Suspension of Disbelief

There was a moment when suspension of disbelief failed for our group while running through D&D module B4 The Lost City. The party reached the level below the undead infested tombs and found some ogres milling around in a storage room. The players questioned how the ogres - as living creatures - came from and how they survived in a ziggurat in the middle of a desert.

It was a reasonable question.

"I don't know. I didn't write the module." I replied.

Maybe throwing Tom Moldvay under the bus wasn't the most gracious move, but he should have provided an answer in the module if he didn't want to catch the blame. D&D adventure design when B4 The Lost City came out was centered around the dungeon as a series of entertaining challenges for the players. Notions of how these spaces might exist as plausible environments within the game setting weren't a consideration.

Yet.

The pendulum swung the other way later. Games emphasized the unchallenged assumptions of their designers. The word "realism" got waved around like a banner. Things that made the artificial nature of games and their settings caught unkind criticisms.

But the truth of it is: Game mechanics are always as obvious as the books and dice sitting on the table. And fictional settings only hold up to so much scrutiny.

That said...

There really should be a reason why ogres are hanging around a storage room in a ziggurat in the middle of desert.