K is basically right when he talks about how travel powers that give you "access to more places" is only a real ability if you have recruiting and shopping rules, but I think there's a more elegant way of getting at the ultimate point. There are basically two things everyone needs to remember.
1: "High Level" is a game mechanic.2:To implement a game mechanic, you have to change the game.3:D&D is not a game. Okay, if you prefer we could say that D&D is not
a game, singular, but a collection of games. Or that part of D&D is a game, but not all. The point is, if we use "playing D&D" to mean "sitting around a table for 5 hours telling stories and rolling dice," then the very concept of level is only going to be relevant for part of it. Okay, now that I have your attention, it's time to define some terms. Obviously the word "game" has all different broad and narrow sense, up to and including "anything which is fun." I'm basically talking about what Richard Garfield called orthogames. So for today's class, we're going to say that something is more like a game the more of these traits it has:
- A game presents players with choices that have objectively verifiable ramifications.
- A game has rules that are binding on all participants.
- A game has a formally defined star and end condition.
- A game has at least a suggestion of win and loss conditions.
Recruiting angels or collecting diamonds from the Earth plane aren't games. There aren't any rules governing how it works, and even if there were, there usually aren't any good rules on what you can buy with the diamonds. Or on what your angel allies can accomplish while they're off-screen.
D&D has a game inside it, and that game is a squad-level tactical combat wargame. Or if you prefer, D&D
is a wargame with narrative fluff wrapped around it. I don't care how you prefer to think about it. What I do care about is this: you kick in the door, the MC draws a little room and tells you there's 4 ogres, an ogre mage, and a zombie dragon. You roll initiative. OK, now we're playing a game. We have abilities written on our sheets and we know what they do. We know how many magic missiles it takes to kill an ogre. We know we just started the combat music and we'll stop when one side cedes the field. the PCs can play to win, and the MC can also play as though he's trying to make the ogres win, because he's bound by rules like everyone else. I mean, the MC can decide to fuck with you, but it's obvious when he's cheating. Importantly, in the context of that game, travel powers are real powers.
Dimension Door is a real ability because the player knows which attacks he can use against the ogre from here, and also which attacks he can use from over there. As long as he teleports somewhere on the battlemat, there's no MTP negotiation about what he finds when he gets there; everyone has pre-agreed about what you can do from this square or that.
All the plane shifting and gate-hunting and tracking and travel montages and opening restaurants and whatnot is not a game. It's pre-game negotiations. It's a bunch of people sitting around discussing what game they'd like to play. "Wanna play heroes vs. demons?" "nah dude, but I'd play heroes and angels vs. demons." Sometimes it's picking the teams, sometimes it's setting handicaps. The player says, "When we play heroes vs. demons, I want my fighter to have a Firebrand attack." The MC says, "Hmm, not how I envisioned it, but let's make a deal. You can have a Fire attack in the next game if you play this other game with me first. It's called heroes vs. fire elementals." All the world maps, travel spells, encounter tables, and so on are not game abilities, they are unenforceable ways for players to state their preferences about what game they'd like to be playing. I mean, games
exist where travel powers are game abilities. They're mostly Eurogames. If Heaven is a space on a board and you roll a die on the "Heaven Recruitment table" when you go there, then i's a game ability just like using Dimension Door to flank an orc is, because the result is something the player chose, not something the MC made up. Now what does this have to do with level? Well, when D&D isn't a
game, it's a
story. The easy way to tell is whether you could call bullshit on your MC. If he refuses to let your fireball kill an orc, he's cheating at a game. If he refuses to let you buy anything in the City of Brass, he's just telling a lousy story. And as we all know,
fictional characters do not have levels. Just because the story happens to be set in Hell or in Space doesn't mean it's a "high-level" story. You can only tell who is what level when you have an objective measuring stick--when your character is being used as a game piece.
So let's say you want to do some kind of leveling and advancement. We know palette-swapping the sets and the monsters doesn't count. That is where 4E went wrong. It would have been fine that all it did was squad combat, but it was the same squad combat game from 1 to 30. It's not enough to change the story,
we have to actually change the game. Fortunately there are a lot of ways to do that. You can go 3-D, you can introduce effective combat healing, or take it away (D&D does both!), you can stop worrying about some mechanics (like higher ground and infantry formations) to concentrate on others (like pokemon type charts.) You can add all-new resource systems. And so on. So if you want to know fi a travel power is a high-level ability, you have to ask yourself if it changes the game.
- Having an Airship drop you off at the adventure-site is level-agnostic. If you can call in air strikes, or if you're fighting on the deck of the ship, it might affect your level.
- Teleporting to and from teleport circles isn't a real ability, and teleporting once a day generally isn't either. But if you have at-will teleports or just "a bunch of teleports," then you can get stuff from your house whenever you want. You can drop hostages off to avoid playing an escort mission. You can worry about the threat of enemy reinforcements showing up without warning at any time. Those are game-changers.
(Incidentally, this is why high-level play has always sucked and will always suck, until someone writes a system where you
lose XP by adventuring)[/list]
