Schattenbach
2020-12-20, 06:45 PM
Re-watching the "Overlord" anime a while back (well, that and re-reading "The Experimental Log of the Crazy Lich") reminded me a bit about how funky some of the scaling in D3.5/etc. can be and made me wonder about just how powerful some of the stronger characters/monsters/etc. in the setting are supposed to be.
There seems to be some odd mix of supposed non-linear scaling (hello there, d20 future "16d8 Energy damage" 1 megaton Nuclear warhead exploding in space ... & hello there, CR20 creature being supposedly ~256x or so as powerful as CR4 creatures, etc. ... & hello there, average small fry humanoid likely possessing about 20-30 HP or so at most) and very linear scaling (linear adding up of material hp of objects per inch, per
square or whatever to somehow end up with hundreds/thousands of object HP so that not even great wyrm/kaiju/great old one slaying magic - or, well aforementioned nuclear explosion - may not reduce that stone dungeon wall to rubble) ... which raises the odd question of just how powerful various degrees of high level capabilities are supposed to be.
What’s worse is that the scaling is often quite inconsistent across various sources (i.e. seemingly somewhat "realistic" - based on some other stuff - 64 HP D20 modern/future tanks vs. ~1900 object HP tanks in Pathfinder that’s calculated on squares)
There’s also the wonky scaling of skill checks and ability checks (sometimes also quite inconsistent at that), but let’s ignore that for now.
I guess there’s a somewhat general lack of effort to handle to different issues, i.e. "weak scratch damage" (i.e. using a pickaxe/laser gun/whatever to continuously do damage just lightly above hardness) vs. "actually serious damage" that might wreck things in general (there are solutions to that, but that isn’t the point of this topic for now), which complicates figuring out how powerful, for example, Meteor Swarm is supposed to be (compared to simply using conventional bombs).
So ... the purpose of this thread is to make sense of how powerful comparable things (like blowing stuff up) are supposed to be at higher levels (i.e. significantly beyond level 10, at level 20 and up to well into epic level range, i.e. level 30-40).
Has someone some idea about that (using things pcs are supposed to face, i.e. monsters or military vehicles and/or weapons, as reference might be a good starting point, while ignoring things that just aren’t meant to be viable, i.e.lvl20 npc classes or quasi-npc classes).
There seems to be some odd mix of supposed non-linear scaling (hello there, d20 future "16d8 Energy damage" 1 megaton Nuclear warhead exploding in space ... & hello there, CR20 creature being supposedly ~256x or so as powerful as CR4 creatures, etc. ... & hello there, average small fry humanoid likely possessing about 20-30 HP or so at most) and very linear scaling (linear adding up of material hp of objects per inch, per
square or whatever to somehow end up with hundreds/thousands of object HP so that not even great wyrm/kaiju/great old one slaying magic - or, well aforementioned nuclear explosion - may not reduce that stone dungeon wall to rubble) ... which raises the odd question of just how powerful various degrees of high level capabilities are supposed to be.
What’s worse is that the scaling is often quite inconsistent across various sources (i.e. seemingly somewhat "realistic" - based on some other stuff - 64 HP D20 modern/future tanks vs. ~1900 object HP tanks in Pathfinder that’s calculated on squares)
There’s also the wonky scaling of skill checks and ability checks (sometimes also quite inconsistent at that), but let’s ignore that for now.
I guess there’s a somewhat general lack of effort to handle to different issues, i.e. "weak scratch damage" (i.e. using a pickaxe/laser gun/whatever to continuously do damage just lightly above hardness) vs. "actually serious damage" that might wreck things in general (there are solutions to that, but that isn’t the point of this topic for now), which complicates figuring out how powerful, for example, Meteor Swarm is supposed to be (compared to simply using conventional bombs).
So ... the purpose of this thread is to make sense of how powerful comparable things (like blowing stuff up) are supposed to be at higher levels (i.e. significantly beyond level 10, at level 20 and up to well into epic level range, i.e. level 30-40).
Has someone some idea about that (using things pcs are supposed to face, i.e. monsters or military vehicles and/or weapons, as reference might be a good starting point, while ignoring things that just aren’t meant to be viable, i.e.lvl20 npc classes or quasi-npc classes).