D&D 5th Edition XII: Peasant Militias Can Defeat Smartphones?

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Trick question, kind of, because if gods are defined in the same manner within this system as everyone else, you can tell those stories without needing anything vaguely resembling prior edition numbers.

I would argue that any god who can be killed by a gaggle of peasants, or who can be killed by a handful of adventurers who can be outdone by a handful of peasants, is not a god.

High-level play is qualitatively different from low-level play, not just numerically, and adding +20 to everything doesn't suddenly make it higher level; higher numbers are necessary for some aspects of high-level play, but not sufficient to define high-level play. You can cut out most bonuses in high-level 3e--just entirely chuck the Big Six items, synergy bonuses, spells that just give numerical bonuses, etc.--and it'll still feel high-level; you can add a bunch of bonuses to high-level 5e (the current incarnation, at least), and it'll still feel low- or mid-level.

So a system of advancement only has value when past a certain point the lower end falls away?

Any generic system of advancement? No. D&D's particular system of advancement, which is full of "you must be this heroic to do X" effects for better or for worse and which has several breakpoints at which lower-level characters are non-challenging mooks? Yes.

1e, the edition whose math was most similar to 5e's bounded accuracy given its limited bonus, loosely constrained -10 to 10 AC, and so forth, still had characters reach a "not at all threatened by minimum-level mooks" breakpoint--fighters could one-shot 1 0-level enemy per level per round, fireballs could one-shot large numbers of mooks, and so forth--and the various rules about needing a +X weapon to damage Y creature and such ensured that only mid-level characters and not peasant hordes could take out scary beasts like dragons and demons.

So again, if 5e wants to emulate the style of any prior edition, its math and leveling assumptions should match those of said prior editions, which requires a sort of planned obsolescence and is incompatible with bounded accuracy and everything being a threat up through level 20.

You were not a deity slaying hero at 15+ in 4E, nor was a Fighter or a Rogue in 3.x.

I admit that I included 4e in that assertion because 4e's level range of 1-30 is really just 1e-3e's level 5-13 "sweet spot" stretched out to 30 levels, so I count its level 30 as mid-high level in older editions at best. Still, level 22 is 4e's level 15, proportionally, and taking on a level 34ish solo with a party of 5-6 optimized level 22s is possible, if quite difficult.

As for martial types being godslayers in 3e, they certainly can be; they need to be well-optimized and have plenty of magical support like any other wannabe godslayer, but just because they're weaker than casters doesn't mean they can't do it.

I'm not arguing that it's easy for PCs to slay gods, or that unoptimized and unprepared PCs can do so, or even that they can do so on their own and not as part of a party. I'm saying that gods being a significant challenge to pretty much everything in the game world and PCs being able to slay them as the culmination of an epic quest are two standard aspects of high-level play in 1e through 4e, and if 5e level scaling is so much lower and slower than 1e-4e that they can't kill gods or can only kill "gods" who can be taken out by any random mortals, then the level scaling will not allow older editions to be emulated as WotC wants.

Not to put too fine a point on it but even WotC has admitted that the game is all about 1-10. Even in 4E, which was a very simple and standardized system to learn and play, the game was still 1-10. Of all the gaming groups that gather together to play D&D, my bet is only a small percentage regularly play above level 10, and a fraction there of play at level 20 or above for any significant amount of time. The designers will never focus that heavily on the top end of the scale because so few people venture up that high.

My group primarily plays D&D because of high level, essentially; it's the only system that bridges the gap between the lower-powered lower-magic games like WHFRP, GURPS Fantasy, and the like and the higher-powered higher-magic games like Exalted, Mage, and similar. We usually make it to the high teens if not low 20s for our games, and other groups in our area are similar. As Kurald noted, starting in the mid-10s and going up from there isn't uncommon, so reaching at least the mid-high levels like Friv's group does isn't uncommon either, so support for those levels can't simply be ignored.

The fact that most people play at 1-10 is no reason to neglect the higher levels...especially because WotC's sucky design and playtesting of higher levels in 3e is likely to blame for many groups finding high levels untenable and avoiding them. Not to belabor the point, but 5e is supposed to be all editions to all people, and if it is to succeed at that goal it has to be able to emulate other editions at least passably, which includes functional high-level play.

In nearly every roleplaying game ever made, the first law of badass has always been that badass is something that cannot simply be written on a character sheet -- instead, it must be established through actual play. No matter how many levels your character gains off-screen, they are not a badass for it.

This is true. However, if the things on your character sheet do not let you be a badass, you cannot establish that you are a badass through actual play.