Because-Dragons Is a Bad Argument

Is this a hot take?

In the D&D discourse, you'll see a common piece of rhetoric, and it goes like this. DM Alice says, "I don't want to allow X in my games; I think it's unreasonable". And DM Bob calls out Alice like this:

Alice says that she doesn't permit X in her games. But Alice accepts Dragons in her game! So that doesn't make any sense!

I call this the "because-dragons" argument. The next most common variant of this argument is, of course, "because-fireballs".

Here's the thing: The space where this argument usually plays out is in the field of features that a player character can opt to start out with. And, to put it briefly, there's lots of stuff in my fantasy world that I would not want players to have on their side at first level.

I'm not even essentially talking about power issues (although that can be a big factor). I'm talking about the background texture of the milieu where player-characters come from. The classic D&D that I fell in love with -- like the pulp fantasy and horror that inspired it -- is well-described by something like Joseph Campbell's theory of the hero's journey: 

Note that there's a key separation in the structure between the "Known" world -- the place the hero starts at -- and the "Unknown" world -- the challenging region they travel into, before returning to their initial home.

Whether you're playing this as modern mythology, fable-making, or horror (especially that: and recall that HPL is foremost among the Appendix N authors), the most compelling dynamic is that of player characters coming from a (mostly) completely mundane place, and adventuring into a space of unimaginable terrors. By having the "Known" world rooted in reality, we get to comment on things that might be connected to our own world. We get to explore transformations that may reflect possibilities for the players themselves. We can practice how a normal-person can best respond to scary challenges or setbacks. We can use the liminal space between normal and abnormal to test the boundaries of what it means to be people like us. And casual players can more easily interface with how our games start and begin playing with us, too. 

There's a pulp-fantasy gesture I'm very fond of in which the narrator, the normal-human population, and even the protagonists themselves, are essentially skeptical, and disbelieve that supernatural events are occurring around them. There's a nifty play there about whether that fantastic stuff is even real (and of course: it simultaneously is, in the fiction, and it is not, in the real world). The real magic is indeed "Unknown", maybe constitutionally incomprehensible, to the normal-folk from which PCs originate.

Simply put -- Dragons don't belong in the starting "Known" part of the story. This model of the monomyth only makes sense if they are cordoned off in the "Unknown" part of the world. Same goes for Fireballs. And a whole lot of other stuff in the game. The hero does not get to start with that stuff. It would dismantle the meaning of their hero's journey if they did.

I mean, obviously you can play a totally "wahoo" anything-goes-out-of-the-box game if you want. But that's not where the game originates, it's at odds with the most compelling model of the monomyth, and it's simply not for all (or I'd argue most) players.

So it's not inherently incoherent to say there's a "Known" world of mundane things where PCs are born, and an "Unknown" world of fantastic magic and terrors which is separate from that. In fact, it's arguably the strongest structure for fantastic storytelling.

And therefore the "because-dragons" argument (particularly in terms of the what-can-PCs-start-with-in-my-game question) is an epic failure.

(See also H.G. Wells: Nothing remains interesting if anything can happen.)