My conceits vs 4e conceits

After posting this the other day, I thought I'd see how they align with my own setting conceits.  I agree with most of them, but not all of them.  The originals are from Wizards Presents Worlds and Monsters.

The World Is More Fantastic: D&D cultures should blend real-world cultures and fantastic elements, not merely elements of medieval and Renaissance Europe. It’s okay for D&D environments to have no realistic analog. 

While this is technically true, especially with stuff like my Baal Hamazi and Kurushat regions, I actually prefer a more familiar feel.  It gives players (and readers, if we're talking about fiction) something familiar to anchor themselves to before you start getting into the fantastic elements.

The World Is Ancient: Empires rise and empires crumble, leaving few places that have not been touched by their grandeur. Ruin, time, and natural forces eventually claim all, leaving the D&D world rich with places of adventure and mystery. Ancient civilizations and their knowledge survive in legends, magic items, and the ruins they left behind, but chaos and darkness inevitably follow an empire’s collapse. Each new realm must carve its own place out of the world rather than build on the efforts of past civilizations. 

Yes.  I like everything about this idea.  Everything.

The World Is Mysterious: Wild, uncontrolled regions abound and cover most of the world. City-states of various races dot the darkness, bastions in the wilderness and amid the ruins of the past. Some of these settlements are “points of light” where adventurers can expect peaceful relations, but many more are dangerous. No one race lords over the world, and vast kingdoms are rare. People know the area they live in well, and they’ve heard stories of other places from merchants and travelers, but few really understand what’s beyond the mountains or in the depth of the great forest unless they’ve been there personally. 

This is another one that I'd independently come around to the same idea before the SCRAMJET team articulated it more clearly than I had.  I agree completely.

Monsters Exist All Over: Most monsters of the world are as natural as bears or horses are on Earth, and monsters are everywhere, both in civilized sections and in the wilderness. Griffon riders patrol the skies over dwarf cities, behemoth beasts carry merchants’ goods long distances, yuan-ti have an empire a few hundred miles from a human kingdom, and efreet in their City of Brass appear in the mountains suddenly like Brigadoon emerging from the mists. 

Yeah, here not so much.  Monsters are fundamentally unnatural.  Now, granted, some things that we consider monsters might be natural on a foreign, fantastic world, but by and large, monsters should be unique, set piece encounters, not a routine part of your daily commute to work.  I've expounded on this idea in the past, and made reference to it many times since; I really haven't changed my opinion at all since then.

Creatures Need a Place in the World: Creatures shouldn’t be introduced into a vacuum. Any monster or player character race we make in the game should occupy a unique space in the D&D world. We need to make sure that new creatures have a new and compelling role in the world, in addition to an interesting mechanical purpose. 

I'm actually not sure that this is relevant to me.  I don't have to deal with a vast catalog of D&Disms, which is what the SCRAMJET team was specifically trying to prune into something more useful, so I don't have to make hard decisions about how much of a "unique space" a monster or race occupies before deciding to cut it or not.  That said; there's not much point in creating new monsters or races that are redundant either, so I guess I agree.  It just doesn't matter nearly as much to me.

Adventurers are Exceptional: The adventurers created by the players are the pioneers, explorers, trailblazers, thrill seekers, and heroes of the D&D world. Although some nonplayer characters might have a class and gain power, they do not necessarily advance as the PCs do, and they exist for a different purpose. Not everyone in the world gains levels like PCs. An NPC might be a veteran of many battles and still not become a 3rd-level fighter; an army of elves is largely made up of nonclassed soldiers. 

I don't know that this is relevant to me either.  I suppose it's true, but this was more a reaction against a design conceit of the mechanics of 3e than it is anything else, so I don't really care one way or another about this point.  I've always felt that the role NPCs and PCs play is different, so there's no reason to treat the setting like a simulation where everybody has to follow the same mechanical rules.  NPCs and monsters are what I need them to be to be fun for the game; nothing more and nothing less.

Magic Is not Everyday, but it Is Natural: No one is superstitious about magic, but neither is the use of magic trivial. Practitioners of magic are as rare as classed fighters. Magic should never cross over into the silly or replicate modern conveniences: We don’t want “magitech” such as arcane elevators and air conditioners, or flying sea serpents to put out fires. At the same time, we don’t want a real-world medieval fear of magic that gets wizards burned at the stake. There might be minor magic that is relatively commonplace; for example, a wealthy farmer might have a magically sharpened plow, but not an animated combine. People might see evidence of magic almost every day, but it’s usually quite minor—a fantastic monster, a visibly answered prayer, a wizard flying by on a griffon—but powerful and experienced practitioners of magic are far from everyday. 

While this makes perfect sense for D&D, it's not the direction I'm going, because I've been for many, many years in a kind of dark fantasy horror hybrid mode with my preferred settings.  Magic is fundamentally unnatural, and although the PCs are more exposed to it than most, it's not even close to everyday.   I see the PCs as more like Mulder and Scully (from the X-files) or Sam and Dean (from Supernatural); they are among the few who understand the threat that the supernatural brings and they deal with it more than most, but that's part of what makes them unique rather than it being a setting conceit that magic is somewhat ubiquitous.  Another good example would be the YA series The Spook's Apprentice or the Jim Butcher series The Dresden Files.  It posits that the world is much as we know it, especially to the perception of most people, but the PCs inhabit a kind of secret world on top of the world as we know it where magic and the supernatural are much more common, albeit still dangerous and unnatural, and it's part of the PCs job to keep this secret world from spilling out and disrupting the normal world.

I do admit, though, that that's a personal conceit of mine and my settings that wouldn't be relevant to most standard D&D-like settings, nor should it be.

“Good” and “Evil” Mean More: Being aligned toward good means being a champion who actively fights for what is right, not merely someone who supports such ideals. Being good is a defense against evil, never a vulnerability to evil. Likewise, evil is more than just bad thoughts. Most average people aren’t aligned one way or the other. You can’t use magic to know whether or not a creature is evil or good: You must judge it by its actions or know its nature (demons, for example, are always evil). 

This was justification for the changes that they made to alignment.  It means less in most respects to me, because there's no such thing as alignment in my game already.  But it also means even more, because it's not a team jersey; you're good by your actions, not by your alignment, etc.  Anyway, that's not a relevant concern to me either.

Remote Gods: Gods are largely distant and detached from the world (with some exceptions, particularly evil gods). Most don’t take an active part in worldly affairs, but they have exarchs and angels who act on their behalf. Gods can be encountered, fought, and killed (although some might be too powerful to challenge). They aren’t omniscient or omnipotent, but they do grant spells to clerics and hear the prayers of their faithful. 

I've actually made the decision (one that would have surprised me to think I'd have made a few years ago) that Christianity is the baseline for all of my settings from here on out.  It just reflects reality, and God is precisely as involved in the world as he actually is in the world.  I don't expect to see PCs praying for miracles and the Red Sea parting for them very often, just like such a thing happening in our world is unusual.  God is usually much more subtle and depends on us using our own God-given wits and talents to solve problems ourselves rather than stepping in and doing everything for us.

That said, there are also powerful non-human beings that bear a resemblance to creatures from Greek and Germanic myth, so while they're not worshiped and don't have churches or prophets or even oracles most of the time, our own pre-Christian pagan heritage has an analog of sorts in my settings.  I don't know how remote they are exactly, because they're not as powerful as gods in D&D sometimes are.  They're fightable, although winning against a "god" is unusual, to say the least.  For that matter, even interacting with one in any capacity is probably extremely rare.

One Sun, One Moon: The world assumes what will be most easily accepted by players without imposing unfamiliar calendars and phenomena. 

I don't see this as necessarily having to do with one sun and one moon and more to do with "let's not create esoteric setting details that players are expected to figure out, like complex monetary systems or calendars with month, day and week names that don't mean anything to anybody in the real world, because that's not fun, it's tedious."  In that respect, I agree completely.  That doesn't mean that there needs to literally just be one moon, though.

No Forced Race Relations: The settlements of the PC races are usually points of light but aren’t necessarily goodaligned. They are places where people can share shelter from the dangers of the wild wide world. There is no inherent racial enmity between PC races, and hostile attitudes do not generally go beyond fear or lack of respect. 

This is another one that requires some context.  For instance, both elves and dwarves are playable races in D&D, but as a nod to Tolkien-influenced setting design, elves and dwarves rarely actually get along.  This means that you have to either simply ignore that aspect of the race relations when it comes to your characters, or have all kinds of tedious interactions that maybe you're interested in and maybe you're not.  In other words, this is a concession to making the "typical" D&D party more playable without causing meta-issues in game about relationships between races.  It's not something that I particularly care about, but I can see where they're coming from.  I wouldn't go nearly as far as they did to create en environment that removes the need to solve a problem that's rather easily solved or ignored by every GM since the history of the game started, though.

Death Matters Differently: It’s generally harder to die than in previous editions, particularly at low level. When a heroic-tier player character dies, the player creates a new character. A paragon PC can come back from the dead at a significant cost. For epic-tier characters, death is a speed bump. Being raised from the dead is available only to heroes, and it’s more than just a spell and a financial transaction. NPCs, both good and evil, don’t normally come back to life unless the DM has a good reason. Monsters and NPCs shouldn’t use the same rules for death as PCs. When they’re down, they’re out—PCs don’t have to slit every monster’s throat after the battle and burn the corpses (except maybe for trolls). 

This isn't really a fluff consideration, it's a legacy mechanics consideration.  Again, not actually playing D&D per se means that it's probably not even relevant to me at all.  D&D style resurrection and how it fits into the setting is only a concern in actual D&D for the most part.

Fantastic Locations: D&D adventures should take place in fantastic settings—no more 10-by-10 rooms with two orcs. Encounters should occur in areas with interesting threats—from encounter traps that activate every round to hazards that were formerly considered monsters, such as assassin vines or gray ooze. 

I tend to agree, although I'd be a little careful about making everything gratuitously fantastical to the point where it starts to become absurd.

Less Evil Fighting Evil: Too much in previous editions deals with evil fighting itself: Demon lords and archdevils war on each other rather than threatening the PCs. We don’t want to waste space on things players can’t use. Make sure conflicts are important and useful to making the game fun.

There's no reason all that can't be fun, but that has to do with a trend that started way back in 2e and just watered down villains until they were silly.  I suspect that had much less relevance or importance to most peoples' actual gaming table than it did to writers and developers.