In which I rant about high-level rpgs

[chuckro]

I'm putting all of this behind a cut. It seems kind.


Dungeons and Dragons is a game of dungeon-crawls. It's not designed as a game of political intrigue (a la Vampire: The Masquerade), it's not a PvP system (a la Paranoia) and it's not a horror system (despite what Ravenloft tries for or what d20 Call of Cthulhu would have you believe). Dugeons and Dragons, in any edition, is about a team of pseudo-mideval fantasy adventurers who delve into the underground lairs of horrible monsters and kill them for their treasure.

I have come to believe that, despite the plethora of monsters that would utterly slaughter a low-level party and would be logical to stock a dungeon with, D&D3.5 breaks down from this model in the low teen levels, especially where wizards are concerned.

The Alexandrian has an excellent article about calibrating "realism" in D&D:
http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/d&d-calibrating.html

The gist of it is, after 5th level, you're not playing characters who could exist in the real world any more. You're playing legendary heroes. And most epic heroes of fantasy (Aragorn, Gandalf, Conan, Fafnir) could be modeled to match their stories as 5th level characters or lower. 15th level characters, in turn, aren't even legendary heroes any more; they're demigods.

Demigods don't dungeon-crawl. It's like sending Superman dungeon-crawling. They can teleport, detect any trap effortlessly, dispel any magical effect, break down any door (or just walk through walls), and see any encounter coming with enough time to surprise it and disable it before it gets to move. That's 15th level characters. The basic rules go up to level 20.

So you have the choice of lining the dungeon walls with kryptonite ("The dungeon is warded against teleporting. This room has an anti-magic field. This door is made of reinforced adamantine.") and/or making wildly impausible encounters ("This ship is crewed by 12th-level pirates with magical weapons, never mind that they could probably conquer several cities with ease," or "The evil priest has an unlimited budget and innumerable servants, but none of them actually know what he looks like or where his lair is, so you can't raid their minds and teleport there.")

But the game books make no effort to note this fact. Modules are full of CR 20 encounters that would splatter any party that would actually encounter them, but be a joke to the "level-appropriate" party who'll detect them early, prepare, surprise, and disable them easily. If they're tired or begin to lose, they teleport away, and come back later with better plans. From there, who wins an encouter quickly becomes a question of "who goes first?"

World of Darkness has a similar problem with high-level mages or vampires, but spends entire chapters of sourcebooks explaining why the Lord High Archmage of Doissitep would never end up in a "whoever goes first wins" battle against the Malkavian Antedeluvian. (For the same reason the US President, holding an H-Bomb under his arm, would never end up in that situation against the Pope with a laser beam strapped to his miter.) Low-level characters roam the streets and interact with normal folks. Mid-level characters roam spirit worlds and Horizon realms where there are still critters that can threaten them. High-level characters interact mostly with their minions and the occasional messenger, because the only things that threaten them are their equivalents on other sides (who are also hiding out of MAD concerns) and the blowback from their own powers (which doesn't exist in D&D).

For the record, several D&D settings attempt to compensate for PCs that get too powerful--Ravenloft has "powers checks" in which the Dark Lords of the realm will take you under their wing and turn you evil; and Dark Sun has the defiling effect of magic, which requires you destroy 6,000 square feet of plant life every time you cast a 9th level spell. This worked vaguely well when they were introduced, but new editions include so many workarounds for the clever player that it only effectively gimps antagonists.

So, to sum up: Classic D&D campaigns, dungeon crawling, heroic quests and interacting with normal folks; they only work for low-level parties. High-level parties might be able to stop a dragon or fight a war, but they're not going to find any other combat-based challenges in an organic campaign.

Which is kinda a shame, because it makes many of the splatbooks full of exciting high-level powers rather useless.

Comments

[gaudium-et-spes.livejournal.com]

This is why I like low-magic campaigns using a vitality-wounds system (ala Star Wars d20). You have as much staying power as you would if you had the fully-stocked cleric, but your plot-defeating mobility is severely limited, you can't cast your way out of most situations, and (courtesy of really viscious crits in vitality-wounds) you can't defeat an entire city by yourself, even if you are a level 20 fighter/weapon-master.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I feel like the bashing/lethal/aggravated health levels (with soaking) system works well up to most points. The fact that you can scale how lethal you want encounters to be with a clearly visible clue to the players (i.e. do the enemies have baseball bats, guns, or werewolf claws?) works for me. It's kinda like in real life, in that you can get a decent idea of how "seriously" the guys in a fight are playing. Taking a knife to a brawl ups the stakes.

I don't mind high-level magic, for the record. I just want it to have limits. Rolling for success and paradox/the masquerade/the veil/whatever do a good job of creating those limits. If botching a spell will seal you into a paradox dimension for the next five months, you're less likely to try to magic your way through situations as a first, last and only resort.

For that matter, I don't mind one person (or one party) being able to hold off an army by themselves. (I think of Helm's Deep, or the current arc in Order of the Stick.) Legendary heroes do that. It just shouldn't be easy or painless. My 15th-level sorceror could take out 10,000 orcish troops without taking any damage and with spells left. A wizard of equivalent level could probably do it better.

[gaudium-et-spes.livejournal.com]

The problem I have with storyteller is that the variance is way too high on damage rolls, relative to the amount of health you have.

Peace,
Chris

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Anything in particular bring this on?

For the same reason the US President, holding an H-Bomb under his arm, would never end up in that situation against the Pope with a laser beam strapped to his miter.
OK, yeah, I'm picturing this now.

I suspect that for high-level D&D many players don't really care about how broken the system is as long as that get to do crazy cool shit. You, obviously, are not that player.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Anything in particular bring this on?

I plotted out a series of encounters and ran them for my Skype game last night. One was supposed to be very difficult, with a trick to it. (They figured out the trick as an afterthought, and would have trounced it fairly easily regardless.) They tried to ignore a (admitted fairly easy) puzzle in favor of "I'll spam spells at the door until I can go through." And the last encounter, which was also supposed to be at least moderately difficult? Laughably easy, over in two rounds.

And I had to line the dungeon with kryptonite (anti-teleport field) to make them go through it in the first place. And I got accused, repeatedly, of using DM fiat to railroad the dungeon even when I wasn't.

I suspect that for high-level D&D many players don't really care about how broken the system is as long as that get to do crazy cool shit. You, obviously, are not that player.

Nope. But then, I'd always rather play the jack-of-all-trades than the focused twink. I think that makes for more fun gaming sessions when you can pull out clever solutions on the fly, rather than having the planned out One True Response to every problem. D&D, especially high-level D&D, hates the non-focused character and makes them useless or dead. Perhaps that's why I prefer Mage.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

The CR system in D&D doesn't work at high levels, as far as encounter planning goes. 8 Iron Golems acting alone are easy to beat for a 15th level party, when the party has surprise, even if the technical EL is 19. On the other hand, an enemy that has some synergies working for them is much harder. On the final encounter, it would have been much harder to fight 1 Advanced beholder with a set of 6 11th level barbarians than to deal with 3 beholders. In this sense, high-level encounters bear more resemblance to strategy miniatures gaming than to a Mage-style combat. Which you prefer is a matter of personal preference (I prefer high strategy combats, obviously.)

As far as the easy puzzle goes, there was little if any flavortext, no clues on the wall, and no penalties for a failed trial. We cast Divination to get some sort of clue to work with, figured out the trick, and tried combinations of keys until it worked. What were you expecting?

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

What were you expecting?

Actually, it was Cubby opening with, "A locked door? I cast knock. Oh, that didn't work? I cast Dispel Magic. Oh, the door is obviously plot-locked." Y'know, before I even finshed describing the room and got to the fact that there were keys.

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

:) To be fair, that's the appropriate demigod-level response to an obstacle. Smite it. Then worry ...

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Which is kinda my point.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

For the same reason the US President, holding an H-Bomb under his arm, would never end up in that situation against the Pope with a laser beam strapped to his miter.

Miter-smiter! Miter-smiter!

I think I missed the part where you were accused of railroading. I'm not really sure how you do a dungeon crawl with high-level characters without some railroading. But then, if you were a high level antagonist with enemies who could teleport, wouldn't you ward the hell out of everything too?

(I think that's one of the things that I like about some of the Mage stuff, too - there's the assumption that people ward things. If you walk into super-high muckety muck's house and it isn't warded against scrying and he isn't warded against mind magic, you start to wonder if perhaps there's something you're missing...)

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

But then, if you were a high level antagonist with enemies who could teleport, wouldn't you ward the hell out of everything too?

Apparently, if I was a high-level antagonist with enemies who could teleport, I should send my best tracker and sneakiest minions to find them, then teleport in with my strongest warriors and best buff spells on right before they make camp for the night. And the first spell I cast better be Dimensional Lock, or they'll teleport away and we'll go through that nonsense again the next day. Or better yet, I cast Time Stop and spam them with no-save instant-kill spells.

Waiting in your lair is so passe. Haven't you heard? "Surprise round" is the new "sanctum of power".

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Waiting in your lair is so passe. Haven't you heard? "Surprise round" is the new "sanctum of power".

I knew I shouldn't have let my subscription to Dark Lords Digest lapse.

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

There's a fair element of MAD involved between high level antagonists who face off. So everybody normally sits down and plays according to limited rules, on the grounds that you're facing civilized opponents, and you all want there to be a world to dominate afterwords :)

When you take the gloves off, that's when epic things like continents sliding into the sea, wild magic zones the sizes of counties, and tortured hordes of undead rising from the shattered earth and steaming sea come to pass.

Way I look at it, if you're going to play high level, play epic -- what happens when the gloves are starting to come off, or are threatening to slip. Edgehopper and I have actually talked about this -- the party has incurred an immense store of negative karma where just about every "evil" power in Eberron is concerned, already. If we ever get around to planning them, terrifying confrontations await.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Which might work...sorta. Key number one is taking away the "safe zone" where you can retreat and heal and be safe. Which, in a world where Mordenkenian's Magnificent Mansion exists, is much harder than it sounds. Key number two is figuring out some way to avoid "I spam spells at this problem until it goes away." In an ideal "realistic" situation, we'd combine diplomacy and subtle, defensive actions to prevent MAD. D&D has a very poor system for high-level diplomacy, and Mutually-Assured Destruction is anything but if you can scry your opponent's location (just have a higher skill check and beat his wards), then teleport in and kill him and his high-level minions before they can react. Make a DC 83 Bluff check to convince everyone you didn't do it. Repeat.

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

Right. I do depart from the game rules to handle diplomacy, usually. D&D is a great rules system to base things from. It doesn't handle everything.

Well, it's not so much a matter of personal safety and aggrandizement. Every wizard who wants to grow a tower and spend days on end entertaining himself with extraplanar gadgets, staged duels betwee demons and archons, etc., can do so to his heart's content.

The people who play the game of world domination in a D&D world want a world they care to live in -- they're all idealists, if you will, even if their ideal is a land populated by undead overlords with human cattle, demon lords who torture angels and cause volcanic eruptions on a whim, or something merely as grandiose as putting the king of their choice on the throne. None of these guys want to create a world where people are afraid to poke their own heads out a window, and spend all their time hiding in the highly luxurious extraplanar equivalent of a hole in the ground.