TTRPGs should punish people who play DMFs.

[name_here]

Actually Josh, while you are 100% correct in most respects, his actual example was people using the map creation engine to create and play DOTA.

Is anyone so stupid that they think Blizzard hadn't thought that people might take the game creation engine in a game with heroes that level up and make and play a DOTA variant?

Well, I mean, besides ishy.

Because everyone else knows that "playing DOTA" is not something Blizzard hadn't thought of.

You... do realize he was talking about WCIII? I.E, the game in which DOTA was first invented? Well, I guess it was based off the preexisting Aeon Of Strife concept, which... was invented in the Starcraft map editor.

I can say with reasonable confidence that a mod in which people controlled individual heroes that leveled up after a fashion was probably not exactly how Blizzard expected the map editor to be used for a game with no integrated level-up mechanics that focused on basebuilding and managing large groups of units.

[Kaelik]

Yes really, I mean WIII, the game where they made heroes who gain levels by farming neutral uncontrolled enemies in order to make them better at killing enemy heroes who do the say thing might have predicted some kind of game where people made the base managing part of the game minimal to focus on leveling heroes.

[K]

So the game world has dirt farmers and spear catchers and shit. There are rules for those people, but you don't want people to play them because they are fucking terrible. So you label them as "NPC only". That's an incentive to not play them. In fact, it's a punishment for playing them, because in order to play one you will have to go through the gauntlet of having the DM look at your character sheet and say "This is an NPC class, what the fuck are you trying to pull?" And while you aren't going to do anything so drastic as that to discourage people from writing up Paladins who don't have arms and armor or to discourage people from writing up Wizards who don't have attack spells in their spellbook, you're still going to do something to guide players in the right direction on those fronts as well.

-Username17

No, you don't have rules for dirt farmers and spear catchers that suck. If you are going to have those rules at all, they have to be comparable to other options or you should not not have them all.

That's the key here: incentives clearly don't work and we know that because people are still playing fighters and monks and all the other substandard things. Hell, they even try to take levels in Aristocrat or Commoner even though these things are clearly marked as "NPC-only" and are demonstrably bad just from glancing at them.

You can't remove optimization from the game or chargen, but you can remove clearly inferior choices from chargen. You can give people equipment packages at first level instead of a pool of gold. You can make NPCs use packaged PC levels instead of having a separate and terrible set of classes for them. You can preset Wizard spells so that they automatically get some good spells.

This won't force them to make good choices in play, but it will prevent them from making choices in chargen that ruin everyone's future experiences with that character. Bad play choices are erased in the next adventure, but bad chargen choices haunt a character for as long as its played.

As a thought experiment, just try to think about the changes you'd make if you wanted there to be no bad choices at chargen. I think you'll find that it would create a game that is far more playable, far more noob-friendly, and far more streamlined and easy to run with far less time spent on chargen and on level-up that could be spent playing.

[DSMatticus]

No, you don't have rules for dirt farmers and spear catchers that suck. If you are going to have those rules at all, they have to be comparable to other options or you should not not have them all.

You need those rules if the players are going to interact with them at all. At the very least, PC's need to know how hard they have to smack their dirt farmers to keep them in line (or, more heroically: what's the biggest monster a bunch of dirt farmers can handle before they have to intervene to save the day). You don't have to have them as rules for PC gen, though, which is kind of what Frank's saying.

That's the key here: incentives clearly don't work and we know that because people are still playing fighters and monks and all the other substandard things.

In actual play with actual DM's, fighter does not remain a sub-optimal choice. There's a reason every defense of the fighter v wizard balance point includes "and the DM dumped a bunch of awesome items and abilities in my lap then sandbagged every encounter, so it's okay!" Because DM's actually do that, either because fighter is the 'cool' archetype that gets to be the hero with the macguffin or because they recognize the balance problems and try to fix them. And I want to note that getting your ass-kicked in every encounter for being a fighter is effectively a punishment, not an incentive, and people are going to blame the DM and the game more than they blame their decisions.

You can't exhaustively prevent bad chargen choices in any system with any D&D-like complexity or features at all. But you shouldn't have to, either; people usually don't jump through hoops to end up at suboptimal classes. People say, "monk, fighter; those seem cool. I'll play one," or "evocation? Hell yeah I wanna blow things up." And it turns out those really simple, really obvious choices lead straight to dead ends.

You don't have to obliterate every part of chargen that could ever lead to poor choices. You just need to make certain the core concepts that your game claims to support are not drastically inferior. Sure, clerics might be able to take nothing but create water, but seriously; how many times has that come up? Do you really need to make rules to prevent it? No! Stop wasting your time!

[ishy]

Really? Fucking Tic Tac Toe?
That's your example of a game where the designer exhaustively thought about how people play the game? Now you're just smoking crack cocaine.

I think you're lacking in reading comprehension. I used it as an example of a game where "a designer will necessarily have a totally comprehensive enumeration of all possible acceptable modes of play". And I used it as an example, because it is an often used example when you're trying to explain exactly that to people.

[nockermensch]

As a thought experiment, just try to think about the changes you'd make if you wanted there to be no bad choices at chargen. I think you'll find that it would create a game that is far more playable, far more noob-friendly, and far more streamlined and easy to run with far less time spent on chargen and on level-up that could be spent playing.

I like this because it seems to tie nicely into the HD = CR thing that I think, should be an ideal.

One of the things I'd like to see in a leveled fantasy RPG is actual parity in the expectations of being "high level". If the 8th level party knows they're up against a 13th level wizard they should feel the same dread as if they were against a 13th level general, or 13th level Assassin. Also ideally, the showdowns against these different NPCs should feel different, but be equally dangerous.

That [awesome] hidden tag that some monsters as dragons have really has to go, in the same way that the [awesome] tag currently on spellcasters has. (or rather, the [shit-tier] tag has to go from the Fighting man)

[K]

No, you don't have rules for dirt farmers and spear catchers that suck. If you are going to have those rules at all, they have to be comparable to other options or you should not not have them all.

You need those rules if the players are going to interact with them at all. At the very least, PC's need to know how hard they have to smack their dirt farmers to keep them in line (or, more heroically: what's the biggest monster a bunch of dirt farmers can handle before they have to intervene to save the day). You don't have to have them as rules for PC gen, though, which is kind of what Frank's saying.

You don't need those rules at all.

For example, you don't need Commoner and Aristocrat levels rules that conform to the same level design guideline as a PC class. Instead, you could do the 2e solution and just have an annotation that says "NPCs that don't have PC levels have a d4 HPs," which converted to 3e would mean giving NPCs a single racial HD that gets replaced if you take real levels. Dirt Farmers just become people who are like Orcs in the MM.

The second option is to make Commoner levels really competitive and just let it be an option that people take. That works too.

The third option, the shitty incentive one, is make them conform to the PC model where they instantly become things that PCs want and feel reasonable for wanting. That's the unworkable one that we have now where players can say something like "Hey, its got the concept I want and it has BAB and HD and skills...and it's not like another level of Rogue is really giving me much more since the next level is empty anyway."

Option 1 and 2 work, and Option 3 does not because its a shitty trap choice that people will want to pick even when it's on the NPC-only shelf. (Hell, most of the classes in Rifts that I wanted to play were on the NPC-only shelf.)

You don't have to obliterate every part of chargen that could ever lead to poor choices. You just need to make certain the core concepts that your game claims to support are not drastically inferior. Sure, clerics might be able to take nothing but create water, but seriously; how many times has that come up? Do you really need to make rules to prevent it? No! Stop wasting your time!

Why not? It takes almost no time to just make a game with fewer bad choices in it.

Do you know how much time I have spent buying basic equipment during chargen? Hell, in most DnD games I've played the entire first 8-12 hour session is blown on chargen.

Frankly, people taking suck options comes up almost every time we do chargen AND every time someone levels up. There is always some guy that doesn't understand that Rogues make better knight-type characters than Fighters or that Bards and Monks suck. There is exhaustive research on prereqs for feats and PrCs that often leads to people having terrible feats now in exchange for the chance at good feats later. There is an endless search for spells and comparison shopping.

Option paralysis is a thing, and I see it every chargen.

It's even the reason why Monsters as PCs rules were never going to work well.... no one had the fucking time or page space to add yet another level of complexity to the game.

[Libertad]

It certainly doesn't rule it out, however. Emergent gameplay certainly exists but you must be careful not to confuse the game for the deck it's being played with. If I invent playing cards en route to creating the game War, that doesn't mean I am a great designer if people skip my turd of game but use the cards to invent cribbage.

I meant akin to finding more routes, play styles, and applications within the rules of the game that the designers did not foresee as opposed to designing an entirely new game.

[hyzmarca]

Really? Fucking Tic Tac Toe?
That's your example of a game where the designer exhaustively thought about how people play the game? Now you're just smoking crack cocaine.

I think you're lacking in reading comprehension. I used it as an example of a game where "a designer will necessarily have a totally comprehensive enumeration of all possible acceptable modes of play". And I used it as an example, because it is an often used example when you're trying to explain exactly that to people.

That's not necessarily true. If you design Tic-Tac-Toe, you probably aren't going to anticipate Tic-Tac-Chess, which is an extremely different mode of play.

[sabs]

I understood the example, I just think it's complete bollocks.
A) Even if it's true that the designers thought of every possible acceptables modes of play. Which I'm not even sure that's true. The complexity differences between tic tac toe and a rpg are really vast.
B) I'm not even sure they looked beyond X starts first.
C) Tic-Tac-Toe is designed as a game to teach children that somethings aren't winnable.

And I'm pretty positive they didn't take into account
3d tic tac toe
quantum tic tac toe
tic tac tactic
tic tac chess

[Whipstitch]

I meant akin to finding more routes, play styles, and applications within the rules of the game that the designers did not foresee as opposed to designing an entirely new game.

Then I honestly don't even see what your point is other than quibbling about the largely semantic difference between "Empowering players so that many choices are viable" and "Limiting the power of options so that no single strategy dominates." Because when it comes right down to it limiting people is seriously about all you can do as a game designer. You define an objective, you set how much information is available and then you decide whether to limit the players in other ways. You sure as hell can't do anything else for them because you're not playing the game for them.

[Libertad]

Then I honestly don't even see what your point is other than quibbling about the largely semantic difference between "Empowering players so that many choices are viable" and "Limiting the power of options so that no single strategy dominates." Because when it comes right down to it limiting people is seriously about all you can do as a game designer. You define an objective, you set how much information is available and then you decide whether to limit the players in other ways. You sure as hell can't do anything else for them because you're not playing the game for them.

My point is that gamers can play the game in ways the designers might not like or intend, but that trying to "correct" these people is not the primary job of a game designer. In an open-ended game like D&D, there's going to be players who play characters differently than the designers. The game designer's primary job is to make a game that a lot of people will play, and correct badly worded rules.

Example: not everybody played 3rd Edition Clerics like healbots (like the game designers did in playtesting). The 3rd Edition designers could have nerfed the Cleric to a healbot role because people were playing it different, but a lot of gamers preferred playing another way. Playing a Cleric as a "warrior" can be both a lot of fun and an effective way of fighting. I say for certain that the way the majority of Gaming Den regulars play 3rd Edition is not the way the designers played the game.

Another example is Cthulhutech. The game designers hated the idea of Tagers being Mecha pilots, or inter-Tier groups. They designed the way they wanted to play the game and errata'ed things to prevent people from "playing the wrong way," but the tactless way they handled it contributed to one of several reasons why people shied away from the RPG. I don't think these "you're playing it wrong!" statements improved the game by driving away customers.

I realize that the 3rd Edition example was a massive oversight of the game designers, though. I also think that returning Clerics back to a non-offensive healbot would be bad for many gamers, even if the game designers liked to play that way.

[nockermensch]

Then why do you gain XP?

-Username17

As a mechanism to facilitate noticeable growth in character power over the course of a campaign.

Granted, in practice bonus XP is typically handed out when players do things the DM wants to encourage, but character advancement up to a certain rate is expected rather than appreciated.

You missed the point entirely. XP is a form of positive conditioning - a series of rewards received for the continued action of playing the game. It's one of the things that keeps people playing long campaigns - the intermittent reward of additional character power is a motivator.

Nockermensch is thus completely off his damn rocker, because if there wasn't an expectation of reward for playing the game there wouldn't need to be any XP. XP rewards can be set up to reward anything from telling jokes to butchering monsters to bringing the MC a beer. But at the very least they reward showing up to the game. Making it to game night is the bell, the XP is the food. The fact that you locate your character sheet the day before is you salivating.

-Username17

WTF Frank, are you still one of the guys who wrote the alternative Character Advancement schedules at the book of Gears, including the ones where characters don't get more powerful?

Of course, "character growth" is a big fucking deal and one of the two telling signs that what you're playing is a RPG, but: 1) there are games where nobody is getting stronger and people still play them anyway; 2) MMOs dangle the XP carrot better than TTRPGs, anyway.

Now, if you talk about, uh ... MTP rewards, then sure, that works, but in a so blindingly obvious way that's almost silly to mention: the players more involved with the game get more stuff from it. If one guy wants to marry the princess after saving her from the dragon and another guy wants to press X to skip the cutscene (not an actual example), guess who'll be carrying one useful trinket next game.

Again, from personal experience, neither kind of reward managed to change the behavior of unatentive players (the only kind I had trouble with). For those, the only thing I found that worked was to go after their characters and, uh, drag them struggling into the spotlight from time to time. Whenever I managed to get them interested in some NPC or story bit, they'd start paying more attention in general.

[Stubbazubba]

You missed the point entirely. XP is a form of positive conditioning - a series of rewards received for the continued action of playing the game. It's one of the things that keeps people playing long campaigns - the intermittent reward of additional character power is a motivator.

Nockermensch is thus completely off his damn rocker, because if there wasn't an expectation of reward for playing the game there wouldn't need to be any XP. XP rewards can be set up to reward anything from telling jokes to butchering monsters to bringing the MC a beer. But at the very least they reward showing up to the game. Making it to game night is the bell, the XP is the food. The fact that you locate your character sheet the day before is you salivating.

-Username17

While the expectation of XP is deeply-ingrained in gamers, it's not what brings most people to the game. It is still an extra, extrinsic incentive which encourages certain behaviors, but honestly, it's a pretty weak one. Most DMs give out XP for playing the game however you like more than killing monsters or collecting treasure specifically, let alone the fact that the vast majority of games on the market today have abandoned the idea of only giving XP for certain, narrow playstyles. We're only one step away from just not having it anymore.

It would be weird to not have it, but I think it would be great to get away from Skinner box reward schedules a little and talk up the intrinsic rewards of playing in RPG books. It would be great if playing the game was, in fact, more fun than leveling up.

Regardless, the extrinsic reward of XP does not motivate people to not be DMFs in the first place.

[Username17]

While the expectation of XP is deeply-ingrained in gamers, it's not what brings most people to the game. It is still an extra, extrinsic incentive which encourages certain behaviors, but honestly, it's a pretty weak one. Most DMs give out XP for playing the game however you like more than killing monsters or collecting treasure specifically, let alone the fact that the vast majority of games on the market today have abandoned the idea of only giving XP for certain, narrow playstyles. We're only one step away from just not having it anymore.

It would be weird to not have it, but I think it would be great to get away from Skinner box reward schedules a little and talk up the intrinsic rewards of playing in RPG books. It would be great if playing the game was, in fact, more fun than leveling up.

Regardless, the extrinsic reward of XP does not motivate people to not be DMFs in the first place.

Are you trying to make my point for me? I really have no idea why or how you think that is a refutation of a single thing I said. Power gain is and always has been a form of positive conditioning to keep people playing the game. DMFs and Monks don't get as much power and have a higher rate of quitting (seriously: how many times have you watched a Monk player get frustrated at his own ineffectiveness and quit the game?). But these lower rates of power growth do not effectively keep people from playing DMFs or Monks in the first place. How could they?

It takes almost no time to just make a game with fewer bad choices in it.

Yes, but the game suffers when you remove too many of the bad choices. Flight and Fireball is a good combination, Flight and Vampiric Touch is not. Sanctuary and Summon Monster is a good combination, Sanctuary and Knife Spray is not. But the game doesn't get better when we give people rigid predefined spell choices.

For one thing, writing out all the possible spell choices that are "not bad" would:

• Still have better and worse selections on it.
• Be way longer than writing a set of spells and letting people choose.

The things you really have to take away are the things like Monk and Spring Attack that tell the player that they are good choices while actually being bad choices. That is super fucked. Bad choices that are obviously bad choices (or at least non-standard choices) aren't something you can or even want to eliminate from the game. There is nothing stopping the player of the Thief from deciding to spend combat actions picking gold off the ground instead of helping his party win the fight. He should not do that because it's a bad choice, but you can't remove it from the game without making a game even more limited than 4e.

-Username17

[K]

It takes almost no time to just make a game with fewer bad choices in it.

Yes, but the game suffers when you remove too many of the bad choices. Flight and Fireball is a good combination, Flight and Vampiric Touch is not. Sanctuary and Summon Monster is a good combination, Sanctuary and Knife Spray is not. But the game doesn't get better when we give people rigid predefined spell choices.

For one thing, writing out all the possible spell choices that are "not bad" would:

• Still have better and worse selections on it.
• Be way longer than writing a set of spells and letting people choose.

Who says that you have to balance every combo with unlimited choices? Who even thinks that it's possible?

At worst, you just need to make sure that our example Wizard has some good spells. This means his beginning spell list needs to look like "Grease, Color Spray, Extra Choice 1, Extra Choice 2" and not be a free-for-all of choices where it might look like "Alarm, Hold Portal, Unseen Servant, Mount."

Let the player pick some bad spells if he wants to as long as he has some pre-decided good options.

It's also fine if he misses out on the synergy stuff. The guy with Fly and Fireball is just going to be 30% better and the game can handle that, but the game can't handle the PC who is 95% useless because he decided to be a Divination specialist who only takes Divination spells.

The things you really have to take away are the things like Monk and Spring Attack that tell the player that they are good choices while actually being bad choices. That is super fucked. Bad choices that are obviously bad choices (or at least non-standard choices) aren't something you can or even want to eliminate from the game. There is nothing stopping the player of the Thief from deciding to spend combat actions picking gold off the ground instead of helping his party win the fight. He should not do that because it's a bad choice, but you can't remove it from the game without making a game even more limited than 4e.

-Username17

You can't do much about suboptimal play. For example, you can't stop the Rogue from picking up gold from the ground during combat.

You CAN make sure that his other options for actions that he can do aren't meaningless. I mean, in every version of DnD the Wizard had an option to do a nearly useless knife attack that probably wouldn't hit and that's bullshit. That attack needs to be level-appropriate if it's going to be an option even if you decide that it's usually the worst of the available options for a Wizard.

[Koumei]

I mean, in every version of DnD the Wizard had an option to do a nearly useless knife attack that probably wouldn't hit and that's bullshit. That attack needs to be level-appropriate if it's going to be an option even if you decide that it's usually the worst of the available options for a Wizard.

I really hope you're saying "everyone should fall within some slim range of accuracy levels rather than having the BAB divide we had in 3.X where the only way Wizards hit anything is by doing touch attacks. The weapon won't do much damage and his accuracy is a couple of points lower than the fighter, but unlike a melee spell it doesn't provoke and is Slashing Damage, so you could conceivably use it", and not "Wizards should be unable to use weapons/have no weapon proficiencies" (people will still picture iconic wizards and take staves they have no proficiency with and then foolishly try to use them). And also not "A wizard using a dagger is just as good as a warlord using a greatsword or a rogue using a pair of daggers".

[Stubbazubba]

I think he means that casters should have an Eldritch Blast-like Magic Missile ability which is just at-will which remains level appropriate as the caster levels up. I don't think he's really referring to casters using weapons at all.

[K]

I mean, in every version of DnD the Wizard had an option to do a nearly useless knife attack that probably wouldn't hit and that's bullshit. That attack needs to be level-appropriate if it's going to be an option even if you decide that it's usually the worst of the available options for a Wizard.

I really hope you're saying "everyone should fall within some slim range of accuracy levels rather than having the BAB divide we had in 3.X where the only way Wizards hit anything is by doing touch attacks. The weapon won't do much damage and his accuracy is a couple of points lower than the fighter, but unlike a melee spell it doesn't provoke and is Slashing Damage, so you could conceivably use it", and not "Wizards should be unable to use weapons/have no weapon proficiencies" (people will still picture iconic wizards and take staves they have no proficiency with and then foolishly try to use them). And also not "A wizard using a dagger is just as good as a warlord using a greatsword or a rogue using a pair of daggers".

I'm saying that you either need to either say "Wizards do no damage with knife attacks" or you say something like "Wizard knife attacks are 70%-strength Warlord greatsword attacks."

You also need to give the Warlord other attacks that are as interesting as Wizard spells, but that's another issue.

[hogarth]

I'm saying that you either need to either say "Wizards do no damage with knife attacks" or you say something like "Wizard knife attacks are 70%-strength Warlord greatsword attacks."

Dictating that "Wizards do no damage with knife attacks" instead of "wizards do very little damage with knife attacks" doesn't solve anything. In a game with sufficient complexity for me to find it interesting, there will always be poor choices for the player to make and there will always be dumb players (or "awesome roleplayers", depending on whom you ask) willing to make those choices. Trying to stamp them all out will just result in a game where you "Press any key to continue" (i.e., it doesn't matter which action you take because they're all about equal).

Like Frank said, the important thing is to make sure that there aren't any options that sound awesome at first glance but that actually suck in practice (e.g. spring attacking monks).

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm saying that you either need to either say "Wizards do no damage with knife attacks" or you say something like "Wizard knife attacks are 70%-strength Warlord greatsword attacks."

I disagree. Having a wizard who is almost worthless in melee combat is actually significantly distinct from having a wizard who is completely worthless in melee combat. Because the first one can actually accomplish something worthwhile in melee combat, and then it becomes a good story.

[K]

I'm saying that you either need to either say "Wizards do no damage with knife attacks" or you say something like "Wizard knife attacks are 70%-strength Warlord greatsword attacks."

Dictating that "Wizards do no damage with knife attacks" instead of "wizards do very little damage with knife attacks" doesn't solve anything. In a game with sufficient complexity for me to find it interesting, there will always be poor choices for the player to make and there will always be dumb players (or "awesome roleplayers", depending on whom you ask) willing to make those choices. Trying to stamp them all out will just result in a game where you "Press any key to continue" (i.e., it doesn't matter which action you take because they're all about equal).

I disagree. Having a wizard who is almost worthless in melee combat is actually significantly distinct from having a wizard who is completely worthless in melee combat. Because the first one can actually accomplish something worthwhile in melee combat, and then it becomes a good story.

I consider my point proved.

Clearly, Angel wants the nearly worthless attack because he thinks it's awesome when that guy can actually accomplish something worthwhile with his nearly worthless attack. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that a lot of players would feel bad if the nearly worthless attack was removed for similar reasons.

This is why that attack either can't exist or has to not be worthless. It's a trap option when it's nearly worthless because it has a strong thematic element that makes people want to use it when logic would say that they should be using an actually effective action, and it perversely becomes more attractive the more worthless it is (but the attractiveness bottoms out when it's completely worthless). It's no different from the strongly-themed Monk that has been sandbagging parties for for over a decade or why people ask to take Aristocrat levels.

Stabbing people with melee weapons has a lot of traction even when it's nearly worthless. This is why it can't be nearly worthless and the mechanics have to not punish people for doing thematically appropriate things.

I'll also say that there is a long distance between making an action minimally worthwhile and making every action the same. There is no reason why a Wizard knife attack can't be the worst attack a Wizard has while avoiding making it nearly worthless. It's actually trivial to hit that balance point.

[echoVanguard]

There is no reason why a Wizard knife attack can't be the worst attack a Wizard has while avoiding making it nearly worthless. It's actually trivial to hit that balance point.

So in other words, you're advocating that there should be a minimum level of effectiveness for any action a character can take which is intrinsically scaled to be worthwhile at any given power level, correct? Something like, say, 1/2 character level + a d20, dealing [1W] damage per tier?

echo

[nockermensch]

There is no reason why a Wizard knife attack can't be the worst attack a Wizard has while avoiding making it nearly worthless. It's actually trivial to hit that balance point.

So in other words, you're advocating that there should be a minimum level of effectiveness for any action a character can take which is intrinsically scaled to be worthwhile at any given power level, correct? Something like, say, 1/2 character level + a d20, dealing [1W] damage per tier?

echo

This actually ties better in what's being described in the Monte Cook game's thread. If the game is leveled, a guy of level X must perform in a way that makes sense for that level. But yeah, this also means that the ancient geriatric wizard can on occasion flip out, do some sick beard-fu moves and then throw a dagger for like 1d4+18. I think everybody wins when this gets better accepted.

[K]

There is no reason why a Wizard knife attack can't be the worst attack a Wizard has while avoiding making it nearly worthless. It's actually trivial to hit that balance point.

So in other words, you're advocating that there should be a minimum level of effectiveness for any action a character can take which is intrinsically scaled to be worthwhile at any given power level, correct? Something like, say, 1/2 character level + a d20, dealing [1W] damage per tier?

echo

Basically, yes.

Otherwise, you shouldn't even be able to do that action. I mean, no one really pretends that 15th level Wizards can disarm worth a damn even though it's one of his potential actions, so including it in a list of "awesome actions you can't succeed at even though you can try them" in the rulebook is just bad design.