D&D is a game. It can be just the starting point for making your own, perhaps quite different game. You are explicitly encouraged to do so: "The best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way!"
By the same token, it seems untenable to knock folks for playing the game as it was designed to be played.
Heroism has nothing intrinsically to do with D&D. The reason it includes no player "wish lists" for magic items is that uncertainty is part of the game (as are such probabilities as the rarity of enchanted arms usable by clerics). It's a matter neither of literary theory nor of "realism" but of game design.
Likewise, it is beside the point that at some point the referee must make decisions about the environment. Taking it for granted, how does it follow (as has time and again been suggested) that the referee's decisions must be to make every situation conform to some notion of what's "appropriate" for the PCs? I does not follow; that is a value judgment to be derived from other predicates -- certainly not from Arneson and Gygax!
Verisimilitude can be appreciated as aesthetic, but its primary function is to provide a reasonable basis by which players can address the limited-information aspect of the game. Again, that is not a matter of ensuring that every player in every situation is able to make a well-informed choice.
It is a game of probabilities, not certainties. In the long run, skilled play results on average in fewer character casualties. One can derive from the books a broad sense of the level of difficulty the designers had in mind, but the number of variables prohibits precise evaluation.
There's no reason one need like that, any more than it is incumbent on anyone to like Chess or Backgammon. It happens simply to be the way the game was intended to be.
By the same token, it seems untenable to knock folks for playing the game as it was designed to be played.
Heroism has nothing intrinsically to do with D&D. The reason it includes no player "wish lists" for magic items is that uncertainty is part of the game (as are such probabilities as the rarity of enchanted arms usable by clerics). It's a matter neither of literary theory nor of "realism" but of game design.
Likewise, it is beside the point that at some point the referee must make decisions about the environment. Taking it for granted, how does it follow (as has time and again been suggested) that the referee's decisions must be to make every situation conform to some notion of what's "appropriate" for the PCs? I does not follow; that is a value judgment to be derived from other predicates -- certainly not from Arneson and Gygax!
"In most instances" (as opposed to "all" or "no" instances) is key, and is to be taken in the full context. "A reasonable chance for survival" is a consideration not spot-by-spot on the map, or relative to a particular character, but in the milieu as a whole.
Verisimilitude can be appreciated as aesthetic, but its primary function is to provide a reasonable basis by which players can address the limited-information aspect of the game. Again, that is not a matter of ensuring that every player in every situation is able to make a well-informed choice.
It is a game of probabilities, not certainties. In the long run, skilled play results on average in fewer character casualties. One can derive from the books a broad sense of the level of difficulty the designers had in mind, but the number of variables prohibits precise evaluation.
There's no reason one need like that, any more than it is incumbent on anyone to like Chess or Backgammon. It happens simply to be the way the game was intended to be.
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