new superheroes capable of defeating evil. You could play it to theme and simply make epic one long superhuman quest to just snatch some tiny measure of victory from uttermost defeat. To save 100 people from the apocalypse and give them some hope of a new world, etc. You could also constantly play up things like supplies, enduring the environment, etc. This is all stuff that is actually pretty well outlined in the DS material, though it isn't strictly really quite a gritty sort of game. It certainly wouldn't be the same as a B/X based game, where desperate ordinary individuals take up the struggle because they must and die in droves, but even B/X has high level play where that sort of thing isn't really appropriate.    In most high grit games the idea is that you have to muck your way through in a mostly pretty mundane way. You need torches. There may be light spells, but they're precious and you need to save them for a very bad situation, if you even have one. If the torches run out, you're up the creek without a paddle. Not having unlimited light spells and whatnot is the sort of thing I'm talking about. 4e handles logistics mostly in a sort of "here's something to explain why you don't have to care about it" sort of way, which isn't really compatible with the sort of exploration play that was common in early D&D and which even 2e supports pretty well.Yep, every time I have this discussion the sandbox DM claims to be the 'one unicorn' of such DMs who's game doesn't work that way. I have no reason to want to offend anyone, and maybe you're REALLY that one unicorn DM, but look at it from my perspective. In FORTY YEARS of play I haven't personally witnessed that sandbox yet. There are certainly sandboxes, which I would classify as 'games which eschew a plot and explicit development.' However, they always arrange their adventuring in such a way that the PCs face things they can face, or if they don't its because the players actively and usually perversely chose not to. The dragon didn't eat the PCs in your game because it wouldn't be fun. Instead he's a clever wily beast who has some complicated agenda, which it sounds like was invented on the spot, but I could be wrong. From this it follows that all games have at least a GAMIST agenda that includes an ongoing game in which it is feasible for the PCs to progress in levels. It may have a narrative agenda too, at least in the sense of creating an interesting story out of that progression. I guess you could have a sort of almost entirely narrative sandbox where the generation of stories of bathos and or absurdity, etc would be the goal, where random luck might let PCs progress a bit before the inevitable axe comes down. No doubt there are various possible nuances.The point is, again, that in the end the DCs and other mechanical elements serve some sort of agenda in which setting them WRT the characters is at some level key. Think of it this way, making a sandbox using 4e is no more difficult to imagine than making one using 5e. IMHO its easier to the extent that you want to know that each adventure has some specific difficulty level, regardless of the mechanism by which the characters are conveyed to the appropriate adventure, either by exploration and hooks or by the application of dramatic means to drive a story forward.</blockquote>

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