Quote Originally Posted by Dion View Post
My suggestion, if there is a serious idea about changing the thread guidelines, is to have two explicitly separate sets of guidelines for the thread.

One set of guidelines might be “how do we discuss the possible ways RAW allow what we see in the comic to happen”.

The second set of guidelines might be “given what we see happen in the comic, what is the consensus for the class level, ability scores, and magic items of the party.”

These should be distinct because they’re two distinct things.

The first set of guidelines allow the pedantic and rule driven discussions we all love. For example, given V’s casting of TB, under RAW the. V is either lvl 16 with a +2 CL bonus, or lvl 17 with a +1 CL bonus, or lvl 18, or cast TB three times, or…

The first set of guidelines allows for actual right and wrong answers.

The second, separate set of guidelines is consensus driven. For example, given V’s casting of TB we know that there are many possible ways that could have happened (where one of the ways is that The Giant simply ignored the rules). The community gets to decide “which of these possibilities is most likely”.

The second set of guidelines doesn’t allow for right or wrong answers. It’s just opinion.

So, in the two sets of guidelines, TooSoon is correct that TB would require CL 18. This does not mean, however, that the community must accept by consensus that V is lvl 17 (since the community gets to choose among the many ways that effect may have been achieved, including “the Giant ignored the rules”,)
I'm open to debating this, but my feeling is that if we are going to lower the standard of proof to one of probability (as you suggest) we should do it in a way that let's us include more information, not less (e.g. V is level 17+, Xykon is level 27+, Tarquin is Epic, etc). It has grown harder and harder to update stat blocks on here, due to the Giant's growing disinterest in helping stat characters. We should react in a way that tries to address that, not in a way that makes it even harder to keep the thread functional.