Elminster and Epic Level Fighters

[Solo]

So, upon first glance it seems odd that such being as Elminster and high level fighters exist. Anyone who has actually seen Elminster’s build, or, indeed, that of Drizz’t Do’Udren was surely shocked at the sheer ineptitude which with they were designed. Drizz’t, master swordsman that he is, cannot defeat a single CR 15 Fire Giant by himself according to his build in the Player’s Guide to Faerun, while Elminster loses 3 caster levels in Fighter and Rogue, while having 3 in Cleric before taking his Wizard and Archmage levels. He does not even have levels of Mystic Theurge, which would make up slightly for the suck his build has.

How can we explain this odd phenomenon of very weak characters somehow becoming the most powerful characters in land for their areas of expertise? Perhaps the answer can be found in how experience is distributed.

Now, we all know that when an enemy is defeated, experience points are rewarded according to the enemy’s Challenge Rating, or CR. However, CR is not a firm guide as to how tough a fight will be; some monsters are under-CR’d while some monsters are too highly ranked. In addition, many variables such as terrain and party preparations could also affect the Encounter Level, or EL, of an fight. It is obvious that a smart party with savvy players will go through encounters more easily than a less skilled group.

It seems only logical to conclude that the EL of a fight is a better basis for rewarding XP than CR, since it is a more holistic measure of the difficulty of a challenge. This would result in a game where weaker characters receive more experience for their troubles while the stronger ones gets a smaller reward.

This explains so neatly how poorly made characters such as Elminster can be of so high level; they succeed not because of their builds, but in spite of them. By barely passing the hurdle, they gain more power compared to powerful characters who blast through challenges but never get the same kind of character building growth through adversity.

It also explains how optimized and unoptimized characters can exist in the same party; while the strong character receive less experience, the weaker ones level up faster until they are of high enough level that all party members have roughly the same power. Thus everyone can feel useful and contribute to the same degree with this fair and equitable new means of experience distribution which rewards everyone equally.

And that is how such things as epic level fighters can come into being in a game where hitting things in the face with a metal object becomes an increasingly nonviable career choice as time goes on.

[Novembermike]

Elminster leveled up in a story. Stories don't follow DnD rules.

[fectin]

Elminster is also played by the DM's girlfriend. In that he keeps getting shagged by gods and gifted with arbitrarily powerful abilities.

[K]

Some problems:

First, you assume that any of the builds for various characters are actual builds. For example, Elminster is one of the most statted up characters in DnD and none of those stats look like the others.

Second, you can farm XP on things much, much lower level than you. The game assumes that you fight things of an EL that is close to your own, but there is no reason why you can't farm low-level stuff for XP. A level 20 character can just kill CR 13 things and get 500 XP. Heck, by the rules you can just get story awards and not actually defeat any enemies and still reach epic levels.

That's how bards get levels.... by not getting into fights. I assume it involves hijinks like mistaken identities and romantic entanglements and the occasional musical number. Basically, like episodes of Glee or Three's Company.

-Third, don't overthink this. The game and the setting/story have never matched up 100%.

[CCarter]

As far as Elminster goes: he's inexplicable. Not only do his ELH stats render him incapable of beating up monsters 10 levels lower than him, he also has an xp penalty of about -40% for class levels out of balance.

[Prak]

Wait, wait. Don't tell me, I got this one.... "fuck that mary sue author avatar up the ass with a rusty Staff of Iron," right?

[darrow]

As an aside, the last 3.5 game I played used this principle in practice: players self-selected into whether they were going to optimize their builds or not, and optimized players started at ECL 5 whereas the rest of the party started at ECL 7. Characters all received the same experience from adventuring (so optimized builds didn't immediately catch up). It worked for us.

(In other news, this might be my first post. I've been lurking forever, created this account after a lot of lurking so that I could keep better track of unread posts. Hi everybody).

[Plebian]

basically Ed Greenwood is a perverted old man and a pretty shitty writer to boot

also, from the perspective of a narrative, do you expect any real person to plan out their entire career from start to finish so they get the ideal set of life skills? or do you expect people to plan things out as they go because life's a series of events that can't usually be predicted in the long-term.

[Xur]

Well, speaking of Elminster builds, can anyone provide a proper one? I have seen a lot of enjoyable rants about the shitty writeups in 3E Faerun supplements, and this "Lets kill Elminster" thread from RPG.net 2 years ago was funny, but I never saw someone trying to put some numbers behind Mr. Greenwoods fictional cock.

[RobbyPants]

So, upon first glance it seems odd that such being as Elminster and high level fighters exist. Anyone who has actually seen Elminster’s build, or, indeed, that of Drizz’t Do’Udren was surely shocked at the sheer ineptitude which with they were designed. Drizz’t, master swordsman that he is, cannot defeat a single CR 15 Fire Giant by himself according to his build in the Player’s Guide to Faerun, while Elminster loses 3 caster levels in Fighter and Rogue, while having 3 in Cleric before taking his Wizard and Archmage levels. He does not even have levels of Mystic Theurge, which would make up slightly for the suck his build has.

How can we explain this odd phenomenon of very weak characters somehow becoming the most powerful characters in land for their areas of expertise? Perhaps the answer can be found in how experience is distributed.

I assume it has more to do with people (who don't understand the game) saying "Hey, guys. Look how cool Elminster looks with this new multiclassing system!", and less to do with people making actual builds and leveling Elminster through actual game play from level 1 to X.

It seems only logical to conclude that the EL of a fight is a better basis for rewarding XP than CR, since it is a more holistic measure of the difficulty of a challenge. This would result in a game where weaker characters receive more experience for their troubles while the stronger ones gets a smaller reward.

This explains so neatly how poorly made characters such as Elminster can be of so high level; they succeed not because of their builds, but in spite of them. By barely passing the hurdle, they gain more power compared to powerful characters who blast through challenges but never get the same kind of character building growth through adversity.

Yeah, but that's not how it really works. Sadly, it is based on CR. So strong PCs can kill bigger things and more things and gain XP, getting even better.

As K said, the game and story have never matched up. This is more of an issue of people making stats after the fact and not really thinking it through.

[Judging__Eagle]

As K said, the game and story have never matched up. This is more of an issue of people making stats after the fact and not really thinking at all.

Fixed.

[Emerald]

also, from the perspective of a narrative, do you expect any real person to plan out their entire career from start to finish so they get the ideal set of life skills? or do you expect people to plan things out as they go because life's a series of events that can't usually be predicted in the long-term.

There is a middle ground between the two. I can't plan out the path my life will take, but I can sit down and say "Okay, I like [subject X], so I'm going to apply to [college Y] and [college Z] because they have good [subject X] programs; I'll try to get an internship with [company W] because they do good work in [subject X], and hopefully that will get me a full-time job with them after I graduate."

That's what planning out a build is like: Here's what I want my character to do/be like, what should my character practice with/learn to do to get there? Just because it's possible to get to college, find out you'd rather major in Interpretive Dance instead of Political Science, and completely change your life plans doesn't mean you can't make any plans beforehand, or that making shit up as you go along is better for a narrative or something like that.

[talozin]

That's what planning out a build is like: Here's what I want my character to do/be like, what should my character practice with/learn to do to get there? Just because it's possible to get to college, find out you'd rather major in Interpretive Dance instead of Political Science, and completely change your life plans doesn't mean you can't make any plans beforehand, or that making shit up as you go along is better for a narrative or something like that.

One of the really unfortunate things about 3.x was the way the prestige classing requirements basically forced you to plan your character's life out from birth. You couldn't just suddenly decide you wanted to become an Interpretive Dance major, because "suddenly" meant you probably didn't have the prerequisite feats for the Interpretive Dancer PrC, which were bound to involve some things you probably wouldn't take willingly and certainly not if you weren't expecting to take the class.

The time lag between deciding, with no previous preparation, that you want to pursue a prestige class and the time you actually get to take your first level in that class is probably somewhere between 4 and 6 levels, depending on how many feats it requires and how many levels you are away from getting your next feat. And that model is shit. The odds are extremely good that your campaign will end before you manage to gain that many more levels.

[Swordslinger]

One of the really unfortunate things about 3.x was the way the prestige classing requirements basically forced you to plan your character's life out from birth.

I hated that, it killed any potential to have your character be affected by what happened in the story. Assuming you didn't want to suck, you couldn't have your character train with a group of clerics and pick up a cleric level to represent that. So your build was on rails and because you could buy any magic item you wanted further made you world oblivious, because your magic item loadout was probably planned too.

Power gamed 3E characters had zero character development.

[RobbyPants]

Power gamed 3E characters had zero character development.

That's not necessarily true, but I understand the sentiment.

[Novembermike]

Power gamed 3E characters had zero character development.

That's not necessarily true, but I understand the sentiment.

They spent their first 5 levels trying to fit the roleplaying requirement to get into their PRC. There is no question of a barbarian taking up the cloth because 3e is basically "Ladder Theory, The Game" and melee and doing awesome things are different ladders.

[Dominicius]

Power gamed 3E characters had zero character development.

That is actually a very good point.

It is not so bad when the game demands some inconsequential mechanical number (ie X ranks in jump) since you can just overlook this or re-fluff it in some way but it is far worse when the game demands a roleplay reason (ie membership in an arcane order). And alignment based stuff is especially bad in this regard.

I don't know how exactly to solve this. Off the top of my head is to have each class have certain abilities within it can can be swapped for something else. For instance if a paladin becomes evil his class is not invalidated, only his abilities are changed around so Detect Good instead of Detect Evil and and Spread Disease instead of Lay on Hands.

[TheFlatline]

I assume it has more to do with people (who don't understand the game) saying "Hey, guys. Look how cool Elminster looks with this new multiclassing system!", and less to do with people making actual builds and leveling Elminster through actual game play from level 1 to X.

And you'd be wrong.

One of the shameful moments of my youth was actually reading the first few Elminster books (Elminster in Hell was so bad I stopped).

In the first book alone (if my 15 year old memory serves), he dabbled as a fighter, a thief, spent a significant amount of time as a female cleric, and *then* started learning magic as a wizard. Oh, and he shagged the goddess of magic and is her personal favorite guy (although she's dead in 4th edition now I guess).

Which means unless you handwave "official history" of the dude, he's a multiclass nightmare.

In 2nd edition when I ran in Forgotten Realms I basically treated Elminster like an Antediluvian from Vampire: No stats, because he's not there to do shit that requires rolling dice. No version of D&D has ever been particularly adept at trying to stat out a narrative character's history. Especially a significant character's history.

Remember the breakdown of apt power level comparisons inherent in D&D? Hercules is like 12 level? Aragorn is like 4th or 5th? This is why Elminster and what's-his-fucking-name-the-dark-elf suck statted up compared to their narrative versions. The narrative authors have difficulty writing stories about true epic level characters that could punch god in the face.

[shadzar]

So, upon first glance it seems odd that such being as Elminster and high level fighters exist.

Not sure what Elminster has to do with high level fighters, but Elminster doesnt exist...not in any game of D&D. He is a character from a novel. Novels use a different media than a game does, so he is a construct for a specific story, and not something actually usable in a game.

Elminster may have started as a character in a game, but after being assembled in many different books and going through changes to meet the needs of those books, he stopped being a character in a game, and was jsut loosely based on the game.

Elminster is the narrator of events in the Forgotten Realms, and exists so that the events could be related through him.

Volo would be his counterpart for game play, and Volo really doesnt exist in many places with stats, but performs the same function. They are both tour guides, but offer a tour through the Realms in different ways.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You're totally not supposed to use PrCs as-is. What many people forget that PrCs were supposed to be examples of classes that you could put into the setting.

This means that the whole issue of people planning out their character builds 8 levels in advance is an aberration of the system; since the DM was supposed to make their own PrCs the requirements were actually supposed to fit your character concept specifically. And when used in this way Prestige Classes are awesome and are probably the best thing to come out of that edition.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. WotC correctly saw that people got off on calling themselves Ninjas of the Crescent Moon and Assassins so determined that they could move books by publishing pre-packaged prestige classes. Of course the big problem was that due to the open multiclassing system, the lack of EXP penalty for prestige classes, and the huge amount of empty levels and save fuckery it encouraged people to do nothing but load up on prestige classes. And of course it's also impossible to design a Ninja PrC that will be appropriate for every game; some people will insist on them being evil, some people will insist on them being a guild, some people will make it halfling-only, etc. So with these two constraits came the ridiculous prerequisites and all of the other things we hate about the system.

Of course if the DM goes back to the original intent of PrCs and custom-makes them to support a character's goals then the entire problem goes away. Of course then it just creates the new problem of DMs creating underpowered or overpowered PrCs that a PC doesn't want and of course there's the fact that most DMs couldn't design their way out of a paper bag.

[talozin]

It is not so bad when the game demands some inconsequential mechanical number (ie X ranks in jump) since you can just overlook this or re-fluff it in some way but it is far worse when the game demands a roleplay reason (ie membership in an arcane order). And alignment based stuff is especially bad in this regard.

My opinion is that, if a character meets the mechanical requirements and wants to take the class, it should just sort of be assumed that the IC organization (or whatever) will admit him. Depending on how lazy the MC is, he can either write this into the campaign as some sort of adventure, or he can just handwave it with a few lines of exposition at the start or end of a session.

Lago is right that PrCs work better (which is to say at all) if they're custom designed for a campaign, but this just sets up a no-win situation: either you use PrCs straight from the book, in which case you can find one that doesn't suck, but the requirements are shit. Or you can have your MC design them, in which case the odds are excellent that the class will blow, but the requirements are actually makeable.

And a whole bunch of this is an artifact of the fact that, despite the ostensible free multiclassing in 3E, multiclassing any primary spellcaster is more broken than the music industry's business model and sucks harder than a supermassive black hole.

[Gnosticism Is A Hoot]

also, from the perspective of a narrative, do you expect any real person to plan out their entire career from start to finish so they get the ideal set of life skills? or do you expect people to plan things out as they go because life's a series of events that can't usually be predicted in the long-term.

There is a middle ground between the two. I can't plan out the path my life will take, but I can sit down and say "Okay, I like [subject X], so I'm going to apply to [college Y] and [college Z] because they have good [subject X] programs; I'll try to get an internship with [company W] because they do good work in [subject X], and hopefully that will get me a full-time job with them after I graduate."

That's what planning out a build is like: Here's what I want my character to do/be like, what should my character practice with/learn to do to get there? Just because it's possible to get to college, find out you'd rather major in Interpretive Dance instead of Political Science, and completely change your life plans doesn't mean you can't make any plans beforehand, or that making shit up as you go along is better for a narrative or something like that.

This, seriously. Making detailed long-term plans while remaining open to changing circumstances is how successful people become successful. If anything, I would find a 'make no plans at all, do whatever seems like a good idea at the time' approach to be deeply out of character for a professional adventurer.

[Plebian]

This, seriously. Making detailed long-term plans while remaining open to changing circumstances is how successful people become successful. If anything, I would find a 'make no plans at all, do whatever seems like a good idea at the time' approach to be deeply out of character for a professional adventurer.

you can argue it either way; adventurers are commonly caught up in situations far, far beyond their training. sticking to your planned career path when Vileflame the Vilest has murdered everyone in your hometown and reanimated their corpses may be admirable from a powergaming standpoint but from the character's point of view it'd be entirely reasonable to start focusing on some undead- or mage-hunting PrC, instead of keeping on going for that PrC that focuses around punching dudes in the throat or some shit.

also a lot of PrCs assume you're receiving some kind of special training from some group of people, which is largely ignored in my experience but brings in the question "wait, how exactly did I just learn to teleport, again?"

[Lago PARANOIA]

but from the character's point of view it'd be entirely reasonable to start focusing on some undead- or mage-hunting PrC, instead of keeping on going for that PrC that focuses around punching dudes in the throat or some shit.

That's so incredibly myopic that it verges on retarded. I seriously cannot believe that you'd say something like that.

[Novembermike]

but from the character's point of view it'd be entirely reasonable to start focusing on some undead- or mage-hunting PrC, instead of keeping on going for that PrC that focuses around punching dudes in the throat or some shit.

That's so incredibly myopic that it verges on retarded. I seriously cannot believe that you'd say something like that.

Why? Nothing he said implies that it's the only real option. In DnD terms though the player never has that choice. He can't just take a couple levels in Undead Fighting 101 because he won't be any better at fighting undead in all likelihood and he'll be a lot worse at evertyhing than someone who just went for his normal progression.