Shitty character concepts need to die

[Username17]

Letting you "earn" an ability that makes the game suck less is the kind of shit they do in MMOs. Just make the game not suck, for everyone, starting immediately. Why the fuck would you ever do anything else?

We're talking about the action "go to the bottom of the sea and adventure there" in the context of "people want to play low level characters who are constrained by mundane abilities". If you think it "sucks" that you can't get up in the morning, put your socks on, and declare that you are going to the bottom of the fucking sea without some sort of intermediary action, then low level D&D is not for you. Because the other players are playing Gimli and Conan clones, and it is somewhat important to their concept that they can't breathe water, stand on lava, or fly up to a cloud castle.

Being able to get to unobtainable fantastic locations is something that necessarily requires effort for mundane characters. Being able to get to such locations effortlessly necessarily implies that the character is not mundane. At the point you are offering characters the ability to travel effortlessly to fantastic locations, you are taking their mundanity away. I hold that there is in fact a level that you are going to have to do that. But you aren't seriously trying to convince everyone that that level is first level, are you?

-Username17

[K]

• At lower level, you need to have a mini-adventure where you get an airship to take you to a high-up location before you can proceed to have an adventure at that high-up location.

How incredibly tedious is that?

If I never play a logistics-based adventure or mini-quest again, I'll consider myself a happy man. It's a waste of session time that could be better spend on doing actual adventuring.

Shit, I'll take pointless RP with nameless NPCs over logistics.

So let me get this straight:

• You refuse to acknowledge that the ability to go to a non-standard location counts as an ability, because you could spend actual table time getting an airship, or a portal, or the use of a water breathing chalice, or the aid of a more powerful character who has the ability to let you get there.
• You don't actually want to spend table time acquiring air ships or portals. Heck, while you find it marginally preferable, you don't even want to spend table time RPing with NPCs who have those abilities.

So your contention is both that having the ability is meaningless and that not having the ability is shitty. That does not compute. At all. If you find not having the ability to be "tedious", then by definition you find having the ability to be a benefit.

-Username17

No, I'm arguing that it's a non-ability that shouldn't take table-time, just like there should be no table time spent on other logistics nonsense like feeding horses or doing character bathroom breaks.

It's doesn't have to take time or be a mini-adventure. Why is that so hard to wrap your head around?

In movies, the bit where they steal a ship is literally ten seconds of screentime if it's shown at all. Why? It's because that shit is pointless and tedious.

For fuck's sake, Snow White and Huntsman was a major Hollywood film where the horse that Snow White uses to escape is just on the beach without any further explanation because no one fucking cares.

Pretending that getting to go on cosmetically-different adventures is advancement is a waste of page-count and ensures that your low-level adventures are going to suck.

What's next? Killing rats for five levels.

Fake advancement is not worth design space.

[Dean]

K could you give a few examples of some "real" non combat abilities and not ones you consider cosmetic changes or wastes of page space?

[Orion]

I'm substantially more sympathetic to your position than to Frank's, K, but I think you are missing something rather important. Not all of the "exotic locations" you've mentioned are actually just palette swaps. Many of them actually substantially change the basic "kick in door, stab fools" adventure in ways that make it a very different game. For that reason, I think you can do advancement without expanding the scope. For instance, let's say you're adventuring on the bottom of the sea. Yes, you could do this at level 1 by making water breathing a first-level spell or letting people play mermaids or saying your setting has Gillyweed in it or whatever. But it's still fundamentally unlike kicking orcs out of a cave because it's in 3-D. Playing a 3-D tactical combat minigame feels very different from playing a 2-D one, so I think that having people fight in caves at level 1 and underwater at level 6 does create some real advancement. While I personally am intrigued by logistics, negotiation, and leadership, every D&D game I have personally played in or run has stuck pretty closely to the "kick in door, kill guards, kick second door, fight boss" model. One campaign I played in took my character from 2nd level to 16th. And even though we spent the entire campaign killing arbitrarily more powerful dudes in arbitrarily more exotic locales, there actually was a lot of advancement that introduced genuine changes. For instance:

• Mass Haste. This was 3.0 and no one had pounce. Without haste, you could charge and get 1 attack. With haste, you could charge and get 5 or more. Before haste, our fighters worried about putting themselves where the action was, or would soon be. Their decision tree tended to go "is there anyone within 5 feet of you? If so, murder them." Haste meant there was no longer a punishment for moving. This meant that fighters now picked out the most dangerous-looking opponent in their line of sight each turn and chased them down. (Or the enemy they had the bane-weapon for, or the one they had a grudge against). This made fights feel less like a military skirmish, and more like a superhero brawl. That's real advancement.
• Telepathy. Once we got telepathy, and some people had teleports or dimension doors, it was no longer suicidal to split the party. When we once would have walked in the cave mouth as a group and stuck together for fear of the dark, now we used SWAT-team tactics, using mobility to powers to surround the enemy complex and busting in from all directions simultaneously. "SWAT team" feels higher-powered than "spelunkers," so that's real advancement.

EDIT: That's a plural you, you and Frank both seem to be missing the ways high-level versions of the basic adventure script can play out differently.

[Whatever]

Letting you "earn" an ability that makes the game suck less is the kind of shit they do in MMOs. Just make the game not suck, for everyone, starting immediately. Why the fuck would you ever do anything else?

We're talking about the action "go to the bottom of the sea and adventure there" in the context of "people want to play low level characters who are constrained by mundane abilities". If you think it "sucks" that you can't get up in the morning, put your socks on, and declare that you are going to the bottom of the fucking sea without some sort of intermediary action, then low level D&D is not for you. Because the other players are playing Gimli and Conan clones, and it is somewhat important to their concept that they can't breathe water, stand on lava, or fly up to a cloud castle.

Being able to get to unobtainable fantastic locations is something that necessarily requires effort for mundane characters. Being able to get to such locations effortlessly necessarily implies that the character is not mundane. At the point you are offering characters the ability to travel effortlessly to fantastic locations, you are taking their mundanity away. I hold that there is in fact a level that you are going to have to do that. But you aren't seriously trying to convince everyone that that level is first level, are you?

-Username17

It doesn't have to be a player ability. But you can still get right to the adventure, without a side quest:

"The prince was kidnapped by Sahuagin! Here's some magic seaweed that lets you breathe under water. Quick, go rescue him!"

"Hi, I'm Cappy, and this is my Airship, the Plot Device. There's treasure up in the Cloud Castles, and I'm looking for some adventurers who want to go steal it. You in?"

"Check out this poster! The Mad Alchemist is giving away free potions of walk-on-lava-and-you-totally-don't-die to anyone who agrees to go murder the fire elemental that lives in the heart of the volcano! Dude must really hate fire elementals."

If no one at the table wants to track rations, you can handwave that. If no one wants to go on sidequests to unlock the adventure, you can handwave that too.

[Username17]

It doesn't have to be a player ability. But you can still get right to the adventure, without a side quest:

"The prince was kidnapped by Sahuagin! Here's some magic seaweed that lets you breathe under water. Quick, go rescue him!"

"Hi, I'm Cappy, and this is my Airship, the Plot Device. There's treasure up in the Cloud Castles, and I'm looking for some adventurers who want to go steal it. You in?"

"Check out this poster! The Mad Alchemist is giving away free potions of walk-on-lava-and-you-totally-don't-die to anyone who agrees to go murder the fire elemental that lives in the heart of the volcano! Dude must really hate fire elementals."

If no one at the table wants to track rations, you can handwave that. If no one wants to go on sidequests to unlock the adventure, you can handwave that too.

So your answer is that absolutely everything should be on hard rails so extreme that you don't even pretend that your character is physically capable of going anywhere other than the next set piece combat?

You should at least pretend that the players have freedom of choice about where to go.

-Username17

[Whatever]

Wat.

You can totally have all three of those offers open to the players at the same time. And if they don't like it, they can do other things too. Giving them access to "high level" zones doesn't require that they go there. I mean, Planescape gives characters access to "everywhere" at level one; you're not seriously saying that the DM is activating Ticket to Ride mode when he starts the game in Sigil?

[Ice9]

There is also the problem where stuff like exotic locations aren't actually hard-coded as high level.

That's true. However, on a fundamental level, nothing is hard-coded as high level, especially when you consider "doing things via a McGuffin / outside help" the same as "doing things via inherent abilities".

End the war between dwarves and orcs. High level? Nope, the L1 characters are in the right place at the right time to receive the prophecy, and it leads them to a forgotten cave where the true history of the original battle is recorded. Sharing this starts a movement that ends the war.

Become ruler of a kingdom. High level? Nope, L1 dude is the long lost heir, and after some fortunate circumstances let him sneak into the throne room, his touch activates the mithral throne and proves it. Instant king.

Create a new demiplane. High level? Not when you find a Plane Seed just laying in the woods, guarded by a capricious divine avatar that prefers riddles and tests of character to traditional tests of power.

TL;DR - nothing is high level in isolation. High level is defined by things you couldn't do at low level. If traveling to other planes is presented as a big deal, and is a huge undertaking or impossible at lower levels, then getting the ability to do it whenever you want will be a high level thing. If people can totally just walk there from the start, it won't.

[Username17]

Wat.

You can totally have all three of those offers open to the players at the same time. And if they don't like it, they can do other things too. Giving them access to "high level" zones doesn't require that they go there. I mean, Planescape gives characters access to "everywhere" at level one; you're not seriously saying that the DM is activating Ticket to Ride mode when he starts the game in Sigil?

No. It honestly doesn't. In Planescape, everywhere is a place you can get to, but at any given time you only have access to a couple of places. Finding portals to where you want to go is within reach when you live in the City of Doors, but you do not have automatic access to all of them and cannot expect to handwave access to any of them.

Think about, say, Torment. You get to go to Mechanus. But you only get to go to a tiny weird dungeon in Mechanus and only after you find a secret gate in an action figure. You get to go to Baator, Carceri, and the Negative Energy Plane. You do not, under any circumstances, get access to a gate to the Plane of Water or the Seven Heavens or anything.

In Tales of the Infinite Staircase, things are nonlinear. You have 8 adventures you can do in any order. And while there are some pretty epically weird locales available (such as a Formian Hive and an Ilithid City), it does not give you access to "everywhere". It just gives you a list of portals to work with on the part of the infinite staircase that you have access to. You get Arcadia, Maelost, Limbo, the Plane of Air, the Astral, the Outlands, and Baator. It's a big list relatively, but it's nothing like everywhere. It's I think the biggest Planescape sandbox ever made, and gives out the most portals. And you still only go to nine actual planes in it.

And that is what Planescape is about. That is what it has always been about. Dangling out small numbers of portals that take you to fantastic locations as parts of quests, so that when you get to higher level and have the ability to visit these locations on your own time you value it. As my father used to say: it is important to start at low level so that when your character can beat an elephant to death with a teddy bear, you appreciate it.

-Username17

[Orion]

Getting to the adventure may be handwavable, except that how you get there effects what you can do when you are there. Flight magic lets you fight in 3-D, having an airship drop you off doesn't. If you get to the adventure with your own teleport spell, rather than some gate, then you can spend 2 rounds to go home and get stuff from under your bed, without having to run back to the entrance.

[ishy]

Handwaving getting to the adventure feels just as terrible as handwaving combat or anything else.
Why even have a cloud castle if nothing about it matters in the slightest.

[Fuchs]

What matters is what players want. If the players don't want to spend a lot of time finding an air ship or acquiring potions of water breathing, then you don't do it but handwave it. Same for logistics. Same for everything. If your players don't have fun you're doing it wrong.

Stuff does not suddenly matter just because it requires time spent doing tedious things no one wants to do. It's not a damn MMOG.

[CCarter]

Player agency distinguishes lower levels from higher level.

The difference between A) "I go to the shop at get gilliweed" and B) "I cast water breathing" is that the first one relies on it being available. If the GM doesn't want to run an undersea adventure you can forget it.

By the same token you can absolutely run a 1st-level adventure where PCs kill the tarrasque because a helpful old man told them how to find the artifact that will instantly do it in, guarded by ogres in an abandoned cloud giant castle (here's your airship and some arrows of ogre slaying). If you want to railroad 20th level PCs into doing the same adventure the GM has to shut down the appropriate powers that would let them bypass the various obstacles and account for them just going to beat up the tarrasque without the artifact, if they want.

Low-level = a railroad appears if the GM adds options.
High level= a railroad appears if the GM subtracts options.

[Orion]

@Frank,

I somehow missed your post on the Narrative power source as a Heroic Tier power. I'm not a huge fan of Narrative at all in this context, but if we're using it I don't see why we couldn't use it for Paragon problems. The trick is you have to follow my advice from the "artificer disguised as fighter" thread: you have to seed your world with enough weird magic rocks, magic plants, and magic places that you can plausibly solve any problem if you have the right stuff on hand.

[K]

Player agency distinguishes lower levels from higher level.

The difference between A) "I go to the shop at get gilliweed" and B) "I cast water breathing" is that the first one relies on it being available. If the GM doesn't want to run an undersea adventure you can forget it.

If the DM doesn't want to run an underwater adventure, your ability to cast water breathing is not going to force him. There is not going to be a pile of statted up encounters and a narrative waiting for you.

Your personal agency is exactly the same regardless of how you get to the adventure.

Your ability to cast planeshift is not going to force the DM to suddenly stat up some Negative Material Plane encounters for you with an entire attached adventure that is both memorable and compelling. Your ability to fly is not going to cause cloud castles to show up full of treasure and a place in the meta-story of your campaign.

Railroads are when you don't have a choice about how to solve problems in the narrative, but choosing whether to go on the adventure is not a railroad. It's a a binary choice where you either go on the adventure the DM has prepared or you don't. Sometimes you get to choose from a few options like in a sandbox game, but that still means that you don't get to do stuff where the DM isn't ready to let you go.

Planescape with planeshift or gate is the same as without.... you do the encounters in their intended order or you fuck off and ask the DM for a new campaign.

[CCarter]

Player agency distinguishes lower levels from higher level.

The difference between A) "I go to the shop at get gilliweed" and B) "I cast water breathing" is that the first one relies on it being available. If the GM doesn't want to run an undersea adventure you can forget it.

If the DM doesn't want to run an underwater adventure, your ability to cast water breathing is not going to force him. There is not going to be a pile of statted up encounters and a narrative waiting for you.

Your personal agency is exactly the same regardless of how you get to the adventure.

Your ability to cast planeshift is not going to force the DM to suddenly stat up some Negative Material Plane encounters for you with an entire attached adventure that is both memorable and compelling. Your ability to fly is not going to cause cloud castles to show up full of treasure and a place in the meta-story of your campaign.

Railroads are when you don't have a choice about how to solve problems in the narrative, but choosing whether to go on the adventure is not a railroad. It's a a binary choice where you either go on the adventure the DM has prepared or you don't. Sometimes you get to choose from a few options like in a sandbox game, but that still means that you don't get to do stuff where the DM isn't ready to let you go.

Planescape with planeshift or gate is the same as without.... you do the encounters in their intended order or you fuck off and ask the DM for a new campaign.

If the GM has agreed to run a high-level game I expect high-level adventure which is to say, they agree to make some effort to accomodate the options available. If I'm GMing one, I make an effort to improvise if required, and to cover more of the possible areas they could go. I can't guarantee 'memorable and compelling' but I have played in high level games where we scryed and fried cloud giants, stole their castle, and set up a business with cloud giant simulacra building more flying castles, without the GM having to do much more than use the monster manual.

[Previn]

I have played in high level games where we scryed and fried cloud giants, stole their castle, and set up a business with cloud giant simulacra building more flying castles, without the GM having to do much more than use the monster manual.

What's high level about that? To paraphrase:

I have played in high low level games where we scryed researched and fried assassinated cloud giants evil dukes, stole their castle, and set up a business with cloud giant simulacra random-slave-labor-thing building more flying castles.

Is it the flying castle thing?

[CCarter]

What's high level about that? To paraphrase:

I have played in low level games where we researched and [attempted to] assassinate evil dukes, stole failed to steal their castle, and set up a business with random-slave-labor-thing and got sent by him on some bullshit quest after we got captured screwing it up.

Fixed that for you.

[Previn]

What's high level about that? To paraphrase:

I have played in low level games where we researched and [attempted to] assassinate evil dukes, stole failed to steal their castle, and set up a business with random-slave-labor-thing and got sent by him on some bullshit quest after we got captured screwing it up.

Fixed that for you.

So you don't actually have an answer. Noted.

[CCarter]

So you don't actually have an answer. Noted.

Less flippantly, your example seems to turn our encounter into an adventure that's planned out in advance, when it was actually more like us going in a random direction and breaking the GM.

Other than that, I'm not sure what you would consider to be a high-level adventure if you're discounting all fluff.

[Fuchs]

Often, the higher the level, the more "dependents" and "stuff we care about 'cause it's ours" PCs have, from friends/allies acquired through their adventures to titles, land and pet projects. Which leads to more adventures either protecting such stuff or pushing forward pet projects.

[violence in the media]

Handwaving getting to the adventure feels just as terrible as handwaving combat or anything else.
Why even have a cloud castle if nothing about it matters in the slightest.

I'm not even sure what we're supposed to be doing in an adventure anymore. From the number and variety of things that are proposed to be handwaved via declarative unopposed statements, it sounds like the typical D&D adventure takes less time than winding your way through a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book.

[Fuchs]

Handwaving getting to the adventure feels just as terrible as handwaving combat or anything else.
Why even have a cloud castle if nothing about it matters in the slightest.

I'm not even sure what we're supposed to be doing in an adventure anymore. From the number and variety of things that are proposed to be handwaved via declarative unopposed statements, it sounds like the typical D&D adventure takes less time than winding your way through a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book.

You're supposed to be doing what is fun for your group, and handwave the rest. If no one likes logistics, don't do logistics. If everyone likes tactical combat and hates traps, don't do traps, and focus on combat. And so on. Generally, make sure everyone gets to do something fun, and the more people in the group like something, the more screentime it gets.

But, and this is important, it is group-specific. Different players have different ideas of what's fun.

[Username17]

Handwaving getting to the adventure feels just as terrible as handwaving combat or anything else.
Why even have a cloud castle if nothing about it matters in the slightest.

I'm not even sure what we're supposed to be doing in an adventure anymore. From the number and variety of things that are proposed to be handwaved via declarative unopposed statements, it sounds like the typical D&D adventure takes less time than winding your way through a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book.

Pretty much this. K's claim seems to be that the ability to change what adventures are available doesn't matter because the DM could always just railroad you into an adventure anyway so you never have anything more than one adventure "available", and in any case the DM's railroad could get you into any adventure, so the ability to get to any location also doesn't matter. The ability to climb doesn't matter because if the DM wanted you to get to the top of the cliff there would be stairs. Or something.

I think instead that we're looking at Tales of the Infinite Staircase as our archetypical "Planescape" adventure. There are nine parts to this adventure, and except for the first part they can be done in any order. Basically, stage one is that you get a quest to do something about the Iron Shadow, which is a thing that is going to do bad things to a bunch of places throughout the planes, and then you do some stuff and get yourself access to the Infinite Staircase from the title. The Infinite Staircase then gives you access to eight portals that allow you to hop into any of the other adventure segments you choose in any order you want. There's some stuff that happens based on how long you take, so order matters but any order is available. That is a Planescape adventure that is semi-sandbox, but it's also a low level adventure. It is the quintessential "go to a bunch of places in the multiverse at low level" adventure that K and company have been ranting about. But it's still demonstrably different from a high level adventure.

The high level version wouldn't have the Staircase in it at all. The players wouldn't need the staircase or the portals, because they could use their own means of planar travel. So the intro to the high level version would merely give the players the target list and some information about what's going on, and then the players would be able to go to those locations on their own. And what's really important is that if they decided to, they could take some time to go to other locations of their choosing in order to do legwork. With the main cost being the same as for taking extra time to complete one of the adventure segments: the Iron Shadow advances and their rivals continue their own research for however much time they spend fucking around.

And K claims that these two adventures are the same, but he is obviously wrong.

-Username17

[Previn]

So you don't actually have an answer. Noted.

Less flippantly, your example seems to turn our encounter into an adventure that's planned out in advance, when it was actually more like us going in a random direction and breaking the GM.

Which doesn't have anything to do with being 'high level.' You could still have randomly gone off and done whatever even at low levels.

Other than that, I'm not sure what you would consider to be a high-level adventure if you're discounting all fluff.

I'm honestly not sure what I consider a high level adventure at this point. I can see valid arguments from both Frank and K. Getting to the cloud castle is easier for 'high level' adventurers, but I'm really not sure how being easier makes something high level.