chuckro | In which I rant about high-level rpgs

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.