Things Other People Aren't Allowed to Like

[echoVanguard]

I just hate it when games say that they're all epic and awesome and really they're not.

You really need to define this term better if you're going to keep throwing it around.

echo

[DSMatticus]

If you have VAHs fighting gods then it implies that five peasants with knives can fight a god, too.

You just implied that five peasants with knives are a match for the highest end VAH's. Do you think Conan would have trouble with a small mob of angry farmers?

More to the point, there's a lot of... confusing terminology going on here. We are talking about capabilities (vanilla and epic; i.e., climbing a mountain, flying to the top of it), and scale (beating up six people at once, cutting down an entire army). A level 20 3.5 fighter has purely vanilla capabilities; he steps up and swings his sword. But he could probably mow down a thousand people this way. He's doing something well beyond the scope of a VAH, in a purely VAH-manner.

And that's where 1e/2e gods and the fighters that fought them were. They did things on the rough level of VAH (in terms of melee combat, anyway), but they could do that vanilla-eyness so much that puny level 1's died to them by the hundreds. Of course, 1e/2e gods and spellcasters also had abilities that allowed them to completely bypass mundane VAH-type challenges. These problems were not introduced in 3.5; 3.5 just made them really super obvious.

Pretty much every edition of D&D until 4e had the problem that some people were playing one game while some others were playing another. 4e solved the problem by making everyone a VAH, and pretending you were cosmos-travelling superheroes. 4e is 30 levels of heroic tier, and any labelling otherwise is a dirty filthy lie.

Now, as a solution, you can either take something with the scale of 4e, and refluff it so it stops lying to you, or you can take something with the scale of 3.5, and eventually let people like fighters level out of being VAH. Either one is perfectly valid, and makes for a completely fine game. It's just a choice of which you want to do.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You really need to define this term better if you're going to keep throwing it around.

Quoting myself from another thread:

Okay, let me try putting this another way. Here are some facets of high-level play. Let's forget about phlebtonium and superpowers for a bit and talk more on theme and tone.

• The time and setting scale is zoomed out. Concerns that happen to high-level characters should happen on a scale of years rather than months. You no longer really give a care about the effects of things that happen in anything smaller than a country, because that's the level you start out with.
• The idea of you operating in a vacuum does not happen anymore. You are no longer an unloved, unmourned hobo. Even if you happen to be playing a character who is the literal incarnation of stealth, your concerns and actions effect everything. If you are the incarnation of war and you get beat up really badly, for the next several years people are a lot more willing to commit wartime atrocities. As you are Gruumsh the God of orcs, winning glory makes your followers smarter and more brawny.
• The status quo changes and constantly. Since you are at a godly or near-godly level, the setting can just go ahead and have big changes. There is a random roll to see whether Krynn is overrun with barbarians. There are random rolls to see what new metropolises are formed. Since you are now part of something bigger the game is more free to change shit around.
• Followers. There is absolutely no getting around it, you have at the very least a basement full of dragons who will follow your every word. While it's not necessary for every adventure or even campaign to have to include you commanding your druid hordes into battle, if you can't handle the idea of your character being theoretically expected to snap his fingers and fight alongside/command thousands or even hundreds of thousands of minions you shouldn't be playing high levels.
• Environmental and social engineering. Even if you're not the kind of person to raise continents from the ocean, you as a high-level character should focus on having some sort of impact on society at large. If you want to be a wizard whose highest ambition is to snort cocaine off of a succubus's tits then stay mid-level. If you want a wizard that created the best wizard's school from scratch after completely genociding/assimilating all of the Southern barbarians and after a couple of centuries brought most of the major nations under the heels of the wizard's guild, welcome to high levels.

Now, what's really sad is that a lot of 4E epic destinies meet every one of those criteria for being epic in the description and fluff. It's just that mechanically they never fail to match up. 99% of epic abilities or powers are less amazing on both a mechanical and conceptual level than motherfucking Mind Spike. That's why I'm so pissed off at the game; if they in their hearts thought that epic meant 'Spider-Man' I wouldn't be so angry, but their fluff clearly shows that they were trying to evoke an image way beyond that. They do that deceitful bait and switch CONSTANTLY and I'm fed up with it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You just implied that five peasants with knives are a match for the highest end VAH's. Do you think Conan would have trouble with a small mob of angry farmers?

Yes, actually. Conan can take on mob of angry farmers with if they're fighting him in broad daylight and have quick Star Wars-style cutaways to mask the fact that no one is really trying to kill him, but if they were to attack him at night after he's wasted on beer and prostitutes no one would call BULLSHIT if said five peasants gave him a good fight or even managed to beat him up and sell him into slavery.

[quanta]

if they were to attack him at night after he's wasted on beer and prostitutes no one would call BULLSHIT if said five peasants gave him a good fight or even managed to beat him up and sell him into slavery.

It had better be enough beer to kill a baby elephant, or I call shenanigans.

4e solved the problem by making everyone a VAH, and pretending you were cosmos-travelling superheroes.

Uh... you can do that in 4e (granted not totally freely until very high level), you just can't do it in 6 seconds.

[DSMatticus]

Yes. The DM can technically give you rituals and plot devices that let you travel the cosmos. It is not a well-developed part of the game, and is basically a "look, look! Don't worry, we still have plane shift! It's the same game, I promise!"

[quanta]

Yes. The DM can technically give you rituals and plot devices that let you travel the cosmos.

If your DM didn't stat out a planar adventure in 3e, that shit still wasn't happening just because you plane-shifted somewhere. Unless you like the DM just randomly pulling whatever the fuck he feels like out of his ass. There's still a planar handbook in 4e. The 2nd DMG ends with ~30 pages on Sigil.

Distant travel abilities really are only meaningful if your DM wants them to be.

And 4e pretty explicitly used to tell the DM "give the players the magic shit they fucking want". But yes, the designers have backpedaled or been fired and now you pretty much can't have the magic items you actually want ever.

[Lago PARANOIA]

It didn't, actually. It said 'a good way of getting people excited over treasure is to get lists from them' or something like that. It doesn't say anything about the DM having to use the lists. And because treasure parcels have a very uneven payout it'd actually be impossible to implement anyway without the group doing an out-of-game powwow to make sure that the party barbarian doesn't ask for a level +4 item at the same time a wizard asks for a level +4 item.

Of course that's a whole 'nother story. Koumei has a quote that pretty much gives my feelings on the 4E treasure situation. And yes, it really does fail that motherfuckingly hard.

[Josh_Kablack]

You just implied that five peasants with knives are a match for the highest end VAH's. Do you think Conan would have trouble with a small mob of angry farmers?

Yes, actually. Conan can take on mob of angry farmers with if they're fighting him in broad daylight and have quick Star Wars-style cutaways to mask the fact that no one is really trying to kill him, but if they were to attack him at night after he's wasted on beer and prostitutes no one would call BULLSHIT if said five peasants gave him a good fight or even managed to beat him up and sell him into slavery.

I think I'm letting myself get trolled here, but the REH Conan can totally take 5 farmers with torches and pitchforks.

Lemme pull up a couple of fights that Conan lost in stories by REH himself:

In an instant he was the center of a hurricane of stabbing spears and lashing clubs. But he moved in a blinding blur of steel. Spears bent on his armor or swished empty air, and his sword sang its death-song. The fighting-madness of his race was upon him, and with a red mist of unreasoning fury wavering before his blazing eyes, he cleft skulls, smashed breasts, severed limbs, ripped out entrails, and littered the deck like a shambles with a ghastly harvest of brains and blood.

Invulnerable in his armor, his back against the mast, he heaped mangled corpses at his feet until his enemies gave back panting in rage and fear. Then as they lifted their spears to cast them, and he tensed himself to leap and die in the midst of them, a shrill cry froze the lifted arms.

Crew of a pirate ship - would have been able to beat Conan after taking heavy losses, but protagonist saved via NPC intervention.

"I never saw a man fight as Conan fought. He put his back to the courtyard wall, and before they overpowered him the dead men were strewn in heaps thigh-deep about him. But at last they dragged him down, a hundred against one. When I saw him fall I dragged myself away feeling as if the world had burst under my very fingers.

100 soldiers, probably first level, and number possibly exagerrated due to perspective of character giving that account - able to beat Conan when he is hungover.

So it probably takes more like 50 than 5 farmers to gank him.

Personally I'd put the original REH version somewhere in the 6th-8th level range - based largely on the identifiable monsters he faces (he can't melee the T-rex in Red Nails, enemy "wizards" big tricks are lightning bolt and polymorph self.) and the likelihood that he has the leadership feat.

The Auhnold movie version is just someone who took a monk level somewhere and at has at least an 18 Str - because it only takes a 19 HP crit to cold-cock a camel.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Yeah, and in Star Wars Luke can dodge hundreds of laser blasts. It's not impossible for that to happen, but the odds are so low that it may as well be. If you have the author on your side you can tell probability to go take a hike--you cannot do this for an actual TTRPG where people don't have author wank and plot armor and manipulative editing to grease the skids without it being extremely disassociative. And even if you accept that, what's the point? You can suspend your disbelief to accept the fact that John Rambo will not get hit by the thousands of bullets that go after him or that Rocky Balboa can actually survive the beatings he takes in Rocky 3/4 but neither could survive getting a bowie knife in the heart if the story came to that? What's up with that? That's taking advantage of peoples' poor perceptions and inability to process probability to play on their puerile need to believe on some level that the story is 'real'. That kind of crap leads to A Million Little Pieces. Not exactly what I'd call the basis for an internally consistent game.

[quanta]

That's taking advantage of peoples' poor perceptions and inability to process probability to play on their puerile need to believe on some level that the story is 'real'. That kind of crap leads to A Million Little Pieces. Not exactly what I'd call the basis for an internally consistent game.

Most people really don't give a shit about consistency. It's nice that you harp on it and all, and consistency can be a good addition but it's not even vaguely as important to the vast majority of people as you make it out to be.

And seriously, for book conan, what exactly about those quotes was inconsistent? He can take 50 dudes. Full stop. He is that fucking strong and fast and his armor is awesome. Sure, that's roughly his limit, but that isn't inconsistent in and of itself.

[DSMatticus]

The Star Wars and Conan examples are totally separate. Luke stands there, making a target of himself, that for some reason no one can hit. Conan is involved in a melee brawl with armor and weapon, where his defense is presumably active.

Luke's super power is being unrealistically lucky. Conan's super power is being unrealistically talented at melee combat. Furthermore, Luke's luck is unexplained in the fiction; they never bother to say, "Luke has the force power 'manipulate probability.' But Conan's talent is explained; the book comes out and says, "yeah, Conan is that badass."

The Star Wars example is internally inconsistent (has plot armor), but the Conan example is completely consistent (is an unrealistically powerful VAH).

[Username17]

...which doesn't stop Conan from being beaten up and captured repeatedly by small groups of unimpressive people. In Rogues in the House, Conan is betrayed by a prostitute and captured while drunk by like two members of the watch.

-Username17

[Dog Quixote]

And seriously, for book conan, what exactly about those quotes was inconsistent? He can take 50 dudes. Full stop. He is that fucking strong and fast and his armor is awesome. Sure, that's roughly his limit, but that isn't inconsistent in and of itself.

When does he take 50 dudes?

I remember there are points in the stories, usually pitched battles, where it is implied that he killed a lot of people, but I don't remember numbers being given. (And in a pitched battle he wouldn't be taking on fifty people all by himself all at once.)

Conan always seems to get exagerrated in these debates, especially if you stick to just the Robert E Howard stories.

[DSMatticus]

Conan's actual ability (like nearly every fictional character's, ever) varies wildly with the plot. Josh just gave some examples where he kills a lot of people in apparently 1-on-lots combat, in the REH stories. Frank's pointing out he routinely gets smashed by handfuls of mooks. REH was not very consistent, which isn't very surprising.

The point of the Conan tangent was that Lago was implying this really weird thing where your options were either A) gods have super powers like high-level 3.5 casters, or B) five peasants have a decent chance of killing gods with pitchforks. Conan is sometimes a counter-example of this, because he does not have superpowers but still manages to take on more than five people at a time fairly routinely, depending on how REH is writing him. There is a fairly large middle-ground between being a superhero and getting beaten up by five dudes. Personally, I kind of like to play in that middleground; I'm okay with people that can take on 50 dudes at once in straight up fights, or even a few hundred, even if it's just by swinging a sword supernaturally well. But I'm really not okay with what high-level 3.5 wizards are capable of. (I like E6-E10.)

[sabs]

So play E6-E10, and don't try and change E12-20 for the people who enjoy playing guys from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or Tiger and Del, Dhulyn Wolfshead and Parno Lionsmane.

[Lago PARANOIA]

There is a fairly large middle-ground between being a superhero and getting beaten up by five dudes.

Depends on how you define Superhero. I mean Green Arrow and Batman are defined as superheroes and five dudes can be a challenge for them depending on the tactical situation.

What I was trying to get at though that while there's nothing wrong with wanting to play a guy without huge superpowers, the problem with VAHs is their selective plot-warping power. They don't have any real established rules; they're based on what the author thinks that they can get away without the audience going 'WTF get this anime shit out of there'. Which isn't consistent. For example, the kinds of beatings that VAH regularly take should leave them crippled and/or dead just as surely as a knife to the heart would, but going like the Energizer bunny from the former would get a pass while the latter would not.

TTRPGs cannot do this kind of thing however, not without letting some outside entity do broad overwrites. For example, if 50 guys attack Conan, should he beat them all up or should he get captured or sold into slavery? You don't frickin' know, so how do you decide the outcome? Your only choices are to allow authorial fiat to take place or to have a powerful random plot generator. How would you like to roll a d10 to see how you performed in battle? And I don't mean a d10 with modifiers against a DC, I mean a d10 with a TN that doesn't change whether you're fighting fifty guys or two.

[DSMatticus]

So play E6-E10, and don't try and change E12-20 for the people who enjoy playing guys from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or Tiger and Del, Dhulyn Wolfshead and Parno Lionsmane.

If I say "I like fruit loops," accusing me of wanting to shit all over your lucky charms is not the appropriate response.

Depends on how you define Superhero.

Agreed. For the purposes of how I was using it, I meant people who behave like mid-high-level 3.5 casters, in that they have entire sets of abilities normal people don't, and those abilities are really strong. Batman has only perfectly normal people abilities, though he's very strong at them and he has tons of plot armor. Green Arrow (weaker versions) has a set of abilities normal people don't, and those abilities aren't very strong.

The difference between a 3.5 wizard and a 3.5 fighter is not that "the fighter isn't good enough at killing people," though that's also true. It's that the fighter has no mechanical abilities beyond combat and no fluff explanation beyond being really good with a sword, while his counterparts have the non-combat abilities "obsolete mundane challenges" and the fluff explanation of "ULTIMATE COSMIC POWER." So you get the effect of the fighter being useless outside of combat AND he requires plot-warping/system bullshitery to stand toe to toe with someone like a wizard.

But in the Conan universe, there are not a lot of people (if any) who can fly or teleport to the top of mountains. Making your way up a mountain is a relevant task for even some of the most powerful people in the fiction. So the fact that Conan might have climb is actually really important. Similarly, there's no one in the Conan universe who destroys mountains with his fist, so we aren't forced to stop and ask, "why didn't Conan break like a twig when that dude punched him?"

Conan being a VAH type character and also being one of the most powerful people in his fiction (sometimes) is not at all plot-warping or inconsistent. Whereas, a level 15 fighter being one of the most powerful people in his fiction requires a lot of bullshittery.

[sabs]

it IS the appropriate response when you say that my lucky charms should taste like your fruit loops.

I'm pretty partial to my lucky charms, and everyone who likes fruit loops seems to think that should be the only cereal served at the cafeteria.

Can we stop talking about worlds that aren't' represented by D&D?
Conan isn't really D&D the most powerful wizard we ever see, can cast like 1 3rd level spell a day.. tops, and is usually having to do a ritual to do it.

[echoVanguard]

Ok, now that we have something to work with, we can start towards a real consensus.

...well, okay, maybe a more cohesive argument, at least.

First off, your expectations for character consistency aren't very realistic, but that isn't your fault - we've been conditioned for years to accept the idea that power-attacking a wall for six hours is reasonable behavior for a protagonist, or that wading through six hundred goblins at 10th level is so insignificant that we don't even roll. The problem is that this tends to create "hard stops" in content tiering, so that what was challenging for you a quarter of your career ago isn't merely easy, it's downright nonexistent.

Secondly, the earmarks of high-level play that you put forth not only seem somewhat disjointed, but several of them feel downright unplayable. I've played in 3.X games from 1st level all the way up to 35th, and while much of the high-level play felt very expansive, much of what you describe never happened. I'd like to put forth a counter-viewpoint of what "epic" should define:

The hallmark of leveled play is capability expansion. One of the features which often defines "epic" play is the exploration of areas, encounters, and concepts that were impossible before, such as challenges involving hazardous environments, combat with opponents that you previously could not have engaged, and new types of encounters.

At low level, you fight monsters of roughly similar size and shape to you who are not possessed of any strange or special powers. You might deal with physical traps which hit or cut you.

At medium levels, you begin to fight opponents that possess strange or unrealistic powers, like breathing ice or cutting through walls. You probably encounter traps that explode or disintegrate you.

At high level, you encounter environments that would kill an ordinary person intrinsically, like planes made entirely of fire or airless environments. You combat creatures that can't be hurt by normal weapons, or who have exceptionally exotic powers like the ability to rewind time or turn opponents into statues.

At very high level and epic levels, things begin to get unrecognizable to ordinary humans - you fight multidimensional creatures, grapple with non-relativistic time flows, battle traps which set off antimatter explosions, and have combats with creatures that can perform seriously mind-bending actions, like duplicate themselves or warp reality.

There are two common threads that weave through these concepts - one, the idea that higher-level characters can achieve and deal with things that are impossible to lower-leveled characters, and two, that higher-level characters are increasingly reliant upon some form of outside agency - usually magic, but sometimes highly-advanced technology or a similar external force. There's probably some kind of transhumanistic theme in there, but that's boring, so let's stick to the work at hand.

Lago makes an off-hand mention about having people level out of VAH, and I think that's a topic worth considering. Is having everyone eventually become a Wizard the only real way to make high-level play consistent and balanced?

echo

[Gx1080]

Is having everyone eventually become a Wizard the only real way to make high-level play consistent and balanced?

According to Lago, yes. Or basically, giving everybody the same level of magic juice.

[Red_Rob]

In Rogues in the House,

Why does this conjure up images of an 80's sitcom about pair of orphan Rogue children adopted into a rich Wizard household?

[Lago PARANOIA]

DSMatticus: I wasn't just talking about power level there. Even if you reduce the scope of the game so that the VAH performs in the sweet spot there's still a problem with the archetype--the problem being that a VAH's skillset is inconsistently defined. They simultaneously hold skillset A of 'peak real world human ability' and skillset B of 'anything that a non-phlebtoniumed hero can do in an action-adventure without being called weeaboo', which imply two different things.

If this was just a Conan problem we could chalk it up to bad writing but pretty much all VAHs in series that contain enough action in them end up dancing between these two contradictory definitions. Even if D&D or any tabletop game decided to just pick one and go with it they're still deviating from what VAHs do; it's important that James Bond / Conan / John McClane / Timothy Dalton / etc. are both able to take on dozens of mooks in fisticuffs or close range combat AND can simultaneously be taken out by two or three mooks that have the drop on then. Unless you make the game mechanics extremely disassociated and/or fiat-based picking a side is as much of an archetype deviation as declaring that Bruce Lee can now shoot fireballs out of his hand.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Lago makes an off-hand mention about having people level out of VAH, and I think that's a topic worth considering. Is having everyone eventually become a Wizard the only real way to make high-level play consistent and balanced?

I think that this question is ambiguous to the point of being loaded. 'Everyone eventually becoming a wizard' simultaneously implies 'everyone gets vast and meaningful superpowers' and 'everyone has to shed themselves of armor and swords and grow a bear and put on funny robes'.

A better, if still potentially loaded question would be 'is having everyone eventually become a superpower' (though that still conjures images of people in spandex and leather). Even better would be 'is having everyone develop some sort of fantastical or impossible ability really the only way to make high-level play balanced'.

To answer that question, I'd say not necessarily but it's pretty much outside the bounds of D&D. Playing a metropolis full of muggles or a 200-man squad of Praetorian-Guard Level fights all with university educations and complete with magical item wand ballistas, catapults, flamethrowing muskets, etc.. could be balanced with playing a high-level wizard.

[hogarth]

I think that this question is ambiguous to the point of being loaded. 'Everyone eventually becoming a wizard' simultaneously implies 'everyone gets vast and meaningful superpowers' and 'everyone has to shed themselves of armor and swords and grow a bear and put on funny robes'.

Who wouldn't want to grow a bear? Bears are awesome.