Feel free Tobin.

Clev, yes I can and have.

Code, you left out invulnerable to infection, pathogens and toxins. Hence all the bizarre surgery with the plumber's tape and screws for skull fractures.

Orc's don't like cold. They will gripe about it well before a human will, but will survive conditions that would kill a human. Heat they tolerate very well.

Jason (!) sorry for any confusion. I wasn't lecturing on Tolkien's work. Just my own gaming world. You CAN run into wimpy, short lived Orcs.

Now because I was validated by the Spell Jammer rules of (physical) interplantary travel in allowing my world to be as large as it is, I don't mind talking about it. All bodys have one gravity of gravitation if it is beyond the range of the larger body's gravity. Then the physically larger dominates. This allows open vessels to pull a bubble of air with them when they leave a world.

A galleon can keep its crew alive for about 2 months on just the air it pulls off on its initial departure. (I won't go into propulsion methods) It will pull a bubble of air twice the width of its longest axis.

So the system (Crystal Sphere) has twelve worlds, lots of moons, a smoke ring, nurmerous rocky bodes and swarms of same, interplanatary life forms similar to both planktonic and nektonic deep sea creatures, on a grander scale. Going from world to world in-system can be a lot like sailing to Hawaii in a ship an inch long. Nothing in particular says you can't make it, its just a little creepy on the way.

Now races get interesting too.

A portal from somewhere else doesn't always open into "now".

Combined with the size of the place (always called "D&D World" not "GreyHawk" or that other place that starts with the RHY something) you get a lot of isolation and speciation.

You basically try to learn the rules of the place you are adventuring in.

"D&D World" is disk shaped, (boy, I'm glad I caught that particular typo) with a surface area of 200 Earths in the Northern Hemisphere alone. (Where all the player characters live.) Disk shaped so you can have an edge of the world. Both aquatic and terrestrial. Guys who aquired a lot of gear and levels try to make the overland passage through the demon haunted deserts of Yondo to peek over the edge and gather the ledendary Black Sand from the very edge. Made of the ashes of stars. Laws of chance and physics aren't nice there. Yes, all the air molecules CAN go "over there". Wandering vacuums are on the encounter tables. Along with both extremes of temperature and variations in the length of night and day.

The Kara-Tur on my world is the largest mono-bloc of humans in the Multi-verse. With a population of 40 billion. (Elaborately rolled for I might add! It just got that way all by itself. So I ran with it.)The rulers and nobilty actually have divine blood in their lines. This allows them to wisely manage such a group.

Some places are heavily cantonized with certain "realities" hidden from the populace so they can do there jobs better. Some adventures involve "Matrix" like awakings. Or sometimes the players are goverment agents in pursuit of something fantastic trespassing into a no-weird zone. (A couple of times THEY were the trespassers)

Magic.
You don't need a special gene. It's just "hard". Learning a spell is like learning C++. You have to apply yourself. And have a good book.

Spells can be cast off the "ready rack" or on the fly. On the fly casting is usually 35% base chance plus 10% per level difference between you and the spell you're hucking. Thus a 5th level wizard can cast a 3rd level fireball with a 55% probability of success. Spells stored in the ready rack are considered already successfully cast.

The balance is I'm really stingy with my spells and experience points.

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In your rush to call everyone "entrenched" or closed-minded or "limited" you fail to note that the "limit" here has a very natural boundary: that point at which the evidence stops. - JayUtah

Science fiction was never meant to be an educational tool. - Editor Amazing Tales