Mephistopheles said:
Take Elminster as an example, although this applies to most if not all significant factions and individuals in FR (or any world for that matter). Sure he could probably solve most problems on FR with very little effort, and certainly anything that PCs are likely to be up against for the early and mid careers with almost no effort at all. But how many people are watching him? There are plenty of factions out there keeping a close eye on what he does. When he takes action it is likely to draw attention to whatever he's getting involved in and possibly invite some form of action from a powerful enemy, either to thwart what he's doing or attack him directly while he's occupied with something else.
Eliminster is just one example but I think that's a good rationale for explaining why even in a world where there are many powerful factions and individuals around there is still a need for lower level adventurers, as well as why FR reality itself isn't constantly being turned on its head with so many opposing forces capable of casting wishes, miracles, etc.
Hey, I really like this explanation. I was a big FR fan in the early 90s in its 2e heyday but I stopped reading the novels around 1996 and then stopped playing d&d altogether and didn't have anything to do with FR until I was brought back into the fold with 3.5 back in 2006. I read through the 3e FRCS, I started playing in a FR campaign, and I started DMing a FR campaign, and I was almost immediately turned off it ... mainly because of the whole "too many high-level NPCs/not enough room for low-level PCs to grow" argument but there were other reasons as well.
If someone had presented me with this point of view sooner, I might have reconsidered. It makes perfect sense and I wonder why I didn't think of it. It's all about politics and consequences. Yes, you might be a super-powerful wizard, but if there are other super-powerful wizards out there who can do what you can do, you might not have the same freedom of action that you had when you were less powerful and weren't on the radar, so to speak. You can even take this a step further and draw real-world comparisons.
First, you can draw people's attention to celebrities. They're the "super-powerful" people in our world. They've got the money, and in many cases, the means to change the world, yet many of them don't. Why? Well, we don't know. But there's certainly the whole "living in the public gaze and having no privacy" aspect.
Second, you can draw people's attention to historical stuff like the Cold War. You could compare super-powerful magic like
wish and
miracle to tactical nukes. People have them but nobody uses them because of the consequences ... The point is, when you're super-powerful you don't actually have as much freedom to use that power as you might think because everyone is watching you and if someone else has the same power, they might use it against you if you use it against them and so on. Lots of politics at play here, and I can easily see it being applicable to the super-powerful NPCs/organizations in FR.
I could probably go on but it's late. I'll finish by saying that, despite all that, I'm actually finding the new Realms appealing. I'll probably get the FRCG, if for no other reason than to plunder ideas for my own campaign. I'll definitely consider running a 4e Realms campaign, though, whereas I'm not so keen on a 3.5 one.
