The Gaming Den

I don't post often but this discussion led me to some serious thought. I believe that you can have a POL-type game AND have agriculture/villages/etc. without resulting to tyrants.

Let me offer a conversion of an old 3.5 city from one of my campaigns converted to a POL-style village.

Riverbend is situated - oddly enough - in the bend of a river. Once a thriving trade center the war took it's toll and now it is little more than a farming village. The old stone city buildings have been torn down and reformed over the years into defensive walls.

Even the oldest elders have not seen a dwarf in their life - despite a former dwarf settlement in the mountains to the south along the river. Few have seen the halfling boat traders - the last came through 50 years ago. The crossroads northwest of town still exhibit a shrine to Fharlanghn - a nearly vain hope to restore the town to its former glory.

The forest to the north and northeast once held an elven kingdom but the giant spiders, orcs and goblins have pushed them deep into the forest. These same forces make it dangerous to move about at night and few venture out without being in groups and only then to tend to fields. The orcs and goblins have reached an uneasy truce with the villagers over the years. They take a great deal of the crops and the villagers let them.

Only the crazy try to reach the mine known as Duskhaven to the east. It holds the remnants of those who once lived in the harbor town of Port Ann. Port Ann has become the home of a kraken and consequently humans avoid the area.

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I believe that I have offered an example that could serve in POL without destroying what we like about the rest of DnD.

Feel free to pick it apart as you see fit.

Absentminded_Wizard wrote:I'm seriously trying to figure out why people are so motivated to complain about "Points of Light." It's obviously a setting (or more accurately setting concept) for beginning GMs who want to run a simple campaign. It releases the DM from having to think about how the PCs' home base interacts with other kingdoms because there's nothing but monsters all around. Furthermore, the assumed history of the great war gives PCs a reason to want to kill all "monsters" on sight. It justifies every convenient trope in the history of the dungeon crawl, and that's its only purpose.

I can understand that a lot of people prefer to have their adventures in more nuanced settings. I just can't figure out why such people are fooling around with 4e enough to get offended at the default PoL concept.

Posts split the emphasize the irony.

People get especially uppity about PoL because it seems to reinforce the whole 'don't interact with the setting unless the DM says it's okay' malarky that 4E emphasizes.

It'd be like trying to be a genuine hero in the WH40K-verse. Even if you don't get brutally killed, there's nothing actually to fight for. Now that works fine for that setting, but 4E D&D advertises itself as being a larger-than-life setting where you perform great acts of heroism. But you don't actually perform great acts of heroism because what you ultimately do is meaningless.

When you clear out a dungeon in such a campaign or destroy an orc fortress in PoL, it doesn't actually mean anything. No one is going to be affected by your achievement and in a couple of months a pack of displacer beasts are just going to move in anyway.

I think that's needlessly reductive. It DOES take that ability out of the player's hands and makes it rely solely on GM fiat (this is of course bad) but given that most things non-combat in 4e are Magic Tea Party, if the displacer beasts come then your GM is a dick more than 4e encourages that kind of thing.

I imagine that turning a PoL setting into something a little more positive would be the point of a 4e campaign.

I find the over analysis of the points of light setting to be almost comical.

The idea is straight out of fairy tales.

The black forest was at one time a natural barrier, the setting for many scary stories, and a place that was basically lawless. Germania and the black forest was so rugged that even the Romans couldn't really get it subdued. They decided it was not worth the effort after losing more than 1 legion to place. The woods little red ridding hood is going into? THAT is the european view of the black forest. The woods with the foul swamp the Beowulf takes all Heorthgar's fighting men into to look for Grendals mom is the black forest. The black forest is the genesis of the points of light campaign.

People lived in and around the black forest until industrialization turned it into a tiny little park. There is a reason why wolves and bears are the bad guys in a lot of european folklore. People lived basically right on top of these dangers.

The idea is not somehow that the world is so dangerous that argiculture can't even exist. Its that even the forest right next to the town is filled with stuff that makes for adventure.

The idea was to try and turn homlett from temple of elemental evil into dreary main from a Stephen King novel. Gee it looks like the town elders accidentally built the village over the old Githyanki graveyard and now their ghosts demand the eldest son of each family and the left eye of each vistor. The idea is that the town can be a days ride from the swamp where the adventure is and only the crazy old hermit knows anything about it because the polite folks just don't think about that.

Its not supposed to be this statement about socio-economics, the path to industrialization and the plight of the working man. Its supposed to make everywhere a place where adventure can be.

souran wrote:Its not supposed to be this statement about socio-economics, the path to industrialization and the plight of the working man. Its supposed to make everywhere a place where adventure can be.

If you think you need this PoL to have adventures "everywhere" you must have missed, oh, 99,9% of our action movies, thrillers, novels, and most RPGs.

Or your definition of "adventure" is limited to killing stuff in a 20 by 20 foot underground chamber.

Your getting backwards.

Points of light is trying to say that the world is LIKE 99.9% of movies, thrillers, novels, and most comptuer rpgs. And NOT like the real world.

Now then to say that that my defination of advenuture is limited to one thing is also completely stupid because the whole point of my post is that POL is saying "adventures happen everywhere"


Finally, considering that POL is all fluff and no crunch its little more than an idea of how a campaign could be structured I don't see why it causes such an uproar over anything.

Forgotten Realms and Ebberrron are as presented in the new books NOT points of light campaigns in most regions. On the other hand the Warhammer universe IS actually a points of light campaign. Stepping one foot out of middenhiem means you stepped into a dangerous world.

Personally, I prefer the Indiana method of campaigns where players go to various iconic areas to adventure and then those places basically cease to exist. I have no qualms about sending my players across the globe to find a map that tells them they need to go back to where they started.

Is this really a points of light game? I don't know, but I do know that without crunch POL has no responsibillities on anybody. I am not saying I think its a bad idea. Its fine if the world you want to run is the village of hommelt and the sourrounding area. It doesn't work for all campaigns but as a default for D&D is not really worse than the years of cannon built up for greyhawk.

No, PoL is saying "Oh, some sort of adventure happens everywhere - some limited sort of adventure".

I can have far more adventures in points of darkness - all the stuff from PoL, and then all the stuff that needs more civilization to be run.

Please explain how POL limits advenuters?

Please explain how POD makes all adventures cool and epic?

Provide 2 concrete examples. Explain why the adventures can't flip settings?


What makes good campaign worlds is good storywritting and dming. What makes bad campaigns is lazy dming and hack storywritting.

Terry Goodkind writes in a POD setting. His stories are still hackneyed crap. Jervis Johnson writes in a POL settings. His stories are also hackneyed crap.

Joe Abercrombie writes in a POL setting. His books roxor. Robert Jordan writes in a POD setting. Before he decided that he was writting the enclyapedia WOT his stuff was also kick ass.

The idea is not fail. It has been used to good effect before. This is bitching for the sake of bitching.

No, wait, the Black Forest is a shit example of PoL. When you talk about the Romans and the Black Forest in terms of PoL you ignore the fact that the Romans had a large empire within which they could freely travel with little to no danger, and there are relatively small areas in it such as the Black Forest where there was lots of danger. When you talk about large continent spanning points of light they are no longer points of light.

It actually sounds more like a Points of Darkness setting.

What about the you know germans living in the black forest. It was still immenslly dangerous for them.

Also, for how large the roman empire was it basically was a single point of light surrounded by a lot of darkness from the Roman perspective.

Additionally, even the roman interior was not free of banditry nor was it easy to travel one end of the empire to another. That was the reason for stationing legions around everywhere. Remember that cities built up around the protection offered by the stablizing force of Rome. Before that the iberian penensula, gaelic france, even the greek citystates where all points of light in a world that was dangerous outside the city walls.

Hell, it turned out that maintaining that much light required you constantly fight the darkness and when that stopped the whole empire collapsed.

Also, see the dark ages. People in France and Germany would not have said that the world had only a few 'ponits of darkness"


Again, look the POL campaign idea is not new. The warhammer world is a POL campaign setting. Its been going for 30 years.

souran wrote:Please explain how POL limits advenuters?

Please explain how POD makes all adventures cool and epic?

Provide 2 concrete examples. Explain why the adventures can't flip settings?

Uh, why? It's self-evident.

If I want to have an adventure centered on a dark, evil forest, I can run that in both settings, since both have such places.

If I want to have an adventure centered on a struggle between two trading houses in an empire, with lots of intrigue, over trading routes and political influence, then I cannot do that without an Empire.

And PoL means no Empire.

An Empire can have dark forests in it, or at its edges. But a world being a dark forest cannot have an Empire connecting all those PoL, and cannot have large swaths of civilisation controlling lands. Or it would not be PoL anymore.

And PoL means no Empire.

Since when? An empire would be a point of light. The size of the invidual point of light is irrelevant. Also, why couldn't the story about two trading houses happen in any point of light?

POL still has large cities. Kingdoms, and yes even Empires. In POL one of the things that makes merchants rich is the fact that most people are not willing to be without signifcant protection for that long.

But honestly, any POL can be the place where your "two guilds/trading companies/houses of verona" takes place.

But again, as POL is just a group of ideas to make a simple default setting for D&D to be played and your advenuture sounds like your players are going to be more involved in the backstory of your world. Therefore yeah a world that is has a different basis than points of light might work better for your game. This does not make POL inferior or stupid or crappy. It means you probably should uses different ideas than POL.

When you want to run a Stephen king type world where the children sneak out of the village at night and are met by Randal Flagg who tells them they need to bring him the hearts of their parents so he can descrate the fairy ring a days ride from the town then you want POL.


By the way I hope you have more success with that than I ever did. I never have found players that were willing to get that invested in the world except when I ran F.R. or Dragonlance and then there was one guy [actually the same guy for both games] who read the shit dnd novels and kept telling me I was presenting the world wrong.

There we disagree. PoL, for me, is the villages and small towns isolated by monsters that need to be killed by the PCs.

Anything that has kingdoms, empires, and generally civilization not reduced to isolated settlements is, in my opinion, not PoL anymore.

Points of Light is designed for campaign worlds like red hand of doom or return to the temple of elemental evil.

A few small towns on the wilderness. Bounded by harsh terrain. No easy access to what remants of easy comfort civilizations might still exist.

The players might travel to the astral see but they never leave the vale of hommlet in the material plane.

Is it great for all campaigns. Deffiantly not. However its not like the idea is somehow impossible or unworkable.

I think its real problem is that it doesn't particularly lend itself to describing a whole world. Honestly, POL isn't really useful for looking at the whole forgotten realms. However the dales, maybe sembia + thay

It does work pretty well for just running a bunch of premade adventures. Either from dragon or purchased ones.

Again, without crunch its just a group of ideas that either work or don't work for your game. To get pissed off about it is silly.

I think that a good example of the PoL vs PoD difference is sadly, most fantasy Larps.

They're usually "towns"; monsters seem to go -to- these towns, all the damned time.

It's fucking -bizarre- as all hell, but that's the way it is.

Everything outside is potentially dangerous. You can travel; but it takes time, and you better be an adventurer, or five.

Most games resolve this by setting the nearest "empires" or "kingdoms" several hundred kilometres away; the empire won't very well send troops into the "wilderness" where a town is, can it?

On the other hand, if said towns literally have several alchemists that can instantly kill undead of any size; or magic-users that can just kill normal monsters in one shot; or you have fighters who can go toe-to-toe with massive golems or insects the size of ogres, then it really doesn't matter if giant monsters are in the wilderness. Does it?

Afterall, the adventure comes -to- the town at that point.

4e DMG, p. 150 under "The World Is Mysterious" wrote:
City-states of various races dot the darkness, bastions
in the wilderness built amid the ruins of the past.
Some of these settlements are “points of light” where
adventurers can expect peaceful interaction with the
inhabitants, but many more are dangerous. No one
race lords over the world, and vast kingdoms are rare.

Rare, not nonexistent. Now, PoL still limits campaigns dealing with the wars between neighboring kingdoms, because two large kingdoms next to each other smack of PoD. However, one kingdom doesn't inhernently violate the concept as defined by WotC.

Would Mouse Guard be points of light?

There are some mouse cities, but they need knights to escort mice from some cities to the next sometimes, and there are dangers of the weather, owls, wolves and such whenever they leave their cities.

souran wrote:
Since when? An empire would be a point of light. The size of the invidual point of light is irrelevant. Also, why couldn't the story about two trading houses happen in any point of light?

POL still has large cities. Kingdoms, and yes even Empires. In POL one of the things that makes merchants rich is the fact that most people are not willing to be without signifcant protection for that long.

The objective size of the realm of safety doesn't mean jack shit. Otherwise you might as well claim that all campaigns are points of darkness because the rest of the universe only has dotted settlements in vast stretches of danger, if that, and all campaigns exist somewhere in the universe.

What matters is the actual size of the world that you adventure in. If your heroes spend all of their time in the territory where the Imperial Hateguard then it doesn't matter what the rest of the world looks like, does it?

Thymos wrote:Would Mouse Guard be points of light?

There are some mouse cities, but they need knights to escort mice from some cities to the next sometimes, and there are dangers of the weather, owls, wolves and such whenever they leave their cities.

Yes, Mouse Guard is a perfect example of a Points of Light setting.

And even though it's a damn good comic, we can already see some of the weaknesses in it already. There biggest problem is that there isn't actually anything for Saxon/Kenzie/Lieam to do outside of missions. Everything is in the moment and once the latest objective is solved that's the end of everything.

Now that works fine for that comic since the tasks in that setting just happen to be the same tasks that the characters want to do. But it's completely inappropriate for a diverse campaign world. If they're not getting missions from Gwendolyn, what things is there for them to actually accomplish? The Mouse Guard RPG works in its way because the game is very upfront about what they want you to accomplish and how tasks are done. But if you want to go off of the rails then the setting breaks down.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

Absentminded_Wizard wrote:I'm seriously trying to figure out why people are so motivated to complain about "Points of Light." It's obviously a setting (or more accurately setting concept) for beginning GMs who want to run a simple campaign. It releases the DM from having to think about how the PCs' home base interacts with other kingdoms because there's nothing but monsters all around. Furthermore, the assumed history of the great war gives PCs a reason to want to kill all "monsters" on sight. It justifies every convenient trope in the history of the dungeon crawl, and that's its only purpose.

I can understand that a lot of people prefer to have their adventures in more nuanced settings. I just can't figure out why such people are fooling around with 4e enough to get offended at the default PoL concept.

Posts split the emphasize the irony.

People get especially uppity about PoL because it seems to reinforce the whole 'don't interact with the setting unless the DM says it's okay' malarky that 4E emphasizes.

It'd be like trying to be a genuine hero in the WH40K-verse. Even if you don't get brutally killed, there's nothing actually to fight for. Now that works fine for that setting, but 4E D&D advertises itself as being a larger-than-life setting where you perform great acts of heroism. But you don't actually perform great acts of heroism because what you ultimately do is meaningless.

When you clear out a dungeon in such a campaign or destroy an orc fortress in PoL, it doesn't actually mean anything. No one is going to be affected by your achievement and in a couple of months a pack of displacer beasts are just going to move in anyway.

Obviously you don't throw many starfish back into the ocean, then.

But a bit more seriously, I think it actually in many ways INCREASES your contribution to the setting. When you're dealing with kingdoms and armies of a hundred thousand men, a hero is small beside that. But when you're dealing with towns and villages, in a small little area, that makes your contributions all the more significant.

Plus, if you clear out an area, then you've made something which wasn't really there before.

PoL is an OK starting point. The second thing the PCs will want to do (after surviving) is to expand the safe area though, so there needs to be a reasonable means of doing this - which largely depends on the GM not the system I think.

The fact that 10th level 4e monsters can slaughter an effectively unlimited number of town guards can be a verisimilitude problem, but the same problem exists in 3e. And 2e. And AD&D 1st edition ...

Orca wrote:The second thing the PCs will want to do (after surviving) is to expand the safe area though

I want to have some sort of business with classed people at every level. 4e only has the A&A dealer who sells me random stuff at inflated prices and the potion guy who sells potions of increase attribute which I hoard until such time that my corresponding stats max out.

Once you actually have classed people, PoL transforms into PoD over time. It doesn't mean you can't have an awesome campaign about this, but the campaign will be definitely one-shot and most likely on rails.

Characters in Midnight AI can't go whenever they want and do just anything because they are KOS everywhere except the few designated "this looks like a safe place to rest" areas, and when they win Izrador is dead and the good gods are happily dancing in circles. This compared to characters in Dark Sun who can go anywhere on the map, and the big cities aren't exactly on friendly terms, you fuck up in Draj and go to Nibenay, no problem.

Once you actually have classed people, PoL transforms into PoD over time. It doesn't mean you can't have an awesome campaign about this, but the campaign will be definitely one-shot and most likely on rails.

It only transforms if the players are successful and the forces of darkness are fleeting.

Whether or not players can affect the world depends more on scale than PoL or PoD I believe.

40k's problem with players not meaning anything is because the scale is so huge they can't mean anything by themselves. It has little to do with PoL or PoD.

Lago wrote:Now that works fine for that comic since the tasks in that setting just happen to be the same tasks that the characters want to do. But it's completely inappropriate for a diverse campaign world. If they're not getting missions from Gwendolyn, what things is there for them to actually accomplish? The Mouse Guard RPG works in its way because the game is very upfront about what they want you to accomplish and how tasks are done. But if you want to go off of the rails then the setting breaks down.

The Mouseguard rules work primarily because it is aimed at young players and convention games. Your characters don't get up in the morning and do whatever, they just have a mission and fairly linearly complete it. With bravery.

Yeah, I can't rally imagine wanting to play a long campaign of Mouseguard. Lke Feng Shui it's really set up to do awesome one-shots.

-Username17

The Mouseguard rules work primarily because it is aimed at young players and convention games. Your characters don't get up in the morning and do whatever, they just have a mission and fairly linearly complete it. With bravery.

Yeah, I can't rally imagine wanting to play a long campaign of Mouseguard. Lke Feng Shui it's really set up to do awesome one-shots.

-Username17

Hey, get your ass back here, Frank!

Aren't you going to do a review of the system? I have a couple of offline people who are dying to hear your thoughts on the whole thing.