High-end power without the high-end?

[Hyfigh]

I am a huge fan of how a character functions around level 20 and adore some of the flavorful level 20 builds have out there (the ones with form and function). High end spells, neat innate abilities like HiPS, ect... I love them all.

I have a problem, though, with the HUGE gap between a level 1 commoner or the local level 5 town sherrif and the level 20 adventurers. I hate that it requires divine intervention (20, 20, confirmed) for the commoner to kill the adventurer. I hate how difficult it can be for a lower level character to hit something. I really dislike how a well seasoned warrior (20 fighter or whatever) can stand toe-to-toe with a tiger, buck-naked, and have a fighting chance to take out the tiger.

I want to fix some of these problems but I don't know how. I can't justify the NPC's getting progressively more powerful as the PC's advance.

Does anyone have a system they use to keep the numbers low, but still gain the neat abilities of the higher-end characters?

[Tor the Fallen]

A level 20 figher isn't a "seasoned warrior", he's a living legend who's fought mythical monsters against impossible odds, encountered unimaginable horrors and escaped unscathed, fallen off cliffs, been to planes that you can only dream of, seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. Well maybe not the last couple ones.

But you get the idea.

A level 20 fighter IS the sort of person that goes up against a wild animal with nothing but his birthday suit, and wins. That's what level 20 is.

Your NPC problem isn't necessarily one of scale- it's one of location. An area that has low level CR 1-5 humanoids should be of no interest to level 20s. There's no wealth, no magic, no threat. Level 20s are fighting titans, tarrasques, wyrms, liches, and monsters with lots of class levels.

And that's if they're on the Prime.

Demon princes, fiendish tyrants, carceri guardians, pandemonic lurkers, wasting daemons, infernal soldiers should be their opponents- not sheriffs, petty feudal despots, or peasants.


[edit]
Wow, can you say accidental alliteration!

[PinkysBrain]

Simple solution, remove the bottom ... everyone starts from 10th.

[Dausuul]

Simple solution, remove the bottom ... everyone starts from 10th.

It takes a touch more than that; you also need to add a bunch of Hit Dice and/or class levels to all the low-level animals and monsters in order to scale up their power. Otherwise every peasant will be able to tackle tigers barehanded (okay, maybe not quite).

Even then, however, the power gulf between level 10 and level 20 is overwhelming.

[Tor the Fallen]

What are level 20 PCs doing hanging out with lvl 1 commoners, anyway? Killing rats?

[Closet_Skeleton]

I would suggest a differant system. DnD is for starting small and leveling up. Non-level based (usually point based) games are better for more individual characters who start with neat abilities.

I suppose you could always halve the number of HD (and other associated things like skills and base attack) you get while keeping the special abilities. Sort of like making every class like the Monster Classes from Savage Species. Therefore a 20th level fighter would have 10 HD but all his bonus feats while a Fighter 5/5 Tempest/10 Dervish or whatever would have his leet two-weapon stuff but have managable HD. You'd have to change the prerequisites on every class.

[Tor the Fallen]

I would suggest a differant system. DnD is for starting small and leveling up. Non-level based (usually point based) games are better for more individual characters who start with neat abilities.

I suppose you could always halve the number of HD (and other associated things like skills and base attack) you get while keeping the special abilities. Sort of like making every class like the Monster Classes from Savage Species. Therefore a 20th level fighter would have 10 HD but all his bonus feats while a Fighter 5/5 Tempest/10 Dervish or whatever would have his leet two-weapon stuff but have managable HD. You'd have to change the prerequisites on every class.

Of course, that would only make the discrepencies between casters and non-casters even greater, unless you also tied casting to HD.

[Lapak]

I more or less agree with what has been posted. As the calibration article that had a long post dedicated to it discussed, a 'well-seasoned warrior' at the peak of normal human achievement is probably in the level 5 range. A level 20 fighter isn't a well-seasoned warrior; he's Hercules right before Zeus promotes him to godly status. Someone who does strangle the Nemean Lion naked and barehanded, wrestle giants, drag animal demigods out of Hades, and so on.

If you want high-level characters who are still human-scale, you'll need either another system or one so heavily houseruled it qualifies as another system anyway.

[NullAshton]

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/ad...oundPoints.htm

Vitality and wound points system. Basically, the majority of hits are grazing hits. If you damage someones vitality points, you barely miss them, not doing any physical damage. There's also wound points. A level 1 character has the same amount of wound points as a level 20 character. You have an amount of wound points based on your constitution. All critical hits are done to wound points, thus it's possible(unlikely, but possible) for a level 1 commoner to down a level 20 character.

[PinkysBrain]

It takes a touch more than that; you also need to add a bunch of Hit Dice and/or class levels to all the low-level animals and monsters in order to scale up their power. Otherwise every peasant will be able to tackle tigers barehanded (okay, maybe not quite).

They would keep trained tigers as pets ... their equivalent of our tigers would be dire tigers.

[Thrawn183]

I have to agree with what's been said above a few times: really high level adventurers just aren't spending their time hanging out with commoners in the rice paddies. They're going to all manner of different planes to kick butt and take names of things that simply couldn't exist on the material plain with any real versimilitude. Sure, there could be an occaisional threat back at home, but where were all those threats when the adventurers were leveling up?

Unless you run your campaigns like power rangers where as the heroes level up, so to do the enemies for some mysterious reason; you just have to find new locales to adventure in.

I actually like this a lot because it prevents things from getting boring. It is also my personal justification for the retraining rules. Its impossible for a starting character to have really known what they were going to face. Once their moves/tactics/whatever seems to stop working, its only logical that they spend some time trying to figure out something that works.

[bosssmiley]

I'll echo what the first few posters said. By level 20 PCs in D&D shouldn't be brawling with the city guard or wrestling tigers in the first place. They should be off-plane fighting for the survival of their world in the face of ancient evils that would drive lesser men insane.

Simple solution to Hyfigh's problem: play something less 'high fantasy' than D&D. WFRP for preference. A few weeks of working up your 3rd-4th career character (mid-high level equiv.) only to have him gassed by sewer-running Skaven grunts or knifed in a mugging-gone-bad usually cures anti-heroic sentiment in players.

More complex fix: seek out a low-powered D&D variant like Sean K. Reynold's freeware "New Argonauts" setting (tops out at 12th level-ish power) and adapt that to regular play. That cures some of the more egregious scaling problems.

[Noneoyabizzness]

1) some rats are friggin huge in d&d, and some demonic entity. if you can afford level 20 exterminators, consider them dead and your sewers the cleanest in all the planes.
2) the FR concept- people at those pre and post epic levels are still on the prime material. they save the world but for the most part smoke, and dabble in politics.
3) why are commoners trying to kill l20crits??

[Jayabalard]

What are level 20 PCs doing hanging out with lvl 1 commoners, anyway? Killing rats?

Perhaps he's playing a campaign in a world modeled a little less after a fantasy world and a little more after the fantasy heroes of the real world; where the fantastic is still something special.

[PinkysBrain]

No he isn't, he is playing a D&D campaign with 20th level PCs.

[Jayabalard]

No he isn't, he is playing a D&D campaign with 20th level PCs.

What level is Hercules? He seems pretty epic to me. I doubt that most of the other greeks were anything but lvl 1 commoners.

High powered or not, there are level 1 commoners all over the world, and high level or not, you're going to have to either interact with them or ignore them occasionally, because they make up most of the world.

I would suggest that you not try and over-generalize how other people play the game; certainly, in some people game worlds, level 20 characters are going to come into contact with lvl 1 peasants on a daily basis.

[bosssmiley]

I would suggest that you not try and over-generalize how other people play the game; certainly, in some people game worlds, level 20 characters are going to come into contact with lvl 1 peasants on a daily basis.

*pffft* for what was the Leadership feat (with those handy cohorts and followers) invented? Send a prole to deal with the proles. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off for a drink with someone much nearer my ECL.

[Jayabalard]

*pffft* for what was the Leadership feat (with those handy cohorts and followers) invented? Send a prole to deal with the proles. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off for a drink with someone much nearer my ECL.

what's Belgarath's ECL? He doesn't seem to mind sitting in tavern's drinking with lvl 1 commoners?

How about Ruddygore from Chalker's Dancing Gods series? He's the head of the council of 13, which is the entity that writes the Rules that govern that world, and he's the only person who can travel unaided to our earth? That's pretty epic. He likes hitting shows on earth, and the people he buys those obnoxious flamingo statues from are probably lvl 1.

I wonder what Lazarus Long's ECL is, considering that he's well over 2000 years old, worked in nearly every prefession known to man, colonized a dozen virgin planets, etc; I wonder what level Dora is in the tale of the adopted daughter, since she starts out as a young child...

sure, the level 20 BBEG is going to be distant from the common man... and even some of the heros... but certainly there are quite a few epic characters that don't lose track of what's important to them, even if it's just sitting in some random tavern.

[storybookknight]

That's the nature of the beast regarding D&D. Dungeons and Dragons, to the best of my knowledge, has never claimed that it has any sort of realism involved.

Savage Worlds is another system for those who like grittier types of combat. Even veterans in the Weird West can occasionally get badly injured by a cowpoke who gets off a lucky shot.

[I_Got_This_Name]

The solution, really, is to move the high-end down. By level 10, even your fighter is in the same league as comic-book superheroes.

The issue with keeping the numbers low but getting high-end abilities is that often the high-end abilities directly interact with the numbers, in ways that are harder to tune (not the Power Words and direct-damage spells; those tune easily). Following the half-hit-dice suggestion, a fighter with 9 HD is much weaker than an 9 HD wizard who can cast, for instance, Summon Monster IX.

A level 20 shouldn't necessarily be away from 1st-level Commoners, but shouldn't be expected to be in their league, either. Herakles might kill a monster that menaces a town full of the above-mentioned Commoners, but they brought him in because both him and the monster are out of their league.

D&D models epic fantasy, where your heroes (and villains) are larger-than-life; if it didn't take divine intervention for Joe Peasant to threaten him, he wouldn't be larger-than-life. That said, Joe Peasant getting divine intervention is also a staple of the genre.

[Lemur]

What level is Hercules? He seems pretty epic to me. I doubt that most of the other greeks were anything but lvl 1 commoners.

Hercules' power level doesn't strike me as being truly epic, by D&D standards. His adventures are certainly bizarre, but not beyond the scope of pre-epic characters. That said, he was definitely in the high-end levels of normal D&D, and possibly had divine rank 0.

Anyway, to the OP: There really shouldn't be a contest between a level 20 and a level 1. Level 20 is in many ways superhuman compared to low-end characters. A "seasoned" warrior is probably in the level 4-8 range.

However, if you want to maintain the idea that creatures in large numbers are a threat, there are ways to do so. A high level character should be able to take on swarms of weak mooks and make it out alive, but they shouldn't be able to last forever against an unlimited number of them.

Try this: The first person to attack a given enemy in a round does so against their normal armor class. The next person to attack that same enemy in the same round does it at their armor class -2. The next person, -4, et cetera. You'll still need a lot of level one commoners to kill a level 20 character, but it can be done eventually.

Also, it sounds like you're using the insta-kill crit varient (if the confirmation is also a 20, roll another confirmation for instant kill). I would advise against using this. It's rather absurd, and statistically unfair to the players.

[Hyfigh]

I think my biggest gripe is that the level 20 fighter, the legend, is still a mortal human (generally). This means that if someone snuck up behind him and stuck a dagger through his ribs (doesn't even have to be a rogue) he'd still die. This can't even be depicted from a coup de grace because he's just flat footed, not helpless.

I really have a hard time expressing everything that I see as the problem because it's a combo of so many of the systems.

I do think that a better trained fighter will win a fight abou 90% of the time. I do think that the wizard should be able to single spell kill stuff. I also think that if a fighter connects with his greatsword that the other fighter would most likely be cleaved in twain.

I dunno... I'll work with different systems and see what I can come up with.

[Jayabalard]

D&D winds up with a pretty big numbers creep... I don't really think you can help it. There are other RPG systems that don't have that sort of HP creep, but then you're really not playing anything like the same game.

[I_Got_This_Name]

Yeah, VP/WP is probably the only quick-fix, and possibly the best fix thtat you can use while still playing D&D (other than lowering the level cap), if you want your top-end stuff to be mortal (equally mortal with everyone else, anyway). High-level D&D is about epic heroes who can take Rasputin-esque amounts of punishment (but can still drown); other systems might cover mortal heroes better.

[PinkysBrain]

Combat heavy + realism = character deaths in every session.

[Lemur]

I think my biggest gripe is that the level 20 fighter, the legend, is still a mortal human (generally). This means that if someone snuck up behind him and stuck a dagger through his ribs (doesn't even have to be a rogue) he'd still die. This can't even be depicted from a coup de grace because he's just flat footed, not helpless.

I really have a hard time expressing everything that I see as the problem because it's a combo of so many of the systems.

I do think that a better trained fighter will win a fight abou 90% of the time. I do think that the wizard should be able to single spell kill stuff. I also think that if a fighter connects with his greatsword that the other fighter would most likely be cleaved in twain.

I dunno... I'll work with different systems and see what I can come up with.

I don't see it as a problem. Rather, it's a mark of just how powerful a level 20 character is supposed to be. Sure, you might manage to sneak up on a level 20 character. However, by level 20, he's probably developed some kind of sixth sense that factors into his hitpoints. As you plunge the dagger into his ribs, he moves instinctively, and the dagger goes into his shoulder blade instead, avoiding a fatal blow.

That's how I see the function of hitpoints working, especially at high levels. Sure, he's mortal, and getting stabbed in the back would kill him. The point is though, that barring exceptional circumstances, he won't let it happen to him. Find a martial arts master and try to hit him in the back. Chances are, it won't go so easily.

Ordinarily, this kind of situation doesn't occur very often, simply because characters of such high level are extremely rare. If you're looking for more gritty realism, then look at lower levels, where most people exist, and where most people are unable to properly defend themselves from ambushes.

[Dhavaer]

I think my biggest gripe is that the level 20 fighter, the legend, is still a mortal human (generally). This means that if someone snuck up behind him and stuck a dagger through his ribs (doesn't even have to be a rogue) he'd still die. This can't even be depicted from a coup de grace because he's just flat footed, not helpless.

The thing is, though, he's not. D&D doesn't work that way. You want Modern for that kind of thing.

[Krellen]

I think my biggest gripe is that the level 20 fighter, the legend, is still a mortal human (generally). This means that if someone snuck up behind him and stuck a dagger through his ribs (doesn't even have to be a rogue) he'd still die. This can't even be depicted from a coup de grace because he's just flat footed, not helpless.

D&D isn't designed to model this sort of situation. What happens when someone tries to sneak up on and stab Batman? He dodges, catches them, or by some other means escapes harm. Hit Points are not purely a measure of physical toughness; the 200-hit point barbarian does not survive twenty direct sword blows. Hit Points represent both physical toughness (less so this, for most games) and combat skill/divine blessing/some other method of avoiding injury. A 10-hit point and 100-hit point character are both hit for 5: but this doesn't mean they both suffer the same injury. While the 10-hit point character probably has a large gash across his chest, the 100-hit point character, far more adept at avoiding injury, managed to "roll" with the blow, and has but a slight scratch.

The rules do still reflect the circumstance you're really talking about: taking a 20th-level character totally unaware, getting him into a situation where he cannot possibly, no matter his training and skill, avoid the blade to his kidney. That is helpless, and is covered by a coup de grace.

[Matthew]

I absolutely recommend the Alexander's Calibration Thread and associated Article. Well worth a read if you are having trouble imagining what it means to be Level 20 in a game like D&D and how that relates to 'real life' expectations.

[Justin_Bacon]

I have a problem, though, with the HUGE gap between a level 1 commoner or the local level 5 town sherrif and the level 20 adventurers. I hate that it requires divine intervention (20, 20, confirmed) for the commoner to kill the adventurer. I hate how difficult it can be for a lower level character to hit something. I really dislike how a well seasoned warrior (20 fighter or whatever) can stand toe-to-toe with a tiger, buck-naked, and have a fighting chance to take out the tiger.

Let's take a step back for a moment:

Why, exactly, do you have a problem with Hercules standing toe-to-toe with a tiger, buck-naked, and having a fighting chance to take out the tiger?

Why, exactly, do you have a problem with Cyrano de Bergerac or Elric being scarcely distracted by the primitive flailings of the scarcely trained?

(And these are just characters in the 10th-to-15th level range, not the virtual demigods of 20th level.)

Once we figure out exactly what your problem is, then we can work on fixing it.

Justin Alexander
http://www.thealexandrian.net