Changing the "Caster beats Mundane" paradigm [Archive] - Page 6

PhoenixPhyre

2017-12-25, 11:46 AM

It also applies to other editions of D&D (except maybe 4th), just to a much lesser extent.

I'll leave pre-3e editions to someone better qualified, but here are my impressions of 4e and 5e:

4e: Category error. There are no mundane classes. Even the Martial Power Source classes are explicitly supernatural in character. Out of combat utility (mostly rituals) is accessible to everyone.

5e: Strongly campaign/setting dependent. Under most cases, everyone's useful at all levels. In fact, you have to go out of your way to build a useless character. What power differences exist (and they do) are small enough that natural table variation swamps them. Oh, and there are very few "mundane" sub-classes (since every class has access to at least one explicitly magical subclass):

Frenzy barbarian (has a QoL issue with frenzy, but mechanically quite good if you have a workaround)
Champion Fighter (mechanically pretty solid, people find it boring)
Battlemaster Fighter (one of the best subclasses mechanically. Lots of utility.)
Thief rogue (tied for best of the PHB rogue subclasses with Arcane Trickster. Drips with utility.)
Assassin rogue (lacks in practice, but not in theory. Sometimes hard to get the big combat benefit, but has great potential for social/infiltration)

That's it (for the PHB subclasses). Everyone else either has magic (spells) or is magic. And anyone (if feats are allowed) can take ritual caster or magic initiate and cast spells.

That is, 5e mostly obliterated the distinction--everybody's fantastical, just each in their own way.

I think one source of the whole problem is the a-textual assumption that fighter == no magic. That's an outside assumption, not a system assumption as far as I can tell.

Cosi

2017-12-25, 12:00 PM

Magic, by its definition, is not science.

Again, yes and no. Obviously scientists don't study magic. But they would if it existed. Remember that Isaac Newton, the same guy who invented calculus and Newtonian mechanics spent time later in life studying alchemy. It happens that those experiments didn't work out, and we remember him for his work with physics, but there was no way of knowing in advance that they wouldn't. If they had, we would consider alchemy a field of science. I don't see why we wouldn't consider whatever kind of "magic" we might encounter the same way.

Magic is not science, it's imagination. We really shouldn't need degrees in chem and physics to play a game. So suspending physics should be no problem. And if something in the rules breaks physics? Well, magic.
Right?

Sure. I'm not suggesting that we need to know the physics explanations for magic. We don't know the exact mechanics of swinging swords, picking locks, or whatever else people do, and everyone agrees those things are governed by physical laws. My objection is just to the notion that those phenomena are somehow physically unexplainable, when that is pretty close to axiomatically impossible.

"when you combine bat guano and sulfur, it creates energy in the form of a fireball"

This is actually a really bad example, because the original idea of spell components was that you were actually creating whatever the magical effect was with something like modern chemistry and physics, then using slight of hand (guano and sulfur contain chemicals used it some kind of explosive). The idea was and is somewhat tongue in cheek, but it's absolutely there.

or, in other words, break the rules.

Not at all. Does it break the rules that silicon, metal, and plastic show images from the other side of the world when arranged into a television, and not when arranged other ways? Does it break the rules that combining the right materials in the right ways can make explosives in the form of grenades or gunpowder? Does it break the rules that meditating can change your heart rate and reduce stress? I would say it obviously doesn't. There's no reason it suddenly would if those effects were more dramatic or operated via mechanisms we don't (yet) understand.

What? Every good 3.5 setting needs to account for Pun-Pun levels of optimization then? No.

No, there shouldn't be Pun-Pun levels of optimization. But every setting should account for the levels of optimization the game does support. I'm not, generally, speaking about 3e specifically. I'm talking about how the game should behave, not how it does behave.

It's rather telling that when people say "caster beats mundane" what they really mean is "D&D 3.X Wizard beats D&D 3.X Fighter".

You're on a forum for a 3e webcomic, where the most searched topics (which seems like a reasonable indicator of interest) are "3.5", "3.5e", and "Pathfinder". That is, assuming size means frequency as it usually does. It would not be unreasonable to expect that 3e would dominate any discussion that it was not explicitly excluded from. I think you need to do more work than this drive-by intimation to demonstrate the point you are trying to make.

Tanarii

2017-12-25, 12:26 PM

It also applies to other editions of D&D (except maybe 4th), just to a much lesser extent.
Not really. Pre-3e, it required house-rules ignoring many of the restrictions on memorizing and casting for it to become an issue. And 5e they toned it down a ton. Unless (for all editions) the DM allows a 5 minute work day on the regular, then it's on the DM.

It's pretty much a 3.X issue, that many 3.X players assume is universal.

ImNotTrevor

2017-12-25, 12:34 PM

That's exactly how he defined it. He wants magic to mean "breaking the laws of physics".
Yes. That's a perfectly reasonable way to describe the thing magic is doing, so long as you don't go on to purposefully be as pedantic as possible.

Which is apparently asking a lot?

(The irony is that adter this post you seem to move away from this highly pedantic string, making me think this is especially on-purpose for a few posters as a kind of intellectual flexing or something? Very impressive.)

Since physics is our model of how the universe behaves, "breaking" it necessarily means doing something outside that model, which would be something you can't do because the model is (notionally) a full model of the universe*.
You were doing great until you decided to not just take the phrase for what it, you know, is intended to mean. Like if I said "it's raining cats and dogs" and you called me an idiot because it's raining water.

Sure, someone IS failing to understand basic english in this equation. But it ain't who you think it is.

Honestly, there are a lot of definitions that do what he apparently wants. You could have an aesthetic definition where "mundane" characters did things that were "muscle-y" or "brain-y" and magical characters did things that were "ritual-y" and "eldritch-y". But that definition would be talking about a different issue, so you would end up with even worse Wittgenstein-esque problems than we have already.
His definition works fine when you don't go out of your way to misread it.

It's interesting how you think "go some place with different laws of physics" represents "breaking the laws of physics".
Please please practice your reading.

The argument made was that things that fit within Physics Framework a setting and That Which Messes Up the Framework can coexist and be different.

You said this is impossible.

I disproved it.

And "reality responds to emotions" is still a set of physical laws.
Reality does not respond to emotions in 40k.
The Warp does. Reality does not.
Warp energies do, but they screw up reality. Like, they literally damage reality.

It's a weird set of physical laws, but so are (arguably) quantum mechanics or any laws that allow FTL. You can't "break physics". We know this, because there is a long history of people displacing models with better models when they did experiments that produced conclusions incompatible with existing models.
The Warp LITERALLY damages reality. It literally has an adverse effect on physical law. Ie, when a ship goes there it needs to be protected or it is destroyed. People who are conduits for Warp Energy are extremely dangerous and sometimes just explode for no reason because the Warp is bad news.

The Warp actively breaks down physics where it touches, and where it isn't, things work according to our physics. It is literally the thing initially described.

Newton didn't "break physics" by discovering that objects of different sizes fall at the same speed. He discovered a flaw in the Aristotelean model of physics, which we then replaced with a Newtonian model that fit reality better. And then we replaced it again with Einstein's model. At no point did those observations "break physics". They simply indicated that our models of physics were incomplete. Similarly, if we discovered that some people could make things move without apparent expenditure of energy, that wouldn't "break physics", it would just mean we needed a model that accounted for that behavior.
Yeah, this is again attempting to poo-poo on a reasonable description of what is happening via technicallity.

Technicalities are for beaurocrats.

"Physics" is not the specific set of models we have written down to describe the world. It is the process of constructing models that describe the world. It can't be "broken" any more than you could "break" language by producing a new concept or "break" economics by finding an empirical counterexample to some theory.

See above on attempted argument via technicality to make a wide stretch to discredit something by wildly misinterpreting it in the stupidest possible way.

Gtfo with that crap.

Wat. This is trivially true (in that, yes, there are other branches of science), but meaningfully false (in that those branches of science are not contradicting physics so much as studying different stuff). Our physical models aren't incompatible with our biological models or our chemical models. It's like saying that Ontology isn't a real branch of Philsophy because Epistemology also exists. It's not so much wrong as a total non-sequitor.
The point continues to be missed.

*: The fact that Warhammer 40k has a parallel universe is mostly you trying to pull slight of hand and failing. Ecology studies the biosphere, but it wouldn't suddenly stop working if we were to discover another biosphere.

It's amazing how good you are at just purposefully misunderstanding plain english. Miraculous.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-25, 01:08 PM

First of all, yes it is possible for one guy to win a fight with six others. It's not especially likely but it is possible. That's the difference between stylized and fantastical. In the former the improbable is exaggerated to the point where it happens regularly, in the latter that which is clearly impossible happens.

The boundary here can be admittedly somewhat vague and is often dependent upon genre conventions. The modern action movie presents itself as merely stylized, even as characters routinely perform outlandish feats of borderline impossibility and take such excessive amounts of punishment that a reasoned medical analysis would suggest that they die multiple times over (the Honest Trailer guys did this for Die Hard once upon a time). We can even see the progression from stylized to fantasy are characters grow in power and plots get bigger - the most notable current example is the Fast & Furious franchise. That started out as merely highly stylized - with dubious but possible chase sequences - but eventually accelerated into pure fantasy - like when they jumped the car between the buildings. In an example closer to RPGs, take martial arts films. There are those that are stylized but not fantasy - say Jet Li's Fearless - and then there are those that are clearly fantasy - like Hero, which also starred Jet Li.

There are many games that try to cap 'mundane' capabilities within the range where they still qualify as stylized. In the oWoD you could be really good at gunplay - Dex 5, Firearms 5, a couple specialties, and maybe even a complementary merit or two, and with a commensurate investment in Dodge and some decent tactics you could tear through common opponents like the Punisher. But it's not until you start stacking Vampire Disciplines, Werewolf Gifts, or Mage Sphere Magic on top that you hit clearly fantastical levels. At the same time, you can be a complete novice at something like gunplay and still use your supernatural abilities to do something utterly impossible with guns.

I'd follow up on this by noting that one of the grey areas where people confuse stylized and fantastic is "I can show one example ever of this happening in real life so it's absolutely plausible for it to routinely happen in my fiction while still claiming my fiction is realistic and grounded".

Example, the guy who argued that it was realistic for characters to semi-reliably survive falls from 1000s of feet because he could cite an example of it happening once in WW2.

Pex

2017-12-25, 01:17 PM

Talakeal

2017-12-25, 01:21 PM

Not really. Pre-3e, it required house-rules ignoring many of the restrictions on memorizing and casting for it to become an issue. And 5e they toned it down a ton. Unless (for all editions) the DM allows a 5 minute work day on the regular, then it's on the DM.

It's pretty much a 3.X issue, that many 3.X players assume is universal.

That is more or less my experience as well, but it doesn't seem universal.

In this very thread we have had Quertus insisting that magic-users were under powered compared to martial in 3E and Calthropstu insisting that magic-users were even stronger in AD&D and 3E actually toned the disparity down.

That's exactly how he defined it. He wants magic to mean "breaking the laws of physics". Since physics is our model of how the universe behaves, "breaking" it necessarily means doing something outside that model, which would be something you can't do because the model is (notionally) a full model of the universe*.

One thing about physics though is that is requires the scientific method to function. Magic might not.

I remember playing Mage games where my character (who had a scientific paradigm) tried to study the "magic" used by the more traditional members of our cabal and being frustrated because you could have the same person do the exact same thing in the exact same way in the exact same place and even with every variable exactly the same you could have wildly different results.

I am not sure if it would be fair to develop new laws of physics to explain magic if they were not, and could not, be verified via the scientific method.

Well sure, but isn't that the nature of any game-changing ability? If you can fly, and other people can't fly, the people who can't fly are going to have trouble keeping up. Even purely mechanical abilities can have this effect. If I can push you off the RNG, you don't really matter any more. That doesn't make the ability inherently problematic, it means that the game will be different at different levels. This is a good thing because it makes character advancement feel meaningful.

So are you suggesting that every character needs to have access to every game changing ability?

If so, I would say to you much the same thing that I said to Quertus when he proposed that everyone should be a T1 caster.

Actually, no. I think those abilities are totally broken. I want to play a game where you can do things like that, but in ways that do not have broken implications. I would like for characters to eventually gain abilities that obviate low level encounters, but I would like that to happen in a controlled and predictable way that is consistent across classes.

Now I am confused. Wasn't the planar shepherd your go to example of the character you wanted to play but couldn't in a "fixed" version of 3.5? And weren't the abilities you were using as examples of reasons why a mundane could never keep up with you SLAs gained as a result of the planar shepherds enhanced wild shape?

I'm not going to quote the whole thing, because I think you're missing the point. I don't need to figure out how to get 3e to do what I want. I can already mostly do that. I want there to be another edition of the game that is designed to do these things from the word go.

That is indeed a different kettle of fish, I really thought we were talking about the best way to fix CMD in 3E.

For the record, I do think that 4E, 5E, and to a lesser extent PF have the right idea about narrowing the power level that the game covers, decreasing power discrepancy between classes, and trying to capture the "sweet spot" feeling of levels 4-10 for as long as possible.

Now, if talking about a hypothetical game, the one you are describing sounds more like a high magic high fantasy version of Mutants and Masterminds. Which is cool, but imo not D&D. D&D is, imo, always going to be set in a fantasy world which is somewhat like a cross between Conan, Lankhmar, and Lord of the Rings with a lot of random gonzo stuff from various sources thrown in around the edges. Also, even if you do go full fantasy super heroes, I still think the genre demands that "mundanes" remain relevant, the Justice League has Batman and Green Arrow, the Avengers have Black Widow and Hawkeye, and even if you go back to ancient sources the Argonauts and the warriors of the Trojan War contained a mix of both super-powered heroes and those with more ordinary (but still heroic) capabilities.

Now, one alternative which you have suggested is to make the game modular, which is a solid point. I personally think it would be a mistake as the publisher would risk splitting their fan base and market share (one of the things that many speculate led to the downfall of TSR) and competing against themselves, and likewise it fractures the gaming group as people have to choose one system or the other rather than finding a middle ground. But this isn't set in stone, and I can easily see how you might feel the other way.

Now, you have suggested dividing the game up into tiers based on level as well, which I think would have all of the problems of Calthropstu's "wizards suck now fighters suck later" paradigm but in many ways amplified, and it would also have the problem that low level characters really don't matter in the setting, nothing they do can ever meaningfully impact the world which a lot of "tier" based games like Exalted suffer from.

digiman619

2017-12-25, 02:50 PM

Cosi

2017-12-25, 03:17 PM

That is more or less my experience as well, but it doesn't seem universal.

Earlier editions were way less hardcore about the idea that you were supposed to follow the rules. The rules were supposed to be modified by the DM, so "you corrupted the experiment by having the DM modify the rules" seems like a weird argument.

I remember playing Mage games where my character (who had a scientific paradigm) tried to study the "magic" used by the more traditional members of our cabal and being frustrated because you could have the same person do the exact same thing in the exact same way in the exact same place and even with every variable exactly the same you could have wildly different results.

We already scientifically study things with random components in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanical experiments can have random results with the same inputs. Even classical ones can if you only think you're capturing all the inputs but there's actually some other thing you've missed.

So are you suggesting that every character needs to have access to every game changing ability?

I think by definition every character needs access to every ability in the game that obsoletes any character without it if any character gets it. Of course, as noted, having the same game-changers doesn't mean having the same ability. See the earlier discussion of a Wizard with teleport versus a Druid with tree stride Even then, that's not every ability. Some stuff happens at party scale, but even there you need to be bringing something to the table. If the Rogue uses his shadow walk to infiltrate the party and the Cleric uses her raise dead to bring back fallen party members and the Wizard uses his fabricate to support the party logistically while the Fighter uses her no abilities to do nothing, it's pretty obvious that someone isn't pulling their weight.

Now I am confused. Wasn't the planar shepherd your go to example of the character you wanted to play but couldn't in a "fixed" version of 3.5? And weren't the abilities you were using as examples of reasons why a mundane could never keep up with you SLAs gained as a result of the planar shepherds enhanced wild shape?

Sure. But gaining them through a broken ability doesn't inherently make them broken. You can get Rage via shapechange by turning into a Badger, does that make Rage broken? If you took away the inherently broken parts of Enhanced Wild Shape you would have an ability that was merely some amount of overpowered and could fit in the game by showing up at a higher level. You could also have the character get those same abilities via some other mechanism.

For the record, I do think that 4E, 5E, and to a lesser extent PF have the right idea about narrowing the power level that the game covers, decreasing power discrepancy between classes, and trying to capture the "sweet spot" feeling of levels 4-10 for as long as possible.

I think trying to extend a level range for as long as possible is essentially stupid. Making the range take more levels without adding more content just means you have less to do at any given point.

D&D is, imo, always going to be set in a fantasy world which is somewhat like a cross between Conan, Lankhmar, and Lord of the Rings with a lot of random gonzo stuff from various sources thrown in around the edges.

D&D is, and has long been, kitchen sink fantasy. At the point where you have six different kinds of core fish person you can no longer claim to be narrowly focused on a couple of basic sources.

Now, you have suggested dividing the game up into tiers based on level as well, which I think would have all of the problems of Calthropstu's "wizards suck now fighters suck later" paradigm but in many ways amplified, and it would also have the problem that low level characters really don't matter in the setting, nothing they do can ever meaningfully impact the world which a lot of "tier" based games like Exalted suffer from.

I don't think Tiers have the kind of balance problems you describe, at least not inherently. You could do it that way, but that would be dumb. They do have the problem of telling people they can't have abilities they want yet, but that problem is inherent in the notion of balancing the guy who wants to play the God Emperor of Man with the guy who wants to play Frodo.

I also disagree that high Teir characters existing means low Tier characters are invalid. In the basic case, you can think about the real world. Is your job irrelevant because the leader of your country could achieve whatever it is you are trying to do way better by directing a couple billion dollars of government money towards your project? It seems to me that it's not, at least as long as they don't actually do that. Similarly, does it really matter that Elminster could go kill those goblins provided he has some reason not to?

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-25, 03:45 PM

On the whole "Physics=all reality; if magic exists, it's physics too" argument,I strobgly disagree with it because even if you don't know why X works, you can still build around X working. I mean, there is something that science goes "We don't understand why X works, but it does" that exists right now. And not somewhere in deep space; on earth, that you could go see in most major cities. Acupuncture. How it is supposed to work is completely contrary to everything that medical science tells us about how the human body works, but it does work and doctors can and occasionally do proscribe it. Heck, you need to get a medical license to practice it in the United States.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/research-casts-doubt-on-the-value-of-acupuncture/
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/acupuncture-doesnt-work/
http://www.dcscience.net/2013/05/30/acupuncture-is-a-theatrical-placebo-the-end-of-a-myth/
https://www.painscience.com/articles/acupuncture-for-pain.php
http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/the-real-miracle-of-acupuncture-that-anyone-still-believes-in-it
https://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/05/alternative_medicine_for_pets_veterinarians_should _not_perform_acupuncture.html

Talakeal

2017-12-25, 03:48 PM

We already scientifically study things with random components in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanical experiments can have random results with the same inputs. Even classical ones can if you only think you're capturing all the inputs but there's actually some other thing you've missed.

Right. But those things actually do have internal logic to them even if we don't understand them. Quantum mechanics work in very specific ways, you can't just have any old craziness occur.

In Mage paradox means that any spell can have any effect. There is no underlying logic or probability to it.

Sure. But gaining them through a broken ability doesn't inherently make them broken. You can get Rage via shapechange by turning into a Badger, does that make Rage broken? If you took away the inherently broken parts of Enhanced Wild Shape you would have an ability that was merely some amount of overpowered and could fit in the game by showing up at a higher level. You could also have the character get those same abilities via some other mechanism.

I don't know about that. If it is a "game changing ability" that invalidates characters without it *and* can only be gotten through the use of another broken ability I would say that sounds pretty broken.

I also disagree that high Teir characters existing means low Tier characters are invalid. In the basic case, you can think about the real world. Is your job irrelevant because the leader of your country could achieve whatever it is you are trying to do way better by directing a couple billion dollars of government money towards your project? It seems to me that it's not, at least as long as they don't actually do that. Similarly, does it really matter that Elminster could go kill those goblins provided he has some reason not to?

Ok, but what if you wanted to have a game where an Alexander the great type character conquers the world through a combination of personal skill and charisma? This is kind of hard to do if you have a plethora of superman hanging around who could each single handidly not only defeat Alexander but also his entire army.

Likewise it would be really hard to have a scenario where a group of adventurers defeat the BBEG in combat when the BBEG necessitates being on a whole other level from them to be a credible threat to the world.

I think trying to extend a level range for as long as possible is essentially stupid. Making the range take more levels without adding more content just means you have less to do at any given point.

But the game has more content. There are plenty of monsters, spells, magic items, and adventures for every level range; they are just adjusting the math at the extreme ends of the system so that the overall play experience remains consistent.

Tanarii

2017-12-25, 05:53 PM

Acupuncture. How it is supposed to work is completely contrary to everything that medical science tells us about how the human body works, but it does work and doctors can and occasionally do proscribe it
That's a joke right? :smalleek: Acupuncture doesn't "work" by any normal definition of the word.

RazorChain

2017-12-25, 11:05 PM

RazorChain

2017-12-25, 11:28 PM

5e: Strongly campaign/setting dependent. Under most cases, everyone's useful at all levels. In fact, you have to go out of your way to build a useless character. What power differences exist (and they do) are small enough that natural table variation swamps them. Oh, and there are very few "mundane" sub-classes (since every class has access to at least one explicitly magical subclass):

Frenzy barbarian (has a QoL issue with frenzy, but mechanically quite good if you have a workaround)
Champion Fighter (mechanically pretty solid, people find it boring)
Battlemaster Fighter (one of the best subclasses mechanically. Lots of utility.)
Thief rogue (tied for best of the PHB rogue subclasses with Arcane Trickster. Drips with utility.)
Assassin rogue (lacks in practice, but not in theory. Sometimes hard to get the big combat benefit, but has great potential for social/infiltration)

That's it (for the PHB subclasses). Everyone else either has magic (spells) or is magic. And anyone (if feats are allowed) can take ritual caster or magic initiate and cast spells.

That is, 5e mostly obliterated the distinction--everybody's fantastical, just each in their own way.

I think one source of the whole problem is the a-textual assumption that fighter == no magic. That's an outside assumption, not a system assumption as far as I can tell.

I kinda agree, in 5e everybody becomes superhuman and as you have very limited choice (if you don't multiclass) it's very hard to make useless character unless you are trying hard. That said Casters still rule because of versatility. Invisibility, teleport, flying, mind control, shape changing, etc will always be hard to beat. Still there are some classess and sub classes that are clearly subpar.

RazorChain

2017-12-25, 11:43 PM

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-25, 11:57 PM

RazorChain

2017-12-26, 12:05 AM

Yeah, I don't understand the insistence some have that the "fighter" MUST be just some guy, nothing special, just getting by on training and experience and guts... split between those who think this makes him clearly inferior to spellcasters, and those who think this doesn't preclude him in any way from doing otherwise impossible things (as in, impossible for most people in the context of that setting).

As has been discussed this is the power scaling issue. I mean I have nothing against playing a fantastical hero or a superhuman and if I partake in a D&D campaign I know where it will be headed if I play long enough.

If people want to play the 3 musketeers or Conan then D&D is a bad choice unless there is a level cap. For that matter trying to play the 3 musketeers I'd say thad D&D was an abysmal choice.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-26, 12:28 AM

As has been discussed this is the power scaling issue. I mean I have nothing against playing a fantastical hero or a superhuman and if I partake in a D&D campaign I know where it will be headed if I play long enough.

If people want to play the 3 musketeers or Conan then D&D is a bad choice unless there is a level cap. For that matter trying to play the 3 musketeers I'd say thad D&D was an abysmal choice.

Indeed. Not disagreeing with you at all.

I'm just perplexed by the way some seem to actively cling to the dissonance.

Pex

2017-12-26, 12:47 AM

As has been discussed this is the power scaling issue. I mean I have nothing against playing a fantastical hero or a superhuman and if I partake in a D&D campaign I know where it will be headed if I play long enough.

If people want to play the 3 musketeers or Conan then D&D is a bad choice unless there is a level cap. For that matter trying to play the 3 musketeers I'd say thad D&D was an abysmal choice.

Reminds me of a debate in a previous thread about some people refusing to accept a chasm eventually becomes not an obstacle and blaming the game instead of either adapting to new obstacles or play a different game if a chasm being an obstacle needs to remain relevant throughout the campaign.

RazorChain

2017-12-26, 01:09 AM

Indeed. Not disagreeing with you at all.

I'm just perplexed by the way some seem to actively cling to the dissonance.

I think it's a system thing. Most people get into D&D and rarely try other systems, then when they try to play their favorite genre and D&D doesn't support it they get mad.

Tanarii

2017-12-26, 01:18 AM

The problem with the 5 minute or 15 minute workday it is a bad game design. The designer that decided that an "adventure day" should be comprised of so and so many encounters was mildly put; an idiot.

So I can't really put an blame on a DM that ignores this as the DM might not want to run a 4 to 6 encounter adventure day and putting some artificial timer on every adventure can be tiring. The original game design was apparently one session full of exploration and combat then get back out of the dungeon = adventuring day.

It wasn't until much later that the game left behind its roots, and 4-6 encounters moght actually be considered high for an adventuring day. In 4e, it was 3-4 that was about right for a session. Luckily it's come back around to about the right point in 5e, where 6-8 encounters is the recommended number and just about right for a 3-4 hour session of D&D.

The 5 MWD isn't bad design. It's more about DMs not willing to use D&D for the kind of games it was designed for.

Talakeal

2017-12-26, 01:31 AM

Let's just face it. High level D&D is so far out there that nobody can stay relevant as a mundane. Let's just look at the bloated HP pool which is superhuman toughness allowing you to drop on your head from vast heights without dying and bathe in lava. The last character I played in D&D was a 5e monk and he could kick an ogre 15' feet into the air and didn't age or didn't have to eat or drink. Even fighters had action surge allowing them to do double their actions and self healing.

I think both Talakeal and Quertus claimed that there were fighters builds that could kill 100+ people in 6 seconds. If that isn't superhuman I don't know what is.

So why are people so insistent that their characters keep staying the guy at the gym when the power level is "should we punch out the sun or not?"

High level D&D is a superhero game. Normal people aren't relevant anymore just like in a supers game. Local authorities don't matter anymore, the heroes either have to be faced down by high powered individuals or national goverments (and they'd better have some high powered individuals else they'll be supplanted)

In the end the heroes will become superhuman, it doesn't matter if it's called magic or something else.

Those who don't want this should probably play somehting else are quit before they achieve high levels. Those that want to balance the mundane with the wizard, just tack on some more superpowers. I mean the Hulk can lift a whole mountain, is nigh invulnerable, can "fly" and probably not be mind controlled because of he's so angry. Why can't that apply to the barbarian? It even has some utility outside of combat.

HP has always been an incredible abstract and unrealistic gamist system. Using it as a justification for "everyone is a super-hero" is a bit weird; do you also claim that house cats are super-cats because they can defeat your average level 1 human or that elephants are super elephants because they also have enough HP to survive a 200 foot+ fall more often than not?

I didn't make a claim about a 100 people a round fighter; I admitted that it is probably possible, with 3E TO almost anything is, but I can almost guarantee you that the guy doing it is not a regular human, he is probably some sort of giant who is loaded down with magic items and buffs.

3E and 4E (and maybe 5E, haven't played it at high levels yet) might work best as a fantasy flavored super-hero game, but I played high level AD&D for years (still do on occasion) and have read a fair bit of D&D inspired fiction, and it has never come across as super-heroic to me.

Note however, that even in honest to god super-hero comic books there are plenty of non-super powered heroes and villains who still provide meaningful contributions to the plot, and even most super-heroes only have a single power, leaving them just another "guy at the gym" when their power isn't directly involved.

Also, I can't fathom the level of jaded misanthropy that goes into the idea that anyone without super-powers is "just some guy (who may or may not currently by in a gymnasium)" and by extension "boring". Do you really think that the entirety of the human race, both real and potential, is "just some guy?" Everyone? Shakespeare, Einstein, Newton, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Plato, Sun Tzu, Robin Hood, King Arthur, Bruce Wayne, Victor Von Doom, James T Kirk, Bruce Lee, Ghandi, Conan, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Indiana Jones, Davey Crocket, Clint Eastwood? All of them are "just some guy?"

Mechalich

2017-12-26, 02:29 AM

3E and 4E (and maybe 5E, haven't played it at high levels yet) might work best as a fantasy flavored super-hero game, but I played high level AD&D for years (still do on occasion) and have read a fair bit of D&D inspired fiction, and it has never come across as super-heroic to me.

Note however, that even in honest to god super-hero comic books there are plenty of non-super powered heroes and villains who still provide meaningful contributions to the plot, and even most super-heroes only have a single power, leaving them just another "guy at the gym" when their power isn't directly involved.

Actual superhero settings cheat about the implications of their powers. Marvel is among the most obvious. It pretends that life goes on as it has in the real world and that all the superpowered stuff has essentially zero impact on the march or history or even the state of media (there's a great example of this in the Avengers Academy comics where an Ant-Man turns to Taskmaster and says 'I've got a bunch of episodes of Chuck on my iPod'). Between Tony Stark, Reed Richards, and Hank Pym, just the Americans of the Marvel universe invent something ludicrously life-changing that would impact everyone on Earth at least once a week. Yet nothing ever changes. Tony was building a freaking Dyson Sphere around the sun at one point. Impact to life on Earth: zero.

D&D, and many, many other fantasy settings, cheat in a similar fashion. They completely avoid that high-level magic can easily render armies irrelevant, or how magical items (even in very small numbers) could trigger an industrial magitech revolution, or what the presence of highly intelligent magical monsters might due to the world's development and economy, and so on. The closest D&D ever got to even marginally reasonable was Dark Sun, which also happens to be its lowest magic setting where magic has a very real cost.

That D&D is not a superhero setting and that it wouldn't degenerate into series of isolated magocracies ruled by tyrannical (not necessarily evil, just tyrannical) wizard or priest kings (and queens, and dragons) is the great lie, one that various writers have gone to great lengths to maintain. There are various reasons why, but the actual bait and switch is indisputable.

There's a reason so many epic fantasy stories start in a relatively low-magic state and then gradually add magic in over time. That way they can preserve the recognizable and suitably human cultures and institutions of their low magic world so their storytelling works, and it is simply accepted that either the magic will go away after the story or that the world will change immensely after the immediate threat is ended. the Wheel of Time is a perfect example of this, in part because Jordan and later Sanderson actually had the guts to show the occasional glimpse of either the Age of Legends or the future to come and how it was a crazy magitech insanity that bore no resemblance at all to the pseudo-Renaissance world in which the stories took place.

And this is all done because everything that is known about the human experience occurs within a reality where the power variation between individual human beings is confined to a tiny range. Even the most physically capable and paranoid tyrant on the planet is dependent upon the loyalty of his/her bodyguards to avoid being knifed when they sleep. Having the skills of a navy seal doesn't make a warlord any safer. Heck even sleeping in a tank barely does. By contrast, being superman absolutely changes that calculation, and engaging with the implications to follow tends to lead you to a place you'd rather not be. Exalted, to it's great credit, actually tried this. The results weren't pretty.

Also, I can't fathom the level of jaded misanthropy that goes into the idea that anyone without super-powers is "just some guy (who may or may not currently by in a gymnasium)" and by extension "boring". Do you really think that the entirety of the human race, both real and potential, is "just some guy?" Everyone? Shakespeare, Einstein, Newton, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Plato, Sun Tzu, Robin Hood, King Arthur, Bruce Wayne, Victor Von Doom, James T Kirk, Bruce Lee, Ghandi, Conan, James Bond, Indiana Jones, Davey Crocket, Clint Eastwood? All of them are "just some guy?"

There are plenty of stories of great interest to be told about people who have merely human capabilities, but not in a universe in which people with vastly superhuman abilities in all possible fields exist. For instance, imagine if Captain America wasn't the only one, but that the formula had been mass produced and by the end of 1945 every soldier was a super-soldier. Well, now you can't tell combat stories about ordinary people - because in an army full of Caps, if you aren't one, you're dead. Okay, in that universe you still have ordinary scientists, and social workers, and politicians, and so on, but each time you add a new super you close down a field for the normals, and if you add in enough eventually they're all gone. You end up in a universe like the Culture - where the humans are window dressing and all the power and capabilities are held by the Minds.

RazorChain

2017-12-26, 02:50 AM

HP has always been an incredible abstract and unrealistic gamist system. Using it as a justification for "everyone is a super-hero" is a bit weird; do you also claim that house cats are super-cats because they can defeat your average level 1 human or that elephants are super elephants because they also have enough HP to survive a 200 foot+ fall more often than not?

I didn't make a claim about a 100 people a round fighter; I admitted that it is probably possible, with 3E TO almost anything is, but I can almost guarantee you that the guy doing it is not a regular human, he is probably some sort of giant who is loaded down with magic items and buffs.

3E and 4E (and maybe 5E, haven't played it at high levels yet) might work best as a fantasy flavored super-hero game, but I played high level AD&D for years (still do on occasion) and have read a fair bit of D&D inspired fiction, and it has never come across as super-heroic to me.

Note however, that even in honest to god super-hero comic books there are plenty of non-super powered heroes and villains who still provide meaningful contributions to the plot, and even most super-heroes only have a single power, leaving them just another "guy at the gym" when their power isn't directly involved.

Also, I can't fathom the level of jaded misanthropy that goes into the idea that anyone without super-powers is "just some guy (who may or may not currently by in a gymnasium)" and by extension "boring". Do you really think that the entirety of the human race, both real and potential, is "just some guy?" Everyone? Shakespeare, Einstein, Newton, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Plato, Sun Tzu, Robin Hood, King Arthur, Bruce Wayne, Victor Von Doom, James T Kirk, Bruce Lee, Ghandi, Conan, James Bond, Indiana Jones, Davey Crocket, Clint Eastwood? All of them are "just some guy?"

No actually I was talking about power levels...I for instance find Superman an extremely boring character. How interesting a character is has nothing to do with power, I think you are reading something in my words that I didn't write. By relevance I meant in the power scale, this discussion is mainly about that not how interesting a character is or how relevant to the plot he is. It isn't just some guy...it's the guy at the gym. The Guy at the Gym is a term for somebody who trains very hard but doesn't get any magical abilities.

I mostly played AD&D 2e. as well, but we usually stopped at around level 13-14 because for our tastes things were getting too wonky in the magical department and we were already using magical items as door stoppers because we had so many of them. The thief didn't want to sacrifice an iron spike to jam a door so he used a shortsword +1 instead.

5e. has taken some steps to keep the game from going full supers by introducing bounded accuracy and making it harder to get AC over 25 so lower level creature can still hit high level characters and capping stats at 20.

D&D fiction has never followed the mechanics of the game

I kinda find the misanthropy term endearing given that I mostly play games that have infinitesimal power scale compared to D&D.

Mutazoia

2017-12-26, 04:05 AM

No actually I was talking about power levels...I for instance find Superman an extremely boring character. How interesting a character is has nothing to do with power, I think you are reading something in my words that I didn't write. By relevance I meant in the power scale, this discussion is mainly about that not how interesting a character is or how relevant to the plot he is. It isn't just some guy...it's the guy at the gym. The Guy at the Gym is a term for somebody who trains very hard but doesn't get any magical abilities.

I mostly played AD&D 2e. as well, but we usually stopped at around level 13-14 because for our tastes things were getting too wonky in the magical department and we were already using magical items as door stoppers because we had so many of them. The thief didn't want to sacrifice an iron spike to jam a door so he used a shortsword +1 instead.

5e. has taken some steps to keep the game from going full supers by introducing bounded accuracy and making it harder to get AC over 25 so lower level creature can still hit high level characters and capping stats at 20.

D&D fiction has never followed the mechanics of the game

I kinda find the misanthropy term endearing given that I mostly play games that have infinitesimal power scale compared to D&D.

The level cap for OD&D was 10. Advanced raised the bar to 18, and 2nd ed. added another two levels on top of that. The problem was, they were just tacking things on to the existing core framework and throwing it further and further out of balance, rather than redesigning the framework from the ground up to handle the new power levels. This is why, as has been pointed out in past threads, D&D starts to break down once you get past level 10. Once you hit 20, it's completely broken, even if you are playing "core only". Copy-pasta that on top of a system that was just as badly balanced. Now add a million and one splats to the game, each with it's own skewed balance, and you have a recipe for disaster

Now, since casters are already broken in core 3.X, if you add poorly balanced classes, feats and PRCs from the above mentioned million and one splats.... well I think you can see where I'm going.

Chaosticket

2017-12-26, 05:50 AM

Starting with Superman would be boring. Usually he has to have plot problems to prevent him from simply solving everything within a few minutes/pages. Getting a character up to Superman's level would be more interesting if it was earned.

Every Magic user is Merlin/Gandalf In-Training. Its expected, from me at least, to use story reasons to keep a character like that from the sole character acting especially past level 10.

Different people enjoy different things. Some people enjoy the drama of a character's story. Other people like how Heracles, King Arthur, Gilgamesh and others are badass warriors that despite being dead or at least no longer in the mortal realm are still being told of thousands of years later.

Again Using either story or mechanics to make a character legendary is a goal. Why would I want my character to die? No, earn your way to be demi-god in Valhalla. Exalted is a game I hear went with that to make all the Player Characters demi-Gods and work past THAT.

That being said I have no idea what 5th edition is trying to do. I dont know all of it, but Im wondering how they do/will handle things like Orcus, Demogorgon, Pazuzu, etc. Will they be wimps? AC is just the factor of being able to HIT a target. After that you have damage reduction.

Yes magic is overlooked in the overall settings of dungeons and dragons. Its expected that the player characters actually ARE legendary heroes its why they have character levels and grow. Pathfinder actually has a high level wizard Razmir become a faux-god with his own priesthood. Of course you could actually make settings where magic is much more prevalent so people much more commonly use magic for things to a mage-punk setting. Wait isnt that Eberron?

Cosi

2017-12-26, 09:01 AM

I don't know about that. If it is a "game changing ability" that invalidates characters without it *and* can only be gotten through the use of another broken ability I would say that sounds pretty broken.

"Invalidates characters without it" is, as mentioned, not a useful standard. So does having big enough numbers. That it can be acquired only through a broken ability is just weird is/ought confusion. If the ability would stop being broken if you printed a PrC with it, it probably wasn't actually broken to begin with. SLA wish for items is broken purely in terms of what it does without considering access restrictions. That is what broken means.

Ok, but what if you wanted to have a game where an Alexander the great type character conquers the world through a combination of personal skill and charisma? This is kind of hard to do if you have a plethora of superman hanging around who could each single handidly not only defeat Alexander but also his entire army.

In MTG you could probably conquer a world if you wanted to. The high level characters don't usually care about local politics. The key, paradoxically, is to make people even more powerful and make them acquire that power even more rapidly. If becoming powerful enough to crush Alexander also means gaining access to resources that make crushing Alexander pointless (e.g. The wish economy described in The Tomes), then it's very easy to explain why Alexander remains uncrushed.

Likewise it would be really hard to have a scenario where a group of adventurers defeat the BBEG in combat when the BBEG necessitates being on a whole other level from them to be a credible threat to the world.

Low level characters mostly don't defeat threats to the entire world. Conan's stories are about him fighting individual dudes, and even insofar as they are nominally "threats to the world", that's basically (as I understand it) fluff because they never pull of their ritual to unleash the dreadgod or raise all dead people as zombies. The story wouldn't change if their plan was something more prosaic like summoning a demon that would kill a town full of people, or murdering Conan's love interest. Even in Lord of the Rings, the classic "mundane guy saves the world", Frodo is arguably not really the main character. It's Gandalf (and Elrond and various other mid/high level characters) who do the actual planning, Frodo is just important because the McGuffin has to be carried by someone whose kind of gimpy and pathetic.

But the game has more content. There are plenty of monsters, spells, magic items, and adventures for every level range; they are just adjusting the math at the extreme ends of the system so that the overall play experience remains consistent.

I think "adjusting the math" and "extending the sweet spot" are different things. Math fixes are good. Extending a level range is bad, because you end up having stuff be incompatible for no real reason. If things are at different levels (really, different Tiers), you should be able to explain why that is without going into mechanical terms. If what you've done is "make levels 4-10 levels 1-20", you probably can't do that.

Also, I can't fathom the level of jaded misanthropy that goes into the idea that anyone without super-powers is "just some guy (who may or may not currently by in a gymnasium)" and by extension "boring". Do you really think that the entirety of the human race, both real and potential, is "just some guy?" Everyone? Shakespeare, Einstein, Newton, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Plato, Sun Tzu, Robin Hood, King Arthur, Bruce Wayne, Victor Von Doom, James T Kirk, Bruce Lee, Ghandi, Conan, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Indiana Jones, Davey Crocket, Clint Eastwood? All of them are "just some guy?"

Bruce Wayne isn't some guy, he's a Wizard who works in a variable-fluff system where he is allowed to describe himself as a gadgeteer. James Kirk has sufficiently advanced technology. Victor Von Doom is magical, and has done things like "fight the people who created the multiverse to prevent them from destroying it" and "journey into hell to save the soul of his mother". King Arthur is pretty closely defined with his magic sword, and he (or the other Knights of the Round Table) have had various amounts of magic.

Shakespeare (and the other intellectual types on your list) have made valuable contributions to humanity, but they probably wouldn't be very interesting characters for a game. What do the challenges look like in Athens: The Philosophizing? "I roll five hits on my Discourse test, do I develop a coherent theory of The Good?"

Your claim isn't entirely false (Age of Empires 2 has an interesting Gengis Khan campaign that has no magic in it), but you've picked some really bad examples in the process of proving your point.

Pex

2017-12-26, 09:02 AM

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-26, 09:38 AM

Reminds me of a debate in a previous thread about some people refusing to accept a chasm eventually becomes not an obstacle and blaming the game instead of either adapting to new obstacles or play a different game if a chasm being an obstacle needs to remain relevant throughout the campaign.

For the kind of setting, genre, characters, story, etc that they want to play, it IS a bad thing that the chasm would cease to be an obstacle. Their mistake is in trying to use a system that deliberately nullifies those sorts of obstacles -- it's hard to play a "grounded" character when the system actively ungrounds.

The other half of the expressed displeasure is that it only ceases to be an obstacle for certain Classes, and that's more fully pin-able on the system itself.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-26, 09:52 AM

The 5 MWD isn't bad design. It's more about DMs not willing to use D&D for the kind of games it was designed for.

Or not willing to use a different system more suited to the kind of things they want to do.

HP has always been an incredible abstract and unrealistic gamist system. Using it as a justification for "everyone is a super-hero" is a bit weird; do you also claim that house cats are super-cats because they can defeat your average level 1 human or that elephants are super elephants because they also have enough HP to survive a 200 foot+ fall more often than not?

If we take a system seriously as an RPG, and not as a tarted-up board game, then yes, the system tells you about the setting.

In this case, it's telling us that house cats are incredibly dangerous and that elephants sometimes survive falls of 200+ feet.

3E and 4E (and maybe 5E, haven't played it at high levels yet) might work best as a fantasy flavored super-hero game, but I played high level AD&D for years (still do on occasion) and have read a fair bit of D&D inspired fiction, and it has never come across as super-heroic to me.

Note however, that even in honest to god super-hero comic books there are plenty of non-super powered heroes and villains who still provide meaningful contributions to the plot, and even most super-heroes only have a single power, leaving them just another "guy at the gym" when their power isn't directly involved.

Also, I can't fathom the level of jaded misanthropy that goes into the idea that anyone without super-powers is "just some guy (who may or may not currently by in a gymnasium)" and by extension "boring". Do you really think that the entirety of the human race, both real and potential, is "just some guy?" Everyone? Shakespeare, Einstein, Newton, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Plato, Sun Tzu, Robin Hood, King Arthur, Bruce Wayne, Victor Von Doom, James T Kirk, Bruce Lee, Ghandi, Conan, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Indiana Jones, Davey Crocket, Clint Eastwood? All of them are "just some guy?"

It's not that their stories become meaningless or boring in isolation. In a world with multiple Superman-like characters, many of the stories of those other characters last only exactly as long as none of the "Supermen" get involved. Genghis Khan's conquests last until one of the "Supermen" decide they don't like what's going on, and then SPLAT, story over. An author can keep some control over this but the nested excuses become increasingly contrived and transparent as things go on. In an active RPG campaign with multiple players, it's downright ridiculous after a short while.

D&D fiction has never followed the mechanics of the game

Exactly.

Tanarii

2017-12-26, 11:53 AM

Or not willing to use a different system more suited to the kind of things they want to do. Absolutely. Not to mention TSR encouraged this kind of thinking a lot in the 80s & 90s, especially during AD&D 2e. The whole holier-that's-thou "real" role playing / storytelling movement that disdained "hack-n-slash", dungeoneering, and other epic adventuring was encouraged far too much by that edition. They missed the point of their own product and often twisted it in a pretzel trying to get it to do stuff it didn't really do all that well. Even 1e Oriental Adventures went down that path a bit much.

Not that I didn't have fun running mini-adventure-arcs in 1e OA, and 2e's historical splats, anyway. But that was in spite of the system/fiction conflict. Not because of it.

Talakeal

2017-12-26, 01:16 PM

If we take a system seriously as an RPG, and not as a tarted-up board game, then yes, the system tells you about the setting.

In this case, it's telling us that house cats are incredibly dangerous and that elephants sometimes survive falls of 200+ feet.

But all RPGs are just "tarted up board games."

All mechanics are abstractions to some degree, HP in D&D especially so. Humans are literally incapable of making a perfect simulator, and some weirdness is always going to slip through the cracks, and even if we could make a perfect simulator it would be so tedious that no one would want to play it.

IMO all RPGs require some degree of imagination to picture the fiction behind the rules, and if you take every rule literally then yeah, I could see why you would have a bad time of it.

Bruce Wayne isn't some guy, he's a Wizard who works in a variable-fluff system where he is allowed to describe himself as a gadgeteer. James Kirk has sufficiently advanced technology. Victor Von Doom is magical, and has done things like "fight the people who created the multiverse to prevent them from destroying it" and "journey into hell to save the soul of his mother". King Arthur is pretty closely defined with his magic sword, and he (or the other Knights of the Round Table) have had various amounts of magic.

D&D has magic items which are useable by mundane characters. I am not arguing against it.

Also, I was not saying all of these characters are good for an RPG, I am saying that it is demeaning to simply dismiss them as "just some guy," simply because they lack super powers.

No actually I was talking about power levels...I for instance find Superman an extremely boring character. How interesting a character is has nothing to do with power, I think you are reading something in my words that I didn't write. By relevance I meant in the power scale, this discussion is mainly about that not how interesting a character is or how relevant to the plot he is. It isn't just some guy...it's the guy at the gym. The Guy at the Gym is a term for somebody who trains very hard but doesn't get any magical abilities.

I mostly played AD&D 2e. as well, but we usually stopped at around level 13-14 because for our tastes things were getting too wonky in the magical department and we were already using magical items as door stoppers because we had so many of them. The thief didn't want to sacrifice an iron spike to jam a door so he used a shortsword +1 instead.

I kinda find the misanthropy term endearing given that I mostly play games that have infinitesimal power scale compared to D&D.

I don't know what you mean by the guy at the gym.

A lot of people mean a lot of different things by it.

To me your post had a very dismissive tone, and I have heard a lot of people, both online and in real life, use it to dismiss all non magical characters as pathetic and boring. Heck, I have one guy in my gaming group who absolutely *will not* play a character who isn't a spell caster, even in a game system that doesn't have magic in it, and when asked why his response is "People are boring. Only powers are interesting."

But really I find the "guy at the gym fallacy" to be a giant crock anyway.

Among its flaws:

We aren't talking about "a guy at the gym," we are talking about a figure out of legend who is as good as or better than the best who has ever been.
Likewise it isn't about what "we" or "some guy" can do, its about what is technically possible to do.
It is more than possible to break into the T3 sweet spot with nothing but mundane abilities.
There is nothing fallacious about wanting your character, or even your whole campaign world, to have the aesthetics of the knight in shining armor or mighty barbarian who slay dragons and battle evil sorcerers with nothing but their strong arms, quick wits, indomitable wills, and martial skill as opposed to Wuxia or mediavel super-heroes.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-26, 01:42 PM

But all RPGs are just "tarted up board games."

All mechanics are abstractions to some degree, HP in D&D especially so. Humans are literally incapable of making a perfect simulator, and some weirdness is always going to slip through the cracks, and even if we could make a perfect simulator it would be so tedious that no one would want to play it.

IMO all RPGs require some degree of imagination to picture the fiction behind the rules, and if you take every rule literally then yeah, I could see why you would have a bad time of it.

What's that old saying... Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Every time this subject comes up, there's at least one person who says (or implies) "there's no such thing as a perfect simulation, so your criticism of a system for being a terrible simulation is invalid".

Elephants that can survive 200' falls, housecats more lethal than some soldiers, etc... these are not just rare edge cases and wierdness falling through the cracks. They represent something fundamentally broken in how the system deals with things outside a narrow lane.

Part of what separates an RPG from a board game is that the rules actual represent something, they're not just "move this many spaces, score this many points".

But really I find the "guy at the gym fallacy" to be a giant crock anyway.

Among its flaws:

We aren't talking about "a guy at the gym," we are talking about a figure out of legend who is as good as or better than the best who has ever been.
Likewise it isn't about what "we" or "some guy" can do, its about what is technically possible to do.
It is more than possible to break into the T3 sweet spot with nothing but mundane abilities.
There is nothing fallacies about wanting your character, or even your whole campaign world, to have the aesthetics of the knight in shining armor or mighty barbarian who slay dragons and battle evil sorcerers with nothing but their strong arms, quick wits, indomitable wills, and martial skill as opposed to Wuxia or mediavel super-heroes.

You are absolutely right -- there's nothing wrong with that... or rather with those.

"Guy out of legend who is better than the best who has ever been" is pushing out of the ealm of the stylized into the realm of the outright fantastic, and probably isn't compatible with "grounded' characters.

"What is technically possible" too often ends up defined by single edge-case examples, and you end up with characters surviving 20000 foot plummets as routine because it's "technically possible".

"Mundane abilities" as defined by legendary/mythical characters and what's "technically" possible... is establishing a fairly fantastic and ungrounded standard for "mundane", which is fine if that's what you want for your setting, but it won't look much like our world.

But the real problem is that for any of these... D&D from AD&D onward is probably not the system to use.

Talakeal

2017-12-26, 02:07 PM

What's that old saying... Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Every time this subject comes up, there's at least one person who says (or implies) "there's no such thing as a perfect simulation, so your criticism of a system for being a terrible simulation is invalid".

Elephants that can survive 200' falls, housecats more lethal than some soldiers, etc... these are not just rare edge cases and wierdness falling through the cracks.

Part of what separates an RPG from a board game is that the rules actual represent something, they're not just "move this many spaces, score this many points".

You sure?

I can't recall ever rolling a combat against a house-cat, and I very rarely roll falling damage against anyone, certainly not a 200' fall against a large animal, they seem like pretty edge cases to me.

But yes, HP are a very bad model, which is why I look at them as extra abstract rather than trying to warp the fiction to suit them.

2D8HP

2017-12-26, 02:13 PM

...D&D is, imo, always going to be set in a fantasy world which is somewhat like a cross between Conan, Lankhmar, and Lord of the Rings with a lot of random gonzo stuff from various sources thrown in around the edges.....
Well said.

Yeah, I don't understand the insistence some have that the "fighter" MUST be just some guy, nothing special, just getting by on training and experience and guts.....
Some of us just like to play characters like that.

As has been discussed this is the power scaling issue. I mean I have nothing against playing a fantastical hero or a superhuman and if I partake in a D&D campaign I know where it will be headed if I play long enough.

If people want to play the 3 musketeers or Conan then D&D is a bad choice unless there is a level cap. For that matter trying to play the 3 musketeers I'd say that D&D was an abysmal choice..
True, but learning new rules is increasingly difficult, and getting other people to learn new rules has always been difficult.

You don't have to like high level play or Superman, but that doesn't mean your preference should be taken away from the game and forbidden from those who do. The solution is easy and already done - end your campaign at whatever level you're comfortable with. However, your dislike of whatever comes after doesn't make the game wrong..
I do end the game at low levels.

I think the motive for the thread is that there is little place for non-magic-user PC's in some versions of D&D and, in the words of the OP, "D&D derivative systems" (meaning Pathfinder) at some levels:

So, just throwing some ideas around. It's late at night so no guarantee this will be coherent. Also, this is not "how to fix class balance in X system," as the D&D derivative systems I'm familiar with (Pathfinder as my personal preference) generally have the way magic works so deeply baked into the assumptions it's basically impossible to change it without more or less fundamentally rewriting the system. This is a discussion of how to avoid a situation where one class (or equivalent) does not simultaneously do the job of several other classes better than they can because magic......
0e Dungeons & Dragons was explicit that Fighters were more powerful at low levels, and Magic-Users were more powerful at high levels, so balanced...
...of a sort.

WD&D "un-nerfed" Magic Users, such that most say 3.5 has "tiers", and has "caster supremacy" (though I can't get a clear answer on exactly which levels that's true (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?545191-Exactly-what-levels-is-there-quot-Caster-Supremacy-quot)), other than "combat takes too long", and "no one plays it" I don't actually understand what peoples complaints are about 4e ("feels like a MMO" is meaningless to me).

5e WD&D seems more balanced than the TD&D I played to me, but I dislike how fast PC's rocket to higher levels, some people complain that "caster supremacy" is still true, and others that "high level PC's feel too weak" (not to me, I feel the opposite, given how fast those levels are reached).

...In this case, it's telling us that house cats are incredibly dangerous and that elephants sometimes survive falls of 200+ feet.....
:amused:

Oh Max_K, that cracks me up.

I can definitely see how a housecat could kill a particularly unlucky players PC in TD&D, but given how many HP all PC's start with in WD&D, that must be some cat! (I never heard the elephants thing).

...There is nothing fallacies about wanting your character, or even your whole campaign world, to have the aesthetics of the knight in shining armor or mighty barbarian who slay dragons and battle evil sorcerers with nothing but their strong arms, quick wits, indomitable wills, and martial skill as opposed to Wuxia or mediavel super-heroes..
I'm sold.

I want to play "knight in shining armor or mighty barbarian who slay dragons and battle evil sorcerers with nothing but their strong arms, quick wits, indomitable wills, and martial skill" RIGHT NOW!!!

Please?

Pex

2017-12-26, 02:22 PM

For the kind of setting, genre, characters, story, etc that they want to play, it IS a bad thing that the chasm would cease to be an obstacle. Their mistake is in trying to use a system that deliberately nullifies those sorts of obstacles -- it's hard to play a "grounded" character when the system actively ungrounds.

In other words, the game is not for them. I got yelled at once for saying that.

The other half of the expressed displeasure is that it only ceases to be an obstacle for certain Classes, and that's more fully pin-able on the system itself.

I would argue that's a matter of personal taste. I don't have issue with only particular classes being able to overcome particular obstacles. Ideally those who don't could overcome other obstacles those who could now can't. The trouble is, the point of the thread, are those who are saying that doesn't exist. Some people want to remove the ability of those who are bypassing obstacles from bypassing obstacles. Those who like bypassing obstacles cry foul. Other people say those who aren't bypassing obstacles be given abilities to bypass obstacles even if different obstacles than the ones being bypassed. Those who like gym people cry foul.

RazorChain

2017-12-26, 02:45 PM

I don't know what you mean by the guy at the gym.

A lot of people mean a lot of different things by it.

To me your post had a very dismissive tone, and I have heard a lot of people, both online and in real life, use it to dismiss all non magical characters as pathetic and boring. Heck, I have one guy in my gaming group who absolutely *will not* play a character who isn't a spell caster, even in a game system that doesn't have magic in it, and when asked why his response is "People are boring. Only powers are interesting."

I'm more inclined to play grounded character in a historical fantasy than epic heroes, that said I have nothing against playing epic heroes or superheroes. The point I was trying to make is it's so almost impossible to keep the mundane relevant if he doesn't become superhuman at the higher levels.

Let's look at this for example from Gurps perspective. A level 1 guy might be a 100 point character, level 2 200 point, level 3 300 point etc. So when they hit level 20 they are 2.000 point characters. So the wizard and the mundane should be the same but they aren't. The wizard has access to all those cool powers like teleport, mind control, flying, scrying, disintegrate and summon a 2.000 point angel to fight for him, these are exclusive to him. The mundane can spend his points on skills, attributes and advantages, every seasoned Gurps player will tell you that your mundane isn't mundane anymore, not with 2.000 points, he's superhuman even though he only buy mundane stuff. Just to be able to spend his points he'd have to break all the limits that Gurps puts on a mundane characters.

But really I find the "guy at the gym fallacy" to be a giant crock anyway.

Among its flaws:

We aren't talking about "a guy at the gym," we are talking about a figure out of legend who is as good as or better than the best who has ever been.
Likewise it isn't about what "we" or "some guy" can do, its about what is technically possible to do.
It is more than possible to break into the T3 sweet spot with nothing but mundane abilities.
There is nothing fallacious about wanting your character, or even your whole campaign world, to have the aesthetics of the knight in shining armor or mighty barbarian who slay dragons and battle evil sorcerers with nothing but their strong arms, quick wits, indomitable wills, and martial skill as opposed to Wuxia or mediavel super-heroes.

The problem is still that either the characters singular in their abilities to be legendary or as most things devolve into like on these threads on these forums: Help my players are level 13 and they are fighting a tribe of level 10 gnolls, how can I stat them?" I don't want to know how a whole tribe of gnolls became level 10 but they apperantly did. Or you have: The king sent a group of level 17 assassins after the group after they insulted him.

Be looking at posts at these forums you'll quickly see that high level characters aren't singular, they're a run of the mill just so they can oppose the epic heroes. So if high level characters are run of the mill who are all figures of legend who are better or the best who have ever been then this is clearly a common, trainable phenomenon. But it still doesn't answer how a the knight in shining armor can compete against the level 20 wizard who has access to world changing powers.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-26, 02:46 PM

.
Some of us just like to play characters like that.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

What I'm wondering about is why some insist on trying to cram the square peg of those characters into the round hole of certain systems or settings that don't support them.

2D8HP

2017-12-26, 02:48 PM

...people say those who aren't bypassing obstacles be given abilities to bypass obstacles even if different obstacles than the ones being bypassed. Those who like gym people cry foul..
Wow, by all the power of Lolth's invisible underwear that is a mouthful @Pex!

I'd word it as:

Some people like to play superpowered Wizards.

Other people don't.

It's been noted that in 3.x D&D, Wizards get very powerful.

Some people like that, and think that's awesome.

People have noticed that other classes don't become quite so powerful.

Some people think that's lame.

Some want to make other classes moar awesome.

Others want to make Wizards more lame.

Other people would rather play other games rather than play high level WD&D anyway.

Personally I like medium level TSR D&D, low lever 5e WD&D, Mythic Iceland, Pendragon, RuneQuest, and Traveller.

With some tweaks, I think Stormbringer could be AWESOME!, but as is "Caster Supremacy" is true for that game as well.

Because they're so many open tables, I'd like to give Pathfinder a try, but the impression that I get from this Forum is "Go optimized caster or go home"

Jama7301

2017-12-26, 02:53 PM

And there's nothing wrong with that.

What I'm wondering about is why some insist on trying to cram the square peg of those characters into the round hole of certain systems or settings that don't support them.

This makes me wonder... How clear are games in laying out what sort of game they are, and what sort of characters work best within it.

Arbane

2017-12-26, 03:33 PM

This makes me wonder... How clear are games in laying out what sort of game they are, and what sort of characters work best within it.

Most older games are as clear as granite. "Indie" games tend to be better at it, simply because they're often more tightly themed than One System To Rule Them All games.

Calthropstu

2017-12-26, 03:55 PM

You sure?

I can't recall ever rolling a combat against a house-cat, and I very rarely roll falling damage against anyone, certainly not a 200' fall against a large animal, they seem like pretty edge cases to me.

But yes, HP are a very bad model, which is why I look at them as extra abstract rather than trying to warp the fiction to suit them.

Feels like an mmo is precisely that. It has the same type of combat system the WoW has to an extent that it really felt like WoW the ttrpg. It nearly completely abandoned everything that made D&D what it was.
If they had called it anything other than D&D, it would have been much better recieved, though it would not have benefited from the D&D name.

Arbane

2017-12-26, 04:01 PM

Feels like an mmo is precisely that. It has the same type of combat system the WoW has to an extent that it really felt like WoW the ttrpg. It nearly completely abandoned everything that made D&D what it was.
If they had called it anything other than D&D, it would have been much better recieved, though it would not have benefited from the D&D name.

I'm going to go on a limb here and guess you've never played 4th edition, WoW, or both.

Remember back when D&D 3rd edition came out and the Internet Hivemind was slagging it for feeling like an videogame? (Specifically, Diablo.) Ahh, the Good Old Days....

Lord Raziere

2017-12-26, 04:08 PM

Most older games are as clear as granite. "Indie" games tend to be better at it, simply because they're often more tightly themed than One System To Rule Them All games.

Pretty much. Shadowrun is also an offender: there are two kinds of hacker, one is a normal hacker and the other is a special sorcerer-esque hacker who can do it with his mind. the normal hacker is mechanically better than the magical hacker, flat out. You wouldn't know this until you try to build one, where creation is complicated due to the vast amounts of equipment, money and so on you have, and guess what? making a character that ISN'T specialized and good at one thing and bad every thing else is apparently playing it badly, because every skill a little game unto itself that no one else participates in. you come expecting cool fantasy cyberpunk adventure, you get a cyberpunk heist simulation game.

and then there's Vampire the Masquerade. its supposed to be a punkish rebellion against authority. In practice its a political game where the Elders always win no matter what. but then again some people outright play it as Super Heroes with Fangs, which is not intended at all, which says something about the capabilities of the system.

and then you read Mage The Ascension: it sounds a lot like it should be this big war your being recruited into and there is all these crazy powers flying around from being a bunch of reality warpers, and that between people who use magic through such esoteric powers of SCREW THE RULES I HAVE MONEY!, drug-addiction, cyberpunk hacking, The Wonders Of Spaaaaaaaaaaace, and Being the Men In Black and so on, that this should be a crazy gonzo reality warper fest of epic proportions for the fate of all existence. except paradox exists and we're supposed to somehow take this all seriously as some secret conspiracy thing where we are just small players in a conflict where everyone is hiding their magic or something.

heck its basically a problem with any system that goes too complex. you get told one thing by the fluff then the mechanics turn out with all their interactions do something completely else thats kind of similar but not really.

Talakeal

2017-12-26, 04:08 PM

The problem is still that either the characters singular in their abilities to be legendary or as most things devolve into like on these threads on these forums: Help my players are level 13 and they are fighting a tribe of level 10 gnolls, how can I stat them?" I don't want to know how a whole tribe of gnolls became level 10 but they apperantly did. Or you have: The king sent a group of level 17 assassins after the group after they insulted him.

Be looking at posts at these forums you'll quickly see that high level characters aren't singular, they're a run of the mill just so they can oppose the epic heroes. So if high level characters are run of the mill who are all figures of legend who are better or the best who have ever been then this is clearly a common, trainable phenomenon.

A tribe of level 10 gnolls is pretty messed up. But that's more a failure of the scaling in 3E where the numbers are so much larger than the d20 that you need to scale everything up to challenge the PCs. It wasn't nearly as much of an issue in 2E; 4E solved it with minions and 5E solved it with bounded accuracy, although I think in both cases they went a bit too far.

Yeah, if you have a world were high level characters is common it gets pretty silly pretty quickly, and you soon run into the old "If everyone is special then no one is" phenomenon. IMO making all high level characters into wizards and super heroes is *more* of a problem in such a setting though as you no longer have anything that even remotely resembles traditional commoners or soldiers.

But it still doesn't answer how a the knight in shining armor can compete against the level 20 wizard who has access to world changing powers.

Stab him?

Of course, this is a really open ended question, we don't know what they are competing in, what these world changing powers entail, or how these powers function.

Talakeal

2017-12-26, 04:14 PM

and then you read Mage The Ascension: it sounds a lot like it should be this big war your being recruited into and there is all these crazy powers flying around from being a bunch of reality warpers, and that between people who use magic through such esoteric powers of SCREW THE RULES I HAVE MONEY!, drug-addiction, cyberpunk hacking, The Wonders Of Spaaaaaaaaaaace, and Being the Men In Black and so on, that this should be a crazy gonzo reality warper fest of epic proportions for the fate of all existence. except paradox exists and we're supposed to somehow take this all seriously as some secret conspiracy thing where we are just small players in a conflict where everyone is hiding their magic or something.

Kind of confused about what you are saying here.

Both the setting and the rules for Mage make it out to be a very covert and subtle game about fighting a secret conflict to discover / control the nature of reality, something akin to Dark City or The Matrix. Not sure who sold it to you as a game of "crazy powers flying around from being a bunch of reality warpers" but that is certainly not something I have ever seen.

Although if you want that sort of thing you can go into the spirit world, the umbra is a lot looser with paradox and consensual reality than Earth is.

Chaosticket

2017-12-26, 04:18 PM

I cant keep track of what everyone is even trying to say.

Magic in Dungeons and Dragons is powerful and grows by magnitude every magic spell tier.

Should mundane abilities like olympic level strength be able to win against say turning yourself incorporeal or firing beams of concentrated energy?

Punch beats Death Ray is what I contrast the argument to.

Physical characters can stil be useful if they harness magic in items like magical arrows and cloaks of Flight.

Mundane on the other hand is the absence of anything magical. That would require banning magical classes, abilities, items, and enemies. In that case stop at level 10 otherwise fighting Demons and Elder God spawn with destroy you.

There are some optional things without magic but that is a genre shift. Pathfinder has rules for rules for different eras of Firearms. You could try that.

Lord Raziere

2017-12-26, 04:24 PM

Kind of confused about what you are saying here.

Both the setting and the rules for Mage make it out to be a very covert and subtle game about fighting a secret conflict to discover / control the nature of reality, something akin to Dark City or The Matrix. Not sure who sold it to you as a game of "crazy powers flying around from being a bunch of reality warpers" but that is certainly not something I have ever seen.

Although if you want that sort of thing you can go into the spirit world, the umbra is a lot looser with paradox and consensual reality than Earth is.

The one who sold me on that is my eyes, by reading the game and its fluff. perhaps if they wanted the matrix style rebellion perhaps they should give me a conflict that isn't literally over the aesthetics of how they do their reality warping. oh wait they did it was called Mage: The Awakening, I read it first and then read M20 and was like, "Ascension is MUCH better than Awakening, give me this gonzo craziness"

because Awakening is much better at the intended matrix thing and I like Ascension MUCH better because it isn't.

Talakeal

2017-12-26, 04:30 PM

Mundane on the other hand is the absence of anything magical. That would require banning magical classes, abilities, items, and enemies. In that case stop at level 10 otherwise fighting Demons and Elder God spawn with destroy you.

There are some optional things without magic but that is a genre shift. Pathfinder has rules for rules for different eras of Firearms. You could try that.

I don't think anyone has suggested banning magic items, and you are the first person to define "mundane" as being unable to benefit from the magic of items or your allies.

I don't think stopping at level 10 has anything to do with it, a Shadow is a CR2 creature which is completely invincible without magic, and there are plenty of big beat 'em up monsters past level 10.

If a game really wanted to it could be designed to allow mundane characters to triumph, you would just need to implement plenty of "folk magic" limitations for the supernatural creatures, like having them be unable to cross holy ground, or unable to touch anyone wearing an iron charm, or destroyed by sunlight or the like.

The one who sold me on that is my eyes, by reading the game and its fluff. perhaps if they wanted the matrix style rebellion perhaps they should give me a conflict that isn't literally over the aesthetics of how they do their reality warping. oh wait they did it was called Mage: The Awakening, I read it first and then read M20 and was like, "Ascension is MUCH better than Awakening, give me this gonzo craziness"

because Awakening is much better at the intended matrix thing and I like Ascension MUCH better because it isn't.

I'm sorry, but I literally do not understand what you are trying to say.

2D8HP

2017-12-26, 04:38 PM

This makes me wonder... How clear are games in laying out what sort of game they are, and what sort of characters work best within it..
I've seen complaints posted about 2e AD&D by someone who felt cheated when they could only play Meriadoc, Pippin, and Samwell level PC's (presumably at first level) but they were told that they would be playing "Beowulf, Conan, Cú Chulainn, and Roland" types, and of course there's this thread, wherein folks have said that they can't play heroic "martials" because "Dr. Strange" does everything, and thus false advertising.

In oD&D & 1e AD&D, unless you had very lucky rolls (or used the cursed abomination of 1985's Unearthed Arcana) you started play at a Bilbo Baggins level, not a Beowulf level, and given the intro's:

Dungeons & Dragons,
Book 1:
Men & Magic, 1974
"These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find Dungeons & Dragons to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers. With this last bit of advice we invite you to read on and enjoy a "world" where the fantastic is fact and magic really works!
E. Gary Gygax
Tactical Studies Rules Editor
1 November 1973
Lake Geneva, Wisconsin"

Dungeon Masters Guide 1979
"The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, REH, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, HPL, and A. Merritt."
Gygax
16 May 1979

...one may feel gyped.

I don't have my 3.5 and 5e PHB with me (they're at home) but I do have the 3e PHB at work with me (as are my oD&D books, and my other set of AD&D books), and the 3e PHB doesn't say much regarding "Inspirations".

In the 3e PHB for "Fighter" it says:
"The questing knight, the conquering overlord, the king's champion, the elite foot soldier, the hardened mercenary, and the bandit king - all are fighters..."

For "Rogue" it has:
"Some are stealthy thieves. Others are silver-tongued tricksters. Still others are scouts, infiltrators, spies, diplomats, or thugs...".

For "Wizards" it's:
"A few unintelligible words and a fleeting gesture carry more power than a battleaxe, when they are the words and gestures of a Wizard..."

....and it goes on further about Wizards (and other classes), but I don't care, because I'm sold on playing a Fighter or Rogue (or both at the same time!).

I guess it's all right there with: "...more power than a battleaxe, when they are the words and gestures of a Wizard...", making me even more commited to the character conception of a "Sneaks up behind Spell casters, and knocks 'em down before they finish incanting" PC.

I'm going to go on a limb here and guess you've never played 4th edition, WoW, or both... .
Same for me.

I DM'd 1977 "Basic" D&D, and then I played (in order) 0e D&D, other RPG's (RuneQuest and MERP/Rolemaster being the most D&D like), B/X D&D, and 5e WD&D, and I DM'd an "edited" version of 1e AD&D, but I never played 2e AD&D, 3e, 3.5, or 4e WD&D, and I have never played WOW or any MMO.

...Remember back when D&D 3rd edition came out and the Internet Hivemind was slagging it for feeling like an videogame? (Specifically, Diablo.) Ahh, the Good Old Days.....
Nope.

I bought the 3e PHB in 2000, but I have little memory of what was "online" back then, mostly I read the New York Times (each page took 20 minutes to load using dial-up), or I'd check my library record, so there just wasn't that much for me to remember.

Cosi

2017-12-26, 05:08 PM

You don't have to like high level play or Superman, but that doesn't mean your preference should be taken away from the game and forbidden from those who do. The solution is easy and already done - end your campaign at whatever level you're comfortable with. However, your dislike of whatever comes after doesn't make the game wrong.

Yes, exactly this. I still don't understand how this is controversial, let alone how adopting this position causes people to describe me as an unreasonable absolutist who is trying to kick them out of the game.

D&D has magic items which are useable by mundane characters. I am not arguing against it.

If the reason you are level appropriate is the particular pile of magical items you have, I don't think you're really a mundane character. You're a vehicle for a pile of enchantments.

Take King Arthur. In many ways, his story is less the story of him as a particular person and more the story of "the guy who happened to get these magic items". He's not king because he conquered England by the strength of his sword arm and his personal cunning. He's king because he pulled the sword from the stone. He wins fights because of his magic sword. If you gave some other moderately competent dude King Arthur's items, he would be King Arthur.

It is more than possible to break into the T3 sweet spot with nothing but mundane abilities.

I don't think that's the sweet spot at all. Using a descriptive system prescriptively is a bad plan, but beyond that identifying Tier Three as the "sweet spot" is kicking raise dead, teleport, and plane shift out of the game, which I don't think is acceptable.

There is nothing fallacious about wanting your character, or even your whole campaign world, to have the aesthetics of the knight in shining armor or mighty barbarian who slay dragons and battle evil sorcerers with nothing but their strong arms, quick wits, indomitable wills, and martial skill as opposed to Wuxia or mediavel super-heroes.

Sure, you can want that. But other people want other things. Such as non-western influences, or higher power levels. I though we were supposed to be compromising?

Feels like an mmo is precisely that. It has the same type of combat system the WoW has to an extent that it really felt like WoW the ttrpg. It nearly completely abandoned everything that made D&D what it was.
If they had called it anything other than D&D, it would have been much better recieved, though it would not have benefited from the D&D name.

"4e was good, but it wasn't D&D" is a compelling narrative, but I think it's a revisionist narrative that doesn't really fit the facts on the ground. 4e has real and serious flaws that are totally independent from our expectations about D&D. At launch, skill challenges simply didn't work. The specific numbers made failure either impossible or inevitable (I forget which side the erred on, it went both ways over the revisions it saw), and the underlying math failed to achieve the design goals they laid out for it (read more here (http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=49652)). Combat had problems as well, particularly in fights with solos which tended to take a long time to reach predetermined conclusions with small numbers of decision points.

A tribe of level 10 gnolls is pretty messed up. But that's more a failure of the scaling in 3E where the numbers are so much larger than the d20 that you need to scale everything up to challenge the PCs.

That's the system working as intended. If you don't scale numbers, nothing can stand against a whole bunch of regular dudes, which is a pretty serious failure in a game that postulates that you send super hardcore dudes (called "adventurers" to go solve problems).

Yeah, if you have a world were high level characters is common it gets pretty silly pretty quickly, and you soon run into the old "If everyone is special then no one is" phenomenon. IMO making all high level characters into wizards and super heroes is *more* of a problem in such a setting though as you no longer have anything that even remotely resembles traditional commoners or soldiers.

I think MTG handles this very well. There is space for regular dudes, and also space for high level characters. This is not nearly the design challenge you and others think it is. The same company that makes D&D solved it easily.

If a game really wanted to it could be designed to allow mundane characters to triumph, you would just need to implement plenty of "folk magic" limitations for the supernatural creatures, like having them be unable to cross holy ground, or unable to touch anyone wearing an iron charm, or destroyed by sunlight or the like.

Making every high level monster a puzzle monster sounds awful. It's a kitchen sink fantasy game. Part of that kitchen sink is stuff that is very dangerous and just straight up kills regular dudes. Why is allowing you to play a character concept that is defined by its limitations up to 20 more important than that?

I'm sorry, but I literally do not understand what you are trying to say.

If I'm understanding her correctly (and I might not be, and might instead be projecting my criticisms of the game), Lord Raziere's point is that the elevator pitch for Mage suggests a game that is, to her, much cooler than what the game actually delivers. Specifically, Mage has the basic premise that belief changes the nature of reality. So if a bunch of people believe that there is life after dead, or that turnips cure cancer, that is actually true. And her not-unreasonable conclusion from this is that the game would be about going around convincing people to buy into your reality paradigm, and then getting into really crazy reality bending fights with people whose paradigms are incompatible with yours, or going on weird acid-trip journeys through spirit realms, or having philosophical arguments about the nature of reality that ultimately result in you getting to shoot lightning from your elbows or whatever. But the game has Paradox as (essentially) a hack to keep you from doing any of that, and instead force you to do the street-level angst White Wolf thinks is Real Roleplaying.

Now, I don't entirely agree with that position. For one, I think the way consensus reality is set up makes player-versus-player conflicts inevitable (which is bad), and I find having the guys who make electricity and vaccines work be villains to be kind of offensive (and while there are ways that you could make that less bad, Mage doesn't really go in for them as far as I can see). I would be very eager to play a game that tried to grab some of the essential concepts of Mage and remix them into something less White Wolf-y. Possibly it could also be a less White Wolf-y version of Exalted.

Lord Raziere

2017-12-26, 05:25 PM

I'm sorry, but I literally do not understand what you are trying to say.

I just said it.

I wasn't being metaphorical or anything.

I don't really get how I can be more clear? is anything specific I should clarify?

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-26, 05:48 PM

I'm going to go on a limb here and guess you've never played 4th edition, WoW, or both.

I used to play WoW, played a ton of it. Also played some City of Villains, and a TON of SWTOR. I've played or studied dozens of RPG systems, including multiple older editions of D&D/d20. I've been involved in game design (unpublished, I did all the math and probability work, and some worldbuilding, but the guy who "owned" the setting flaked out).

One read-through of 4e was enough for me to say that it felt a lot like an MMO. Note that this was an independent opinion, before I'd read anything about the opinions of others along the same lines.

"If you haven't played it, you don't know" is a convenient dismissal, and nothing more.

Calthropstu

2017-12-26, 06:27 PM

I'm going to go on a limb here and guess you've never played 4th edition, WoW, or both.

Remember back when D&D 3rd edition came out and the Internet Hivemind was slagging it for feeling like an videogame? (Specifically, Diablo.) Ahh, the Good Old Days....

Ok, I have not played WoW. I have played Guild Wars and Everquest and some others however, and have watched WoW being played.

I most certainly have played 4e, and the similarities are obnoxiously obvious. You have quick recharge spam powers vs the at will 4e powers, mid range recharge powers vs 4e encounter powers. You have long wait recharge powers vs 4e daily powers.

The out of combat powers for 4e were virtually nonexistant. The powers and abilities have similar effects to what you get in an mmo. I played a psion from phb3, and I remember thinking "add the sound effects and this guy is a GW mesmer."

Yeah, there was a bit of abilities that were unique, but it was easy to draw the connection.

Talakeal

2017-12-26, 06:53 PM

I don't think that's the sweet spot at all. Using a descriptive system prescriptively is a bad plan, but beyond that identifying Tier Three as the "sweet spot" is kicking raise dead, teleport, and plane shift out of the game, which I don't think is acceptable.

I know you don't. In my experience most people do though, and the CR system seems balanced around the mid point.

I agree that getting rid of those spells is not a good thing, but you can still have them in the game some other way, depending on what you are doing. For example fixed list casters tend to be T3-4, and the Healer can raise the dead, not sure of the top of my head who (if anyone) gets teleport but a fixed list conjurer probably wouldn't be hard to whip up.

Sure, you can want that. But other people want other things. Such as non-western influences, or higher power levels. I though we were supposed to be compromising?

We are. I have no problem with other people playing wuxia martial artists or fantasy super-heroes in the same party as my barbarian or knight. As a DM I even bend my setting to allow all sorts of crazy anime characters if the player has their heart set on it. I just don't like being told what I *can't* play (again within the rules of the game and the bounds of reason).

That's the system working as intended. If you don't scale numbers, nothing can stand against a whole bunch of regular dudes, which is a pretty serious failure in a game that postulates that you send super hardcore dudes (called "adventurers" to go solve problems).

The population demographics in the DMG imply that an entire tribe of level 10 gnolls is not something that is really intended.

I think MTG handles this very well. There is space for regular dudes, and also space for high level characters. This is not nearly the design challenge you and others think it is. The same company that makes D&D solved it easily.

Depends on how the DM runs the game. It can work well or it can not work well.

Making every high level monster a puzzle monster sounds awful. It's a kitchen sink fantasy game. Part of that kitchen sink is stuff that is very dangerous and just straight up kills regular dudes. Why is allowing you to play a character concept that is defined by its limitations up to 20 more important than that?

Agreed. While I have mixed feelings about an occasional puzzle monster, I certainly wouldn't enjoy an entire tier of the game of them.

Note that it isn't about "level" though, there are plenty of low level "puzzle monsters" and high level "big bags o' HP" monsters.

I was merely stating how one would go about integrating monsters like Shadows into a "no magic" fantasy campaign, which is not something I have ever actually run or intend to run.

Chaosticket

2017-12-26, 06:58 PM

Again I dont understand what each person's stance is.

I like magic and thinking about combinations to making it possibly more useful than intended. Pretty clear I'm pro-magic.

Ive never reached a point where its been broken. If I did I think I would either be jealous of not having it ("i picked the wrong character") or bored by basically reaching a pinnacle of power.(Doctor Strange vs highwaymen) If that was reached I would probably progress to gradually more difficult to succeed characters.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-26, 08:04 PM

Again I dont understand what each person's stance is.

Have you read the thread from the beginning?

I've laid my position out repeatedly, including on this thread.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-12-26, 08:33 PM

That's the system working as intended. If you don't scale numbers, nothing can stand against a whole bunch of regular dudes, which is a pretty serious failure in a game that postulates that you send super hardcore dudes (called "adventurers" to go solve problems).

At the cost of a huge issue with maintaining a normal-seeming world. Without something like 5e's bounded accuracy (which I know you hate), runaway power scaling causes worlds to go sideways.

Consider a superhero setting. One where superheros are virtually immune to "normals" (ie most of them). If you want to maintain any kind of "status quo" in the setting, one or more of the following must be true, none of them very good.

1) The heroes and the villains exist in an eternal deadlock. Neither side can ever win, not even temporarily. As soon as one villain is put down, another must rise up (and the same goes for the heroes). No one can take enough time off to use super-strength to build a dam or use their intellect to invent useful gadgets, etc. While this makes for good movies and games, it's unsatisfying from a world-building perspective, as well as quite artificial.
Corollary: Heroes and villains must be unable to switch sides except in matched pairs. Otherwise the balance would be disrupted long enough for the setting to go sideways.

AND/OR

2) Superpowers must be unuseable for doing anything but fighting super-powered opponents and must only really be useful by supes.. A single Iron Man invention would radicalize the world, after all. That's screwy, personally.

AND/OR

3) Supes (both villains and heroes) must be unwilling to help/hinder "normals." Since that's not true in any superhero setting I'm familiar with, I think we can discard this one.

Bounded accuracy (or limited power scaling in general) prevents that by allowing large-enough, determined-enough groups of normals to oppose even a major threat. I did some simulations that showed that in 5e, 50 CR 3 veterans, 100 CR 1/8 guards and 4 ballista (an average castle loadout per the DMG) could take down an adult red dragon with only about 20% casualties as long as they could see it coming long enough to fire from the ballista's max range. Given a dedicated archer corps, they'd take many fewer casualties. This means that dragons are no longer existential threats--they're dangerous, but not country-destroying threats that it takes a high-level adventuring party to deal with. You no longer need to have these super-powered guards at every gate just to handle the average set of bandits.

Because having tribes of CR 10 gnolls (especially if CR 10s are basically immune to anything of CR 5 or below) means that the setting's going to start creaking and groaning under the implausibility pile-up. Why haven't all these high level threats done anything? How did they get this powerful without being obliterated by the other high level threats? How can the party get powerful without being scryed and killed by someone who figures out that in 6 months they'll be a threat? Etc. This is a never-ending spiral of setting failure.

I think MTG handles this very well. There is space for regular dudes, and also space for high level characters. This is not nearly the design challenge you and others think it is. The same company that makes D&D solved it easily.

MTG handles it by being single-author fiction (for the relevant parts, as the card game itself has no plot, no binding setting, just disassociated mechanics). Same way that the D&D novels (which don't use the mechanics at all) handle it. By ignoring the mechanics and fiat'ing all the relevant details into shape. That doesn't work for a game.

Mechalich

2017-12-26, 09:03 PM

2) Superpowers must be unuseable for doing anything but fighting super-powered opponents and must only really be useful by supes.. A single Iron Man invention would radicalize the world, after all. That's screwy, personally.

Even if supers can do nothing but revolutionize military technology and a few other high risk sectors (search and rescue, prizefighting, etc.) you're still going to dramatically change the world because of cascade effects. I mean, if every country can replace their military with a sanctioned Supers Dueling Team for dispute settlement that costs about as much money to maintain as the Golden State Warriors do it would dramatically change the flow of money and arms and other factors all over the planet.

MTG handles it by being single-author fiction (for the relevant parts, as the card game itself has no plot, no binding setting, just disassociated mechanics). Same way that the D&D novels (which don't use the mechanics at all) handle it. By ignoring the mechanics and fiat'ing all the relevant details into shape. That doesn't work for a game.

MTG also allows the high-level folk - the Planewalkers - to massively F-over the low level everyone else by totally rewriting whole worlds at a time. Take Tarkir - Sarkhan literally re-wrote the history of that world. If you were part of the Khanates, well, now you don't exist anymore and dragons own all your ancestor's land. MTG fully embraces the scheme that the lowbies don't matter and it's either go planeswalker or go home.

Cosi

2017-12-26, 09:46 PM

I know you don't. In my experience most people do though

Bull. Did you see the popularity drop off from 3e to 4e? Pathfinder literally exists as a viable product because people are not okay with taking away the non-combat abilities of casters.

The population demographics in the DMG imply that an entire tribe of level 10 gnolls is not something that is really intended.

Not the point (although it was a little confusing quoting the first sentence of yours). 10th level Gnolls are dumb. Though, it should be pointed out, they are dumb for the exact same reason that a 20th level mundane character is dumb -- the game should change as you level. The point was that pushing low level people off the RNG is genuinely fine, because it makes high level characters distinct from low level ones.

MTG also allows the high-level folk - the Planewalkers - to massively F-over the low level everyone else by totally rewriting whole worlds at a time.

MTG establishes the superiority of high level characters over low level ones, because that is what having a level system means. 20th level characters are supposed to beat up on 5th level ones, otherwise the system isn't doing its job. That's different from obsoleting them wholesale. Planeswalkers don't solve all the problems on all the worlds. Every single block has non-Planeswalker characters winning victories that are meaningful to them and achieving goals that they find meaningful. Do you want me to point you at specific plot points? Because I can if that's something you need. Hell, every single Planeswalker's story starts with someone who is specifically not a Planeswalker doing something heroic.

Again, think about the real world. Whatever you do, it is all but certain that it could be done better if the President of the United States* happened to want to do it, or that it could be undone if he wished to undo it. Does that make your actions meaningless? Do you think, every time you go to work, "you know, the President could direct a couple billion dollars of discretionary spending towards my job and make more progress than I ever could, no real point in doing this"? I would imagine you don't. So why should the fact that a Planeswalker could knock over your character's sandcastle necessarily make building that sandcastle irrelevant?

*: Or whoever your country's leader happens to be.

Take Tarkir - Sarkhan literally re-wrote the history of that world. If you were part of the Khanates, well, now you don't exist anymore and dragons own all your ancestor's land.

Time travel is weird. All Sarkhan actually did was tip history slightly towards "there are more dragons". The rest was still the result of non-Planeswalker individuals making decisions and engaging in struggle for power and dominance. If those struggles were meaningful in the Khans timeline, they are presumably still meaningful in the Dragons one, so it's hard to say that Sarkhan really destroyed any meaning people might have found. I mean, yes, those characters don't exist any more, but that's more down to him doing time travel at all than the specific results of that time travel (Chaos Theory says that even if all he did was slightly change Alesha's diet, the world would probably have had totally different leaders in the modern era). From the perspective of the non-Planeswalker people, Sarkhan's actions were all but undetectable.

Consider a superhero setting. One where superheros are virtually immune to "normals" (ie most of them). If you want to maintain any kind of "status quo" in the setting, one or more of the following must be true, none of them very good.

Our world doesn't have a stable status quo. It has (to my knowledge) no superheroes of any kind. Yet the world looks totally different than it did fifty years ago. Fifty years ago, we had yet to land a man on the moon. Fifty years ago, there was no world wide web. Fifty years ago, there was still a USSR. Fifty years ago, there had never been a black President of the United States. Fifty years ago, we didn't have cell phones or GPS. It is simply very difficult to maintain a status quo in any setting where change is possible at all, regardless of whether that setting has superhumans in it or not.

3) Supes (both villains and heroes) must be unwilling to help/hinder "normals." Since that's not true in any superhero setting I'm familiar with, I think we can discard this one.

Weird, this is basically the best solution, and is the solution implied to one degree or another by various parts of D&D. High level characters go off to have planar adventurers, and mostly don't poke at mortal kingdoms. When they do, its in highly specific places and in highly specific ways that mostly don't upset the overall applecart. After all, why would they? They can make anything mortals can better and faster, so there's no reason for anyone to conquer a mortal kingdom in general, and if people have specific reasons that is what we call a "plot hook". You don't need to make it so no supers ever step on the normals. That's dumb, because "supers are stepping on the normals" is an interesting campaign. You need to make it so the default is "don't step on the normals", because that allows you to have normals that aren't stepped on when you want that.

Bounded accuracy (or limited power scaling in general) prevents that by allowing large-enough, determined-enough groups of normals to oppose even a major threat. I did some simulations that showed that in 5e, 50 CR 3 veterans, 100 CR 1/8 guards and 4 ballista (an average castle loadout per the DMG) could take down an adult red dragon with only about 20% casualties as long as they could see it coming long enough to fire from the ballista's max range. Given a dedicated archer corps, they'd take many fewer casualties. This means that dragons are no longer existential threats--they're dangerous, but not country-destroying threats that it takes a high-level adventuring party to deal with. You no longer need to have these super-powered guards at every gate just to handle the average set of bandits.

Great, your system can't do The Hobbit which has a dragon taking over a city as party of the backstory. I think literally every person in this thread agrees that D&D ought to be able to handle The Hobbit. Also, you probably should need adventurers, because why else would you tolerate people whose career is "killing things and taking their stuff"? Finally, the game already has things that are "dangerous but not existential threats" without Bounded Accuracy. All Bounded Accuracy does is remove the possibility of anything being an existential threat. That shrinks the game for no reason.

Why haven't all these high level threats done anything?

Why don't most people become adventurers? Is it really difficult to imagine that the majority of Illithids, Beholders, Dragons, Liches, or what have you might be content to sit around studying magic or ruling over a kingdom they've held for a couple hundred years? Really, it's weirder if there aren't high level threats lying around in the status quo, because that implies that the PCs are the reason all the evil happens. There should be Murkwoods and Mordors sitting around waiting for people to overthrow their masters. Or ancient tombs waiting to be plundered. Or any number of other adventures.

How did they get this powerful without being obliterated by the other high level threats?

How did Country X develop nuclear weapons without being obliterated by Country Y (where Country Y is some country that had them first)?

How can the party get powerful without being scryed and killed by someone who figures out that in 6 months they'll be a threat?

Divination doesn't really work like that. Also, "the Dark Lord sends minions after you because he thinks you'll become a threat" is exactly the plot of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.

Do you have some harder questions?

Talakeal

2017-12-26, 10:06 PM

Bull. Did you see the popularity drop off from 3e to 4e? Pathfinder literally exists as a viable product because people are not okay with taking away the non-combat abilities of casters.

That's quite a stretch.

4E did a lot of things that turned a lot of people off. I hated 4E, but it sure as heck wasn't because of tighter balance or lack of T1 casters.

If it was as near unanimous as you claim I don't think 5E would have doubled down on the whole "bounded accuracy" thing like it did or implemented things like the concentration mechanic.

Not the point (although it was a little confusing quoting the first sentence of yours). 10th level Gnolls are dumb. Though, it should be pointed out, they are dumb for the exact same reason that a 20th level mundane character is dumb -- the game should change as you level. The point was that pushing low level people off the RNG is genuinely fine, because it makes high level characters distinct from low level ones.

Strongly disagree. Its the "entire tribe is 10th level" that I was disagreeing with, not the fact that using the same enemies over time is lame. I think one of the great advantages of 3E is that I can have a CR 20 gnoll of legend if I am so inclined.

Edit: Also, there is not really any necessity to have a correlation between a mundane character and one who plays the same at all levels. One could easily design a system where the casters kept the same spell list throughout levels 1-20 and just got better at casting those spells or one where a martial character learned entirely new types of abilities every level; for example, imagine if, hypothetically, fighters picked up the full package of rogue abilities at 18th level, I imagine that would shake up the game pretty dramatically as far as their tactics go.

RazorChain

2017-12-26, 10:52 PM

Strongly disagree. Its the "entire tribe is 10th level" that I was disagreeing with, not the fact that using the same enemies over time is lame. I think one of the great advantages of 3E is that I can have a CR 20 gnoll of legend if I am so inclined.

Can't you do that in all systems? I mean if you want a tougher monster then you just toughen it up....there is a lion and there is the Nemean lion.

D&D has long since abandoned any pretense that the mechanics have anything to do with the settings. D&D has never fullfilled the promises of playing the heroes from your favorite fantasy (unless maybe if you read D&D novels but still....). D&D is unique for the better or worse and is it's own genre of fantasy.

Some have claimed that 5e is E6 spread over 20 levels as that is a bad thing but I think it's just a direct answer from the crowd that wants the mundane to stay relevant. 3.X is for people who to advance and never look back until they become gods and can stomp everything that isn't gods, they want to defeat armies singelhandedly at level 10. They want low level threats to become irrelevant just so they know how powerful they have become. 3.X is powerfantasy at it's finest.

5e seems to be trying to break from the uber powerfantasy and succeeds partially.

As for the mundane, I've kinda come to the conclusion that in a game that has a tendency to end in killing gods at higher levels has no place for mundanes at that power level.

This discussion also reminds me why I mostly stopped playing D&D with a few nostalgic relapses trying out 3.e and 5.e. D&D always had the tendency to scream at me "IT'S A GAME, RAZORCHAIN, YOU ARE PLAYING A GAME" When what I was after was more immersive experience.

Talakeal

2017-12-26, 10:59 PM

As for the mundane, I've kinda come to the conclusion that in a game that has a tendency to end in killing gods at higher levels has no place for mundanes at that power level.

Depends on the situation. I can cite a number of sci-fi stories where the protagonist was able to defeat an effectively omnipotent being by outsmarting it.

D&D has long since abandoned any pretense that the mechanics have anything to do with the settings. D&D has never fullfilled the promises of playing the heroes from your favorite fantasy (unless maybe if you read D&D novels but still....).

And what if you do want to recreate D&D novels?

I really enjoyed the Dragon Lance books and wouldn't mind playing a game that emulated them, but 3E really isn't suited for that sort of game, and many people tell me that it is logically inconsistent for any game to operate on that scale, like where Raistlin is literally able to defeat gods but still almost dies to a knife in the guy from a random bandit ambush.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-12-26, 11:00 PM

Our world doesn't have a stable status quo. It has (to my knowledge) no superheroes of any kind. Yet the world looks totally different than it did fifty years ago. Fifty years ago, we had yet to land a man on the moon. Fifty years ago, there was no world wide web. Fifty years ago, there was still a USSR. Fifty years ago, there had never been a black President of the United States. Fifty years ago, we didn't have cell phones or GPS. It is simply very difficult to maintain a status quo in any setting where change is possible at all, regardless of whether that setting has superhumans in it or not.

But the scale of the changes is smaller and slower. If Tony Stark could spend his time only making peaceful things, the world would progress exponentially faster (as in space travel for everyone in a few years). If any of the villains won (and was so inclined), you'd have total world domination.

Weird, this is basically the best solution, and is the solution implied to one degree or another by various parts of D&D. High level characters go off to have planar adventurers, and mostly don't poke at mortal kingdoms. When they do, its in highly specific places and in highly specific ways that mostly don't upset the overall applecart. After all, why would they? They can make anything mortals can better and faster, so there's no reason for anyone to conquer a mortal kingdom in general, and if people have specific reasons that is what we call a "plot hook". You don't need to make it so no supers ever step on the normals. That's dumb, because "supers are stepping on the normals" is an interesting campaign. You need to make it so the default is "don't step on the normals", because that allows you to have normals that aren't stepped on when you want that.

That feels really really artificial. No high-power person wants to stay around? No high power person wants to help other people? That's a horrible way of life.

Great, your system can't do The Hobbit which has a dragon taking over a city as party of the backstory. I think literally every person in this thread agrees that D&D ought to be able to handle The Hobbit. Also, you probably should need adventurers, because why else would you tolerate people whose career is "killing things and taking their stuff"? Finally, the game already has things that are "dangerous but not existential threats" without Bounded Accuracy. All Bounded Accuracy does is remove the possibility of anything being an existential threat. That shrinks the game for no reason.

First, Smaug didn't directly attack a castle that knew he was coming. He came in from below and took them by surprise. And no, D&D shouldn't handle the Hobbit. Very different world-building, very different assumptions, very different style. Adventurers are useful, but in 3e they're essential. As in any nation that doesn't have a slew of high-level people is utterly powerless to do anything. So everyone's high leveled. Which makes a run-away power spiral. See Naruto for the effects on worldbuilding when the power scale only involves more.

Why don't most people become adventurers? Is it really difficult to imagine that the majority of Illithids, Beholders, Dragons, Liches, or what have you might be content to sit around studying magic or ruling over a kingdom they've held for a couple hundred years? Really, it's weirder if there aren't high level threats lying around in the status quo, because that implies that the PCs are the reason all the evil happens. There should be Murkwoods and Mordors sitting around waiting for people to overthrow their masters. Or ancient tombs waiting to be plundered. Or any number of other adventures.

And those should be doable even if the threat could, in principle, be handled by an army. Because most places don't have armies. Anyway, adventurers are cheaper. And most people don't become adventurers (or high level ones) because they can't or because they don't have the patience, time, or luck. 3e's assumption that XP is a real in-universe thing (because otherwise how do you get level 20 commoners who've never been off the farm?) is monumentally stupid in my opinion. Levels aren't a in-universe thing. They're there for game convenience only.

How did Country X develop nuclear weapons without being obliterated by Country Y (where Country Y is some country that had them first)?

Because we didn't want to start another world war? The two are completely different. Targeted scry-and-fry is a surgical removal. Especially when you can do it anonymously, from across several planes, with functionally zero risk to yourself.

Divination doesn't really work like that. Also, "the Dark Lord sends minions after you because he thinks you'll become a threat" is exactly the plot of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.

And those are single-author fiction that revolves around author fiat. And in both of those, the "Dark Lord" figure is both strongly weakened (at the beginning) and unable to act directly. If Voldemort were at full power in book 1, Harry would be dead without a struggle. If Sauron had been at full power, the Ringbearer would never have been born. Voldemort in particular is much weaker than a level 20 3e T1 caster with any optimization (with the sole exception of the plot armor horocruxes).

What works in one medium (single author fiction, video games, movies, etc) doesn't necessarily work in a TTRPG. Mechanically representing any of those plots in D&D (especially 3e) would fail hard. In many many many world-shattering ways. D&D does not emulate fiction. It doesn't try to emulate fiction. It shouldn't try to emulate fiction. It's its own thing and should be left as such.

Mechalich

2017-12-26, 11:07 PM

Can't you do that in all systems? I mean if you want a tougher monster then you just toughen it up....there is a lion and there is the Nemean lion.

It is mechanistically much easier to do this in 3.X. That's one of the major advantages of the system actually, that you can do stuff like add a level of fighter to a troll and it doesn't get too weird.

D&D has long since abandoned any pretense that the mechanics have anything to do with the settings.

Granted, but a huge part of this thread is an examination of what it takes to fix that - not only for D&D but for systems in general since many of them have this problem. 3.X, and especially Pathfinder, admittedly don't seem to want to do this. They're far more committed to the kitchen sink and dumping anything they possibly can into the system to squeeze money out of it (Pathfinder introduced Krampus as a CR 29 Monster, I just can't even...) than making a viable system that works across the full scale presented.

5e, to it's credit, made a major attempt to address this through bounded accuracy. It is a matter of some debate as to both how well this works, and also how intrusive it appears to people playing the game as a blatant mechanical kludge. It would help if 5e were a properly supported game given a real chance and not an excuse for Mearls to keep getting dem checks.

Pex

2017-12-26, 11:16 PM

Some have claimed that 5e is E6 spread over 20 levels as that is a bad thing but I think it's just a direct answer from the crowd that wants the mundane to stay relevant. 3.X is for people who to advance and never look back until they become gods and can stomp everything that isn't gods, they want to defeat armies singelhandedly at level 10. They want low level threats to become irrelevant just so they know how powerful they have become. 3.X is powerfantasy at it's finest.

Your argument is lost with hyperbolic nonsense. You haven't crossed the Stormwind Fallacy line but have touched it.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-12-26, 11:19 PM

It is mechanistically much easier to do this in 3.X. That's one of the major advantages of the system actually, that you can do stuff like add a level of fighter to a troll and it doesn't get too weird.

At a significant cost, both in DM time and in world-building assumptions. It means you can't have an expert blacksmith who isn't also dozens of times more durable and combat capable than his apprentice. Or an expert farmer. It makes "levels" and "classes" into in-fiction things which is all sorts of distorting.

5e, to it's credit, made a major attempt to address this through bounded accuracy. It is a matter of some debate as to both how well this works, and also how intrusive it appears to people playing the game as a blatant mechanical kludge. It would help if 5e were a properly supported game given a real chance and not an excuse for Mearls to keep getting dem checks.

I've not found bounded accuracy to be intrusive at all. It makes worlds make much more sense to me, for reasons I've said above. I can actually imagine a world with people of those levels without wondering how it holds together and why it hasn't been broken by an errant sneeze yet. It's part of my disconnect with superhero fiction--you have that many super-powered folk running around and things aren't completely broken yet? Especially with all the collateral damage they cause.

And 5e seems to be significantly more well supported than you make it out to be. Don't confuse "not very many splats" with "poorly supported." That was a conscious decision, and in my opinion a feature. Just like the (first) video-game collapse of 1983, the RPG collapse at the end of 2e was exacerbated (not caused by, but made worse by) all the low-quality splats being dumped on the market. 3e went the same way and saw the same effect--lots of low-quality splats, no concern for theme or balance. Just more content. 4e started down that road. You hit market saturation pretty darn quick, and the market now is more fragmented than ever.

Cosi

2017-12-26, 11:30 PM

That's quite a stretch.

Sure, the failure of 4e is complicated. But I hardly think it's unreasonable to suggest that a game that stripped out all those abilities floundering while one that didn't succeeded is at least weak evidence that those abilities are important.

If it was as near unanimous as you claim I don't think 5E would have doubled down on the whole "bounded accuracy" thing like it did or implemented things like the concentration mechanic.

It seems to me that neither of those things have anything whatsoever to do with whether or not people can cast major creation.

Also, there is not really any necessity to have a correlation between a mundane character and one who plays the same at all levels.

I still am baffled by how you are apparently unable to comprehend the notion that defining your character by what abilities she doesn't have leads to a more limited character.

But the scale of the changes is smaller and slower. If Tony Stark could spend his time only making peaceful things, the world would progress exponentially faster (as in space travel for everyone in a few years). If any of the villains won (and was so inclined), you'd have total world domination.

Some people predict the Singularity in less than twenty years. Also, advancement from a medieval baseline is different from advancement from a modern one. We know what advancement from a medieval baseline looks like. We've done that. Extrapolating from a modern baseline is harder. But if you want to ask "what happens when something dramatically increases agricultural yields in a medieval society", that is a question we can answer.

That feels really really artificial. No high-power person wants to stay around? No high power person wants to help other people? That's a horrible way of life.

Several points:

1. It hardly seems fair to complain about a world that is functionally identical to the one you are pushing for. If you could accept the world looking the way you want because no one can do anything about it, it seems to be you should equally accept it being that way because no one does do anything about it. At least in the second world the PCs could change things if they wanted to.
2. It's not necessarily the case that no one helps anyone, simply that there are places which aren't helped. In this model, the Outer Planes (or Ravnica, or wherever high level people hang out) are presumably full of whatever magical wonders high level characters can create.
3. It doesn't have to be no one sticking around. There just has to be not be some incentive that makes everyone powerful intervene. There probably should be places where high level characters interact with low ones, but requiring that those characters have some motivation for doing it allows for a diversity of campaigns and makes those interactions more interesting.

Adventurers are useful, but in 3e they're essential. As in any nation that doesn't have a slew of high-level people is utterly powerless to do anything. So everyone's high leveled.

That doesn't follow at all. The real world contains plenty of countries that are powerless on an international scale. No one is kneeling before the armies of Turkmenistan or Paraguay. Does that mean that the lives of everyone in those countries are meaningless? Are their experiences not interesting and valuable? I wouldn't say that, although I suppose you could. Of course all the major players have lots of power, that's inherent in the concept of being a major player. All you can actually change is the power threshold. If there weren't nukes, that wouldn't suddenly make everyone an equal participant in international politics.

Because we didn't want to start another world war? The two are completely different. Targeted scry-and-fry is a surgical removal. Especially when you can do it anonymously, from across several planes, with functionally zero risk to yourself.

Again, several points:

1. Divinations sufficient to find targets are also sufficient to find perpetrators.
2. Scry-and-Die is remarkably fragile. Tweaking the balance in favor of the defender makes it go away almost entirely.
3. Killing off everyone who may become a threat also means killing of lots of potentially useful allies. This alone probably turns anyone who tries this into a pariah among the high-level community.
4. Spending your time and resources killing off everyone who may become a threat means not dealing with people who actually are threats right now.

Talakeal

2017-12-27, 12:04 AM

I still am baffled by how you are apparently unable to comprehend the notion that defining your character by what abilities she doesn't have leads to a more limited character.

Of course it does.

My disagreements are:

A: I think limits are a very good thing. As I said before "If everyone is special then no one is," it is, in my opinion, far more interesting to have strengths and weaknesses than to be one of many people who can do everything equally well.

B: I believe that the limits for a mundane character do exist in some hypothetical high powered epic game, but that they are beyond what D&D has traditionally listed as "level 20 challenges".

Chaosticket

2017-12-27, 12:09 AM

the Fighter in pre-5th(or 4th) edition follows the definition of Mundane. It has no special abilities.
Base Attack bonus is actually worse than 2nd or 5th editions' Extra Attacks as those are made with your highest ratio. in 3rd edition every attack after the first is probably going to miss. Bonus Feats arent much use as there are entire feat trees with requirements and often minor bonuses.

Other classes have much more variety and Variety=Power in DUngeons and Dragons.

a Pathfinder Sorcerer can learn 74 different spells more or less. a Fighter attacks with a weapon. It take a great deal of expanded rules to make a Fighter more than just what its name says or even be great in what its supposed to be. I heard in least 2nd edition there were handbooks that greatly enhanced the Fighter to outfight Spellcasters balancing things so they didnt just make Fighters obsolete after a point.

But really what justification should a Fighter be better than anyone who actually has powers? A Cleric if a Fighter/Priest personally watched over by a God. Its like comparing the Punisher to Captain Marvel/Shazam.

Pathfinder doesnt really fix this, but makes a large number of options available. There are new classes and archetypes for existing classes. the Warpriest is pretty blatant as someone who wants Divine Powers but still get bonus feats and ultimately is better from being blessed by a God.

RazorChain

2017-12-27, 12:19 AM

Your argument is lost with hyperbolic nonsense. You haven't crossed the Stormwind Fallacy line but have touched it.

Not really, it's just based on my perception. I am not going to make some survey reaching to all roleplayers that play or have played D&D to prove my point. I am quite happy just be sitting in my chair arguing and telling you that claiming my arguement is an hyperbolic nonsense is a bad counter argument.

Cosi and Quertus are quite happy about high level 3.X/Pathfinder and at least Quertus wants to fight Invisible spectres guarding a dimensional portal at the bottom of the ocean and that requires high level play. Cosi I don't know what he wants but he defends high level play with astounding vigour.

PhoenixPhyre can attest that in the Getting of the treadmill thread in the 5.e subforums that people have been arguing that 5e sucks as low level threats aren't made irrelevant as in 3.5. One guy claims that a 10th level fighter should be able to defeat an army.

Then I've been viewing some 3.5 characters from other posters who are happily playing at level 17 and with their AC reaching almost 40 I can see that all low level threats have been made irrelevant.

And then I have my experience from 15 years ago where we happily pounded dragons to dust with high level characters

Then I have a long time friend who I played AD&D 2.e with 25 years ago who is happy as a camper about Pathfinder He was the one that was really disappointed about how we never used the Dungeon Masters Options; High Level Campaign as he always played Wizards and reeeally wanted to cast some 10th level dweomers.

So it just seems to me that people who want epic power fantasy are happy about 3.5/pathfinder and more power to them. I support all kinds of play, I mean my 10 year old son is a blatant power gamer. Who am I to tell him that his style is wrong?

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 12:27 AM

So it just seems to me that people who want epic power fantasy are happy about 3.5/pathfinder and more power to them. I support all kinds of play, I mean my 10 year old son is a blatant power gamer. Who am I to tell him that his style is wrong?

Save him before it's too late!

(I kid, I kid. :smallwink: )

RazorChain

2017-12-27, 12:34 AM

Save him before it's too late!

(I kid, I kid. :smallwink: )

I'm running a 5e game for him and couple of his friends and they really just want to kick the **** out of things and grab the loot, rinse and repeat and level up. I was at a point thinking of grabbing Pathfinder but I think 5e is powerfantasy enough to start with and much easier as there are fewer options. My eldest daugther betrayed the cause and is mostly into LARPING....gives her reason to make costumes :smallsmile:

Chaosticket

2017-12-27, 12:36 AM

RazorChain

2017-12-27, 12:43 AM

What is the point of this thread? It's just saying magic it overpowered again and again.

I honestly dont know what you want or expect out of games. Do you?

The real Gamebreaking spells are the ones that are logical shortcuts to skip railroading and cliches. Play enough games and youll be desperate for choices to actually matter.

Show me non-magical alternatives please!

The point of this thread is for grognards to argue about the state of gaming and why D&D is unbalanced in the favor of the Wizard (caster). We fully realize we're not going to change anybodies meaning on anything as we never do. I think everybody knows what steps must be made to "fix" things. Some think nothing needs to be fixed and others don't care but are just arguing for the arguments sake.

I've been playing for 3 decades, played dozens of systems, I have climbed the mountain and stared into the eye of the serpent and I have long since realized what I want out of gaming. So what do you want out of gaming?

Non magical alternatives to what? Making choices matter have nothing to do with magic, there are lot of systems that have no magic at all.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 12:45 AM

2D8HP

2017-12-27, 01:06 AM

PhoenixPhyre can attest that in the Getting of the treadmill thread in the 5.e subforums that people have been arguing that 5e sucks as low level threats aren't made irrelevant as in 3.5. One guy claims that a 10th level fighter should be able to defeat an army....
:sigh:

Thanks for the warning, I will try to stay away from reading that thread as that just sounds like something that will make me grumpy.

A single 10th's level Fighter defeating a whole army?

A whole army of what, kittens?

That just sounds ridiculous.

That's not Dungeons & Dragons that's Champions!

Yes I know DC did Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and Marvel did Conan in the 1970's (I have some of those issues!), but in general, please keep "four color" comic-book superheroics away from my Swords & Sorcery game settings!

I've seen some of the Naruto cartoons that my son watched, and yeah we're supposed to be inclusive and not say something is badwrongfun, yadda, yadda, yadda. .. oh just damn it, what in the name of Crom's backside sweat is an any level Fighter doing defeating a whole (presumably human) army?!

Just Nope!

:annoyed:

Mutazoia

2017-12-27, 01:16 AM

That feels really really artificial. No high-power person wants to stay around? No high power person wants to help other people? That's a horrible way of life.

The problem with ruling the world, is finding someone to run it for you.

5 high powered people could technically split up and take over 1/5th of the world each. Then what? The game changes from Dungeons & Dragons to Dominions & Diplomats. Who wants to play THAT as an RPG?
Players want to keep playing their high powered characters, and take them plane hopping, because that is really the only way to keep challenging them with out obvious shoehorning.

IRL, there are lots of people who could change the world. If every multi-millionaire spent as much time trying to make the world a better place as they did trying to avoid paying taxes, they could wipe out world hunger with a generation or two. After all, what good does having 2 billion dollars in the bank actually do you? It generates interest, making more money, that you do what with? Nothing. So if Tony Stark spent all of his time making peace time crap (which technically he does between his Iron Man gigs), there are still people just like him that aren't. He can't do it all by himself.

First, Smaug didn't directly attack a castle that knew he was coming. He came in from below and took them by surprise. And no, D&D shouldn't handle the Hobbit. Very different world-building, very different assumptions, very different style. Adventurers are useful, but in 3e they're essential. As in any nation that doesn't have a slew of high-level people is utterly powerless to do anything. So everyone's high leveled. Which makes a run-away power spiral. See Naruto for the effects on worldbuilding when the power scale only involves more.

First of all, how does a dragon "come in from below". Not great tunnelers, dragons. Smaug attacked head on, and there wasn't squat anybody could do about it.

But D&D can and should handle the Hobbit. The world building us up to the DM, not the rule books. There are enough options there that you can do anything from low to high fantasy and anywhere in between. The availability, or lack thereof, of Adventurers of any power level is, again, up to the DM. You can have a world like "Log Horizon", where adventurers are a dime a dozen, or a world like the Hobbit, where very few people go on adventures.

And those should be doable even if the threat could, in principle, be handled by an army. Because most places don't have armies. Anyway, adventurers are cheaper. And most people don't become adventurers (or high level ones) because they can't or because they don't have the patience, time, or luck. 3e's assumption that XP is a real in-universe thing (because otherwise how do you get level 20 commoners who've never been off the farm?) is monumentally stupid in my opinion. Levels aren't a in-universe thing. They're there for game convenience only.

Adventurers are cheaper? Really? Compare the cost of one set of +5 armor against the average annual income of an average kingdom, and see which is greater.... Oh...and I would LOVE to see where you are finding these level 20 commoners.

Because we didn't want to start another world war? The two are completely different. Targeted scry-and-fry is a surgical removal. Especially when you can do it anonymously, from across several planes, with functionally zero risk to yourself.

Which is EXACTLY why Sarumon killed Bilbo Baggins in Bag End and took the ring of power back, long before Gandalf found out about it!

Most entities with that kind of power, have ego's the size of most star systems, and don't believe that some puny mortals could ever be a threat. At best, they play cat and mouse, until it's too late.

IRL, we call "scry-and-fry" drone strikes. And as you can see, we have achieved world peace!

And those are single-author fiction that revolves around author fiat. And in both of those, the "Dark Lord" figure is both strongly weakened (at the beginning) and unable to act directly. If Voldemort were at full power in book 1, Harry would be dead without a struggle. If Sauron had been at full power, the Ringbearer would never have been born. Voldemort in particular is much weaker than a level 20 3e T1 caster with any optimization (with the sole exception of the plot armor horocruxes).

What works in one medium (single author fiction, video games, movies, etc) doesn't necessarily work in a TTRPG. Mechanically representing any of those plots in D&D (especially 3e) would fail hard. In many many many world-shattering ways. D&D does not emulate fiction. It doesn't try to emulate fiction. It shouldn't try to emulate fiction. It's its own thing and should be left as such.

What game are YOU playing? Mechanically representing any of those plots in D&D is what D&D DOES son. It is meant to allow you to play the plucky underdog who eventually saves the world. Because if you start your characters at a power level that can be a serious threat to the BBEG, then one has to beg the question "How did the BBEG even survive long enough to be a threat to anybody, with out "Adventurers" squashing him like a bug the moment he stuck his head above ground?" D&D IS fiction, I'm not sure how you divorce the two.

Mechalich

2017-12-27, 01:38 AM

The point of this thread is for grognards to argue about the state of gaming and why D&D is unbalanced in the favor of the Wizard (caster). We fully realize we're not going to change anybodies meaning on anything as we never do. I think everybody knows what steps must be made to "fix" things. Some think nothing needs to be fixed and others don't care but are just arguing for the arguments sake.

It's more than that, really.

This isn't precisely a D&D specific question. Many systems allow characters with broadly defined 'magic' powers to walk all over characters with far more strictly defined powers or just high end skills. This was certainly a problem in the oWoD. Mages were the third most important splat, with MtA having a much, much smaller player base than Vampire, but they had so much greater power that it was the decisions of mages and mage organizations that ultimately drove the metaplot and determined the outcome of the oWoD. Case in point: there was that one time WW decided to wake up an antideluvian - literally the most powerful possible vampire available - and a bunch of mages killed her by using satellite death lasers and spiritually resonant nuclear weapons. When the Time of Judgment ultimately happened, the conclusion to Mage completely overwrote all of reality, rendering the endings provided to every other splat totally irrelevant. Did your vampire character manage to survive Gehenna? Who cares, everyone just got absorbed into a universal conglomerate entity like in the End of Evangelion (seriously, that's how the ToJ ends, the only thing that's missing is giant Rei). and it's true in many other games. Pretty much every iteration of a Star Wars RPG that has ever been produced has allowed force users to rock face all over everyone else, and while this is admittedly not unjustified given the source material, it certainly creates problems in play.

Ultimately this discussion is about how to manage characters who have powers that clearly violate known laws of physics versus characters who do not have such powers. There are two contingent goals underlying this: game balance and verisimilitude in world-building.

Now, it is absolutely possible to design a game that is inherently lacking in balance, where character types are explicitly wildly unequal and will not be able to function in equivalent situations and the GM is going to have to juggle this accordingly. RIFTS is a well-known example of a game that openly laughs in the face of balance (and while it's at it verisimilitude too) and is predicated pretty much entirely on being crazy and insane and offering world-of-cool or ludicrously humorous experiences that function on a purely emotional level. That is okay. You can absolutely design a game that way. So long as you're up front about it and GMs know what they are getting into the right kind of gaming group can have a grand old time.

The problem with not having game balance is that the wrong kind of gaming group, or just a group with a specific type of player (typically a highly competitive personality that 'plays to win' in all efforts) or GM (such as a person who indulges friends unequally, especially common in GMs who play with their significant others/spouses) will not have fun within such a system and may quickly descend into bitter acrimony and the game design can spur actual OOC conflicts. Additionally it creates massive burdens on groups that don't know each other (increasingly common) or on players who don't know the system.

One of the reasons D&D comes up in balance discussions so much is not simply that it is popular, but that it is unbalanced and has persisted in pretending that it is not and is also the game that by far the most commonly played by new gamers and by groups that don't know each other. So game balance is a particular problem for D&D in a way that is isn't for RIFTS (which pretty much anyone who's ever heard about knows is blatantly unbalanced).

Verisimilitude is world-building is a bit of a different issue. A huge number of gamers simply don't care if a setting doesn't work when you think about it seriously or requires ludicrously blatant handwaves to hold together. And this is also okay - if you admit to it at some point. The Dragonball universe is ridiculous, and if you built a tabletop RPG for it (maybe something along the lines of Xenoverse) you would admit it, make a quick comment about gods or Zen-Oh or dragonballs themselves, and then move on to throwing kamehamehas at mountainsides. D&D, at times, has done this too. Spelljammer and later Planescape were clearly ridiculous. In Planescape you did bizarre things to answer internal character questions (like in Torment) or just to have a good time and everyone understood that this was nuts. I have a number of great Planescape memories along these lines.

But if you're after serious immersive storytelling that isn't going to cut it. If you want a universe with internal consistency you have to put in a bunch of work, and key element of this is dealing with power scaling. If you allow a character who is powerful enough to destroy the world you have to answer the question of why said character doesn't destroy the world. More importantly, you have to answer the question of how a player give that kind of power might act. Anyone who has even read tales about game design recognizes that if you allow any power to a group of players they will absolutely do not only the craziest things they can think of, but also the worst possible things you can think of (https://www.ranker.com/list/cruel-things-done-by-gamers-in-video-games/nathan-gibson). So there are real questions of how much power overall, how much power relative to the weakest significant individuals in the world, and what kinds of power, PCs (and by extension NPCs) can be allowed in a setting.

D&D, much like in the balance case, pretends that is has the answer for this. The idea is that the world can generally handle anything up to level 20 and maybe a handful of exceptional individuals/beings past that. This is absolutely untrue (except partially in Dark Sun, where the high level characters wrecked the world and you're playing in the ashes). And this seems to be mostly because D&D is bound by a bunch of weird sacred cows that accumulated alongside its very organic development process and is forever stuck trying to be both serious and silly at the same time.

RazorChain

2017-12-27, 01:49 AM

.
:sigh:

Thanks for the warning, I will try to stay away from reading that thread as that just sounds like something that will make me grumpy.

A single 10th's level Fighter defeating a whole army?

A whole army of what, kittens?

That just sounds ridiculous.

That's not Dungeons & Dragons that's Champions!

Yes I know DC did Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and Marvel did Conan in the 1970's (I have some of those issues!), but in general, please keep "four color" comic-book superheroics away from my Swords & Sorcery game settings!

I've seen some of the Naruto cartoons that my son watched, and yeah we're supposed to be inclusive and not say something is badwrongfun, yadda, yadda, yadda. .. oh just damn it, what in the name of Crom's backside sweat is an any level Fighter doing defeating a whole (presumably human) army?!

Just Nope!

:annoyed:

Just because I'm such a nice guy I found what he was writing......you can thank me later :smallwink:

IMO, 5e got off the 3.5e treadmill and built its' own, different but not necessarily better.
Late 3.5 was, perhaps unintentionally, an interesting game progression-wise, because you could feel the mechanical growth of your character - some things were just not a threat anymore. At all. Put a late 10th level fighter-type character in a gorge and tell them that they're the only thing that can stop a hobgoblin horde? Absolutely doable, it's not even worth getting dice rolled except to simulate a few first seconds of the fight - hobgoblins are so below your level that you can wipe out an army, if you can just mitigate random 20s that could happen - fast healing or DR or even that one Crusader stance. Most people complain that it's bad, but personally, I always felt that it's the right way to go - at some point, you have to outclass your old enemies so badly that quantity can't catch up to quality. And with some splats you can even build for that to work without magic items - making a "Horde-slayer" is rather simple in 3.5e.

5e downsizes and instead of making high-level challenges insurmountable without magic items and magic support, just makes high level enemies into slightly more buff and higher-damage punchbags than whatever you were fighting 5 levels ago, with one or two schticks if they're lucky/iconic enough. It's E6 stretched over 20 levels, and that's why you presumably don't need magic anything - if there's not a lot of magic going around your enemies, why would you need any? Lots of magic items could make to-hit vs. AC combat run off the RNG, and 5e can't have that - if you've got +3 full plate, a +3 shield, and a defensive fighting style, then perhaps some enemies can't even hit you except on a 20 - which is going against the design goals for the system. Add more magic items into the mix, and the bounded accuracy falls apart, because it's just designed to work with rather low amounts of magic items.
Sorry about going on a rant, just thought it's rather appropriate to the topic.

Arbane

2017-12-27, 02:12 AM

.
:sigh:

Thanks for the warning, I will try to stay away from reading that thread as that just sounds like something that will make me grumpy.

A single 10th's level Fighter defeating a whole army?

A whole army of what, kittens?

That just sounds ridiculous.

Totally ridiculous. (http://www.toptenz.net/10-warriors-faced-entire-armies-alone.php)

Yes, the Fighters must adhere to a somewhat constricted view of REALISM. Please ignore the levitating wizard tossing lightning-bolts from their fingertips.

(Nobody tell this guy about mythology, his head might explode. Benkei mentioned above, Samson, Cu Chulainn... who else went mano-a-army and won?)

RazorChain

2017-12-27, 02:17 AM

It's more than that, really.

This isn't precisely a D&D specific question. Many systems allow characters with broadly defined 'magic' powers to walk all over characters with far more strictly defined powers or just high end skills. This was certainly a problem in the oWoD. Mages were the third most important splat, with MtA having a much, much smaller player base than Vampire, but they had so much greater power that it was the decisions of mages and mage organizations that ultimately drove the metaplot and determined the outcome of the oWoD. Case in point: there was that one time WW decided to wake up an antideluvian - literally the most powerful possible vampire available - and a bunch of mages killed her by using satellite death lasers and spiritually resonant nuclear weapons. When the Time of Judgment ultimately happened, the conclusion to Mage completely overwrote all of reality, rendering the endings provided to every other splat totally irrelevant. Did your vampire character manage to survive Gehenna? Who cares, everyone just got absorbed into a universal conglomerate entity like in the End of Evangelion (seriously, that's how the ToJ ends, the only thing that's missing is giant Rei). and it's true in many other games. Pretty much every iteration of a Star Wars RPG that has ever been produced has allowed force users to rock face all over everyone else, and while this is admittedly not unjustified given the source material, it certainly creates problems in play.

Ultimately this discussion is about how to manage characters who have powers that clearly violate known laws of physics versus characters who do not have such powers. There are two contingent goals underlying this: game balance and verisimilitude in world-building.

Now, it is absolutely possible to design a game that is inherently lacking in balance, where character types are explicitly wildly unequal and will not be able to function in equivalent situations and the GM is going to have to juggle this accordingly. RIFTS is a well-known example of a game that openly laughs in the face of balance (and while it's at it verisimilitude too) and is predicated pretty much entirely on being crazy and insane and offering world-of-cool or ludicrously humorous experiences that function on a purely emotional level. That is okay. You can absolutely design a game that way. So long as you're up front about it and GMs know what they are getting into the right kind of gaming group can have a grand old time.

The problem with not having game balance is that the wrong kind of gaming group, or just a group with a specific type of player (typically a highly competitive personality that 'plays to win' in all efforts) or GM (such as a person who indulges friends unequally, especially common in GMs who play with their significant others/spouses) will not have fun within such a system and may quickly descend into bitter acrimony and the game design can spur actual OOC conflicts. Additionally it creates massive burdens on groups that don't know each other (increasingly common) or on players who don't know the system.

One of the reasons D&D comes up in balance discussions so much is not simply that it is popular, but that it is unbalanced and has persisted in pretending that it is not and is also the game that by far the most commonly played by new gamers and by groups that don't know each other. So game balance is a particular problem for D&D in a way that is isn't for RIFTS (which pretty much anyone who's ever heard about knows is blatantly unbalanced).

Verisimilitude is world-building is a bit of a different issue. A huge number of gamers simply don't care if a setting doesn't work when you think about it seriously or requires ludicrously blatant handwaves to hold together. And this is also okay - if you admit to it at some point. The Dragonball universe is ridiculous, and if you built a tabletop RPG for it (maybe something along the lines of Xenoverse) you would admit it, make a quick comment about gods or Zen-Oh or dragonballs themselves, and then move on to throwing kamehamehas at mountainsides. D&D, at times, has done this too. Spelljammer and later Planescape were clearly ridiculous. In Planescape you did bizarre things to answer internal character questions (like in Torment) or just to have a good time and everyone understood that this was nuts. I have a number of great Planescape memories along these lines.

But if you're after serious immersive storytelling that isn't going to cut it. If you want a universe with internal consistency you have to put in a bunch of work, and key element of this is dealing with power scaling. If you allow a character who is powerful enough to destroy the world you have to answer the question of why said character doesn't destroy the world. More importantly, you have to answer the question of how a player give that kind of power might act. Anyone who has even read tales about game design recognizes that if you allow any power to a group of players they will absolutely do not only the craziest things they can think of, but also the worst possible things you can think of (https://www.ranker.com/list/cruel-things-done-by-gamers-in-video-games/nathan-gibson). So there are real questions of how much power overall, how much power relative to the weakest significant individuals in the world, and what kinds of power, PCs (and by extension NPCs) can be allowed in a setting.

D&D, much like in the balance case, pretends that is has the answer for this. The idea is that the world can generally handle anything up to level 20 and maybe a handful of exceptional individuals/beings past that. This is absolutely untrue (except partially in Dark Sun, where the high level characters wrecked the world and you're playing in the ashes). And this seems to be mostly because D&D is bound by a bunch of weird sacred cows that accumulated alongside its very organic development process and is forever stuck trying to be both serious and silly at the same time.

Well written. I played VtM, WtA and MtA and we never cared about the metaplot and we knew that you could mix vampires and werewolves but as soon as a mage entered the mix then he'd be in a class of his own.

Most mature gaming groups will recognize gaming balance problems. When my group played Star Wars we only allowed couple of Jedi's, the power gamer in the group was unsatisfied because he felt that the others were more powerful than him. The others were just fine with the power balance and I didn't mind playing the Han Solo to my friends Skywalker.

I'm on the opinion that balance issues have to be solved at the table. Now this doesn't mean that game designers shouldn't strive for balance where applicable and blatant imbalance is bad game design.
If a game has a blatant imbalance that causes trouble then the group shouldn't play that game. Don't buy it, don't support it if you are unhappy with it. Ultimately it is the gaming group that calls the shots because almost all systems can be exploited in one way or another and most groups I have played with contain at least one gamer that goes for the exploits.

So when a system contains a gross imbalance the group has to first acknowledge it and then either fix it, switch systems or be ok with it.

I'm not going to go into internal consistency or verisimilitude as they kinda are a different problem all by themselves.

RazorChain

2017-12-27, 02:40 AM

Totally ridiculous. (http://www.toptenz.net/10-warriors-faced-entire-armies-alone.php)

Yes, the Fighters must adhere to a somewhat constricted view of REALISM. Please ignore the levitating wizard tossing lightning-bolts from their fingertips.

(Nobody tell this guy about mythology, his head might explode. Benkei mentioned above, Samson, Cu Chulainn... who else went mano-a-army and won?)

Cu Chulainn was the son of Lugh which literally makes him a demi god, also his war were mostly champion duels at fords. Benkei, disarmed 999 men in duels and killed over 300 men defending a bridge. Don't forget that Samson was divinely empowered by the spirit of God.

So that kinda makes Benkei the only one who is mundane I guess.

Mechalich

2017-12-27, 02:45 AM

I'm on the opinion that balance issues have to be solved at the table. Now this doesn't mean that game designers shouldn't strive for balance where applicable and blatant imbalance is bad game design.
If a game has a blatant imbalance that causes trouble then the group shouldn't play that game. Don't buy it, don't support it if you are unhappy with it. Ultimately it is the gaming group that calls the shots because almost all systems can be exploited in one way or another and most groups I have played with contain at least one gamer that goes for the exploits.

So when a system contains a gross imbalance the group has to first acknowledge it and then either fix it, switch systems or be ok with it.

It's certainly true that pretty much every system contains exploits, but it is very helpful from the perspective of table-management to have it be only the player who always goes for the exploits to be the one the GM has to manage. It's when players build a character that the game assures them is totally reasonable that turns out to be either unreasonably awesome or unexpectedly awful that you have problems.

I have the biggest problem with the bait and switch. If someone plans out a game expecting balance and discovers in play that things turn out to be very much imbalanced, then you have a problem. this is particularly bad for highly complex systems - like the d20 system because houserules may cause a cascade impact and because new options may totally the system in ways you do not anticipate. This sort of situation imposes an immense demand on GMs to maintain system mastery at all times. When a system can toss out some massively destabilizing ability option out of a list of dozens or hundreds of options it puts a huge burden to anticipate on GMs - because retroactively banning or taking away abilities is awful at a table. D&D is particularly bad in this regard because class vs. class balance issues emerge only over time. Something that works fine in levels 1-5 or even 5-10 can shatter utterly once those limits are breached.

In D&D this manifests as 'caster beats mundane.' Which is ultimately simply an observation that something the game claims to be true - in that anything of X total levels is roughly equal to anything else of the same, is not true.

RazorChain

2017-12-27, 03:03 AM

It's certainly true that pretty much every system contains exploits, but it is very helpful from the perspective of table-management to have it be only the player who always goes for the exploits to be the one the GM has to manage. It's when players build a character that the game assures them is totally reasonable that turns out to be either unreasonably awesome or unexpectedly awful that you have problems.

I have the biggest problem with the bait and switch. If someone plans out a game expecting balance and discovers in play that things turn out to be very much imbalanced, then you have a problem. this is particularly bad for highly complex systems - like the d20 system because houserules may cause a cascade impact and because new options may totally the system in ways you do not anticipate. This sort of situation imposes an immense demand on GMs to maintain system mastery at all times. When a system can toss out some massively destabilizing ability option out of a list of dozens or hundreds of options it puts a huge burden to anticipate on GMs - because retroactively banning or taking away abilities is awful at a table. D&D is particularly bad in this regard because class vs. class balance issues emerge only over time. Something that works fine in levels 1-5 or even 5-10 can shatter utterly once those limits are breached.

In D&D this manifests as 'caster beats mundane.' Which is ultimately simply an observation that something the game claims to be true - in that anything of X total levels is roughly equal to anything else of the same, is not true.

The problem I have had with D&D is that each class has it's own rules. Instead of developing an underlying mechanic that has internal consistency. Just tacking things on really doesn't help for balance. It irked me for example when I was playing 5.e that suddenly the vampire we were fighting could just ignore the grappling rules and grapple at will, why have grappling rules if you are going to ignore them? That doesn't help internal consistency.

With bait in switch the only thing that can be done is try different systems until you find something you like and mechanically does what you want. I've tried dozens of systems but I only GM maybe 10 of them, those are the systems that have clicked for me. It doesn't mean I didn't have fun playing other systems, it's just I have little interest running them, they didn't support the style or the genre I'm interested in.

Mutazoia

2017-12-27, 04:53 AM

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 08:31 AM

The problem with ruling the world, is finding someone to run it for you.

5 high powered people could technically split up and take over 1/5th of the world each. Then what? The game changes from Dungeons & Dragons to Dominions & Diplomats. Who wants to play THAT as an RPG?
Players want to keep playing their high powered characters, and take them plane hopping, because that is really the only way to keep challenging them with out obvious shoehorning.

That presumes only PCs ever reach high level. Or that all high level NPCs will always behave exactly as you presume PCs would. Or that all players share your priorities and have no interest in taking over the (in-game) world.

None of these are well-founded presumptions.

IRL, there are lots of people who could change the world. If every multi-millionaire spent as much time trying to make the world a better place as they did trying to avoid paying taxes, they could wipe out world hunger with a generation or two. After all, what good does having 2 billion dollars in the bank actually do you? It generates interest, making more money, that you do what with? Nothing. So if Tony Stark spent all of his time making peace time crap (which technically he does between his Iron Man gigs), there are still people just like him that aren't. He can't do it all by himself.

Multi-millionaires and billionaires do change the world every day -- or haven't you heard of the Koch brothers or George Soros?

One suspects that this is a case of a person not seeing the changes because "that's how it is" doesn't count as a change.

First of all, how does a dragon "come in from below". Not great tunnelers, dragons. Smaug attacked head on, and there wasn't squat anybody could do about it.

Existing cave system? It could happen. And tunneling ability might depend on the dragon... magic dragon fire might melt rock, and we've seen that at least the film version of Smaug survive being immersed in molten gold.

But D&D can and should handle the Hobbit. The world building us up to the DM, not the rule books. There are enough options there that you can do anything from low to high fantasy and anywhere in between. The availability, or lack thereof, of Adventurers of any power level is, again, up to the DM. You can have a world like "Log Horizon", where adventurers are a dime a dozen, or a world like the Hobbit, where very few people go on adventures.

"This system works great for this setting if you ignore 2/3 of the rules".

Adventurers are cheaper? Really? Compare the cost of one set of +5 armor against the average annual income of an average kingdom, and see which is greater....

And yet it's "+5 armor" and found lying around somewhere and taken for free, the sort of equipment presumed requisite for high-level characters... rather of being a named artifact with a story behind it.

One has to wonder just how well "more expensive than an army" really lines up with the gameplay there...

Oh...and I would LOVE to see where you are finding these level 20 commoners.

In the rules of 3.x...

Which is EXACTLY why Sarumon killed Bilbo Baggins in Bag End and took the ring of power back, long before Gandalf found out about it!

First, Sarumon?

Second, there are several reasons given in the story for why Sauron didn't seize the ring earlier.

Third, part of what initiates Gandalf checking on the ring is that the recently more active and less covert recovering Sauron had started to search for it more intensely.

Fourth, why do you think the Nazgul came to the Shire and chased Frodo all the way to Rivendell?

Most entities with that kind of power, have ego's the size of most star systems, and don't believe that some puny mortals could ever be a threat. At best, they play cat and mouse, until it's too late.

So you're advocating Idiot Plot, Evil Overlord Syndrome, and Stupid Evil, as the foundations of solid worldbuilding and storytelling?

IRL, we call "scry-and-fry" drone strikes. And as you can see, we have achieved world peace!

Maybe you've been watching too much bad fiction... drones aren't magic scrying devices any more than spy satellites are.

What game are YOU playing? Mechanically representing any of those plots in D&D is what D&D DOES son. It is meant to allow you to play the plucky underdog who eventually saves the world. Because if you start your characters at a power level that can be a serious threat to the BBEG, then one has to beg the question "How did the BBEG even survive long enough to be a threat to anybody, with out "Adventurers" squashing him like a bug the moment he stuck his head above ground?" D&D IS fiction, I'm not sure how you divorce the two.

You appear to be justifying D&D as a system for these stories by presuming D&D's presumptions about how these stories go... that's a tangled mess that's I'm not sure can be unraveled.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 08:45 AM

It's more than that, really.

This isn't precisely a D&D specific question. Many systems allow characters with broadly defined 'magic' powers to walk all over characters with far more strictly defined powers or just high end skills. This was certainly a problem in the oWoD. Mages were the third most important splat, with MtA having a much, much smaller player base than Vampire, but they had so much greater power that it was the decisions of mages and mage organizations that ultimately drove the metaplot and determined the outcome of the oWoD. Case in point: there was that one time WW decided to wake up an antideluvian - literally the most powerful possible vampire available - and a bunch of mages killed her by using satellite death lasers and spiritually resonant nuclear weapons. When the Time of Judgment ultimately happened, the conclusion to Mage completely overwrote all of reality, rendering the endings provided to every other splat totally irrelevant. Did your vampire character manage to survive Gehenna? Who cares, everyone just got absorbed into a universal conglomerate entity like in the End of Evangelion (seriously, that's how the ToJ ends, the only thing that's missing is giant Rei). and it's true in many other games. Pretty much every iteration of a Star Wars RPG that has ever been produced has allowed force users to rock face all over everyone else, and while this is admittedly not unjustified given the source material, it certainly creates problems in play.

Ultimately this discussion is about how to manage characters who have powers that clearly violate known laws of physics versus characters who do not have such powers. There are two contingent goals underlying this: game balance and verisimilitude in world-building.

Now, it is absolutely possible to design a game that is inherently lacking in balance, where character types are explicitly wildly unequal and will not be able to function in equivalent situations and the GM is going to have to juggle this accordingly. RIFTS is a well-known example of a game that openly laughs in the face of balance (and while it's at it verisimilitude too) and is predicated pretty much entirely on being crazy and insane and offering world-of-cool or ludicrously humorous experiences that function on a purely emotional level. That is okay. You can absolutely design a game that way. So long as you're up front about it and GMs know what they are getting into the right kind of gaming group can have a grand old time.

The problem with not having game balance is that the wrong kind of gaming group, or just a group with a specific type of player (typically a highly competitive personality that 'plays to win' in all efforts) or GM (such as a person who indulges friends unequally, especially common in GMs who play with their significant others/spouses) will not have fun within such a system and may quickly descend into bitter acrimony and the game design can spur actual OOC conflicts. Additionally it creates massive burdens on groups that don't know each other (increasingly common) or on players who don't know the system.

One of the reasons D&D comes up in balance discussions so much is not simply that it is popular, but that it is unbalanced and has persisted in pretending that it is not and is also the game that by far the most commonly played by new gamers and by groups that don't know each other. So game balance is a particular problem for D&D in a way that is isn't for RIFTS (which pretty much anyone who's ever heard about knows is blatantly unbalanced).

Verisimilitude is world-building is a bit of a different issue. A huge number of gamers simply don't care if a setting doesn't work when you think about it seriously or requires ludicrously blatant handwaves to hold together. And this is also okay - if you admit to it at some point. The Dragonball universe is ridiculous, and if you built a tabletop RPG for it (maybe something along the lines of Xenoverse) you would admit it, make a quick comment about gods or Zen-Oh or dragonballs themselves, and then move on to throwing kamehamehas at mountainsides. D&D, at times, has done this too. Spelljammer and later Planescape were clearly ridiculous. In Planescape you did bizarre things to answer internal character questions (like in Torment) or just to have a good time and everyone understood that this was nuts. I have a number of great Planescape memories along these lines.

But if you're after serious immersive storytelling that isn't going to cut it. If you want a universe with internal consistency you have to put in a bunch of work, and key element of this is dealing with power scaling. If you allow a character who is powerful enough to destroy the world you have to answer the question of why said character doesn't destroy the world. More importantly, you have to answer the question of how a player give that kind of power might act. Anyone who has even read tales about game design recognizes that if you allow any power to a group of players they will absolutely do not only the craziest things they can think of, but also the worst possible things you can think of (https://www.ranker.com/list/cruel-things-done-by-gamers-in-video-games/nathan-gibson). So there are real questions of how much power overall, how much power relative to the weakest significant individuals in the world, and what kinds of power, PCs (and by extension NPCs) can be allowed in a setting.

D&D, much like in the balance case, pretends that is has the answer for this. The idea is that the world can generally handle anything up to level 20 and maybe a handful of exceptional individuals/beings past that. This is absolutely untrue (except partially in Dark Sun, where the high level characters wrecked the world and you're playing in the ashes). And this seems to be mostly because D&D is bound by a bunch of weird sacred cows that accumulated alongside its very organic development process and is forever stuck trying to be both serious and silly at the same time.

+1, if that were possible here.

Very well said.

Regarding the part I bolded, I think one of the stumbling blocks in me getting across my point of "you have to give something up, it is literally impossible to have everything" breakdown of options to fix the initiating question of this thread, is that some people have so little consideration or concern for a setting that works, that's internally coherent and consistent, that they don't even realize that's the thing they gave up, and they don't understand why it's a thing someone else might value.

However, one doesn't even need to be into deliberate storytelling to care about a setting that holds up on its own. Personally, when I'm gaming, I want the setting to feel like a place that could be real, a place that's "alive"... and the NPCs to feel like people who had their own lives before my character came along, and will have their own lives when my character has moved on down the road. Nothing ruins my gaming faster than opening a (metaphorical) door and realizing that there's nothing there, it was just a facade in a "movie set".

Chaosticket

2017-12-27, 09:52 AM

Bilbo and Gandalf.

One is weak but clever and his unexpected heroism is a renowned tale. The other is strong but leaves the story repeatedly to not overshadow the other.

In player Parties I hope something similar is presented for the same reasons. If and when I see people saying to the effect of "Bilbo should be stronger than Gandalf" I just get confused when people miss the point.

In a Low Fantasy games Magic users work better as Npcs that player characters to avoid "Gandalf saves the Day" problems.

Dungeons and Dragons has expanded a great deal. Demons, universal planes, Elder Gods. If you compare things to that a Wizard/Druid/Cleric to those, its balanced.

I dont understand when understand when people say in obtuse ways they don't want Cthulu as an enemy. You can play lower tiered games instead of traveling the Planes to take over the Nine Hells.

So is that it or are you complaining that Bilbo/Frodo didnt personally defeat Smaug/the Balrog/Saruman/Sauron?

Tanarii

2017-12-27, 10:13 AM

the Fighter in pre-5th(or 4th) edition follows the definition of Mundane. It has no special abilities.
Base Attack bonus is actually worse than 2nd or 5th editions' Extra Attacks as those are made with your highest ratio. in 3rd edition every attack after the first is probably going to miss. Bonus Feats arent much use as there are entire feat trees with requirements and often minor bonuses.Again, this needs to be written as "the Fighter in 3rd Edition ..."

The Fighter (and sub-classes) in AD&D (both editions) and BECMI has many special abilities:
- the largest HD
- one of only two classes (other being Cleric) that can use all armor, including magic armor
- only one that can use all weapons, including magic weapons, and especially including magic swords! Magic swords are by far the most powerful magic weapons in the game, by leaps and bounds. (I may be incorrect and Theives can use magic swords too.)
- has an amazing attack matrix / Thac0
- has amazing saving throws
- advances on an okay (not good, not bad) XP table

Compared to a wizard, they have outstanding attack rolls, AC, HPs (usually close to double), consistent damage output, advance in levels faster, and are virtually untouchable by anything that allows a saving throw at the highest levels.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 10:36 AM

Tanarii

2017-12-27, 11:05 AM

Cu Chulainn was the son of Lugh which literally makes him a demi god, also his war were mostly champion duels at fords. Benkei, disarmed 999 men in duels and killed over 300 men defending a bridge. Don't forget that Samson was divinely empowered by the spirit of God.

So that kinda makes Benkei the only one who is mundane I guess.demi-God-like power doesn't necessarily mean not mundane. After all, the defining example of a Demi-God for many people is Hercules. He didn't have magic powers, just strength and endurance and combat skills beyond human capabilities, and magic items.

Unless you want to define those things as magic powers, in which case I don't know what people actually want out of a mundane any more.

Knaight

2017-12-27, 11:28 AM

Again, this needs to be written as "the Fighter in 3rd Edition ..."

The Fighter (and sub-classes) in AD&D (both editions) and BECMI has many special abilities:
- the largest HD
- one of only two classes (other being Cleric) that can use all armor, including magic armor
- only one that can use all weapons, including magic weapons, and especially including magic swords! Magic swords are by far the most powerful magic weapons in the game, by leaps and bounds. (I may be incorrect and Theives can use magic swords too.)
- has an amazing attack matrix / Thac0
- has amazing saving throws
- advances on an okay (not good, not bad) XP table

Every single one of these fits the definition of mundane in use - particularly as their ability to use magic swords is an application of their fighting ability and not a narrow magical power.

Mutazoia

2017-12-27, 11:35 AM

That presumes only PCs ever reach high level. Or that all high level NPCs will always behave exactly as you presume PCs would. Or that all players share your priorities and have no interest in taking over the (in-game) world.

None of these are well-founded presumptions.

"I can drop kick ancient red dragons into the middle of next century in my sleep. I think I'll go be a bureaucrat now...that sounds like fun."

Multi-millionaires and billionaires do change the world every day -- or haven't you heard of the Koch brothers or George Soros?

One suspects that this is a case of a person not seeing the changes because "that's how it is" doesn't count as a change.

Oh yeah, I forgot that they already ended world hunger last Friday. Silly me.

Existing cave system? It could happen. And tunneling ability might depend on the dragon... magic dragon fire might melt rock, and we've seen that at least the film version of Smaug survive being immersed in molten gold.

Sure...and all that molten rock flows where exactly?

"This system works great for this setting if you ignore 2/3 of the rules".

You must be seriously OCD if you can't grasp the simple concept that you don't have to use every single rule. You can use, or not use, any rule in the game at your discretion, to make the kind of game you want to run. People have run low fantasy games in D&D for decades, and cut out magic altogether...guess what? It worked just fine, and they had fun.

And yet it's "+5 armor" and found lying around somewhere and taken for free, the sort of equipment presumed requisite for high-level characters... rather of being a named artifact with a story behind it.

One has to wonder just how well "more expensive than an army" really lines up with the gameplay there...

+5 armor is never "laying around somewhere". So tell me how a kingdom is going to pay for a group of high level characters, who could be off making far more money by themselves?

In the rules of 3.x... Book, and page number, please.

Second, there are several reasons given in the story for why Sauron didn't seize the ring earlier.

Reasons you scoff at and say are stupid when used in a game?

Third, part of what initiates Gandalf checking on the ring is that the recently more active and less covert recovering Sauron had started to search for it more intensely.

It was actually Bilbo's behavior, and his unnaturally long life span. Sauron had been looking for the ring LONG before Bilbo found it under the Misty Mountains.

Fourth, why do you think the Nazgul came to the Shire and chased Frodo all the way to Rivendell?

Because Sauron caught Gollum and he squealed Bilbo's name and home address??

So you're advocating Idiot Plot, Evil Overlord Syndrome, and Stupid Evil, as the foundations of solid worldbuilding and storytelling?

As opposed to every character being killed as soon as it's created because some uber-powerful BBEG is so paranoid that his plans will fail, that he is constantly scrying every living thing in the multiverse just in case?

Come on....these guys have better things to do...Evil plans to make, world to conquer, that kind of thing. They can't spend every waking minute glued to a crystal ball watching The Truman Show.

They have lots of irons in lots of fires. They plan on some of these plans not working out. So if the PC's foil a few plans, they still won't register on the radar for quite a long time.

Maybe you've been watching too much bad fiction... drones aren't magic scrying devices any more than spy satellites are.

They are the "fry" part of the scry-and-fry equation.

You appear to be justifying D&D as a system for these stories by presuming D&D's presumptions about how these stories go... that's a tangled mess that's I'm not sure can be unraveled.

I appear to be justifying D&D for these stories, by presuming to be intelligent enough to be able to use it to tell these stories by including, or omitting, rules as needed. Again, just because they exist, doesn't mean they all have to be used. Again....OCD much?

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 12:01 PM

Tanarii

2017-12-27, 12:34 PM

Every single one of these fits the definition of mundane in use - particularly as their ability to use magic swords is an application of their fighting ability and not a narrow magical power.I agree entirely.

For the purposes of these discussions, I've consistently defined that as "magic" in the broad sense -- things that exceed the normal physical boundaries of "human" capability for that setting.Yes. You're quite consistent in what you think is mundane. Also one of the few that doesn't see "caster beats mundane" and subconsciously translate it into one of "Wizard beats Fighter", "D&D Wizard beats D&D Fighter", or "3e D&D Wizard beats 3e D&D Fighter".

But ...

Using our world as a baseline for example purposes, a human being cannot lift 10 tons, the body cannot support that much weight and things would simply break and tear. Anything that would let a human being lift that much (purely technological/mechanical assistance of whatever kind aside) counts as "magic" in this context of discussing fantasy settings. Divine bloodline, exposure to an eldritch artifact, tapping into "ki", spells, whatever... if it pushes a person's capability well beyond what even the most dedicated and trained person can do in that setting, it's getting into "magic" in the broad sense.

This is also why I've tried to fastidiously use "spellcasters" to refer to what Wizards and Clerics do in D&D, for example.
... I'm willing to hazard very few people see mundane and think "nothing that exceeds the human norm", and anything that exceeds the human norm as "magic".

But yeah, I definitely put forth my opinion on definitions it in an aggressive way. Let me try again. :smallwink:

"Unless you want to define those things as magic powers. I sure don't. But I did grow up on D&D."

Talakeal

2017-12-27, 12:44 PM

demi-God-like power doesn't necessarily mean not mundane. After all, the defining example of a Demi-God for many people is Hercules. He didn't have magic powers, just strength and endurance and combat skills beyond human capabilities, and magic items.

Unless you want to define those things as magic powers, in which case I don't know what people actually want out of a mundane any more.

AFAICT I don't think anyone has actually suggested a "no magic, not even in the form of items," definition for mundane; that appears to be a straw-man concocted by the pro-high magic side.

Bilbo and Gandalf.

One is weak but clever and his unexpected heroism is a renowned tale. The other is strong but leaves the story repeatedly to not overshadow the other.

In player Parties I hope something similar is presented for the same reasons. If and when I see people saying to the effect of "Bilbo should be stronger than Gandalf" I just get confused when people miss the point.

In a Low Fantasy games Magic users work better as Npcs that player characters to avoid "Gandalf saves the Day" problems.

Dungeons and Dragons has expanded a great deal. Demons, universal planes, Elder Gods. If you compare things to that a Wizard/Druid/Cleric to those, its balanced.

I dont understand when understand when people say in obtuse ways they don't want Cthulu as an enemy. You can play lower tiered games instead of traveling the Planes to take over the Nine Hells.

So is that it or are you complaining that Bilbo/Frodo didnt personally defeat Smaug/the Balrog/Saruman/Sauron?

Bilbo is supposed to be more or less a common man, not a great hero. You can have a legendary powerful burglar type character, Gygax's Gord the Rogue comes to mind, but Bilbo sure isn't it.

Note however, that in the Hobbit the dwarves were expecting Gandalf to find them a mighty warrior who could simply slay Smaug for them, and Gandalf tells them that such legendary warriors are very rare and he couldn't find one. This implies that there are martial characters in the setting who can surpass Gandalf in combat ability if nothing else. Also, Sauron was defeated by "mundane" warriors on several occasions, and in the Silmarillion his master, the Valar Morgoth, Sauron's master, is duals against an elven hero and is, although he eventually wins, fights for a very long time and is seriously wounded in the affair.

Also, magic weapons have quite a legacy in fantasy. Typically legendary artifacts like Excalibur, Mjolnir, or Anduril are given a lot more gravitas than magic spells, and are precisely the sort of thing I would use to kill a demon lord or an elder god, and I would rather have an experienced swordsman wielding such a thing than an old man in a bathrobe who has never touched a sword before in his life.

I personally don't want martials to be better than casters. It would be nice if all player characters were evenly balanced, but that is a pipe dream. I will personally settle for the different character classes to be close enough in power that a mixed party is stronger than the sum of its parts and is more useful than one that is all clerics, druids, or wizards.

Quite a post.

Sorry to nitpick, but a couple corrections about WoD.

It wasn't space lasers that killed the antediluvian. He had been in on ongoing battle with a group of powerful eastern vampires and changelings for several days and the mages panicked and nuked the area, but this failed to kill the antediluvian, it merely wiped out those who were holding him in check. The mages then killed him not with "magic space lasers" but by redirecting a bunch of satellites to reflect sunlight onto him from around the globe, which did put him down.

Also, the Time of Judgment books didn't have one official ending (except maybe in the tie in novels) each game had four possible scenarios and the storyteller was supposed to mix and match them as appropriate for their campaign. I don't clearly recall the Mage scenario you were talking about, but of the other three two are more or less "save the world and everything goes back to normal," and the last involves eldritch horrors from a previous age rewriting the nature of the world and turning reality into an unending Hell on Earth.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 12:52 PM

"I can drop kick ancient red dragons into the middle of next century in my sleep. I think I'll go be a bureaucrat now...that sounds like fun."

Presumes false dichotomy that ruling a country requires one to be a middle-management bureaucrat.

Presumes that all individuals will share the same priorities and motivations.

Oh yeah, I forgot that they already ended world hunger last Friday. Silly me.

Presumes that "ending world hunger" is the only change that persons of power and/or wealth could be causing, and that only "things are different than they are now" counts as "changing things". If people in power had done different things over the last 50 years, the world would be a different place.

Sure...and all that molten rock flows where exactly?

Where do tunnel boring machines put all that rock they crush at the front end to bore out the tunnels? /rhetorical

You must be seriously OCD if you can't grasp the simple concept that you don't have to use every single rule. You can use, or not use, any rule in the game at your discretion, to make the kind of game you want to run. People have run low fantasy games in D&D for decades, and cut out magic altogether...guess what? It worked just fine, and they had fun.

When the only tool you have is a hammer, driving in screws by whacking them seems to work quite well, too.

+5 armor is never "laying around somewhere". So tell me how a kingdom is going to pay for a group of high level characters, who could be off making far more money by themselves?

The irony is, that little economic tidbit tells us just how broken the system-setting interplay is in the typical D&D setting.

(And if it's not lying in some dungeon or some treasure horde, where exactly is this +5 armor coming from? If it's being made in the present day for these particular adventurers, why isn't it being made more often, for others, and why is it so expensive?)

Book, and page number, please.

I sold all that stuff off years ago when I washed my hands of d20/D&D.

However, here's an easy reference for starters: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/npcClasses/commoner.htm

Reasons you scoff at and say are stupid when used in a game?

No. Reasons that actually make sense in the context of that individual setting and story, and aren't just blanket recycled excuses that amount to handing the "BBEG" (ugh) the Idiot Ball.

It was actually Bilbo's behavior, and his unnaturally long life span. Sauron had been looking for the ring LONG before Bilbo found it under the Misty Mountains.

Because Sauron caught Gollum and he squealed Bilbo's name and home address??

What started this little sidebar was this comment from you:

Which is EXACTLY why Sarumon killed Bilbo Baggins in Bag End and took the ring of power back, long before Gandalf found out about it!

What you seem to be forgetting is that Sauron wasn't at full capability for most of the Third Age. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauron#Third_Age.

Oh, and if you want to be pedantic, Gollum didn't know Bilbo's address, he just gave Sauron the name of a Hobbit, which lead Sauron to send the Nazgul to the Shire. But Sauron was only able to track Gollum down because he had regained enough power to do so. For much of the 3000 years of the Third Age, the ring lay simply lost at the bottom of a river... surely if Sauron could have instantly found it in Bilbo's possession, he'd have instantly found it at the bottom of a river or in Gollum's possession in the intervening centuries.

As opposed to every character being killed as soon as it's created because some uber-powerful BBEG is so paranoid that his plans will fail, that he is constantly scrying every living thing in the multiverse just in case?

Since that only bears a sort of "they're both using the same words" resemblance to what PhoenixPhyre's original comment, could you explain exactly where it is you're getting that notion?

They are the "fry" part of the scry-and-fry equation.

And in this screwy parallel, what is the "scry" part?

I appear to be justifying D&D for these stories, by presuming to be intelligent enough to be able to use it to tell these stories by including, or omitting, rules as needed. Again, just because they exist, doesn't mean they all have to be used. Again....OCD much?

Ad hom much?

Tanarii

2017-12-27, 12:55 PM

AFAICT I don't think anyone has actually suggested a "no magic, not even in the form of items," definition for mundane; that appears to be a straw-man concocted by the pro-high magic side.Yes, but at least one person, and IIRC several others upthread, has suggested: no inherent magic, including anything that exceeds the human norm, like super-strength or super-endurance or super-reflexes. To paraphrase. Basically, objecting to a reasonable degree of super-hero-like or anime-like or demi-god-like or action-hero-like or epic-story-hero-like, or whatever you want to call it, levels of "normal".

By that standard, no high level D&D character, and many other RPG characters at high "level" (even in level-less RPGs), meet the standard of mundane.

Talakeal

2017-12-27, 01:01 PM

Yes, but at least one person, and IIRC several others upthread, has suggested: no inherent magic, including anything that exceeds the human norm, like super-strength or super-endurance or super-reflexes. To paraphrase. Basically, objecting to a reasonable degree of super-hero-like or anime-like or demi-god-like or action-hero-like or epic-story-hero-like, or whatever you want to call it, levels of "normal".

By that standard, no high level D&D character, and many other RPG characters at high "level" (even in level-less RPGs), meet the standard of mundane.

Is that innate or as a result of items though?

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 01:04 PM

Yes. You're quite consistent in what you think is mundane. Also one of the few that doesn't see "caster beats mundane" and subconsciously translate it into one of "Wizard beats Fighter", "D&D Wizard beats D&D Fighter", or "3e D&D Wizard beats 3e D&D Fighter".

But ...

... I'm willing to hazard very few people see mundane and think "nothing that exceeds the human norm", and anything that exceeds the human norm as "magic".

But yeah, I definitely put forth my opinion on definitions it in an aggressive way. Let me try again. :smallwink:

"Unless you want to define those things as magic powers. I sure don't. But I did grow up on D&D."

For clarity, I didn't say "anything that exceeds the human norm". In real life, I know people who exceed the norm in various ways. They're not "magic".

What I said was "if it pushes a person's capability well beyond what even the most dedicated and trained person can do in that setting, it's getting into "magic" in the broad sense" (in the context of fantasy settings).

But that could just be going another level down the rabbit hole of definition-quibbling, this time over what the word "norm" means... and an illustration of why these discussions get so lost and convoluted: people can't agree on the goal, or on the definitions.

Yes, but at least one person, and IIRC several others upthread, has suggested: no inherent magic, including anything that exceeds the human norm, like super-strength or super-endurance or super-reflexes. To paraphrase. Basically, objecting to a reasonable degree of super-hero-like or anime-like or demi-god-like or action-hero-like or epic-story-hero-like, or whatever you want to call it, levels of "normal".

By that standard, no high level D&D character, and many other RPG characters at high "level" (even in level-less RPGs), meet the standard of mundane.

Is that really a problem? Is it really a problem if the high-level Fighter is using "magic" -- internal magic, magic items, etc -- that's just not spellcasting or the like, in order to keep up with the high-level spellcasters as they exist in many editions of D&D (and D&D-like systems)?

(An otherwise "strict mundane" character who picks up a magic sword and magic shield and magic armor and magic accessories, and uses those to keep up with spellcasters, is still using magic -- it's just not inherent/internal, and not spellcasting.)

To me, the problem is that some people want to have their cake and eat it to... they want to hold tightly to a particular concept, and for their character to be utterly totally fastidiously strictly mundane, and yet able to keep up with characters who have access to world-bending spellcasting and other fantastic abilities, and for the setting to be completely like the sort of quasi-medieval quasi-feudal quasi-Eurasian populated-by-mainly-recognizable-people setting they've come to consider "standard" for fantasy.

And they're completely unwilling to give up on any of these, even though when taken all together they're mutually incompatible.

AFAICT I don't think anyone has actually suggested a "no magic, not even in the form of items," definition for mundane; that appears to be a straw-man concocted by the pro-high magic side.

That's come from "two" factions.

The first faction is the "mundanes should suck" faction, who appear to want spellcasters to be the "master class", and to heck with anyone who wants to play something else.

The second faction is the "I want to play non-magic character concept X" faction, who appear to want to play Conan , or a Musketeer, or the Grey Mouser, and appear to consider the total-non-magicness of that character a core immutable essential part of the concept.

Where it gets really wonky is when someone insists that those total-non-magic characters, and worldbending spellcasters, should all be viable and inter-balanced concepts across the entirety of the D&D level progression range (particularly for 3.x/PF)... and that this has no effect on the setting at all.

Pex

2017-12-27, 01:34 PM

Not really, it's just based on my perception. I am not going to make some survey reaching to all roleplayers that play or have played D&D to prove my point. I am quite happy just be sitting in my chair arguing and telling you that claiming my arguement is an hyperbolic nonsense is a bad counter argument.

Cosi and Quertus are quite happy about high level 3.X/Pathfinder and at least Quertus wants to fight Invisible spectres guarding a dimensional portal at the bottom of the ocean and that requires high level play. Cosi I don't know what he wants but he defends high level play with astounding vigour.

PhoenixPhyre can attest that in the Getting of the treadmill thread in the 5.e subforums that people have been arguing that 5e sucks as low level threats aren't made irrelevant as in 3.5. One guy claims that a 10th level fighter should be able to defeat an army.

Then I've been viewing some 3.5 characters from other posters who are happily playing at level 17 and with their AC reaching almost 40 I can see that all low level threats have been made irrelevant.

And then I have my experience from 15 years ago where we happily pounded dragons to dust with high level characters

Then I have a long time friend who I played AD&D 2.e with 25 years ago who is happy as a camper about Pathfinder He was the one that was really disappointed about how we never used the Dungeon Masters Options; High Level Campaign as he always played Wizards and reeeally wanted to cast some 10th level dweomers.

So it just seems to me that people who want epic power fantasy are happy about 3.5/pathfinder and more power to them. I support all kinds of play, I mean my 10 year old son is a blatant power gamer. Who am I to tell him that his style is wrong?

In 1E characters attack Lolth

In 2E characters attack Vecna and Orcus

In 4E characters become Demigods

In 5E characters attack Tiamat

For those players who want to attack gods, 3E is not so unique in the matter. For those players who want epic power, 3E is not so unique in the matter.

It is also insulting to suggest that the aspirations of those who play 3E is to want power.

Chaosticket

2017-12-27, 01:56 PM

For clarity, I didn't say "anything that exceeds the human norm". In real life, I know people who exceed the norm in various ways. They're not "magic".

What I said was "if it pushes a person's capability well beyond what even the most dedicated and trained person can do in that setting, it's getting into "magic" in the broad sense" (in the context of fantasy settings).

But that could just be going another level down the rabbit hole of definition-quibbling, this time over what the word "norm" means... and an illustration of why these discussions get so lost and convoluted: people can't agree on the goal, or on the definitions.

Is that really a problem? Is it really a problem if the high-level Fighter is using "magic" -- internal magic, magic items, etc -- that's just not spellcasting or the like, in order to keep up with the high-level spellcasters as they exist in many editions of D&D (and D&D-like systems)?

(An otherwise "strict mundane" character who picks up a magic sword and magic shield and magic armor and magic accessories, and uses those to keep up with spellcasters, is still using magic -- it's just not inherent/internal, and not spellcasting.)

To me, the problem is that some people want to have their cake and eat it to... they want to hold tightly to a particular concept, and for their character to be utterly totally fastidiously strictly mundane, and yet able to keep up with characters who have access to world-bending spellcasting and other fantastic abilities, and for the setting to be completely like the sort of quasi-medieval quasi-feudal quasi-Eurasian populated-by-mainly-recognizable-people setting they've come to consider "standard" for fantasy.

And they're completely unwilling to give up on any of these, even though when taken all together they're mutually incompatible.

That's come from "two" factions.

The first faction is the "mundanes should suck" faction, who appear to want spellcasters to be the "master class", and to heck with anyone who wants to play something else.

The second faction is the "I want to play non-magic character concept X" faction, who appear to want to play Conan , or a Musketeer, or the Grey Mouser, and appear to consider the total-non-magicness of that character a core immutable essential part of the concept.

Where it gets really wonky is when someone insists that those total-non-magic characters, and worldbending spellcasters, should all be viable and inter-balanced concepts across the entirety of the D&D level progression range (particularly for 3.x/PF)... and that this has no effect on the setting at all.

Mundane by definition means boring and uninteresting. Its being used as a synonym for nonmagical. What some people want it to mean "super", as in greater than mundane.

I agree with you on the other points.

Standard statistics ingame are about base 10 so an average player character with 12-20 stats is already super to a low degree. Every level you gain makes it more obvious so youre shrugging off arrows.

Youre not swinging a sword so hard it creates a vacuum, cutting things. At least not without magic.

I want people to be more clear what they want. Do you want every character to not have magic?

Do you want it like a videogame where magic is so casually used it becomes mundane?

High level characters of all types are powerful enough to be authority figures. Your Fighter isnt Gimli, its Heracles.

There are games where characters are basically RedShirts like Paranoia and Only War if that is more suitable.

Tanarii

2017-12-27, 01:59 PM

Is that innate or as a result of items though?Innate. Even in AD&D, between HPs, attack matrix, and saves Fighters have demi-god like offensive and endurance capabilities. Rogues can do utterly ridiculous things to begin with right out the gate (although low chance in early editions), even if you carefully reign in Hide in Shadows and Move Silently.

For clarity, I didn't say "anything that exceeds the human norm". In real life, I know people who exceed the norm in various ways. They're not "magic".

What I said was "if it pushes a person's capability well beyond what even the most dedicated and trained person can do in that setting, it's getting into "magic" in the broad sense" (in the context of fantasy settings).Oops. My bad. You're right, norm is not the correct word. Maximum capabilities would be more accurate.

(Edit: As a side note, non-magical but beyond human maximum capabilities is pretty much the standard for a huge number of adventure books / movies protagonists.)

But that could just be going another level down the rabbit hole of definition-quibbling, this time over what the word "norm" means... and an illustration of why these discussions get so lost and convoluted: people can't agree on the goal, or on the definitions.Which is why I keep harping on people that seem to be using D&D 3e Fighter when they say "mundane", or "D&D mundane", or even "D&D Fighter".

Is that really a problem? Is it really a problem if the high-level Fighter is using "magic" -- internal magic, magic items, etc -- that's just not spellcasting or the like, in order to keep up with the high-level spellcasters as they exist in many editions of D&D (and D&D-like systems)?Nope. It's only important so we both/all know what we're talking about.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 02:31 PM

Innate. Even in AD&D, between HPs, attack matrix, and saves Fighters have demi-god like offensive and endurance capabilities. Rogues can do utterly ridiculous things to begin with right out the gate (although low chance in early editions), even if you carefully reign in Hide in Shadows and Move Silently.

And "they're not normal people even for that fantasy setting, there's something innately different about them", is to me a better explanation for HP and levels and some of the crazier abilities that even Fighters and Rogues and Barbarians and other "non spellcaster" Classes have, than all the other justifications offered.

But there are those players who are actively bothered -- offended, even --by the notion that their Conan- or Grey Mouser- or whoever-inspired character isn't an utterly non-magical character.

Oops. My bad. You're right, norm is not the correct word. Maximum capabilities would be more accurate.

(Edit: As a side note, non-magical but beyond human maximum capabilities is pretty much the standard for a huge number of adventure books / movies protagonists.)

And those make me start wondering about how that setting works and if there's anything I should know about those characters and so on... are the people of that fictional world different from "IRL", is there something else going on, or what?

My suspension of disbelief has a very low tolerance for incongruities.

PS: it's very nice to have a couple branches of this discussion without acrimony and personal comments, even when there's disagreement.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 02:37 PM

Mundane by definition means boring and uninteresting. Its being used as a synonym for nonmagical. What some people want it to mean "super", as in greater than mundane.

Mundane can also mean "ordinary", "common", or "related to the world as opposed to supernatural". It's from those meanings that the usage in these threads derives.

Every alternative word that's been offered has its own baggage that's at least as complicating to the entire discussion. "Muggle" has been offered by that's setting-specific and IMO even more specifically demeaning towards any character without magic, given the way most "muggles" are depicted, if at all, in the source material for that term.

I agree with you on the other points.

Standard statistics ingame are about base 10 so an average player character with 12-20 stats is already super to a low degree. Every level you gain makes it more obvious so youre shrugging off arrows.

Youre not swinging a sword so hard it creates a vacuum, cutting things. At least not without magic.

I want people to be more clear what they want. Do you want every character to not have magic?

Do you want it like a videogame where magic is so casually used it becomes mundane?

High level characters of all types are powerful enough to be authority figures. Your Fighter isnt Gimli, its Heracles.

There are games where characters are basically RedShirts like Paranoia and Only Eat if that is more suitable.

I don't have any one thing I want, other than for people to think about what they want and what choices they have to make -- which is why my posts have been more about a framework to find a solution for the subject of this thread, than about trying to impose a single solution based on my specific preferences.

My only firm sticking point is that they can't have their cake and eat it to -- they have to give up something, even if it's something they don't realize they've already given up.

RazorChain

2017-12-27, 02:39 PM

In 1E characters attack Lolth

In 2E characters attack Vecna and Orcus

In 4E characters become Demigods

In 5E characters attack Tiamat

For those players who want to attack gods, 3E is not so unique in the matter. For those players who want epic power, 3E is not so unique in the matter.

It is also insulting to suggest that the aspirations of those who play 3E is to want power.

I think this is taken out of context as what I wrote was people were complaining about the bounded accuracty in 5e, meaning that low level encounters weren't triviliazed. The comparison was that in 3.x low level encounters were triviliazed, people felt the mechanical advancement. Hence that 5e was like E6 spread over 20 levels. So 3.x players were complaining that they felt that 5e characters didn't become as powerful as in 3.X.

The comparison was made between 3.X/Pathfinder and 5e which are the most played versions of D&D played at the moment if these forums are andy indication.

It is also insulting to suggest that the aspirations of those who play 3E is to want power.

Why is that insulting? I can assure you that 99% of D&D players do want to level their character up not just 3E players. So if they want to level up then they want power.

I'm very well aware that high level play in all versions of D&D are power play, it started with this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d3/TSR1017_Dungeons_%26_Dragons_-_Set_5_Immortal.jpg

Tanarii

2017-12-27, 02:49 PM

And those make me start wondering about how that setting works and if there's anything I should know about those characters and so on... are the people of that fictional world different from "IRL", is there something else going on, or what?

My suspension of disbelief has a very low tolerance for incongruities.I've noticed. :smallbiggrin:

I can stretch my suspension of disbelief to a certain point for heroes. I don't have any problem with Die Hard, but I started to roll my eyes by Die Hard 4. Somewhere they crossed the line between those two. Ditto for Indiana Jones, somewhere between 1 and 4 they crossed a line. Whereas the Matrix makes you wonder what the heck is going on right out the gate, with the Trinity resisting arrest scene. Similar as Dark City progresses, your suspension of disbelief starts getting (very intentionally) stretched until the big reveal.

I'm very well aware that high level play in all versions of D&D are power play, it started with this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d3/TSR1017_Dungeons_%26_Dragons_-_Set_5_Immortal.jpg
IIRC Frank was pretty open on Dragonsfoot that he didn't really expect anyone to make it to Immortality by climbing through the levels, either.
Although there was some guy on DF that claimed to have legitimately made it all the way to Hierarch twice, and become an old one. Like, he came back and responded to his original thread about starting the attempt many years later to say he'd done it.

Talakeal

2017-12-27, 03:51 PM

Tanarii

2017-12-27, 04:02 PM

That's all stuff that a level 1 commoner can pull off if they roll well though.

When I see a high level fighter who can reliably pull all of that off I think "action hero," not "super hero.":smallconfused:
Commoners (or more accurately normal man) aren't in the same boat for hit points, attack rolls, or saving throws.

And they have zero chance to do anything Thieves can do. (My mistake in saying Rogues, I was talking AD&D / BECMI.)

Technically even in 5e this holds true, a Rogue with a starting +7 bonus can do things a common can't dream of. Of course, any PC with a +1 or more bonus can too, since commoners are +0 across the board. :smallamused:

Edit: on action hero vs super hero, I think most of us make that distinction and draw the line somewhere. We just do it at different points. (Max_Killjoy seems to be the exception.)

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 04:15 PM

Edit: on action hero vs super hero, I think most of us make that distinction and draw the line somewhere. We just do it at different points. (Max_Killjoy seems to be the exception.)

I think you can have an action hero who doesn't cross into superhero territory, but there are also those characters who blur or cross the line, especially as "Sequel Escalation" takes place.

Chaosticket

2017-12-27, 04:18 PM

Mundane can also mean "ordinary", "common", or "related to the world as opposed to supernatural". It's from those meanings that the usage in these threads derives.

Every alternative word that's been offered has its own baggage that's at least as complicating to the entire discussion. "Muggle" has been offered by that's setting-specific and IMO even more specifically demeaning towards any character without magic, given the way most "muggles" are depicted, if at all, in the source material for that term.

I don't have any one thing I want, other than for people to think about what they want and what choices they have to make -- which is why my posts have been more about a framework to find a solution for the subject of this thread, than about trying to impose a single solution based on my specific preferences.

My only firm sticking point is that they can't have their cake and eat it to -- they have to give up something, even if it's something they don't realize they've already given up.

In Harry Potter I dont know if it was ever explained if "muggles" didnt know about magic or could never learn it as in having zero magic.

In Dungeons and Dragons different kinds of magic are common enough for their to be groups of all kinds of mages in the forms of priesthoods, wizard schools, druid circles and more. Its more like going to college than unveiling the Masquerade.

Every class has super powers. Its whether you think matrix bullet time to make more attacks in a few seconds, make people ignore you just by skulking, or teleport.

It can keep pointing out that things like teleportation are possible so long as you multiclass.

Or possibly people want a system change where you can punch someone into a moon and call that "mundane"?

Arbane

2017-12-27, 04:19 PM

"I can drop kick ancient red dragons into the middle of next century in my sleep. I think I'll go be a bureaucrat now...that sounds like fun."

Oh yeah, I forgot that they already ended world hunger last Friday. Silly me.

Hey, it worked in Exalted.

For a thousand years or so.

Sure...and all that molten rock flows where exactly?

The same place all the water drains to, and the breathable air comes from for the vast underground complexes, oh master of selective realism.

Talakeal

2017-12-27, 04:22 PM

:smallconfused:
Commoners (or more accurately normal man) aren't in the same boat for hit points, attack rolls, or saving throws.

As I discussed with Max, HP are so abstract that they are all but meaningless in trying to define a character's capabilities.

But attack rolls and saving throws auto succeed on a 20 in every edition of D&D, so like I said a commoner can pull of the same results with lucky rolls.

Tanarii

2017-12-27, 04:27 PM

As I discussed with Max, HP are so abstract that they are all but meaningless in trying to define a character's capabilities.It still represents *something* which increases their suitability to far exceed the human norm. As baselined by a normal man.

But attack rolls and saving throws auto succeed on a 20 in every edition of D&D, so like I said a commoner can pull of the same results with lucky rolls.That's like saying a house cat and a tiger can do the same damage and take the same hits, so they're on the same scale.

I mean, it's technically related, but totally beside the point.

Talakeal

2017-12-27, 04:33 PM

It still represents *something* which increases their suitability to far exceed the human norm. As baselined by a normal man.

Right, but HP are said to represent a combination of health, body mass, morale, luck, fighting skill, energy, and even less tangible things like "plot importance" or "fighting inertia".

About half of those things aren't really measureable, and I can see someone having orders of magnitude more of than someone else without being a super hero.

That's like saying a house cat and a tiger can do the same damage and take the same hits, so they're on the same scale.

I mean, it's technically related, but totally beside the point.

But those are all things that are within the realm of possibility and won't break suspension of disbelief if they happen now and again, and all a high level person is doing is succeeding more and more often.

Its not like they are flying like super-man, or running around the world in an instant like the flash, or surviving in the ocean depths like aqua-man, or regrowing a severed arm like dead-pool, or any of the crazy stuff that a super-hero could do but no human could do on their best day.

Tanarii

2017-12-27, 04:40 PM

Right, but HP are said to represent a combination of health, body mass, morale, luck, fighting skill, energy, and even less tangible things like "plot importance" or "fighting inertia".

About half of those things aren't really measureable, and I can see someone having orders of magnitude more of than someone else without being a super hero.

But those are all things that are within the realm of possibility and won't break suspension of disbelief if they happen now and again, and all a high level person is doing is succeeding more and more often.

Its not like they are flying like super-man, or running around the world in an instant like the flash, or surviving in the ocean depths like aqua-man, or regrowing a severed arm like dead-pool, or any of the crazy stuff that a super-hero could do but no human could do on their best day.
Okay. But track the conversation back to where I started this: Hercules. Demi-god. Powers: Amazing strength, endurance, toughness, plus a pretty decent dose of super-power level stupidity. All inherent. That's what I'm comparing an AD&D Fighter at high levels to. (He did have at least one Magic Item: hide of the Nemean lion.)

Talakeal

2017-12-27, 05:03 PM

Okay. But track the conversation back to where I started this: Hercules. Demi-god. Powers: Amazing strength, endurance, toughness, plus a pretty decent dose of super-power level stupidity. All inherent. That's what I'm comparing an AD&D Fighter at high levels to. (He did have at least one Magic Item: hide of the Nemean lion.)

Yeah, Hercules isn't too far off, but we do see him occasionally pull of feats of strength that are, well, flat out impossible for anyone, time to time, like holding up the sky or redirecting a river. I wonder what the highest actually possible feat of strength we actually he from him is and how far off it is from real world strong men.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 05:42 PM

2D8HP

2017-12-27, 06:13 PM

Old TSR D&D had "balance" by having Fighters be more powerful at low levels and Magic-Users at high levels 1974 - Dungeons & Dragons Book 1: Men & Magic,
(Page 6)

"Magic-Users: Top level magic-users are perhaps the most powerful characters in the game, but it is a long hard road to the top, and to begin with they are very weak, so survival is often the question, unless fighters protect the low-level magical types until they have worked up...." old TD&D also had different classes gain levels at different rates for the same XP, and "homebrewing" that is easier than balancing each level, but ideally (to communicate to playets what the "power level" is, classes of the same level should deliver, not "power" per say, but roughly equal spotlight time, and ideally the same should be true with the "power points" used in HERO and GURPS.

Okay. But track the conversation back to where I started this: Hercules. Demi-god. Powers: Amazing strength, endurance, toughness, plus a pretty decent dose of super-power level stupidity. All inherent. That's what I'm comparing an AD&D Fighter at high levels to. (He did have at least one Magic Item: hide of the Nemean lion.).
My own taste is more along the "Three Musketeers" to "Conan" level, but ideally I would hope that (since enough other people like it), possible levels or power points should be broad enough to accommodate Hercules, Dr. Strange, The Incredible Hulk, Merlin, and Superman as well.

I personally don't want martials to be better than casters. It would be nice if all player characters were evenly balanced, but that is a pipe dream. I will personally settle for the different character classes to be close enough in power that a mixed party is stronger than the sum of its parts and is more useful than one that is all clerics, druids, or wizards...
That sounds like a worthy goal, a mixed party of disperate characters should be stronger than "cookie cutter" ones.

So I want a rules system that allows me to play*"d'Artagnan" in Faerie", and others to play Dr. Strange and Superman.

I further want clear labels on how likely any given PC is to be able to change the imaginary world around them (whether by skill, strength, or spells).

I also want a pint of ale, a corned beef sandwich, and a pony.

Chaosticket

2017-12-27, 06:49 PM

Pex

2017-12-27, 06:54 PM

In Harry Potter I dont know if it was ever explained if "muggles" didnt know about magic or could never learn it as in having zero magic.

When the Wizarding World went into hiding the Muggles forgot about magic, probably with a generous helping of Obliviate spells. It became stories of fiction. A Muggle cannot learn magic. You have to be born with it, though it is possible for a child of Muggles to be born with it.

Tanarii

2017-12-27, 07:00 PM

.
My own taste is more along the "Three Musketeers" to "Conan" level, but ideally I would hope that (since enough other people like it), possible levels or power points should be broad enough to accommodate Hercules, Dr. Strange, The Incredible Hulk, Merlin, and Superman as well.Well that's the classic Avengers problem isn't it? What happens when you have Black Widow, the archer kid, Cap, Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk all in one party? From least powerful to most, you've got two people on par with the absolute best skilled martial artists/warriors IRL, a genetically enhanced soldier just beyond the best a human could possibly be, a flying tank with built-in artillery, a god walking the earth, and an indestructible incarnation of pure rage with no known upper strength limit.

I mean, they kinda make it work, but only if you willingly set aside suspension of disbelief and intentionally buy in.

Mutazoia

2017-12-27, 07:10 PM

Presumes false dichotomy that ruling a country requires one to be a middle-management bureaucrat.

Presumes that all individuals will share the same priorities and motivations.

Your stance assumes that people who can conquer a kingdom, or a planet, single handed, would actually bother doing so, or sticking around afterward.

You, personally, could take over a grade school playground, and impose your own brand of justice (assuming no other adults would come along and stop you/throw you in jail). You could stop the bullies, make sure all the kids get equal time on all of the playground equipment, etc. And you don't because?

Presumes that "ending world hunger" is the only change that persons of power and/or wealth could be causing, and that only "things are different than they are now" counts as "changing things". If people in power had done different things over the last 50 years, the world would be a different place.

More like "uses 'ending world hunger' as a catch all for putting the billions of dollars they have in the bank, back into to the world, for anything other than tax breaks." How many billionaires live in a 4 bedroom track home, and drive a Toyota Corolla, because they put the vast majority of their money into something like the World Health Organization? Name one.

For bonus points, please describe how things "change" yet are no different than they are now? Please show your work.

Where do tunnel boring machines put all that rock they crush at the front end to bore out the tunnels? /rhetorical

Oh...so our mythical dragon is setting up a mining operation, complete with conveyors and mining staff to haul out the "molten rock" as fast as he can melt it? Does he follow mine safety regulations or worry about OSHA inspections?

When the only tool you have is a hammer, driving in screws by whacking them seems to work quite well, too.

The rules are a complete tool box. Only a complete tool would think otherwise.

The irony is, that little economic tidbit tells us just how broken the system-setting interplay is in the typical D&D setting.

(And if it's not lying in some dungeon or some treasure horde, where exactly is this +5 armor coming from? If it's being made in the present day for these particular adventurers, why isn't it being made more often, for others, and why is it so expensive?)

Presumably, some high level adventurer paid a small fortune to have it crafted, and then died fighting something bigger and badder than he was...that's usually how it works.

I sold all that stuff off years ago when I washed my hands of d20/D&D.

However, here's an easy reference for starters: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/npcClasses/commoner.htm

Ah...I see your confusion.

You are okay with PC's doing their job (class) and getting better at it, but not okay with a blacksmith doing his job years and getting better at it, but still only being a normal schmuck with 1d4 hp no matter how good he gets at his job?

No. Reasons that actually make sense in the context of that individual setting and story, and aren't just blanket recycled excuses that amount to handing the "BBEG" (ugh) the Idiot Ball.

Okay, so how would YOU justify the PC's living beyond birth if the BBEG is so smart and capable and can "scry-and-fry" anybody who might pose an eventual threat to their existence?

What you seem to be forgetting is that Sauron wasn't at full capability for most of the Third Age. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauron#Third_Age.

Oh, and if you want to be pedantic, Gollum didn't know Bilbo's address, he just gave Sauron the name of a Hobbit, which lead Sauron to send the Nazgul to the Shire. But Sauron was only able to track Gollum down because he had regained enough power to do so. For much of the 3000 years of the Third Age, the ring lay simply lost at the bottom of a river... surely if Sauron could have instantly found it in Bilbo's possession, he'd have instantly found it at the bottom of a river or in Gollum's possession in the intervening centuries.

He just had an entire nation of Orcs and supernatural lich kings to do his leg work for him, that's all. And if you want to be pedantic, "Shire" is all the address you need when every hobbit in existence apparently lives within a 100 mile radius of each other. Hard to track things down when they are buried under a mountain....

Since that only bears a sort of "they're both using the same words" resemblance to what PhoenixPhyre's original comment, could you explain exactly where it is you're getting that notion?

Sure!

If you are so dead set against the BBEG's not snuffing out the PC's the moment they foil one little plan, what's the alternative?

And in this screwy parallel, what is the "scry" part?

A vast intelligence network that includes such elements as field agents, computer/data mining, satellites, etc. It's not perfect, but then neither is the game version of "scry-and-fry".

Ad hom much?

Occasionally, when I feel a bit snarky.

ross

2017-12-27, 07:12 PM

sorry for not reading 46 pages, just wanted to say #3 already exists in the form of saving throws and spell resistance (and some spells actually have attack rolls)

2D8HP

2017-12-27, 07:50 PM

What is stopping you from making reasonably heroic characters?

Unless you are in a group that focuses entirely on winning and treats you poorly for being different then it should be possible.

Many heroes in fiction are Fighter/thieves such as Conan. They can be more interesting than say Goku.....
That was right after my post, are you asking me?

Assuming you are, my last WD&D "campaign", which I played for about a year, I just quit.

I liked the low levels, and yes my PC was a Fighter/Rogue. Another player, who's PC was a Barbarian quit the week before, and it was my PC and Casters left.

It was a conga-line of combat and they were no locks or pockets to pick, no damsels to charm, no traps to disarm, and other than maudlin dialog, and Captain Haddock-like cussing, the only role of my PC was to shoot arrows at the antagonists that the Barbarian stood next to, and trying and failing to stop other less risk-averse PC's from getting into danger.

Typical of high level D&D, the game was becoming increasingly surreal and magic filled, which I enjoy less than low level play, plus neither I as a player, nor my PC really "groked" superpowered magic.

It just got dull being a tag-along

Well that's the classic Avengers problem isn't it? What happens when you have Black Widow, the archer kid, Cap, Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk all in one party? From least powerful to most, you've got two people on par with the absolute best skilled martial artists/warriors IRL, a genetically enhanced soldier just beyond the best a human could possibly be, a flying tank with built-in artillery, a god walking the earth, and an indestructible incarnation of pure rage with no known upper strength limit.

I mean, they kinda make it work, but only if you willingly set aside suspension of disbelief and intentionally buy in..
Yeah, ideally there would be good labels to identify relative PC power, low level D&D seems pretty balanced, but as it goes on, either because of my lack of player skill, or because of the rules themselves, things just get wonky (in my experience).

Chaosticket

2017-12-27, 08:07 PM

What is the highest challege rated monster with zero magic power or magical abilities?

Its possible to make a low magic setting so "jedi" arent common.

There are many counters to magic if it ever becomes an "I win" button.

Low magic Setting, penalties, all of 5th edition, plot requirements to gain class levels and so on.

If other players are being overshadowed you can let them retrain and/multiclass into magical builds like Arcane Tricksters, Eldritch Knights, Arcane Archers, etc.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 08:33 PM

Okay, so how would YOU justify the PC's living beyond birth if the BBEG is so smart and capable and can "scry-and-fry" anybody who might pose an eventual threat to their existence?

Your pathetic strawmen and personal attacks aren't worth the time. Maybe someday you'll learn to address things that people have actually said instead of making up and responding to something else that's easier for you to pretend you've refuted.

Until then, /plonk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plonk_(Usenet))

I mean, seriously, thank goodness for the ignore list.

.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 08:39 PM

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-27, 08:45 PM

Well that's the classic Avengers problem isn't it? What happens when you have Black Widow, the archer kid, Cap, Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk all in one party? From least powerful to most, you've got two people on par with the absolute best skilled martial artists/warriors IRL, a genetically enhanced soldier just beyond the best a human could possibly be, a flying tank with built-in artillery, a god walking the earth, and an indestructible incarnation of pure rage with no known upper strength limit.

I mean, they kinda make it work, but only if you willingly set aside suspension of disbelief and intentionally buy in.

A guess a little authorial fiat goes a long way... :smalltongue:

Cosi

2017-12-27, 10:40 PM

Cosi and Quertus are quite happy about high level 3.X/Pathfinder

Well, not quite. I like the power level, but I acknowledge that there are real problems. wish is abusable and stupid. A lot of classes are simply not good enough. The non-combat rules are lacking. But basically none of the problems are "normal dudes can't compete" or whatever it is people complain about.

PhoenixPhyre can attest that in the Getting of the treadmill thread in the 5.e subforums that people have been arguing that 5e sucks as low level threats aren't made irrelevant as in 3.5. One guy claims that a 10th level fighter should be able to defeat an army.

Someone needs to be able to defeat armies, because how the hell else are you going to get Dark Lords? If government can only exist via the consent of the governed (because no one can ever actually stop a bunch of random dudes from killing them), you can't have the "overthrow the Dark Lord" plot that is central to a lot of fantasy. Because going in and killing off a leader whose people are okay with them being in charge isn't being heroic, it's being a ****. How are you supposed to save the world when it is explicitly impossible for anything to be an existential threat to a single city?

Bounded accuracy fails one of the fundamental tests required of heroic fantasy -- providing a reason for heroes to exist.

demi-God-like power doesn't necessarily mean not mundane. After all, the defining example of a Demi-God for many people is Hercules. He didn't have magic powers, just strength and endurance and combat skills beyond human capabilities, and magic items.

So what would be "magical powers" if not "has superhuman strength because he is part god"? Diverting a river with your muscles does not strike mean as "mundane" in any sense of the word I can imagine. If you have the blood of the gods running in your veins, I think that makes you magic.

Also, magic weapons have quite a legacy in fantasy. Typically legendary artifacts like Excalibur, Mjolnir, or Anduril are given a lot more gravitas than magic spells, and are precisely the sort of thing I would use to kill a demon lord or an elder god, and I would rather have an experienced swordsman wielding such a thing than an old man in a bathrobe who has never touched a sword before in his life.

I don't think most people find "guy who carries the sword that solves the problem" to be a terribly compelling character, and frankly having "mundane" characters rely on magic items isn't really having them be "mundane". If the thing that lets you solve the problem is the pants you wear rather than the abilities you have, you are not the hero. Your pants are.

I personally don't want martials to be better than casters. It would be nice if all player characters were evenly balanced, but that is a pipe dream. I will personally settle for the different character classes to be close enough in power that a mixed party is stronger than the sum of its parts and is more useful than one that is all clerics, druids, or wizards.

No. People should be allowed to play the characters they want, and that means you can't require that their party has a Fighter (or a Wizard) in it. The Fighter needs to be justifiable because he actually has abilities you want, not because there are challenges you lose if you forgot to pack a Fighter. The thing where someone has to be a Cleric because otherwise anyone who fails a save against a Medusa can't play any more is dumb, and the game should move away from it, not towards it. A party of Cleric/Druid/Wizard/Sorcerer is a perfectly viable party, and I see no reason to change that.

In 1E characters attack Lolth

In 2E characters attack Vecna and Orcus

In 4E characters become Demigods

In 5E characters attack Tiamat

For those players who want to attack gods, 3E is not so unique in the matter. For those players who want epic power, 3E is not so unique in the matter.

It is also insulting to suggest that the aspirations of those who play 3E is to want power.

Yes. Almost every edition has tried to support the things I am asking for. All I want is for that support to actually work. Honestly, having these discussions has made me much more confident that the things I want are reasonable, because I have looked at old editions and found support for them in every single one.

What is the highest challege rated monster with zero magic power or magical abilities?

I think the Devestation Vermin? But those are basically a joke because you can kill all of them as a 6th level Warlock. Which really only goes to show that there is only so far being really good at hitting people can take you.

Mutazoia

2017-12-27, 11:14 PM

Your pathetic strawmen and personal attacks aren't worth the time. Maybe someday you'll learn to address things that people have actually said instead of making up and responding to something else that's easier for you to pretend you've refuted.

Until then, /plonk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plonk_(Usenet))

.

It's a serious question. You rail against any reason for a powerful BBEG to let the PCs live long enough to pose a serious threat, yet refuse to offer an alternative reason. And to top it off, you add /plonk as a way to say "I can't answer your question with out retconning stuff I've said, so I'm going to pretend to ignore you, rather than answer valid question."

#goplonkyerself.

ImNotTrevor

2017-12-27, 11:51 PM

It's a serious question. You rail against any reason for a powerful BBEG to let the PCs live long enough to pose a serious threat, yet refuse to offer an alternative reason. And to top it off, you add /plonk as a way to say "I can't answer your question with out retconning stuff I've said, so I'm going to pretend to ignore you, rather than answer valid question."

#goplonkyerself.

Because the BBEG is feckin' busy orchestrating the summoning of his Dark Lord into the realm of flesh and understands the concept of delegation.

Also 4 randos killing goblins and causing minor hiccups isn't worth upsetting his entire schedule to personally get rid of them. Hell, if his organization is large enough he might not even know about the problem until later! (Is the CEO of Walmart informed of each and every late shipment of blogna to the stores and expected handle them personally? At low levels this is the amount of inconvenience the PCs cause. Local leaders would be expected to handle it.)

Your entire premise is about as solid as a foundation made of jello.

RazorChain

2017-12-27, 11:54 PM

It's a serious question. You rail against any reason for a powerful BBEG to let the PCs live long enough to pose a serious threat, yet refuse to offer an alternative reason. And to top it off, you add /plonk as a way to say "I can't answer your question with out retconning stuff I've said, so I'm going to pretend to ignore you, rather than answer valid question."

#goplonkyerself.

Well it's hard given the rules of D&D. Divination is kinda broken spell for world building as 1) You know when it fails 2) You can ask if an endeavor will succeed or fail a week into the future.

The powerful BBEG doesn't see any farther than than that into the future but should he deem that the PC's are getting troublesome and he is vastly more powerful then there is little to stop him just to find the PC's via scrying, teleport to them and squash them or just find out their plans and foil them.

The 5D wizard chess has been discussed on these forums numerus times where there is a magical arms race to ward yourself and destroy your foes.

Mutazoia

2017-12-28, 12:13 AM

Because the BBEG is feckin' busy orchestrating the summoning of his Dark Lord into the realm of flesh and understands the concept of delegation.

Also 4 randos killing goblins and causing minor hiccups isn't worth upsetting his entire schedule to personally get rid of them. Hell, if his organization is large enough he might not even know about the problem until later! (Is the CEO of Walmart informed of each and every late shipment of blogna to the stores and expected handle them personally? At low levels this is the amount of inconvenience the PCs cause. Local leaders would be expected to handle it.)

Your entire premise is about as solid as a foundation made of jello.

In a previous post, I laid out this exact scenario (more or less)...it was shot down by Killjoy, who said it wouldn't work in D&D, because any reason used in a book, can't possibly work in game. I asked him to give an approved reason and he shouted "STRAWMAN" and ran away. Killjoy is using "strawman" the way Trumpkins use "Fake news".

Well it's hard given the rules of D&D. Divination is kinda broken spell for world building as 1) You know when it fails 2) You can ask if an endeavor will succeed or fail a week into the future.

The powerful BBEG doesn't see any farther than than that into the future but should he deem that the PC's are getting troublesome and he is vastly more powerful then there is little to stop him just to find the PC's via scrying, teleport to them and squash them or just find out their plans and foil them.

The 5D wizard chess has been discussed on these forums numerus times where there is a magical arms race to ward yourself and destroy your foes.

See above...

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 12:22 AM

Well it's hard given the rules of D&D. Divination is kinda broken spell for world building as 1) You know when it fails 2) You can ask if an endeavor will succeed or fail a week into the future.

The powerful BBEG doesn't see any farther than than that into the future but should he deem that the PC's are getting troublesome and he is vastly more powerful then there is little to stop him just to find the PC's via scrying, teleport to them and squash them or just find out their plans and foil them.

The irony is that it's perfectly set up to let "heroes" get just dangerous enough to draw a little notice...

The 5D wizard chess has been discussed on these forums numerous times where there is a magical arms race to ward yourself and destroy your foes.

Yeap. It's like "I am not left-handed!" "Neither am I!"... only with spells, counter-spells, defensive spells, and more spells, all nested together layers and layers deep.

Arbane

2017-12-28, 12:29 AM

Mutazoia

2017-12-28, 01:12 AM

The 5D wizard chess has been discussed on these forums numerus times where there is a magical arms race to ward yourself and destroy your foes.

Which circles quite nicely back to the original topic... because no matter how powerful a fighter gets, he can never play 5D wizard chess....

RazorChain

2017-12-28, 02:30 AM

Which circles quite nicely back to the original topic... because no matter how powerful a fighter gets, he can never play 5D wizard chess....

True, the wizard goes and finds his pet Cleric and just ask if he'll manage to destroy the fighter a week before he uses scry to find out where the fighter is and if he's sleeping and then teleports in to zap him. If the answer is yes, then he goes ahead with his plans.

ImNotTrevor

2017-12-28, 09:18 AM

Ahh, the ever-popular White Wolf Explanation: "Basically, your characters suck too much for anyone to bother killing them. If you start succeeding at anything, that will change."

I wasn't aware that first level characters roughing up a few minor cult orderlies is reason for the grand master of the great unflesh church to abandon his efforts and personally deal with them. Must be the reason his plan takes forever! Literally every time a few cultists get caught doing illegal things the leader has to drop everything and go kill the other low-level folks responsible for the arrest!

Complaining about this is silly.

Chaosticket

2017-12-28, 12:21 PM

In certain editions of D&D, and some other systems, if someone else in the group decides to make a wizard, then "Conan" may never actually get in an action edgewise at higher levels -- unless the GM or other PCs contrive to allow it.

http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Prismatic_Dragon

That is the highest challenge rated enemy I could find in 30 seconds.

Dragons are in the name of the game. Dungeons and Dragons can scale out faster than you grow so you cant just use the same tactics you started with. Even early on you can encounter Incorporeal enemies that require magic to deal with or ones that can paralyze you making you an easy kill.

Later on it goes even further where even common enemies are magical-[blank] to make it clear youve gone way past fighting goblins to fighting Devils, Dragons, and beyond that.

You would have to reduce so much to make high levels magic-free. Even the lower magical creatures are more like Kaiju.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 12:45 PM

http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Prismatic_Dragon

That is the highest challenge rated enemy I could find in 30 seconds.

Dragons are in the name of the game. Dungeons and Dragons can scale out faster than you grow so you cant just use the same tactics you started with. Even early on you can encounter Incorporeal enemies that require magic to deal with or ones that can paralyze you making you an easy kill.

Later on it goes even further where even common enemies are magical-[blank] to make it clear youve gone way past fighting goblins to fighting Devils, Dragons, and beyond that.

You would have to reduce so much to make high levels magic-free. Even the lower magical creatures are more like Kaiju.

OK.

So you've decided that it's high magic and that you're retaining the degree of power that spellcasters obtain at higher levels.

You then have a choice:

* the "Conan" concept changes to drop the strict "totally unmagical" element so that the character is open to gaining fantastic abilities as levels progress and can keep up with the spellcasters.
* the "Conan" concept doesn't change, and the character doesn't gain any fantastic elements and can't keep up with the spellcasters.
* the "Conan" concept doesn't change, but does gain fantastic elements despite still being "totally unmagical", and the setting changes to accommodate this shift in the capabilities of all "humans".
* the "Conan" concept doesn't change, but does gain fantastic elements despite still being "totally unmagical", and the setting utterly ignores this and become internally incongruous, incoherent, and inconsistent.

Cazero

2017-12-28, 01:14 PM

Dragons are in the name of the game. Dungeons and Dragons can scale out faster than you grow so you cant just use the same tactics you started with. Even early on you can encounter Incorporeal enemies that require magic to deal with or ones that can paralyze you making you an easy kill.Are you seriously suggesting that owning a weapon that happens to be magical or casting Protection from Petrification two minutes before entering the basilisk cave are meaningful change in tactics?

Tanarii

2017-12-28, 01:28 PM

* the "Conan" concept changes to drop the strict "totally unmagical" element so that the character is open to gaining fantastic abilities as levels progress and can keep up with the spellcasters.
* the "Conan" concept doesn't change, and the character doesn't gain any fantastic elements and can't keep up with the spellcasters.
* the "Conan" concept doesn't change, but does gain fantastic elements despite still being "totally unmagical", and the setting changes to accommodate this shift in the capabilities of all "humans".
* the "Conan" concept doesn't change, but does gain fantastic elements despite still being "totally unmagical", and the setting utterly ignores this and become internally incongruous, incoherent, and inconsistent.
You forgot:
* the "Conan" concept doesn't change, but does gain fantastic elements despite still being "totally unmagical", and the setting utterly ignores this, and the players and DM suspend their disbelief successfully without issue.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 01:30 PM

You forgot:
* the "Conan" concept doesn't change, but does gain fantastic elements despite still being "totally unmagical", and the setting utterly ignores this, and the players and DM suspend their disbelief successfully without issue.

Nope. That's the fourth one on my list.

Tanarii

2017-12-28, 01:36 PM

Nope. That's the fourth one on my list.
Nope, because in that case, the setting does not "become internally incongruous, incoherent, and inconsistent." That statement isn't a fact of the setting. It's a view of the setting based on DM & player perception and opinion. If they successfully suspend belief, it doesn't become so.

Chaosticket

2017-12-28, 01:40 PM

Are you seriously suggesting that owning a weapon that happens to be magical or casting Protection from Petrification two minutes before entering the basilisk cave are meaningful change in tactics?

I was thinking more like enlisting an army of peasants, shrinking boulders then unshrinking them after launch, befriending monsters, and other possibilities.

Classes that dont have magic require player input for out of the box tactics to replicate what magic can do.

If swinging a sword doesnt work then what do you do?

Nonmagical characters having superpowers should be better explained if youre going to use them.

Cazero

2017-12-28, 01:59 PM

If swinging a sword doesnt work then what do you do?
In D&D : the Inventory Management game, if swinging a sword doesn't work you run away because you're not properly prepared. Also, the wizard and the fighter are balanced since the wizard still need the fighter to physically bash dragons on the head because his magic sure as hell doesn't work on them.

In D&D : the Heroic Adventure game, there is an issue with caster/martial disparity. Shocking twist.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 02:12 PM

Nope, because in that case, the setting does not "become internally incongruous, incoherent, and inconsistent." That statement isn't a fact of the setting. It's a view of the setting based on DM & player perception and opinion. If they successfully suspend belief, it doesn't become so.

It is what it is.

There's nothing inherently wrong with it. If the group chooses internal coherence and consistency as the thing they give up, and that makes for the most enjoyable game, that's fine.

But no amount of enjoyment makes the facts go away. An impossibility has been added to the setting, and that impossibility doesn't go away because it's being ignored.

The following cannot all be true at once:
* humans in the setting are like humans in our world.
* the setting bears resemblance to something that could have existed in our world (example, the quasi-medieval quasi-Eurasian setting quite common to fantasy RPGs and fiction).
* there exist(s) one or more humans who can do things that humans in our world (and thus their world) cannot by any stretch do.
* those particular humans are in no way "magic" (broad sense), so there's no explanation for what allows them to exceed the limits of humans within their own world.

Cazero

2017-12-28, 02:18 PM

But no amount of enjoyment makes the facts go away. An impossibility has been added to the setting, and that impossibility doesn't go away because it's being ignored.
Actualy it does, because if you ignore it the impossibility isn't established to begin with.
More specificaly,

* humans in the setting are like humans in our world.
is never established.

Tanarii

2017-12-28, 02:30 PM

But no amount of enjoyment makes the facts go away.No amount of insisting perception and opinion that are subjective are facts will make it true.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 02:31 PM

Actualy it does, because if you ignore it the impossibility isn't established to begin with.
More specificaly,

is never established.

It was established in the previous options, where are in tern a subsection of a longer list of branching choices posted previously.

"Humans are different, and the setting accounts for it" falls under:
* the "Conan" concept doesn't change, but does gain fantastic elements despite still being "totally unmagical", and the setting changes to accommodate this shift in the capabilities of all "humans".

If humans are different in the setting such that it allows a thoroughly "unmagic" character to do things that would be grossly impossible for any human being in our world, but nothing about the setting reflects that difference, then that is just another form of "the setting is internally incongruous, incoherent, and inconsistent".

Cazero

2017-12-28, 02:44 PM

If humans are different in the setting such that it allows a thoroughly "unmagic" character to do things that would be grossly impossible for any human being in our world, but nothing about the setting reflects that difference, then that is just another form of "the setting is internally incongruous, incoherent, and inconsistent".Tell me how every single farmer on the planet can find the time and motivation to add a daily 10h training regimen to their chores and I'll believe your claim that the setting is transfigured by removing the hard cap on what training can do on the human body.

Wait, we already has that conversation, so let's skip to the conclusion : I'm terrible at conveying my ideas/opinions, and you refuse to hold yourself at the level of proof that you demand from others.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 02:53 PM

Tell me how every single farmer on the planet can find the time and motivation to add a daily 10h training regimen to their chores and I'll believe your claim that the setting is transfigured by removing the hard cap on what training can do on the human body.

Wait, we already has that conversation, so let's skip to the conclusion : I'm terrible at conveying my ideas/opinions, and you refuse to hold yourself at the level of proof that you demand from others.

If the only thing you have to support your position is personal attacks, we can dismiss your position entirely.

Meanwhile, if you raise the ceiling for highly trained humans, you've also raised the average and the floor for everyone else -- the capabilities of any species are going to be a range, and extended that range sans "magic" is firmly in the "incoherent setting" territory.

(And if you think the average farmer in one of these fantasy settings isn't "training" for at least 10 hours a day, I think you might want to go do some reading on what farming was like before the advent of mechanized equipment.)

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 03:06 PM

There is another way of making 3.5 martials stronger against wizards: give them abilities that imply the fallibility of spells compared to their martial abilities. Walls of force are immune to damage except damage dealt by a veteran, because veterans are just that much better at breaking things than fighters. Astral projection cords are resistant to everything except for githyanki silver swords and attacks made by veterans. Protection from arrows protects against arrows unless they're magical or fired by a veteran. Dominate monster lets you dominate any creature unless they have a spell or racial immunity or they're a slayer or a veteran. Incorporeality is a special quality that protects against most attacks that don't come from a veteran. And you can give the veteran class features that imply a fallibility of magic without having to change the wording of wizard or any of its spells (or even give the veteran an explicit resistance to magic, unless you really want to argue that fighters are magical because they possess saving throws).

Then, give the veteran abilities which are bound by human limits, but aren't bound by much else. When I hit a wizard with a longsword, it shouldn't deal 1d8+something of his plot armour points in damage, it should cut his head off because I'm one of the greatest swordsmen who's ever lived, dammit, and I actually know how to kill people - it's not just that mundanes are bound by the rules of reality, but they're also critically weak because they need 10 longsword attacks to take off the head of a wizard who isn't doing anything to stop them. That's just not how longswords work. If the veteran isn't going to have supernatural strength, he sure as hell ain't having a supernatural weakness either.

Go down the list of what wizardly types can do that veterans should also be able to do. Well, wizards and clerics can plane shift, but clearly veterans shouldn't be able to... except, that in real life, there aren't any locations you can't go to by travelling there normally. Planar travel is something that real-life people can't do only because they don't have any opportunity to try (plus, in Norse mythology, you can plane shift by climbing up and down a giant tree in the centre of the universe anyway). So we can give the veteran the chance to find locations where you can go to plane shift.

What else? Wizards can send long-distance messages, so why not let veterans craft an "Envoy firework", which sends a message over a long distance with ingenuity and gunpowder? Clerics can heal hit point damage, and to be honest, why shouldn't veterans be able to do that? I can bring people back from the dead (for a certain value of "Dead", I'll admit), why can't veterans be able to? Sure, less "Raise dead" and more "Revivify", but still pretty helpful. Why shouldn't a veteran be able to manipulate and influence people like a wizard, sorcerer or bard does, when that's also something people can do in real life? Hells, why can't a veteran build a small flying machine, like a hang-glider with an ego? And why not let them create pseudo-alchemical items, healing poultices, and honest-to-goodness explosives (fun fact: you can make smoke bombs out of sugar and anything that will make the burning faster).

So why not make a class that does all that? Oh wait... I already did (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?428437-quot-Stand-back-boy-and-let-me-show-you-war!-quot-%283-5-class-PEACH%29).

Cazero

2017-12-28, 03:11 PM

Meanwhile, if you raise the ceiling for highly trained humans, you've also raised the average and the floor for everyone else -- the capabilities of any species are going to be a range, and extended that range sans "magic" is firmly in the "incoherent setting" territory.
Okay, this sounds like a personal attack, but I'd like you to show your work. Especialy the part where high level character aren't statistical anomalies with little to no impact on the average.
And I really don't see how the idea that training has no bound can possibly raise the floor. If anything, it should lower it since making training that more important will make people who don't have a heavily physical job physicaly weaker by comparison.

(And if you think the average farmer in one of these fantasy settings isn't "training" for at least 10 hours a day, I think you might want to go do some reading on what farming was like before the advent of mechanized equipment.)
Irrelevant. There are so many average farmers that they establish the average, ergo any one of them would need extra training on top of farm work to become super-strong.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 03:12 PM

No amount of insisting perception and opinion that are subjective are facts will make it true.

It's not subjective, perception, or opinion in the first place.

A noise that doesn't bother you is still a noise. A flickering light that doesn't bother you is still flickering.

An incongruity in the setting that doesn't bother you is still an incongruity, it doesn't just disappear if you ignore it.

How is it not an incongruity if you have some number of individuals who far exceed what's otherwise possible for people in a setting, without anything separating them from the rest of their species, other than "because it's cool"?

How is it not an incongruity to have a setting with people with a range of capabilities that significantly exceed those of people in our world, and yet otherwise that setting looks just like our world? (If the average laborer can lift and carry 500kg and run 20km/hour with it for 8 hours straight... why are there merchant caravans of oxcarts trundling along the roads?)

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 03:31 PM

Okay, this sounds like a personal attack, but I'd like you to show your work. Especialy the part where high level character aren't statistical anomalies with little to no impact on the average.
And I really don't see how the idea that training has no bound can possibly raise the floor. If anything, it should lower it since making training that more important will make people who don't have a heavily physical job physicaly weaker by comparison.

Irrelevant. There are so many average farmers that they establish the average, ergo any one of them would need extra training on top of farm work to become super-strong.

It has nothing to do with statistics. At all.

It's about the range of capability.

In our world, no amount of training will let someone lift 10 tons, because the amount of force necessary to do so drastically exceeds what it takes to break bones and shred muscles. So, you have to change something for your fictional setting. Whatever you do to raise the maximum also raises the minimum and the "norm", because whatever you change about humans to drastically move the upper limit affects all humans -- whether that's changing what they're made of, or changing the properties of what they're made of.

"Training" is just another form of physical exertion... the farmer or laborer who engages in hard physical work for 8+ hours every day, year after year, is going to build strength and endurance to a certain degree, and if the range of human capability has shifted, then the results of that buildup are going to shift with the range.

"Boundless training" is just a different slip-cover for something like "ki" or "universe energy" or whatever... might as well call it magic.

E: now, part of what I don't get is, why are some people so dead-set against just saying "yeah, there's some 'magic' going on here" in most of these settings?

2D8HP

2017-12-28, 03:55 PM

....I honestly dont know what you want or expect out of games. Do you?....

....Show me non-magical alternatives please!

Okay, I will show you:

"It was a time of adventure" (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W5K3AKl5qpchttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=__0r5M2RjCM)

"We will use the old ways" (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=__0r5M2RjCM)

"YOU MURDERER!" (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tE3TbBwSVe8)

"Making this up as I go" (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F1ZyHNmb1yU)

...The second faction is the "I want to play non-magic character concept X" faction, who appear to want to play Conan , or a Musketeer, or the Grey Mouser, and appear to consider the total-non-magicness of that character a core immutable essential part of the concept......
Yes.

There is another way of making 3.5 martials stronger against wizards....

....why not make a class that does all that? Oh wait... I already did (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?428437-quot-Stand-back-boy-and-let-me-show-you-war!-quot-%283-5-class-PEACH%29)..
You have my interest!

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 04:04 PM

E: now, part of what I don't get is, why are some people so dead-set against just saying "yeah, there's some 'magic' going on here" in most of these settings?

Some people want to have a character who is defined by skill rather than hacking the universe. Why a fair few people's solution to that is to hack the universe and then pretend it's skill, I don't know.

You have my interest!

My signature has a link to my homebrew signature, and if you scroll down, you'll find the "Hypermundanes project" which has a buncha classes like this.

Cazero

2017-12-28, 04:05 PM

"Training" is just another form of physical exertion... the farmer or laborer who engages in hard physical work for 8+ hours every day, year after year, is going to build strength and endurance to a certain degree, and if the range of human capability has shifted, then the results of that buildup are going to shift with the range.
Effective physical training require you to push your limits away constantly. Farm work has a pretty much constant workload.
Farmers may be able to grow from below average to above average in a few years instead of a decade, but still never approach super strength because changing the range didn't change the workload.

And if you apply conservation of energy and the square cube "law", a farmer strong enough to do the work of 2 will need the energy (and food) to sustain 4. Outside of an elite topforce that's a liability and not an asset.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 04:15 PM

Some people want to have a character who is defined by skill rather than hacking the universe. Why a fair few people's solution to that is to hack the universe and then pretend it's skill, I don't know.

First, I'd say that "hacking the universe" can be an expression of skill -- wizards are certainly using "knowledge and art" to accomplish their hacking.

Second, a character who simply "has some internal magic" that allows her to far exceed the limits of most people isn't really hacking the universe, it's just an "delimiter" that allows her skill-based concept to keep going beyond the normal bounds of her setting and species -- without distorting the rest of the setting.

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 04:21 PM

First, I'd say that "hacking the universe" can be an expression of skill -- wizards are certainly using "knowledge and art" to accomplish their hacking.

Second, a character who simply "has some internal magic" that allows her to far exceed the limits of most people isn't really hacking the universe, it's just an "delimiter" that allows her skill-based concept to keep going beyond the normal bounds of her setting and species -- without distorting the rest of the setting.

Some people want their sword skill to be sword skill, not hacking skill or ki/chakra/internal magic/nonsense skill. But that's fine, because if someone good at swords hits someone else with a sword, they die. You don't need magic to make that happen.

Jama7301

2017-12-28, 04:22 PM

Second, a character who simply "has some internal magic" that allows her to far exceed the limits of most people isn't really hacking the universe, it's just an "delimiter" that allows her skill-based concept to keep going beyond the normal bounds of her setting and species -- without distorting the rest of the setting.

If I were to sit down and seriously define a setting, that's basically how I'd tackle things. Something about how all the world altering magic, direct divine intervention, and natural phenomena have woven a sort of magic into the world itself. Everyone has a bit of them. It's essentially the background radiation of life. For some, the spark of magic manifests as innate talents that, if cultivated, would lead to a world class chef, a legendary blacksmith, an expert tactician, reality-warping wizards, and legendary heroes. The spark of magic could amplify the 'pull' of their calling, leading them down the path, even if they never gain the ability to cast a single cantrip.

There are probably lots of points where this could go wrong, but it's a framework that I find acceptable, and it could let me explain anything from an Uberwizard to a Fighter that could cleft a mountain in twain.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 04:28 PM

Effective physical training require you to push your limits away constantly. Farm work has a pretty much constant workload.
Farmers may be able to grow from below average to above average in a few years instead of a decade, but still never approach super strength because changing the range didn't change the workload.

And if you apply conservation of energy and the square cube "law", a farmer strong enough to do the work of 2 will need the energy (and food) to sustain 4. Outside of an elite topforce that's a liability and not an asset.

Are you sure about that?

Doing some preliminary digging, it doesn't appear to be the case -- rather it appears that there's a pretty direct ratio between work done / exertion, and the caloric intake needed.

(E: unless you've switched to talking about a specific setting/example, and not about the general issues.)

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 04:41 PM

Some people want their sword skill to be sword skill, not hacking skill or ki/chakra/internal magic/nonsense skill. But that's fine, because if someone good at swords hits someone else with a sword, they die. You don't need magic to make that happen.

The issue in the context of this thread isn't skill in that sense.

No amount of skill will allow a "like our reality" human or human-like person physically do things that enable them to keep up with D&D spellcasters at higher levels -- things like cutting through stone walls in a single stroke, stabbing through plate armor, leaping over 50' wide chasms at a dead run and continuing on the other side, deflecting a storm of arrows with their sword, etc. Those things require someone to drastically exceed human capability (unless you adjust "human capability" upwards with all the implications that come with that change).

If you want a game where a character can be viable throughout the progression simply because they're "just that darn skilled", then a system like D&D (3.x especially) isn't the system you want (unless you're going to trashcan 2/3 of the system, which looks a lot like the bad end of system Jenga). If you want to use 3.x D&D without hacking it to pieces, then characters based on pure sword skill and nothing else are going to be niche characters. (General you, not specifically you.)

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 04:47 PM

The issue in the context of this thread isn't skill in that sense.

No amount of skill will let a "like our reality" human being physically do things that allow them to keep up with D&D spellcasters at higher levels. Things like cutting through stone walls in a single stroke, stabbing through plate armor, leaping over 50' wide chasms at a dead run and continuing on the other side, deflecting a storm of arrows with their sword, etc. Those things require someone to drastically exceed human capability (unless you adjust "human capability" upwards with all the implications that come with that change).

If you want a game where a character can be viable throughout the progression simply because they're "just that darn skilled", then D&D isn't the system you want (unless you're going to trashcan 2/3 of the system, which looks a lot like the bad end of system Jenga).

But you can and do have examples of people who can get through stone walls (even if it's with a low-tech grenade, it still counts!), kill people wearing plate armour, bypass chasms (if not instantly), take on armies (of archers or otherwise), and so forth. There's nothing about mundane that stops you from keeping up with the casters with a little ingenuity and a lot of character abilities which, as I said before, are limited by reality but not limited by much else. If nothing else, you can defeat wizards by shooting the bastards straight through their protective magic (see post about implying fallibility and fighters having saving throws and still not being magical). And at the end of the day, at least in core, wizards still can't heal, but there's no reason that mundanes shouldn't be able to; clerics can't create decent explosions until the midgame but there's no reason mundanes shouldn't be able to, and so forth. It doesn't have to be about doing everything a wizard and cleric can (a cleric can't do everything a wizard and cleric can) so much as doing stuff that is still useful to have despite the wizard and cleric being there.

Maybe I confused you by saying "Sword skill" - I'm not expecting a veteran only ever to use a sword. I don't expect modern soldiers only ever to shoot at things until they go away, either.

RazorChain

2017-12-28, 04:56 PM

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 05:01 PM

Hafþór Júlíus or the mountain (GoT) is one of the strongest men in the world and his calorie intake is 10.000 or 4-5 times of average human.

Irrespective of whether or not this is true, I'm probably one of the weaker people around (I won't say weakest, but probably no higher than STR 8) and my calorie intake is about 6000 per day, because I have a hyperactive metabolism. So a single example doesn't necessarily mean that strong people need a bunch more calories.

Arbane

2017-12-28, 05:08 PM

Soooo... how many caiories does a FLYING FIREBREATHING DRAGON need daily? Gotta have our incredibly selectively applied realism, after all!

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 05:10 PM

Soooo... how many caiories does a FLYING FIREBREATHING DRAGON need daily? Gotta have our incredibly selectively applied realism, after all!

Is it wrong that mundane characters and dragons are allowed to exist in the sa...

...silly me, of course it is. Can't have anyone playing the character that they want to, can we?

EDIT: I also find it hilarious that you brought this up in a discussion of, of all characters, the mountain. He's not allowed not to be a spellcaster because dragons!

PhoenixPhyre

2017-12-28, 05:10 PM

Irrespective of whether or not this is true, I'm probably one of the weaker people around (I won't say weakest, but probably no higher than STR 8) and my calorie intake is about 6000 per day, because I have a hyperactive metabolism. So a single example doesn't necessarily mean that strong people need a bunch more calories.

Caloric balance is really a hard subject to pin down. It depends on

a) personal factors/genetics (ie your metabolism)
b) specific body composition (muscle takes more energy than fat at a given activity rate, but muscles can be more or less efficient depending on training, genetics, etc.)
c) past diet (peoples' metabolisms change relatively drastically depending on how they eat--eating too little can tank your metabolism)
d) inaccuracies in measurement of both calories in and calories out (both are notoriously subject to error, in all sorts of random directions)
e) physical activity levels--when training, Michael Phelps (the swimmer) eats around 12 000 Calories per day to maintain weight.
f) probably a bunch more factors.

But in general, people with significantly more muscle mass should eat more than people with less muscle mass. How much? Hard to say.

Edit: and flying, firebreathing reptiles (at least the super-sized draconic ones) require a whole lot more than just extra calories. Super-strong, super-light materials for wings/bones for one. A rampant disregard for the square-cube law when it comes to body heat generation. And a few other things. :smallwink:

Jama7301

2017-12-28, 05:17 PM

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 05:20 PM

But you can and do have examples of people who can get through stone walls (even if it's with a low-tech grenade, it still counts!), kill people wearing plate armour, bypass chasms (if not instantly), take on armies (of archers or otherwise), and so forth. There's nothing about mundane that stops you from keeping up with the casters with a little ingenuity and a lot of character abilities which, as I said before, are limited by reality but not limited by much else. If nothing else, you can defeat wizards by shooting the bastards straight through their protective magic (see post about implying fallibility and fighters having saving throws and still not being magical). And at the end of the day, at least in core, wizards still can't heal, but there's no reason that mundanes shouldn't be able to; clerics can't create decent explosions until the midgame but there's no reason mundanes shouldn't be able to, and so forth. It doesn't have to be about doing everything a wizard and cleric can (a cleric can't do everything a wizard and cleric can) so much as doing stuff that is still useful to have despite the wizard and cleric being there.

Maybe I confused you by saying "Sword skill" - I'm not expecting a veteran only ever to use a sword. I don't expect modern soldiers only ever to shoot at things until they go away, either.

I was just running with the sword part, but the same thing applies to skill in general.

If we're staying specific to D&D, what does a Fighter have, even if we include tricks and setting-appropriate technology, that's going to equal a Wish or Miracle? How long is it going to remain satisfying for the player of the Fighter PC to have to go through all this planning and edge-pushing and terrain-using and effort... just to accomplish what the level 15+ Wizard PC or Cleric PC can do with a handwave?

RazorChain

2017-12-28, 05:20 PM

But you can and do have examples of people who can get through stone walls (even if it's with a low-tech grenade, it still counts!), kill people wearing plate armour, bypass chasms (if not instantly), take on armies (of archers or otherwise), and so forth. There's nothing about mundane that stops you from keeping up with the casters with a little ingenuity and a lot of character abilities which, as I said before, are limited by reality but not limited by much else. If nothing else, you can defeat wizards by shooting the bastards straight through their protective magic (see post about implying fallibility and fighters having saving throws and still not being magical). And at the end of the day, at least in core, wizards still can't heal, but there's no reason that mundanes shouldn't be able to; clerics can't create decent explosions until the midgame but there's no reason mundanes shouldn't be able to, and so forth. It doesn't have to be about doing everything a wizard and cleric can (a cleric can't do everything a wizard and cleric can) so much as doing stuff that is still useful to have despite the wizard and cleric being there.

Maybe I confused you by saying "Sword skill" - I'm not expecting a veteran only ever to use a sword. I don't expect modern soldiers only ever to shoot at things until they go away, either.

I personally would still use another system. Maybe because I can run 5 different systems right now and 5 more with little prep.

But what you are discussing is tech against magic. This comes into conflict in for example supers and modern day with magic. Why should I have armor spell when I can just buy armor or why do I need magic missile when I have an assault rifle.

And this is fine if the settings contain the technology involved. Problem with D&D is niche protection or the reason why wizards cant use armor

Cazero

2017-12-28, 05:23 PM

Are you sure about that?

Doing some preliminary digging, it doesn't appear to be the case -- rather it appears that there's a pretty direct ratio between work done / exertion, and the caloric intake needed.

(E: unless you've switched to talking about a specific setting/example, and not about the general issues.)
I mentioned the square-cube "law" for a reason. Two, actualy.
The first reason is the implied diminutive returns wich neatly prevent the überfamer problem.
The second is evoking the math, and more specificaly curves of math functions. If you zoom enough on a curve (any continuous curve, with any continuous equation, no matter how complex), it will look linear. Real world examples are a very narrow portion of the curve centered around the average value of one, so they naturaly look linear. But if you start looking a bit further than the square/cube of one, the square/cube ratio keeps growing faster and faster.

So no, I'm not sure about that, I don't know the exact equations, and I don't really care about what they look like because in the fantasyland where trained superstrength is a thing, I can pretend that a different equation that looks the exact same in the real world range is the one that applies.

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 05:28 PM

Wasn't this whole Strength/Caloric intake thing related to Max's claim that "If you have humans that are the same as in this world, with no changes, they should follow consistent rules"? If I'm reading his statement right, if you divorce martials in your game from what Earth Humans can do, then this becomes a non-issue, because the physics of Fantasyland are different.

I apologize if I'm wildly misreading this though.

The trouble is, if "The physics in fantasyland are different" then you have to take that to its logical conclusion or risk massive dissonance, and taking it to its logical conclusion massively changes the setting. You can do it, but the humans you get won't feel like humans and the setting will change wildly.

I was just running with the sword part, but the same thing applies to skill in general.

If we're staying specific to D&D, what does a Fighter have, even if we include tricks and setting-appropriate technology, that's going to equal a Wish or Miracle? How long is it going to remain satisfying for the player of the Fighter PC to have to go through all this planning and edge-pushing and terrain-using and effort... just to accomplish what the level 15+ Wizard PC or Cleric PC can do with a handwave?

Wish and miracle are pretty wishy-washily defined spells, so you'll excuse me if I look at some other ninth-level spells. Some of them, like meteor swarm and storm of vengeance, are just an advanced excercise in hurting things, which fighters should be pretty damn good at anyway ("I nock three arrows to my bow and fire them, and do that again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, because if Lars Andersen can do it, why can't I?"). Astral projection is an advanced exercise in not dying, which fighters should be able to manage anyway. Elemental swarm, gate, SNAIX, SMIX and shambler are all just "I get friends", which a fighter should be able to do. Soul bind prevents resurrection, but since the soul has to be willing to return, killing people so hard that they don't want to come back would achieve that anyway. Time stop is just being faster, but a veteran can already be faster. And I don't know that there are any circumstances where specifically doing negative levels (as opposed to doing a sword through the face) is the best thing to do anyway.

Sure, miracle and wish provide a bunch of abilities, but that's just because they refer you to lists of things you could do anyway.

2D8HP

2017-12-28, 05:45 PM

because dragons!.
Dragons are AWESOME!!!

I want Dragons.

...then this becomes a non-issue, because the physics of Fantasyland are different....
In my earlier post answering "what do you want"

Okay, I will show you:

"It was a time of adventure" (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W5K3AKl5qpchttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=__0r5M2RjCM)

"We will use the old ways" (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=__0r5M2RjCM)

"YOU MURDERER!" (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tE3TbBwSVe8)

"Making this up as I go" (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F1ZyHNmb1yU).
....the last scene is from Raiders of the Lost Ark which is set in living memory. No man could physical do all that Indian Jones does in that scene and still walk. I also doubt that any pair of trousers could survive that, nor that the hat would stay on!

But it was AWESOME!

So no, not really mundane, but no spells were cast (okay, one ritual spell was cast later, which did not end well for the caster), that's what I want.

Here's another scene (with a DRAGON!):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BcVR_gweCfQ

Fire breathing Dragons don't exist.

But I want to imagine a Knight on horseback charging one with a lance.

I also want to imagine agile quick witted Rogues saving said Knight, and I don't want either of them to need to stand aside while some neckbeard wearing a pointed hat and a blue bathrobe with stars and moons sewn on it, gestures and mumbles.

Is that too much to ask?

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 06:38 PM

Dragons are AWESOME!!!

I want Dragons.

Next thing I know, you'll be wanting dungeons too! You're so hard to please! :smalltongue:

Is that too much to ask?

For some people, apparently.

Cosi

2017-12-28, 06:44 PM

It's a serious question. You rail against any reason for a powerful BBEG to let the PCs live long enough to pose a serious threat, yet refuse to offer an alternative reason.

That's not really hard:

1. Destroying resources. Killing people who are weak prevents you from recruiting them. Even if you think you can't recruit them, other people might, and might retaliate for destroying them.
2. Honor. It's not unreasonable to imagine a culture where attacking someone substantially weaker than you is strongly frowned upon.
3. Resource expenditure. Teleporting in to kill someone and teleporting back is already two mid level slots, plus whatever divinations you cast. You can't do that for every enemy.

You forgot:
* the "Conan" concept doesn't change, but does gain fantastic elements despite still being "totally unmagical", and the setting utterly ignores this, and the players and DM suspend their disbelief successfully without issue.

You're playing a language game. Max thinks that "magical" and "fantastical" are synonyms. You can say they aren't, but you're not rebutting any of his points. You need to provide some reason your definition is better, and I think that case is hard to make because I don't see a better term for "everything beyond our world" than "magic". Are you willing to admit that both Wizards and Fighters should be getting "fantastical abilities"?

There is another way of making 3.5 martials stronger against wizards: give them abilities that imply the fallibility of spells compared to their martial abilities.

Yes, that is called "giving them magic". It's also stupid, because countering magic doesn't give you anything to actually do. You still can't make any declarations that advance the plot in the way that plane shift or raise dead would. You just get to say "nope, doesn't work". That's not an interesting character.

When I hit a wizard with a longsword, it shouldn't deal 1d8+something of his plot armour points in damage, it should cut his head off because I'm one of the greatest swordsmen who's ever lived, dammit, and I actually know how to kill people -

So what, he doesn't get any say in the matter? Offense beats defense because that's your concept? What about his concept?

So we can give the veteran the chance to find locations where you can go to plane shift.

"Go to the planar portal" is a first level ability. That is, by definition, not a high level ability. plane shift is high level specifically because it does not require you to do any extra work to make your ability function. An ability that requires you to do extra work is, by definition, not equal to plane shift.

What else? Wizards can send long-distance messages, so why not let veterans craft an "Envoy firework", which sends a message over a long distance with ingenuity and gunpowder? Clerics can heal hit point damage, and to be honest, why shouldn't veterans be able to do that? I can bring people back from the dead (for a certain value of "Dead", I'll admit), why can't veterans be able to? Sure, less "Raise dead" and more "Revivify", but still pretty helpful. Why shouldn't a veteran be able to manipulate and influence people like a wizard, sorcerer or bard does, when that's also something people can do in real life? Hells, why can't a veteran build a small flying machine, like a hang-glider with an ego? And why not let them create pseudo-alchemical items, healing poultices, and honest-to-goodness explosives (fun fact: you can make smoke bombs out of sugar and anything that will make the burning faster).

If making your viable mundane requires you to fundamentally alter the setting (adding gunpowder, aeroplanes, and whatever else), you've basically admitted that mundane characters are not viable as is. We already know that you can make mundanes work by adding tech, because Shadowrun has done that for decades.

Some people want to have a character who is defined by skill rather than hacking the universe.

Wait, Wizards aren't skilled? Every single person who isn't a mundane is just lucky? It seems like your "make mundanes viable" pitch requires a lot of pretty fundamental alterations to the rest of the game. Mundanes automatically win in combat because they're good at swording, which means no one is commensurately good at defensive magic. Mundanes develop new tech, which changes the era the game is emulating. "Skill" is defined as excluding "magic". All those things are carving out chunks of the game way bigger than "you can say your guy isn't magic until he hits the number you want".

lesser_minion

2017-12-28, 06:50 PM

Soooo... how many caiories does a FLYING FIREBREATHING DRAGON need daily? Gotta have our incredibly selectively applied realism, after all!

Dragons don't do flying and firebreathing all the time (or even that often), and, unlike the fighter, haven't been arbitrarily forbidden from doing, having, or being 'magical'.

Some people want their sword skill to be sword skill, not hacking skill or ki/chakra/internal magic/nonsense skill. But that's fine, because if someone good at swords hits someone else with a sword, they die. You don't need magic to make that happen.

I've said it several times in this thread, but 3e D&D has an existing precedent in the bard that sufficient skill in a mundane activity results in magical powers. It's also not clear why a fighter would never sing, shout, or mentally recite a litany while in battle, nor is it clear why none of these things should have no effect. So you certainly could justify magic and even spellcasting as being part of the fighter concept. More easily than you could justify them being part of the wizard concept, interestingly.

I mentioned the square-cube "law" for a reason. Two, actualy.
The first reason is the implied diminutive returns wich neatly prevent the überfamer problem.

Isn't the square-cube law about how strength relates to mass (i.e., strength is proportional to 'size' squared, while mass is proportional to 'size' cubed)? I don't see how it applies to two different groups of broadly human-sized individuals who, in the proposed setting, clearly violate the "square" part anyway.

As for the claim that a farm requires a fairly consistent workload, if your limits can be pushed further than a real world human's, then a rural environment has plenty of opportunities for you to do so. Real-world farmers have found uses for all sorts of machines, vehicles, and draft animals for centuries, if not millennia, almost any of which could be replaced by a human if they could be strong enough. And one would presume that one human with the strength of a shire horse is cheaper than a human plus a shire horse would be.

Lathes (for making tools) used to be horse-powered -- with your setting change, those can be replaced with human-powered lathes, for a substantial saving. You can plough fields by hand and do as well as a horse- or ox-drawn plough; carry goods to market without the aid of a vehicle or animals; quickly dam watercourses to flood unused fields with rich silts (or to avert flooding, of course); and more.

Your setting change would result in far less technology and far fewer animals being needed in the fields, and you'd likely see people finding their way to cities, monasteries, temples, etc. far 'sooner' than in the real world -- where they would presumably become priests and philosophers. With abundant priests and philosophers, and with physical types being both comparatively rare and extremely valuable in the fields, forges, and workshops, magic-users would become incredibly abundant compared with D&D, potentially forcing purely-physical fighters out of the armed forces entirely. I don't think such a setting would have anything close to the traditional D&D fighter or rogue, except possibly as "magitechnician" archetypes (with power armour and warbeasts and mechs, oh my!).

While it sounds pretty cool, I don't think this really accomplishes your goals.

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 07:07 PM

Yes, that is called "giving them magic".

It's quite clearly not. Beating up a summoned creature isn't magic, making a fortitude save isn't magic. Mettle isn't magic even though it gives you the ability to make better saves against magic (in a way that isn't just geddouttatheway). Shooting through protective spells isn't magic either.

It's also stupid, because countering magic doesn't give you anything to actually do. You still can't make any declarations that advance the plot in the way that plane shift or raise dead would. You just get to say "nope, doesn't work". That's not an interesting character.

I for one like my high-level characters to be able to defeat appropriate-level combat challenges, because that's a thing that I can do.

So what, he doesn't get any say in the matter? Offense beats defense because that's your concept? What about his concept?

Quite frankly, in 3.5, all sorts of things beat all sorts of other things. Mind blank beats dominate monster and is lower-level. Greater dispel magic has a 50-50 chance to beat epic spells. And if you're objection is seriously that the mundane is too good at his job, that's score 1 for mundanes who actually do stuff.

"Go to the planar portal" is a first level ability. That is, by definition, not a high level ability. plane shift is high level specifically because it does not require you to do any extra work to make your ability function. An ability that requires you to do extra work is, by definition, not equal to plane shift.

Yeah, but, like, the veteran ability doesn't just do that.

If making your viable mundane requires you to fundamentally alter the setting (adding gunpowder, aeroplanes, and whatever else), you've basically admitted that mundane characters are not viable as is. We already know that you can make mundanes work by adding tech, because Shadowrun has done that for decades.

I mean, yeah? As in, yeah the veteran is better at tech than the wizard? It's not like a hang glider with an ego or literally anything remotely explosive are beyond people's capabilities at this point.

All those things are carving out chunks of the game way bigger than "you can say your guy isn't magic until he hits the number you want".

I mean, "My sword guy is good at sword fighting" isn't really "Carving out chunks of the game". Or more to the point, it shouldn't be, because sword guys should already be good at swords.

I've said it several times in this thread, but 3e D&D has an existing precedent in the bard that sufficient skill in a mundane activity results in magical powers. It's also not clear why a fighter would never sing, shout, or mentally recite a litany while in battle, nor is it clear why none of these things should have no effect. So you certainly could justify magic and even spellcasting as being part of the fighter concept. More easily than you could justify them being part of the wizard concept, interestingly.

I'm aware that something I don't want to do is possible but that doesn't help me do what I want to do.

Chaosticket

2017-12-28, 07:38 PM

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 07:43 PM

I encourage people to think of alternatives to wanting "Mundane to Beat Special".

I mean, half of the problem here is that special so readily beats mundane...

Pex

2017-12-28, 07:52 PM

"Training" is just another form of physical exertion... the farmer or laborer who engages in hard physical work for 8+ hours every day, year after year, is going to build strength and endurance to a certain degree, and if the range of human capability has shifted, then the results of that buildup are going to shift with the range.

I am suddenly reminded of the old movie "The Three Stooges Meet Hercules". It's Ancient Greece and the Stooges are friends and traveling with the Hero, who is not Hercules. The Hero is just some average guy. They're all captured and become slaves on ship. Through the act of rowing the Hero becomes steadily stronger. Eventually he becomes as strong as Hercules, and the Stooges use him to get rich and famous.

I think weird things sometimes.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 07:54 PM

I encourage people to think of alternatives to wanting "Mundane to Beat Special".

Technology is more likely to work. If magic is limited to certain people with the right Intelligence/Wisdom/charisma and only if they pursue it then what about everyone else?

What about nonmagical inventors? When does someone find the right combination to make gunpowder? Think about armies of thousands of people with Firearms.

Changing the setting to include technology that really starts to level the playing field is a whole different discussion, and you get something that might be called "Napoleonic Fantasy" or "Flintlock Fantasy", heading forward into other eras -- could be fascinating as settings, but they're not really the sorts of setting typical to D&D or other games that have the fantasy version of the problem being discussed here.

Of course, several of the modern-era WoD settings have an issue similar to the one being discussed, but they take the choice path of "If you don't have magic, you don't matter." If you're not a Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, etc, then you're very likely to be a "meaningless nobody" whose best hope is to go completely unnoticed by the powerful things just around that corner, just behind that door, just over that hill...

lesser_minion

2017-12-28, 09:26 PM

EDIT: We're on the second to last page. Do we want another thread?

I'm aware that something I don't want to do is possible but that doesn't help me do what I want to do.

My view is that there is a need to justify not doing it. Whether it's by introducing a new setting element so that it only works for music, or by having a bard that works differently to the current 3rd edition one, you can't make a fighter without 'magic' until you've considered why their skill at arms doesn't itself result in magic.

This sort of magic fits aesthetically, makes sense, and avoids a huge number of potential pitfalls with fighters. And clearly makes everything be about their skill at arms, not about brute strength or ki or hacking or invoking divine power or anything similar. I'd strongly recommend just merging the two classes, even if you do want to go back and change the bard so that it has less magic.

RazorChain

2017-12-28, 09:35 PM

As for the claim that a farm requires a fairly consistent workload, if your limits can be pushed further than a real world human's, then a rural environment has plenty of opportunities for you to do so. Real-world farmers have found uses for all sorts of machines, vehicles, and draft animals for centuries, if not millennia, almost any of which could be replaced by a human if they could be strong enough. And one would presume that one human with the strength of a shire horse is cheaper than a human plus a shire horse would be.

Lathes (for making tools) used to be horse-powered -- with your setting change, those can be replaced with human-powered lathes, for a substantial saving. You can plough fields by hand and do as well as a horse- or ox-drawn plough; carry goods to market without the aid of a vehicle or animals; quickly dam watercourses to flood unused fields with rich silts (or to avert flooding, of course); and more.

Your setting change would result in far less technology and far fewer animals being needed in the fields, and you'd likely see people finding their way to cities, monasteries, temples, etc. far 'sooner' than in the real world -- where they would presumably become priests and philosophers. With abundant priests and philosophers, and with physical types being both comparatively rare and extremely valuable in the fields, forges, and workshops, magic-users would become incredibly abundant compared with D&D, potentially forcing purely-physical fighters out of the armed forces entirely. I don't think such a setting would have anything close to the traditional D&D fighter or rogue, except possibly as "magitechnician" archetypes (with power armour and warbeasts and mechs, oh my!).

While it sounds pretty cool, I don't think this really accomplishes your goals.

See this I like, this is taking that humans have a higher upper limit to it's logical conclusion. Why the heck do you need an ox if you're strong enough to plow yourself. The basis of economy is how much food you can produce per person. If one guy can produce enough food for 10 then the other 9 are free to do somehting else....and magic hasn't even entered the picture.

So in the end we have farmers that are very strong, tough and have massive stamina and probably other workers. And if you don't need any gift to study magic only intelligence then you can mass produce wizard through the education system. In the end if you get resurrected or not will just be simple economics...are you worth it?

Will this lead to a split caste system where those who study will become super smart or wise, the workforce will become super strong and tough and then we have leaders/entertainers who are super charismatic?

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 09:37 PM

My view is that there is a need to justify not doing it.

I don't want to use magic. There's your justification for me not using magic.

RazorChain

2017-12-28, 09:47 PM

I don't want to use magic. There's your justification for me not using magic.

Don't use magic then!

It's that simple. Just say that your veteran uses his superior skill to cut through that force wall. His superior will to escape the shackles of the wizards mind control. His superior thoughness to keep fighting when lesser men have succumbed. His superior mobility to fly through the air and rain arrows on his enemies. His superior speed to move between to places instantaneously.

The problem is as others have pointed out there is a limit how far you can stretch this. You can call these mundane abilities to yourself but others might not agree with you.

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 09:56 PM

Don't use magic then!

It's that simple. Just say that your veteran uses his superior skill to cut through that force wall. His superior will to escape the shackles of the wizards mind control. His superior thoughness to keep fighting when lesser men have succumbed. His superior mobility to fly through the air and rain arrows on his enemies. His superior speed to move between to places instantaneously.

The problem is as others have pointed out there is a limit how far you can stretch this. You can call these mundane abilities to yourself but others might not agree with you.

I mean, apart from unaided flight, "Cutting through things that have few well-defined characteristics anyway", "Having a will save", "Having hit points", "Shooting things" and "Running" aren't exactly magical. But there's always someone, somewhere, (cough Cosi cough) saying that they are and that having a mundane character is a terrible thing and I'm a terrible foolish person for attempting it.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 10:13 PM

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 10:18 PM

"Moving between places instantly" becomes magic (of some sort) quickly.
I mean, the fact that movement is instantaneous is just an artefact of 3.5's turn-based system (and most RPGs' turn-based systems). Sure, teleportation is magic, but you don't usually need teleportation to solve any problems that walking (and the veteran's other abilities) can't.

Starting out with D&D (particularly 3.x and friends) is doomed to fail as a coherent setup with a stricture to "keep the unmagic unmagic".

Apparently not, all things considered.

RazorChain

2017-12-28, 10:49 PM

I mean, the fact that movement is instantaneous is just an artefact of 3.5's turn-based system (and most RPGs' turn-based systems). Sure, teleportation is magic, but you don't usually need teleportation to solve any problems that walking (and the veteran's other abilities) can't.

Apparently not, all things considered.

Not that I want to discourage you from doing what you want in 3.5, but for me it just keeps harder to explain away how the mundane still keeps being mundane at high levels. Some maintain that Hercules is a mundane even though he's as strong as a Titan in a world where Titans are the old gods and literally carries the heavens on his shoulders. So this is all a matter of perspective, what you consider what is mundane and what not.

For me everything that crosses the boundary of what a man can do today is superhuman with some fuzz around the edges. I mean if some character can run the 100m in 9 seconds flat, half a second faster than Usain Bolt then I won't call that super, it's the fasterst man alive. But if a character runs the 100m in 5 seconds then that is clearly a superhuman...or liftin a ton or jumping 5 meters into the air or surviving a 100 meters fall and picking himself up and contine walking like nothing happended*.

I have nothing against superhuman, heroic, legendary, mythical campaigns. But when that barbarian gets so angry that he ignores the wounds that would kill a normal man, breaks off the shackles of the wizards spell, jumps over a 15 meter (50') chasm to cleave the evil wizard down to his navel. Then in my book it's alright to call that a superhuman rage, doesn't have to be magic of any sort, just superhuman. Something an ordinary human can't do.

*I don't care if somebody managed to survive a fall from a plane once, we've already discussed that to death and I proposed the idea of throwing a lot of cute, fluffy puppies from the Empire state building and see how many would survive, people didn't like that idea. So if you aren't ready to jump from a plane without a parachute for the sake of scientific experiment then that argument is invalid.

Chaosticket

2017-12-28, 10:57 PM

"Moving between places instantly" becomes magic (of some sort) quickly.

To me, the core problem is one of mismatch -- mismatch in power scale between types of characters, and mismatch between system and desired gameplay and desired setting.

If you really want your "unmagic" characters to be really, really unmagic, and based purely on skill, will, and wits, then you work backwards from that, set up how powerful and useful magic is from that balance point, and design/choose your setting and system around what you want to do.

Starting out with D&D (particularly 3.x and friends) is doomed to fail as a coherent setup with a stricture to "keep the unmagic unmagic".

I see this going round and round.

In my most obstinate state of mind I have had days like this.

I have a personal attachment to making Sharpshooter characters. My first Pathfinder character attempt was a Bounty Hunter but it didnt work. Game rules make it difficult if not on possible. High tier play like this thread is about means even with all that work its not a high tier build. So after finally accepting that I adapted.

Now I changed my plan to keep the Concept but using an Arcane Trickster Build.

If you want to make a high tier character with low tier class then youre going to keep running into dead ends. I suggest you either adapt to the system or use a different edition such as 5th or another Rpg.

I would hope that you find a group more into roleplay than rollplay.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 11:03 PM

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 11:09 PM

Not that I want to discourage you from doing what you want in 3.5, but for me it just keeps harder to explain away how the mundane still keeps being mundane at high levels. Some maintain that Hercules is a mundane even though he's as strong as a Titan in a world where Titans are the old gods and literally carries the heavens on his shoulders. So this is all a matter of perspective, what you consider what is mundane and what not.

For me everything that crosses the boundary of what a man can do today is superhuman with some fuzz around the edges. I mean if some character can run the 100m in 9 seconds flat, half a second faster than Usain Bolt then I won't call that super, it's the fasterst man alive. But if a character runs the 100m in 5 seconds then that is clearly a superhuman...or liftin a ton or jumping 5 meters into the air or surviving a 100 meters fall and picking himself up and contine walking like nothing happended*.

I have nothing against superhuman, heroic, legendary, mythical campaigns. But when that barbarian gets so angry that he ignores the wounds that would kill a normal man, breaks off the shackles of the wizards spell, jumps over a 15 meter (50') chasm to cleave the evil wizard down to his navel. Then in my book it's alright to call that a superhuman rage, doesn't have to be magic of any sort, just superhuman. Something an ordinary human can't do.

*I don't care if somebody managed to survive a fall from a plane once, we've already discussed that to death and I proposed the idea of throwing a lot of cute, fluffy puppies from the Empire state building and see how many would survive, people didn't like that idea. So if you aren't ready to jump from a plane without a parachute for the sake of scientific experiment then that argument is invalid.

The veteran can't jump a 50 ft chasm (disclaimer: there is probably some veteran build that can jump a 50 ft cavern by 20th level, but that's probably nothing to do with the veteran class itself and more to do with some silly mix of feats). He can break the wizard's spell every bit as much as the fighter can. He can survive a fall because D&D hit points are like that (I should point out that the "If you aren't willing to jump from a plane without a parachute/drop puppies off the ESB, no-one could survive doing that" argument is like guy at the gym, only it's more like person at home who doesn't exercise very much or puppy on the empire state building apparently. Just because I can't doesn't mean the veteran can't. Incidentally, it happens that the veteran probably shouldn't be able to).

The veteran doesn't need to have supernatural strength because he also defies supernatural weakness. Unlike a fighter, who has the exceptional ability to stab someone with a longsword twenty times and not have them keel over and die, if a veteran puts five feet of steel down your throat, you die. Unlike the fighter who has a low but non-negligible chance to resist being mind controlled, if you try to use wibbly-wobbly mindy-windy stuff on the veteran, you fail. If you're a flying, firebreathing, physics-defying lizard and a veteran shoots you through the face with a ballista, you lose. If you're trying to protect yourself with a second-level spell against someone who shoots people with normal missiles for a living, it doesn't work. By not enforcing the weaknesses that don't have to be part of the veteran concept, you can go a long, long, long way.

:smallconfused:

There's a difference between a nearly-unavoidable system artifact, and actual instantaneous movement. I can't believe that even needs to be said.

Aside from that, teleportation and running have so many differences as "special effects" that I don't even know where to begin -- especially flawless teleportation (whatever that's actually called). Can't run across a gorge or chasm, can't run through a door or wall instantly, usually can't run behind someone or onto a ledge above them without being noticed, etc, etc, etc.

To be clear, veterans don't actually teleport in any regard other than "Oh lookit a naturally-occuring portal", though I admit to Find Rift being my least favourite veteran ability. They do move, though. Unsurprisingly.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 11:20 PM

The veteran doesn't need to have supernatural strength because he also defies supernatural weakness. Unlike a fighter, who has the exceptional ability to stab someone with a longsword twenty times and not have them keel over and die, if a veteran puts five feet of steel down your throat, you die. Unlike the fighter who has a low but non-negligible chance to resist being mind controlled, if you try to use wibbly-wobbly mindy-windy stuff on the veteran, you fail. If you're a flying, firebreathing, physics-defying lizard and a veteran shoots you through the face with a ballista, you lose. If you're trying to protect yourself with a second-level spell against someone who shoots people with normal missiles for a living, it doesn't work. By not enforcing the weaknesses that don't have to be part of the veteran concept, you can go a long, long, long way.

So it's a class almost entirely built around no-selling everyone else's abilities, and bypassing what are otherwise the rules to insta-kill things.

Right.

I see this going round and round.

In my most obstinate state of mind I have had days like this.

I have a personal attachment to making Sharpshooter characters. My first Pathfinder character attempt was a Bounty Hunter but it didnt work. Game rules make it difficult if not on possible. High tier play like this thread is about means even with all that work its not a high tier build. So after finally accepting that I adapted.

Now I changed my plan to keep the Concept but using an Arcane Trickster Build.

If you want to make a high tier character with low tier class then youre going to keep running into dead ends. I suggest you either adapt to the system or use a different edition such as 5th or another Rpg.

I would hope that you find a group more into roleplay than rollplay.

To be clear, I walked away from anything D&D or d20 sometime between 3.0 and 3.x/PF, and I've never looked back.

My arguments in this thread have been less about pushing my own preference for how to fix the central issue, and more about presenting a framework for people to work out what they actually want and how to solve it for themselves, because there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 11:23 PM

So it's a class almost entirely built around no-selling everyone else's abilities, and bypassing what are otherwise the rules to insta-kill things.

Right.

I mean, it's a class based around no-selling the abilities which normally no-sell martials, in part, yes. You can't do your job if you can't bypass the wizard's immunity to death by hit point damage. It's not like it doesn't do a bunch of other stuff, though.

EDIT: I could make the exact complaint you did about the wizard. Protection from blah no-sells blah. Death magic "Bypasses what are otherwise the rules" (because every class feature and spell bypasses what are otherwise the rules) to insta-kill things. I don't see what your issue is.

Chaosticket

2017-12-28, 11:30 PM

Okay so is there actually a class called Veteran or is it a homebrew?

Also if you want superheroes with powers like invulnerability please just say it.

Superpower are not mundane except in Superhero Roleplaying games.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 11:31 PM

I mean, it's a class based around no-selling the abilities which normally no-sell martials, in part, yes. You can't do your job if you can't bypass the wizard's immunity to death by hit point damage. It's not like it doesn't do a bunch of other stuff, though.

EDIT: I could make the exact complaint you did about the wizard. Protection from blah no-sells blah. Death magic "Bypasses what are otherwise the rules" (because every class feature and spell bypasses what are otherwise the rules) to insta-kill things. I don't see what your issue is.

Yeah, and you kinda make my point for me in saying that. The veteran isn't a solution to the problems, it's a classic case of "two wrongs don't make a right". It's doing the sorts of bad-for-the-game things that high-level spellcasters do, just putting "no, no, it's not magic, don't you dare say it's magic" fig leaf over them.

Jormengand

2017-12-28, 11:34 PM

Yeah, and you kinda make my point for me in saying that. The veteran isn't a solution to the problems, it's a classic case of "two wrongs don't make a right". It's doing the sorts of bad-for-the-game things that high-level spellcasters do,
Yes, yes, the high power level is "Bad for the game". I've heard it before. But no crap it's doing the same kind of stuff that actually good classes do; it is an actually good class. It needs that level of stuff to compete. It's weird that after all this, people are complaining that veteran is too GOOD.

just putting "no, no, it's not magic, don't you dare say it's magic" fig leaf over them.

Oh, cut it out. Shooting people and those people ACTUALLY DYING isn't magic.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-28, 11:53 PM

Yes, yes, the high power level is "Bad for the game". I've heard it before. But no crap it's doing the same kind of stuff that actually good classes do; it is an actually good class. It needs that level of stuff to compete. It's weird that after all this, people are complaining that veteran is too GOOD.

I'd make the same complaint about the veteran that I make about several other classes.

Oh, cut it out. Shooting people and those people ACTUALLY DYING isn't magic.

That's a problem with the system, not a problem with any of the classes. If you don't like other characters not dying when you stab them, then a system with high-scaling abstract Hit Points isn't the system for you. Hell, it's one of the things that made my wash my hands of D&D/d20 myself. But in terms of mechanics, and in terms of effects on other characters, bypassing HP is bypassing HP.

As you describe it, this class is doing the same sorts of things that spellcasters do in terms of bypassing in-setting reality and bypassing how the system otherwise works for "mundane" characters, and just slapping a "no magic, nope" veneer over it, which is where that part of the comment came in.

Or to put it another way, in D&D, shooting people and ignoring their Hit Points so that they fall over dead regardless, is a kind of magic. Even if you don't call it that. Be they ever so wonky and broken a mechanic, those high-scaling HP represent the in-game reality, and ignoring reality is ignoring reality. Magic is as magic does.

Adding more "save or die" and "save or suck" abilities to the game just adds to the problem.

RazorChain

2017-12-29, 12:20 AM

Yes, yes, the high power level is "Bad for the game". I've heard it before. But no crap it's doing the same kind of stuff that actually good classes do; it is an actually good class. It needs that level of stuff to compete. It's weird that after all this, people are complaining that veteran is too GOOD.

I think nobody is criticising if the veteran is a good class or not. I don't have a clue really.

Oh, cut it out. Shooting people and those people ACTUALLY DYING isn't magic.

Like Max has explained that bypassing or ignoring HP is bad from a game design principle. Save or Die is bad in the way it disregards HP which is supposed to be the measure of the characters life. So giving everybody "Make Your Save Or Now You Die ability" at high levels doesn't solve any problems. If it worked we could just have implemented it at lower levels as well.

I understand that you're trying to give the veteran a fighting chance against the Wizard, so he doesn't get obliterated while trying to get through the wizards defenses and HP pool.

Ever increasing HP serve only one purpose and that is to make lower level content irrelevant because everbodies damage output will increase with their level.

Jormengand

2017-12-29, 12:40 AM

Chaosticket

2017-12-29, 12:53 AM

My two cents on this.

Save or Die spells are supposed to keep its effect useful while scaling. A lot of spells end up useless as they dont grow or do so too slowly. Non-damage versions versions of everything from Sleep on up still exist.

Harm from older editions could reduce the target to 1d4 hit points possibly from a starting values in THOUSANDS. It was meant to be a high risk, high reward. That it was but it also was usually a Clerics one Turn kill combo.

Toning spells like to actual damage values is much more fair. However that can also make it seem like there are no guaranteed death methods and instead its like a videogame. What happens when you fall into a bottomless hole, say you need a class that can avoid all traps 100percent?

RazorChain

2017-12-29, 01:03 AM

To be on par with a T1 casters who are literally defined to break the game, it's understandable that you would need to do some things that break the game. That doesn't mean that it's not possible for mundanes to be as effective in casters in 3.5, though.

And the argument that "In D&D, coup de graces are magic" kinda falls on its face. All sorts of things bypass hit points and kill you. Why shouldn't "Veterans" be one of those things?

Or would you rather it be like rogue, dealing so many arbitrarily-many +d6s of damage that it kills you with a penknife anyway?

I'm very well aware of the limitations of D&D and the HP system and the Class/Niche protection.

In most other systems there are just hit locations so everybody is a rogue. You just aim for the heart, neck , face etc. D&D locked this away behind a niche protection called backstab. For all the D&D system cares there is nothing stopping the rogue from killing people with needles that do +Xd6 in damage (depending on level) so long as he strikes when you are unprepared or in the back.

Coup de grace is D&D adressing complaints from players why they had to use 10 minutes to kill a bound and gagged opponent because he was protected by the wonky HP pool. We all now ramming a sword through somebodies eye socked while he's helpess is a good way to kill him. The 10 minutes represent the old rounds where each was 1 minute.

To be on par with a T1 casters who are literally defined to break the game, it's understandable that you would need to do some things that break the game. That doesn't mean that it's not possible for mundanes to be as effective in casters in 3.5, though.

We know that a high level caster is literally able to rape the system six days till sunday and the mundane has no chance. Whatever you will do will not fix the mundane against the caster. You can give him powers to negate the caster but your explanations of how he does it will never suffice for me. I will call you out on that you have made the mundane superhuman. In your mind he might be perfectly mundane, but to me that has the has the mundane benchmark in the real life what a human being can do. You have to convince me (and probably others) on the how and why the mundane can negate all the casters powers.

So if you say that the mundane made a circle out of salt to protect himself from magic because the laws of magic dictate that magical beings or magic can't cross the salt then all it tells me is salt stops magic and salt prices will soar. It also tells me that everybody can stop magic with salt. Telling me that the mundane can find magical rifst in reality and travel through them tells me that there are magical rifts and if one mundane can find them then everybody with the right training can. Taken to it's logical conclusion places of rifts will be like bridges over rivers. Somebody wants to control them and tax them for their ease of travel.

Jormengand

2017-12-29, 01:54 AM

You have to convince me (and probably others) on the how and why the mundane can negate all the casters powers.

Okay, look at it this way:

People in real life can't resist magic only because they never have the opportunity to try: there's no magic to resist. This is true whether "Resist magic" means "Survive a ray of frost spell" or "Save against a dominate person spell" or "Shoot straight through a protection from arrows spell". Anyone can do the first fairly easily (even a commoner only has a 1 in 3 chance to be knocked out, and then they might or might not bleed out from there). Doing the second is harder, but it's impossible not to be able to do it. Doing the third requires a specific class feature.

But if you have a magical spell which summons a monster (like summon monster), you can overcome that spell with good enough sword power. If you have a magical spell that creates a wall of ice (such as wall of ice), you can overcome that spell with sword power. If you have a spell that creates some magic armour (such as mage armour, you can pierce that magical protection if you have a special ability that lets you do that (such as the Pierce Magical Protection feat, Complete Arcane p. 82, extraordinary ability). If a creature is hiding behind a protection from arrows spell, you can't remove that with Pierce Magical Protection, but it turns out that if you're a veteran, you can remove that with the veteran's Mortal Wound or You Have No Power Over Me tricks. Why is cutting through mage armour okay but ignoring DR evilbadmagic?

I'll always be against ki-power-not-magic and lifting without limits, but arguing, in effect, that will saves are magical is ridiculous.

RazorChain

2017-12-29, 02:17 AM

Okay, look at it this way:

People in real life can't resist magic only because they never have the opportunity to try: there's no magic to resist. This is true whether "Resist magic" means "Survive a ray of frost spell" or "Save against a dominate person spell" or "Shoot straight through a protection from arrows spell". Anyone can do the first fairly easily (even a commoner only has a 1 in 3 chance to be knocked out, and then they might or might not bleed out from there). Doing the second is harder, but it's impossible not to be able to do it. Doing the third requires a specific class feature.

But if you have a magical spell which summons a monster (like summon monster), you can overcome that spell with good enough sword power. If you have a magical spell that creates a wall of ice (such as wall of ice), you can overcome that spell with sword power. If you have a spell that creates some magic armour (such as mage armour, you can pierce that magical protection if you have a special ability that lets you do that (such as the Pierce Magical Protection feat, Complete Arcane p. 82, extraordinary ability). If a creature is hiding behind a protection from arrows spell, you can't remove that with Pierce Magical Protection, but it turns out that if you're a veteran, you can remove that with the veteran's Mortal Wound or You Have No Power Over Me tricks. Why is cutting through mage armour okay but ignoring DR evilbadmagic?

I'll always be against ki-power-not-magic and lifting without limits, but arguing, in effect, that will saves are magical is ridiculous.

Pierce Magical Protection
( Complete Arcane, p. 82)

[General]

You can overcome the magical protections of your enemies.

Prerequisite
Mage Slayer (CAr) , CON 13,

Benefit
Your contempt for magic is so fierce that as a standard action you can make a melee attack that ignores any bonuses to Armor Class granted by spells (including spell trigger or spell completion effects created by magic items such as wands or potions). If you deal damage to your opponent, you also instantly and automatically dispel all that opponent's spells and spell effects that grant a bonus to Armor Class.

I looked up pierce magical protection. Now the mundane can defeat magic with contempt as his weapon. Now let's just take this to it's logical conclusion :You can use contempt to dispel magical effects.
So I guess you are right. The mundane can defeat magic with contempt as his weapon.

Jormengand

2017-12-29, 02:51 AM

I looked up pierce magical protection. Now the mundane can defeat magic with contempt as his weapon. Now let's just take this to it's logical conclusion :You can use contempt to dispel magical effects.
So I guess you are right. The mundane can defeat magic with contempt as his weapon.

Weirdly, I don't think it literally means that you pick up your contempt for magic and beat the enemy's mage armour spell up with it. :smallsigh:

RazorChain

2017-12-29, 04:55 AM

Weirdly, I don't think it literally means that you pick up your contempt for magic and beat the enemy's mage armour spell up with it. :smallsigh:

I'm just seeing how the D&D world kinda crumbles by peoples contempt for magic :smallbiggrin:

Joe Hero: "Hello peasants! I'm here to save you from the Necromancer and his evil undead minions"

Peasant #1: "No worry, his magic didn't stand up to old man Harris' contempt"

Peasant #2: "There is a lot of scorn in this village, Aunt Sofia took care of the Evil Overlord last week, mocked him right out of his tower with her disdainful quips. Grabbed him by the ear and showered him in contempt. Poor fella only lasted minutes under her scorn"

Joe Hero: "I guess then I'm off to the desert of doom then, where evil magic have sucked the life out of the....."

Peasant #1 Interrupts "'Already taken care of son, we call it happy valley now!"

2D8HP

2017-12-29, 07:28 AM

...Peasant #1: "No worry, his magic didn't stand up to old man Harris' contempt"...

...Peasant #2: "There is a lot of scorn in this village, Aunt Sofia took care of the Evil Overlord last week, mocked him right out of his tower with her disdainful quips. Grabbed him by the ear and showered him in contempt. Poor fella only lasted minutes under her scorn".. .
I see nothing wrong with those scenerios.

:tongue:

Florian

2017-12-29, 07:55 AM

I'm just seeing how the D&D world kinda crumbles by peoples contempt for magic :smallbiggrin:

Tja. Vance-style magic is just you trying to superimpose your version of reality using a spell. No one said that this superimposition can't be opposed. PF is very clear about how the interaction with SR, saves, feats and class feature that counter spells work, whole game systems like L5R and to an extend WoD Mage or even Ars Magicka are based around this.

(Yeah, I like that an PF Barbarian can literally kick a wish in the nuts and undo it)

lesser_minion

2017-12-29, 08:03 AM

Oh, cut it out. Shooting people and those people ACTUALLY DYING isn't magic.

On the other hand, drawing power from a vow never to use magic, to the point that breaking your vow causes you to forget most of your class features, very much is magic.

And unless I'm missing something, your proposed class can kill the tarrasque from 3rd level -- take Always Strike First, Combat Coup, and Killing Blow. You always win initiative and act in the surprise round; combat coup means that your coup de grace works even if the enemy has regeneration against the damage type you're dealing, isn't helpless, or has a clause in its stat block explicitly preventing it from being instantly killed; and Killing Blow causes the combat coup to automatically kill any crit-susceptible enemy without recourse to a saving throw (a "successful" coup de grace attempt can only be one that "succeeds" in killing the target -- the only checks involved are the fortitude save to not die).

You then take Heroic Killing Blow and Volley of Arrows, allowing you to automatically kill everyone in a 20ft. radius around an arbitrary point of your choosing within 1100 feet (which you can increase to at least 2200 feet), while simultaneously making you the worst "tag" player on the planet, since you can't turn off the "Heroic Killing Blow" ability while you have it, resulting in your touch attacks to tag the other players causing automatic instant death.

At 10th level, anything that can, in any way, be characterised as the result of any form of magic neither has nor provides any recourse against any of your attacks whatsoever.

Horrible abilities aren't somehow OK just because some casters also have horrible abilities.

Jormengand

2017-12-29, 09:25 AM

On the other hand, drawing power from a vow never to use magic, to the point that breaking your vow causes you to forget most of your class features, very much is magic.

It's almost like people actually gain strength from conviction in real life.

Horrible abilities aren't somehow OK just because some casters also have horrible abilities.

Horrible abilities are necessary to, need I remind you, "Chang[e] the "Caster beats Mundane" paradigm", which I am given to believe is the point.

You can't say "Oh well veteran doesn't count because it's OP". Of course veteran is OP. Wizard is OP. Veteran has to be OP to achieve its entire purpose in life.

PhoenixPhyre

2017-12-29, 09:45 AM

It's almost like people actually gain strength from conviction in real life.

Horrible abilities are necessary to, need I remind you, "Chang[e] the "Caster beats Mundane" paradigm", which I am given to believe is the point.

You can't say "Oh well veteran doesn't count because it's OP". Of course veteran is OP. Wizard is OP. Veteran has to be OP to achieve its entire purpose in life.

Or we can meet in the middle, perhaps? Slaughter a few of those sacred cows that make T1 classes (conveniently all casters) able to break the game (remember that's inherent in the tier definition!) and relax the tight reign on so-called "plausibility" for martials that prevents them from reaching higher tiers?

And I'd like to remind everyone that the biggest disparity is not in combat killing power. It's in being able to do anything else while also being able to be relevant in combat.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-29, 09:49 AM

It's almost like people actually gain strength from conviction in real life.

At least in real life, you can't will your way into being bulletproof, or walk through a reactor safely because you have scorn & contempt for radiation.

Horrible abilities are necessary to, need I remind you, "Chang[e] the "Caster beats Mundane" paradigm", which I am given to believe is the point.

You can't say "Oh well veteran doesn't count because it's OP". Of course veteran is OP. Wizard is OP. Veteran has to be OP to achieve its entire purpose in life.

This is mainly informative about the high-level wizard.

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-29, 09:52 AM

PhoenixPhyre

2017-12-29, 10:16 AM

Or you can get rid of massive scaling Hit Points, and Levels themselves while you're at it.

But those are two of the sacred cows of D&D.

So yes, if you stop playing D&D you can avoid the problems. Because if you do so, you're getting rid of the entire system. Which is a rather baby and bathwater solution to a problem that only really exists (in acute form) in a single edition. Neither 4e nor 5e (both of which have scaling HP and levels) suffer from this particular problem. And doing so (especially changing the scaling HP) changes the genre--you no longer have heroic fantasy, you have something much more gritty. Which may be to some people's taste, but it's not to mine.

Biased comment is biased.

Cosi

2017-12-29, 10:27 AM

Quite frankly, in 3.5, all sorts of things beat all sorts of other things. Mind blank beats dominate monster and is lower-level. Greater dispel magic has a 50-50 chance to beat epic spells. And if you're objection is seriously that the mundane is too good at his job, that's score 1 for mundanes who actually do stuff.

The objection is that the mundane is defined as being the best at his job, which is not how those counters work (you remember the thread about "countering hard counters"?). Also, the "hard counter" paradigm geuinely is bad, and should be replaced by something like opposed caster level checks.

I mean, yeah? As in, yeah the veteran is better at tech than the wizard? It's not like a hang glider with an ego or literally anything remotely explosive are beyond people's capabilities at this point.

Missing the point. The default setting of D&D doesn't have "hang gliders with an ego". It's a medieval setting, and adding more technology changes the setting. Unless that technology only works for Veterans, in which case we're right back at magic.

I'm aware that something I don't want to do is possible but that doesn't help me do what I want to do.

You're missing the point. The claim being made is that extreme skill is a form of magic in the setting. That's how the Bard works. That's how all the core Rogue PrCs work (seriously, they all give you magical powers). That's how it works form the perspective of people in the historic era we're emulating. If you told a medieval guy about a warrior who killed any enemy he fought and could craft devices beyond the worlds greatest craftsmen, he would not say "that seems like something a regular person could achieve by training". He would say "that seems like magic".

EDIT: We're on the second to last page. Do we want another thread?

I believe the convention is to let this thread die, wait until someone posts a new thread on a nominally related topic, then rehash the same arguments with a randomly permuted subset of the participants.

I don't want to use magic. There's your justification for me not using magic.

Cool. And I don't like the idea of running away from giant monsters. So I don't play at low level. It turns out the entire game does not exist to service you.

Horrible abilities aren't somehow OK just because some casters also have horrible abilities.

The thing to understand about Jormengand is that they genuinely think the Truenamer is a well designed class. So when they sit down to write something, they assume that making insane assertions about how abilities "just work" and ignoring all the related rules and precedent is how you are supposed to do things. It should not surprise you at all that a class they wrote is a garbage fire of brokeness because all it's abilities are asserted as "just working". Notably this is not actually how casters work, and is not in any sense necessary to compete with them. finger of death doesn't specifically negate all possible defenses against it. Saying your instant death ability counters "a clause in its stat block explicitly preventing it from being instantly killed" is the kind of think you expect to see out of children playing cops and robbers, not serious efforts at game design. "I have a super death lazer, it goes through your shield! Nuh uh, I have an ultra shield, it stops every kind of lazer even ones that say they go through shields! Nuh uh, I have an omega lazer, it can't be blocked even by things that say they block omega lazers!"

It's almost like people actually gain strength from conviction in real life.

Consider this ability:

Flaming Body (Su): The body of a balor is wreathed in flame. Anyone grappling a balor takes 6d6 points of fire damage each round.

As written, that is a Supernatural ability. Would you consider an ability with the exact same effect mundane on the basis that "It's almost like people actually have a body temperature in real life."? If not, why is "it's almost like people actually gain strength from conviction in real life" a sufficient explanation?

Max_Killjoy

2017-12-29, 10:38 AM

So yes, if you stop playing D&D you can avoid the problems. Because if you do so, you're getting rid of the entire system. Which is a rather baby and bathwater solution to a problem that only really exists (in acute form) in a single edition. Neither 4e nor 5e (both of which have scaling HP and levels) suffer from this particular problem. And doing so (especially changing the scaling HP) changes the genre--you no longer have heroic fantasy, you have something much more gritty. Which may be to some people's taste, but it's not to mine.

Biased comment is biased.

I'm pretty sure you can have heroic fantasy without massive scaling hit points.

LibraryOgre

2017-12-29, 10:54 AM

The Mod Wonder: Oh, look, page 50. May I suggest that those of you who are still into this topic reconvene soon, with some more narrow focuses?

PhoenixPhyre

2017-12-29, 10:59 AM

I'm pretty sure you can have heroic fantasy without massive scaling hit points.

Only by significantly toning down the damage progression, and if that dragon doesn't hit much harder than a regular human, that's not what I'd call heroic fantasy.
-------------------------------
On a different tack, I decided to compare the class features of 3.5e fighters with 3.5e sorcerers. Fighters are notoriously T4, Sorcerers T2. The major class features of each class are simple: fighters get bonus feats, sorcerers get spells.

A quick calculation shows that (except at 1st level), a fighter gets about 1/4 as many bonus feats (cumulative) as a sorcerer knows spells (also cumulative). To have rough balance, that means that a fighter feat must be "worth" about 4 times as much as a sorcerer's spell. To account for the other things like BAB, proficiencies, bigger HD, I'll knock that down to 2x as much.

Is each fighter bonus feat worth 2x as much? Not even close.

Making it worse,
a) the bonus feats come from a very narrow list, restricted to basically just combat effects. Most of them are trap options in fact.
b) the sorcerer can trade out a spell known every other level. While slow, this allows ditching poor-scaling spells for better ones or fixing mistakes.
c) sorcerers draw from the wizard list, which is huge and varied, including a large variety of non-combat capabilities.
d) fighter feats are often locked behind prerequisite chains, making you have to waste precious feats on useless things (dodge anyone?)

Purely from a system perspective, this is crappy design. One potential fix would be to give fighters actual class features or make fighter bonus feats actually worth something and exclusive (which is the same thing). Do that and start trimming the spell bloat and you'd come closer to parity without slaughtering any sacred cows or destroying any reasonable concepts.