What's with the obsession with "High Level" D&D?

[Korwin]

Liked Alloy of Law

Mistborns seems to be a thing of the past

[OgreBattle]

Are there any examples of low or mid-level D&D in literature then? The original Conans? Looking for a little perspective to contrast the high level examples.

Conan has straight 18's for stats and psychic powers.

Low D&D literature is... if you read a fantasy novel and the skeleton the heroes pass by in the dungeon, that was a low level D&D guy.

In my current retroclone game, we've recruited orphaned kids as ablative armor for the 1hp mage. The Fighter has 1hp, I think his hireling has more than 1hp. I've seen a swashbuckler get bitten by a lizardman in the leg, and his spine was broken (roll on table when you go below 0 hp)

I am a 7hp Elf (Fighter/Mage) in plate armor, I can cast in armor. I stand behing my hireling with a shield, because I use a reach weapon.

There's really no fantasy literature that resembles this, ones that aren't comedy anyways.

[Aryxbez]

Are there any examples of low or mid-level D&D in literature then? The original Conans? Looking for a little perspective to contrast the high level examples.

Conan has straight 18's for stats and psychic powers.

On Conan: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=273220#273220

I could've sworn there was an entry in the Tomes that mentioned Conan being a Rogue, but it's true he does do Rogue like actions. I suppose it's possible he's got the equivalent of a 96pt point buy on him, given how his story plays up all his traits. However can just being skilled in many things, which a rogue does quite well, can even justify kinda why he doesn't tend to wear heavy armor too much (till late in his career). At that point, he's probably just fueling off of E6's rules of getting all these feats for armor prof, good writing skills and so on. Part of understanding him as a rogue, help those know why their Conan-expy's are very shallow form of the Shining blue eyed Cimmerian. However, how does Conan the barbarian have Psychic powers?

Elder Scrolls protagonists tend to be fitting low level characters as I recall. Can also consider likes of Ezio as a 1-5th level Rogue kind of character as well. Most Fantasy media I see these days, is pretty much well rooted in low levels, so play any of those, and you'll get comparisons, if you're willing to expand your examples into video games as well. For a more relevant example, seems John Carter of Mars is an example of a low-mid level character, since he's capable of taking on savage armies, and can jump 35ft with east, to like 200ft with effort.

[ishy]

Not sure if this book is any good but yeah :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Rogue

[Stubbazubba]

Going back to Mistborn. Anyone who red the Mistborn RPG?
(i'm still reading, didn't get to the Magic chapter, but I dont belive them its balanced with non-magic like they claimed in the Char Generation chapter)

I've read it and ran a handful of sessions of a game of it.

Mistborn and Allomancers are kind of balanced against each other (Mistborn have more breadth of ability, but Allomancers are better at their specialty), but regular people don't compare at all. The only way for a normal person to compare to even a Mistborn's level of competence is in the area of Resources, which no allomancy can boost. At least not directly.

Also, in my experience, it got really easy for players to get to the point where they could easily hit the highest TN in the book in their specialty, so I had to start improvising new ways of making challenges, y'know, challenging.

I was, overall, disappointed with the MAG; it was unbalanced (in the future I'll just make a rule saying no humans or Mistborn, just Allomancers, I would think), it was impossible to grok your odds on the dice, and it was far too easy to specialize in one thing until you simply didn't really have to roll it anymore. Also, the initiative order is funky, though I can see why, and what happens when you pick up a Beat or whatever is still a mystery to me (you don't get any more Action Dice but you can do something else after you most likely just spent all your Action Dice?)

Alloy of Law, however, is a great entry in the steampunk genre. I really enjoyed it. The original trilogy is quite good, too. I'm excited for the video game under development, and I've heard rumors that a movie is being pitched, as well.

[hyzmarca]

Elder Scrolls protagonists tend to be fitting low level characters as I recall.

Elder Scrolls protagonists have access to the construction set, canonically. That puts them slightly below the programers at Bethesda who created the game engine in terms of in-universe power level.

[MisterDee]

Are there any examples of low or mid-level D&D in literature then? The original Conans? Looking for a little perspective to contrast the high level examples.

Thinking about it, I'd say the Wheel of Time runs the gamut from low to high level.

You have to exclude Rand, however, as he gets plot coupons of awesomeness out of order. But otherwise:

Book 1: The four PCs (Perrin the Ranger, Mat the Rogue, Nynaeve the Cleric and Egwene the Wizard) get sent on an adventure. Bunch of capable NPCs accompany them, but even then the heroes are still roughly equal to competent regular people. They manage a few kills, etc.

Book 2: Egwene and Nynaeve miss a few sessions and return for the end of the book as mildly competent wizards and clerics. At that point they pack enough firepower to be serious threats despite not being physically imposing. Meanwhile Perrin and Mat get better BAB and some bullshit feats, plus I think Perrin starts to get some of his talk-to-animal powers there. Definitely still low-level however.

Book 3: Egwene and Nynaeve get a bit better (that's pretty much how it is through the entire scope of the series - they're usually faced with scaling threats and escalate their own power to match.) Mat earns his signature class ability of "reroll everything random, forever". Somehow, he's become significantly better than regular paladins/rangers in combat. Perrin gets more fighting prowess, and gets more wolf powers.

Book 4-5-6: More of the same. By book 6, I'd say they've clearly hit the mid-levels. Both Perrin and Mat have evolved into leaders (and their players are bitching about it), Egwene and Nynaeve have reached "well, we have enough abilities to fuck up any plot a mediocre DM thinks of having his superbadass highlevel badwizard try" level. Along the way, Egwene picked up a full spellcasting prestige class too.

Book 7 and 8. The GM is stumped and nearly kills the campaign with a side fetchquest for an artefact that will be used once and promptly forgotten. Every suggestion made by the PCs is rejected until he figures out what to do.

Book 9-and-onward: The GM found the Den and saw the light. After a few months of playing Dom3, he restarts the campaign. By now Egwene and Nynaeve have the ability, should they so choose, to detonate the equivalent of nuclear weapons on armies (sure, it's Aviendha that does it, but the two casters know how too). Nynaeve is allowed to basically rewrite the setting rules by healing just about everything possible. Perrin can now basically command all the wolves (he's obsessed about wolves, otherwise it'd be all the tyrannosaurs.) He forges an artefact-level weapon for himself, and basically decides that if he wants he'll go tell every single king to go fuck himself. Mat, at this point, literally goes to the realm of the Sidhe and essentially fucks Titania in front of Oberon and gets away with it (I may have made up that last part, but it's essentially the same level of I-don't-give-a-fuck-about-myths-and-legends.)

At the end of the next-to-last book, nobody in their right mind would fuck with any of the heroes. By now, the badass Dukes-of-Hell stand-in wizards won't go near Egwene or Nynaeve. There is literally nothing in the Dark One's physical cupboard that can go toe-to-toe with any of the PCs. (They might try, but they'd lose.) Mat is literally immune to half of the magic in the world. Perrin probably can deal with that too.

And I've skipped some of the PC's top-level powers in that description.

(Oh, and the as-yet-to-be-published final book will probably end up with the DMPC rewriting the whole of existence, and he won't seem that powerful compared to the rest of the party.

[JigokuBosatsu]

hilarity

This makes me want to go back and finish the series. And that's saying something.

[rasmuswagner]

hilarity

This makes me want to go back and finish the series. And that's saying something.

Book ...10? IIRC....is 1 million pages of more Aes Sedai and other female channelers than you can possibly distinguish, spending the entire book glaring and scowling at each other.

[Kaelik]

hilarity

This makes me want to go back and finish the series. And that's saying something.

Book ...10? IIRC....is 1 million pages of more Aes Sedai and other female channelers than you can possibly distinguish, spending the entire book glaring and scowling at each other.

I think you mean every book is that.

[JigokuBosatsu]

This makes me want to go back and finish the series. And that's saying something.

Book ...10? IIRC....is 1 million pages of more Aes Sedai and other female channelers than you can possibly distinguish, spending the entire book glaring and scowling at each other.

I think you mean every book is that.

Beat me to it. Am I alone in wanting the books to just basically James Bond with the serial numbers filed off, all about the bone-tastic adventures of antihero Mat Cauthon, getting wacky steampunk gadgets from his Illuminator pal and... oh, I can't go on. The dream will never see the light of day.

[jadagul]

Book ...10? IIRC....is 1 million pages of more Aes Sedai and other female channelers than you can possibly distinguish, spending the entire book glaring and scowling at each other.

I think you mean every book is that.

Beat me to it. Am I alone in wanting the books to just basically James Bond with the serial numbers filed off, all about the bone-tastic adventures of antihero Mat Cauthon, getting wacky steampunk gadgets from his Illuminator pal and... oh, I can't go on. The dream will never see the light of day.

Book ten is particularly bad. This is because books ten and eleven are essentially one book that was too long to be published at once, so book ten doesn't really have an ending. If you read 10 and 11 together without stopping as one 1500-page book it's actually quite satisfying. (The same is true of 8 and 9, actually).

I like WoT as an example here because it's one of the very few cases where not only the characters but the actual world changes from a low-level world to a high-level world. Basically over the course of book six. The main plots of book 5 involve one set of characters fighting an enormous war with hundreds of thousands of grunts on each side while two or three wizards are doing some random blasting from the side (wizards participating in wars at all is unheard of at this point), while another set of characters are trying to get from one city to another city.

The main character has a slow teleport but he basically uses it for nothing important the whole book. Until the last scene, where he invents scry-and-die as a tactic. By the end of book seven scry-and-die is more common than not.

Over the course of book six the other characters learn teleport, and the main character realizes how easy life is if he uses it all the damn time. The final set piece battle starts out with two hundred-thousand-plus armies fighting, each with a couple hundred wizards (who all had to march to get there). The battle is then completely changed when a force of like 300 other wizards (just wizards, no grunts) teleport in out of nowhere and kick the enemy army's ass, by themselves.

From the end of that book most armies have mass teleport and all armies you care about have a bunch of wizards doing a lot of the heavy work. And, as MisterDee points out, all the characters pull progressively more spectacular asymmetrical shenanigans where in straight-up combats they Just Win and the challenge is understanding the politics of situations, finding their enemies, rooting out traitors, and generally figuring out where to bring the hammer down.

[Korwin]

Book 9-and-onward: The GM found the Den and saw the light. After a few months of playing Dom3, he restarts the campaign. By now Egwene and Nynaeve have the ability, should they so choose, to detonate the equivalent of nuclear weapons on armies (sure, it's Aviendha that does it, but the two casters know how too). Nynaeve is allowed to basically rewrite the setting rules by healing just about everything possible. Perrin can now basically command all the wolves (he's obsessed about wolves, otherwise it'd be all the tyrannosaurs.) He forges an artefact-level weapon for himself, and basically decides that if he wants he'll go tell every single king to go fuck himself. Mat, at this point, literally goes to the realm of the Sidhe and essentially fucks Titania in front of Oberon and gets away with it (I may have made up that last part, but it's essentially the same level of I-don't-give-a-fuck-about-myths-and-legends.)

Book 11, the GM changes and things gets rolling again (finally!).

[Aryxbez]

Elder Scrolls protagonists tend to be fitting low level characters as I recall.

Elder Scrolls protagonists have access to the construction set, canonically. That puts them slightly below the programers at Bethesda who created the game engine in terms of in-universe power level.

If you're being sarcastic, I think you need to make it a bit more obvious, since this is text. Could you explain what you mean "canonically"? As I assume you're referring to the fact that players get access to modding tools to do whatever they want to the game. So aside from using Mod's to look prettier and fix any design issues , how's it canonical if the game is being played straight from then on? Regardless if ye even have to go in, and add stats to the way ye want when leveling up or something. Unless you're referring to the storys, how apparently ye kill gods in Morrowind, though it sounds like most of these "gods" don't really have high level abilities anyway, so if they're still in range of low-mid anyway, then it's still a source of low level fantasy. Although, the lore does have some pretty damn cool sounding stuff in there, enough so I'd like to see those in the ACTUAL GAMES.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Elder Scrolls protagonists tend to be fitting low level characters as I recall.

Elder Scrolls protagonists have access to the construction set, canonically. That puts them slightly below the programers at Bethesda who created the game engine in terms of in-universe power level.

If you're being sarcastic, I think you need to make it a bit more obvious, since this is text. Could you explain what you mean "canonically"? As I assume you're referring to the fact that players get access to modding tools to do whatever they want to the game. So aside from using Mod's to look prettier and fix any design issues , how's it canonical if the game is being played straight from then on? Regardless if ye even have to go in, and add stats to the way ye want when leveling up or something. Unless you're referring to the storys, how apparently ye kill gods in Morrowind, though it sounds like most of these "gods" don't really have high level abilities anyway, so if they're still in range of low-mid anyway, then it's still a source of low level fantasy. Although, the lore does have some pretty damn cool sounding stuff in there, enough so I'd like to see those in the ACTUAL GAMES.

It's called CHIM.

http://fallingawkwardly.wordpress.com/2 ... nd-part-3/
EDIT: further googling yields
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/615803-t ... m/61231075
and
http://1d4chan.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls#CHIM