Mechanics that disappoint you in every conceivable manner

[hogarth]

Honestly, if Magic Items were rarer they could simply make you overpowered against some challenges without overpowering all challenges, and that would probably be the best of both worlds. If getting a Fire sword meant you can breeze past Ice enemies, without meaningfully impacting your ability to defeat other challenges, then people would feel like their Magic Items were cool and special without them simply making the whole game a cakewalk.

Your second sentence has nothing to do with rarity. Is it supposed to be connected to the first sentence?

[Kaelik]

Honestly, if Magic Items were rarer they could simply make you overpowered against some challenges without overpowering all challenges, and that would probably be the best of both worlds. If getting a Fire sword meant you can breeze past Ice enemies, without meaningfully impacting your ability to defeat other challenges, then people would feel like their Magic Items were cool and special without them simply making the whole game a cakewalk.

Your second sentence has nothing to do with rarity. Is it supposed to be connected to the first sentence?

If items are common as shit, you can have a different sword for every enemy type, and thus, it totally would not be fine for them to work that way.

[Username17]

Therefore, once you have given them those items, the statement "this specific character should be facing the following Y challenges" is factually wrong, because that character is now going to face the following Z challenges, which are greater than Y.

I was with you until this. The fact that they can beat harder challenges or more challenges of the same hardness or whatever, does not mean that they should face stronger or more numerous challenges. You're basically mixing up "is and ought" to stealth in a demand for a hard level treadmill. Why? Why not just let players who get some asymmetric power actually win a bit harder?

In a game like Morrowind, you're pretty pissed off when gaining levels just makes the bears more powerful, right? That's because level treadmills are stupid and insulting.

If the players do something to make themselves win harder, they probably should actually just win harder. That's genuinely OK. It makes it seem like investing in stuff actually has rewards of some kind. Nothing bad happens if the players win a battle easily from time to time.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

"Win a battle easily from time to time" is a bit different from "and now since you have a lot of magic items, essentially every fight you encounter should be a cakewalk."

It's more satisfying if it takes an encounter or two before the difficulty catches back up with your power gains every once in a while, yes, but it should catch up eventually or the game stops being interesting.

[Kaelik]

I was with you until this. The fact that they can beat harder challenges or more challenges of the same hardness or whatever, does not mean that they should face stronger or more numerous challenges. You're basically mixing up "is and ought" to stealth in a demand for a hard level treadmill. Why? Why not just let players who get some asymmetric power actually win a bit harder?

Because the claimed idea was that you balanced the game on no magic items of any kind, and then still provided each and every PC with multiple magic items. At that point, you are not winning slightly harder, you are literally just curb stomping the challenges the book tells you to face.

[GâtFromKI]

No actually, none of those are options, because the actual statement was:

"I am saying that if you design and balance the Challenges your PCs will face such that a character of a specific level is expected to face certain kinds of challenges without any magic items, and then you give him a pile of magic items that he cares about and actually uses"

"Caring about some item" and "actually using that item" is not the same thing. Like, at all.


Players don't care about their new +3 sword and shit like that. The only reaction they have when they find it is to add a +1 bonus on their sheet, and then nobody will ever mention it again and nobody will ever remember anything about that sword.

In other words: the PCs find it or buy it and then use it because they have to. If they don't, they won't overcome new challenges. But no one cares about that item. You could remove the sword from the game, and give instead a +1 bonus at level up, and nobody could tell the difference.


In the other hand, the players actually remember about the bag of infinite dung they used with create pit to humiliate the opponents. They remember about the helm of underwater action they gave to some random beggar because that item was so shitty. They remember the rules of immovable-Jenga, a game combining Jenga and some immovable rods. They remember the hentai rod, even if they didn't actually use it.

In other word, the players care about things they don't actually use. They can have a negative reaction, or they can find a great tactical usage of some shitty item, but at least they have a reaction instead of adding some bonus on a pile and never mentionning it again.

And if they didn't have to spend their money to buy bigger swords, they would care also about other useless stuff, like how many ale and whores they can store in their chocolate castle.


So in the end, your third solution (item are useless) is better in every way than the WBL system: that is how shitty WBL rules actually are.

[Kaelik]

"Caring about some item" and "actually using that item" is not the same thing. Like, at all.

Please learn to read. "And" is a word. It has a meaning. That meaning is not the same thing is as "equals." In fact, by using the word and I strongly implied that caring and using an item are two different things, and that if you design items that do both of them, the other things follow.

So in the end, your third solution (item are useless) is better in every way than the WBL system: that is how shitty WBL rules actually are.

They are not solutions. They are results. They are the three possible results of designing your game in that way. Another thing you could do is not design your game in a shitty way.

[MGuy]

We are talking about balancing players against challenges. I don't give two fucking shits what you think players call or do not call leveling up. No one at any point ever is talking about leveling the fuck up.

That's fine that you don't care. The conversation (right now) is about characters being 'higher level' because of item acquisition and whether or not shit like rope or infinite arrows 'count' as being higher level. I'm saying that in most cases people wouldn't see getting something like that or infinite arrows as a level up because having rope or more arrows to fire doesn't scale up the challenges you can face in a fashion that's worthy to be called higher level, or leveling up. I'm not saying that 'all' items even fall under this category either just that some fall into the niche of handy but negligible such that it doesn't increase the player's overall power level but would still be used.

Long distance communication is super good. There are any number of situations that it'd find use but in a game where you spend most of your time fighting stuff having it or not is not important when considering a character's ability to face challenges they are likely to face while still being something people would use. Giving the entire them distance communication devices is even better but still doesn't increase the level of the challenges that they can face and isn't something that you'd scale challenges in order to 'deal with'. There have been threads about narrative abilities and the like that, while having them would be handy, they couldn't be considered when looking at the overall power level of the character.

If you have a general statement in your game, that says "A level X character, should be facing the following Y challenges" of any kind or form, so don't fucking nitpick this you shitbag, and then you have the fucking PCs obtain items that do not suck and actually do anything at all of any kind even remotely, even if they just allow them to climb things, even if they just allow them to fly more time, or fly and cast one more spell. Even if it is "just" a Pearl of Power of their highest level spell slot, then that item makes them capable of:

1) Beating harder challenges.
2) Beating New challenges.

Even if the New challenge is just "everything I did yesterday, and also something else that someone else of my level could do yesterday."

Therefore, once you have given them those items, the statement "this specific character should be facing the following Y challenges" is factually wrong, because that character is now going to face the following Z challenges, which are greater than Y.

The way you're phrasing it the difference between Z and Y can be so small it would be negligible to consider. I'm certainly not sure at this point what you even mean by 'can do anything at all' and 'not suck'. Your explanation makes having an extra arrow as a thing that makes you higher level. I don't think that's a good idea and I don't believe having an extra arrow or a single extra use of an ability you already have at any level makes you a higher level character. There are multiple differences between a level 5 wizard and level 6 wizard and all those put together makes the level 6 wizard a higher level character. I do not believe that having the extra fireball a day is 'enough' to count or even allows the character to take on 'higher' level challenges. There's no standard challenge I can think of where access to an extra fireball would allow a level 5 wizard to succeed against higher level challenges in a way that they could not do so before.

So in other words, this ability is a perfectly acceptable ability that does not make a character higher level in any way at all:

"The character holding this item can cast Gate at will" since it doesn't add any combat bonuses. Or hey, "Gate at will, but the creates cannot take attack actions or cast spells that target a creature." Eliminates most buffs and offensive spells, but by no means all. But hey, it doesn't increase their numbers in combat, so totally not something that makes someone act as a higher level character at all...

Gate would only not count if you already can use Gate yourself. There are a bunch of numbers involved with it and I'm confused as to why you think it doesn't. The spell specifically has you bring a hole bag of numbers to you in order to get them to do something you want with those numbers.

They obviously and trivially help you overcome new challenges. The Wall you could not scale can now be scaled. You can overcome a challenge you could not before. That is in fact, the very definition of an item helping you overcome new challenges.

I am not saying various items can't be useful. If you have ink and a pen you can write on things. That is something you can do that you couldn't do without it. That's wonderful and everything, and people do use it, but the utility it provides is negligible for the purposes of designing challenges or when considering what level the character is at.

I'll note that they are literally the same fucking dichotomy I presented earlier, where one and three are the same exact fucking things from before, and I added "Also you can beat down previous challenges without them being challenging because they are now easier."

You literally just told me that the things I typed are magically different from the same exact things from earlier.

They didn't read the same to me. In the one you mentioned the dichotomy in you said if characters are designed such that they can already meet the challenges given to them that the addition of items either enables them to face new or harder challenges or were useless. In the other you just state the items that make things easier also count and that's different because something you can already do being made easier isn't a new or harder challenge and just because you can do something you can already do but in an easier fashion doesn't necessarily enable you to face new or harder challenges.

And I'm saying that no in the entire universe who isn't an idiot gives a flying fuck what people mean when they talk about their character being higher level when we non idiots, IE not you, are talking about designing fucking challenges for characters, so we only care if the advice for how many challenges of what difficulty you give PCs is accurate or not.

I think that having better terminology would be better. You can blow up about that all you want but if you're using the terms in such a way that 'having a house' falls under being higher level I think your meaning has diverged significantly enough that you should perhaps consider using something more fitting.

You fucking said, your stupid fucking example of giving a fucking Wizard who can cast fly a item that casts fly as an item that doesn't level people up because it doesn't give them new abilities, just more fireballs, so they do more damage, so they can defeat harder challenges.

No matter how many fireballs you give your level 5 wizard they will not be able to beat a level 10 challenge. A level 5 wizard is 'better off' with having an extra scroll of fireball or whatever but it doesn't change his effective level. He's still level 5, with level 5 stats, and level 5 abilities. You don't have to design extra shit for him having another use of his level 5 ability because his level 5 ability is pretty much only going to be useful against things at or around level 5. All you're saying by saying a level 5 wizard = level 6 wizard is that there isn't a lot of distinction between levels 5 and 6 (even though the level 6 wizard has better stats and better fireballs).

Now obviously, giving a Wizard, more fireballs, allows them to beat harder challenges, so you are an idiot, and wrong.

But on top of that, you specific example was giving a Wizard an item that casts fly. Since you probably aren't designing and RPG meant to be played by one person, there is absolutely nothing at all that prevents that fucking Wizard from handing the item to some other character who can't fly, who will then, have more fucking abilities from gaining a fucking ability he previously did not have, from your item.

That is the fucking point.

I get that was your point and I even specified that I don't disagree with it, cause there's no reason to. However, it wasn't MY point you fucking asshole. Yes, you can spread the love, sure, but that's not what I was talking about RIGHT THEN. All mentioning it would make me have to do is posit a situation where the entire TEAM can already fly. I didn't do that because that's pointless, MY point still remains the same.

[Kaelik]

That's fine that you don't care. The conversation (right now) is about characters being 'higher level' because of item acquisition and whether or not shit like rope or infinite arrows 'count' as being higher level..

No, that is not what the conversation is about. That is never what the conversation was about. No intelligent human being things that is what the conversation is about. Learn to read. Stop posting anything at all ever on the internet until you learn to read.

[MGuy]

That's fine that you don't care. The conversation (right now) is about characters being 'higher level' because of item acquisition and whether or not shit like rope or infinite arrows 'count' as being higher level..

No, that is not what the conversation is about. That is never what the conversation was about. No intelligent human being things that is what the conversation is about. Learn to read. Stop posting anything at all ever on the internet until you learn to read.

I can read. All you've been saying is that you are using higher level in such a way that having rope makes character A higher level than character B that does not. I don't think that's useful. The fact that you don't care if your use of the terms includes that is your own thing. The fact that you think that somehow a Level 5 wizard with an extra scroll is equal in every way that 'counts' as a level 6 wizard is just extra bullshit I don't agree with. Most other people wouldn't if you'd presented that to them too.

[Kaelik]

That's fine that you don't care. The conversation (right now) is about characters being 'higher level' because of item acquisition and whether or not shit like rope or infinite arrows 'count' as being higher level..

No, that is not what the conversation is about. That is never what the conversation was about. No intelligent human being things that is what the conversation is about. Learn to read. Stop posting anything at all ever on the internet until you learn to read.

I can read. All you've been saying is that you are using higher level in such a way that having rope makes character A higher level than character B that does not. I don't think that's useful. The fact that you don't care if your use of the terms includes that is your own thing. The fact that you think that somehow a Level 5 wizard with an extra scroll is equal in every way that 'counts' as a level 6 wizard is just extra bullshit I don't agree with. Most other people wouldn't if you'd presented that to them too.

No you completely ignorant fucking shitbag, I am talking about how characters that have equipment that allows them to bear harder or new challenges can beat harder and newer challenges.

THIS DISCUSSION IS ABOUT BALANCING CHALLENGES FOR PLAYERS, NOT ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT TO CALL LEVEL.








I give zero fucking shits if you want to call a character with an item of non combat Gate at will "A level 1 character who can beat the same challenges that level 40 characters are supposed to face." I don't care what level you say someone is. I care what challenges they can beat, for the purpose of discussion of balancing fucking players against challenges.

[MGuy]

No, that is not what the conversation is about. That is never what the conversation was about. No intelligent human being things that is what the conversation is about. Learn to read. Stop posting anything at all ever on the internet until you learn to read.

I can read. All you've been saying is that you are using higher level in such a way that having rope makes character A higher level than character B that does not. I don't think that's useful. The fact that you don't care if your use of the terms includes that is your own thing. The fact that you think that somehow a Level 5 wizard with an extra scroll is equal in every way that 'counts' as a level 6 wizard is just extra bullshit I don't agree with. Most other people wouldn't if you'd presented that to them too.

No you completely ignorant fucking shitbag, I am talking about how characters that have equipment that allows them to bear harder or new challenges can beat harder and newer challenges.

THIS DISCUSSION IS ABOUT BALANCING CHALLENGES FOR PLAYERS, NOT ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT TO CALL LEVEL.








I give zero fucking shits if you want to call a character with an item of non combat Gate at will "A level 1 character who can beat the same challenges that level 40 characters are supposed to face." I don't care what level you say someone is. I care what challenges they can beat, for the purpose of discussion of balancing fucking players against challenges.

Look fucker, these are the terms you fucking decided to argue over. Get mad, place big red letters in all caps all you want THIS IS WHAT YOU DECIDED TO ARGUE ABOUT. I told you that using 'level' to express the concept was inappropriate. You wanted to argue that magic items that have effects that do 'anything' either made someone 'higher level' or didn't do dick and I disagreed because I felt and still feel that that was WRONG. I gave examples of magic items that did shit but didn't enable a character to face 'harder' or 'new' challenges while giving examples of MUNDANE items that fit into that category but DID NOT increase the over all expected challenge level of the fucking character! So go ahead, retreat to this new 'you're not even part of the discussion' angle all you want. You picked the fight over the statement and you've provided no reason for my opinion to shift. Claiming 'now' that that wasn't the argument in the first place is just a strange kind of flailing as far as I'm concerned.

[Kaelik]

You wanted to argue that magic items that have effects that do 'anything' either made someone [capable of beating] 'higher level' [challenges] or didn't do dick and I disagreed because [I am too stupid to be able to read, and cannot understand what the discussion is about].

I agree, you are too stupid to follow this discussion. So please stop. You repeated insistance that the conversation is about whether a PC counts as level 5 or level 6 and totaly inability to understand that the actual conversation is about what challenges you send the PCs against is not interesting, or helpful, or useful, or worth typing on a keyboard.

So stop fucking doing it. Stop. Please go away. Just shut the fuck, and stop talking about something completely irrelevant that no one else is talking about. Make you own thread about how you want stick the level of your PCs up your ass until you orgasm, but stop bringing it up when it is not what this conversation was ever about.

[Dean]

@Kaelik: I think it was fair to defend that "levels" weren't being gained even if there was some increase in power because "level" has a meaning in the context we were speaking in. However since you have now made it clear what you were implying in using the word level I have no problems debating your clarified premise because I still disagree with it. You say this...

Those are the only three options.
1) Harder challenges than before.
2) Same challenges are easier.
3) Items do nothing.

Your premise is: If a game was balanced before the introduction of magic items then the game would no longer be balanced after the inclusion of those magic items if they offered meaningful abilities (meaningful abilities here are being defined as "abilities that help you overcome challenges"). I disagree with this premise.

D&D and every other game I know has certain kinds of challenges it cares about and certain kinds of challenges it doesn't. Whichever kind of challenges the game concerns itself with are the challenges we should give more weight to in deciding whether the game is balanced or not. D&D cares a lot about combat and Gumshoe cares a lot about investigation. Gaining an unusual amount of combat power would be more unbalancing in D&D than it would be in Gumshoe, and the reverse would be true of investigative ability.

If you define "challenge" as "anything that could possibly occur" then that is a poor definition to judge a game's overall balance. An Orb of Storms could be a decisive piece of equipment in the challenge of capturing a fleeing boat, but your character's new ability to dominate in the field of naval escape prevention isn't something D&D puts much weight on so I think it's unreasonable to declare the overall game unbalanced just because your character is more capable in that niche form of adventure.

So I think items can make some challenges easier than before without making the game unbalanced.

[Kaelik]

Your premise is: If a game was balanced before the introduction of magic items then the game would no longer be balanced after the inclusion of those magic items if they offered meaningful abilities (meaningful abilities here are being defined as "abilities that help you overcome challenges"). I disagree with this premise.

I don't care if you disagree with premises you make up that aren't what I said, so disagree away.

I never said anything about being unbalanced. I said that your guidelines on appropriate encounters for PCs become wrong, and so it is better to write those guidelines for the actual abilities the PCs will actually have.

In that light, your Orb of storms falls clearly within one of those categories. Either the game told you you weren't supposed to expect your PCs to be able to chase down the ship but they did, or it said they were supposed to and then it became a cakewalk, or chasing down the ship was not a meaningful challenge according to your game and the item did nothing to effect that, and so there is no reason for the PCs to really care about it.

Different spheres of the game may be more or less game breaking when the PCs become more capable of defeating challenges, but that is irrelevant to the challenge guidelines of your game. And honestly, becoming combat broken is only a problem in D&D because of how it occurs, by pushing one ability completely off the "RNG"(getting gate at level 1 is pushing the spell availability off the "RNG"). If people became combat broken by getting early access to spells one level earlier and increasing all their numbers a little bit, you would just throw slightly higher level monsters at them and move on. That would still break your challenge guidelines just as much regardless of whether the game was still balanced.

The only reason an Orb of Storms doesn't break the challenge guidelines in D&D is because the challenge guidelines are shitty and only address combat. Contrary to what the book ascribes CR to, other challenges still exist and overcoming them is equally as important as combat. That is literally the reason why people talk shit about Fighters.

[GâtFromKI]

They are not solutions. They are results. They are the three possible results of designing your game in that way. Another thing you could do is not design your game in a shitty way.

'K

So do you actually have something to say, or are you just writting some derpities?

You have a fantasy game with magic items. D&D 3 chose to create a WBL system, whict is your "result" 1: challenge are scaled up, a CR 10 creature is ballanced against level 10 characters with magic items. There are two other "results", "magic items make the game easier" and "magic item are useless", which are both better than WBL. At this point we agree. And now you're saying there exists some magical unknown design goal allowing for some other unknown and better "result"? Great. If you have nothing more to say about this mysterious design goal, you can now go back to Rainbow Kingdom where all game have The Perfect Design.

[Kaelik]

So do you actually have something to say, or are you just writting some derpities?

You have a fantasy game with magic items. D&D 3 chose to create a WBL system, whict is your "result" 1: challenge are scaled up, a CR 10 creature is ballanced against level 10 characters with magic items. There are two other "results", "magic items make the game easier" and "magic item are useless", which are both better than WBL. At this point we agree. And now you're saying there exists some magical unknown design goal allowing for some other unknown and better "result"? Great. If you have nothing more to say about this mysterious design goal, you can now go back to Rainbow Kingdom where all game have The Perfect Design.

Look, I get that you get off to the idea of murdering a personified WBL. But nothing I said at any point defends WBL. No matter what method of magic item acquisition system you use, whether 3e WBL, or 2e treasure tables, or a system that isn't retarded, you should write your challenge guidelines based on expected magic items. No matter what those are. No matter what system. No matter how possible it is to deviate from that standard.

And you should do that because if you don't, your challenge guidelines will be bad, because they will be inaccurate to an even greater degree than they already would have to be due to the nature of the game.

[darkmaster]

Kaelik, nothing he said, in his most recent post countermanded that, merely that in a system where you can magic items either they will be a source of asymmetric power and make fights easier, or not and not. Obviously you balance based on the assumption that magic items will be involved and either a) battles will be harder without them because magic items make fights easier, or b) battles will not be appreciably harder without them because, for some reason, maybe because the designer of the game is thick, magic items don't make fight's easier and you're essentially balancing against basic PCs.

I don't know what started this argument, and I'm not reading through you guys' walls of text to find out. But your current statement does not counter his current statement other than to call into question the relevance of his reference to WBL and does not call back to previous points. Just saying, if this were a tournament debate, you would lose points for that.

[Kaelik]

Just saying, if this were a tournament debate, you would lose points for that.

If this were a tournament debate, the people scoring it would know the actual topic under discussion, and would thus know the conclusion he was attempting to support by his screed against WBL, and would therefore know that I was addressing the conclusion, and correctly pointing out that his hatred of WBL is irrelevant to the thing he is supporting.

To whit:

First of all, I want that the player don't need anything, be it a helm of underwater action or a +1 sword. If they are supposed to fight incorporeal creatures, they should have class abilities allowing that. The whole game should be functional and balanced without any magic item.

Then, every magic item should allow them to do things they aren't supposed to do (or before the level they are supposed to do it).

And as every post before, I am continuing to point out that there is no good reason for declaring that PCs are supposed to be able to do X at level Y, but all PCs ever get to do it at level X-3 because magic items exist. Because then your statement to DMs ostensibly for the purpose of helping them run a game is false.

The fact that he attempts to support this by whining about WBL means that explaining how WBL being bad does not in fact support this is actually relevant.

Kaelik, nothing he said, in his most recent post countermanded that, merely that in a system where you can magic items either they will be a source of asymmetric power and make fights easier, or not and not.

Great, so why did he contradict me by not contradicting me. Why don't you get mad at him for posting something completely irrelevant that doesn't in any way address anything I said before this point.

Oh wait, I know the answer:

I don't know what started this argument, and I'm not reading through you guys' walls of text to find out.

I told Mguy if he was too stupid to understand the discussion to just not post.

If you are too lazy to understand the discussion then please for the love of god be too lazy to post nonsense shit posts like this where you demonstrate your ignorance.

[darkmaster]

Hey kaelik, it looks like you not only don't read the posts of people you're in protracted arguments with but also just skim anyone's post you want to reply to. If you didn't you'd obviously know I was specifically pointing out that you were not paying attention to what you were actually arguing against at that moment and therefore made yourself look like a stupid asshole by arguing against points your opponent wasn't making instead of using the actually useful and topical arguments that his points were not contradicting you or were irrelevant. But no, much easier to lash out at the person who points out you're making an ass of yourself than stop and think for a second.

[GâtFromKI]

Look, I get that you get off to the idea of murdering a personified WBL. But nothing I said at any point defends WBL. No matter what method of magic item acquisition system you use, whether 3e WBL, or 2e treasure tables, or a system that isn't retarded, you should write your challenge guidelines based on expected magic items. No matter what those are. No matter what system. No matter how possible it is to deviate from that standard.

Ok, and I say the expected magic items should be "none". The characters have class abilities to handle challenges of their level. The acquisition method should be either MTP, either "suck the cock of the MC and maybe you will get an item". Anyway, the characters have class abilities to handle challenges of their level; and each acquisition method ever published in any format being worse than MTP, you should definitively use MTP.

Useful magic items should unlock the easy mode; like playing with 30 character points instead of 15, maximizing each hit dice or playing gestalt characters.

[Kaelik]

Hey kaelik, it looks like you not only don't read the posts of people you're in protracted arguments with but also just skim anyone's post you want to reply to. If you didn't you'd obviously know I was specifically pointing out that you were not paying attention to what you were actually arguing against at that moment and therefore made yourself look like a stupid asshole by arguing against points your opponent wasn't making instead of using the actually useful and topical arguments that his points were not contradicting you or were irrelevant. But no, much easier to lash out at the person who points out you're making an ass of yourself than stop and think for a second.

Hey darkmaster, clearly you aren't reading or you would see that I am telling you that I was specifically telling someone that their current post did not support the conclusion they were trying to defend. I was thus in fact, "arguing against" the point that was actually being made, IE, that WBL being shitty supports the conclusion he stated earlier in the discussion.

Hey darkmaster, clearly you aren't reading or you would see that I just finished telling you that I did fucking use the useful and topical arguments that his points were not contradicing mine and were irrelevant.

Here, let me quote the post you quoted and complained about in which you said I should have said those things:

But nothing I said at any point defends WBL.

No matter what method of magic item acquisition system you use, whether 3e WBL, or 2e treasure tables, or a system that isn't retarded, you should write your challenge guidelines based on expected magic items.

Those sure look a hell of a lot like:

1) You didn't contradict me.
and
2) You criticisms of WBL are irrelevant to the point I made.

Hey Shithead, at least if you are going to tell me what I should have done instead, maybe you should make sure you don't accidentally tell me I should have done exactly what I fucking did and thus look like the fucking idiot you are.

[Kaelik]

Ok, and I say the expected magic items should be "none".

Except that you are lying. Because if you expect no magic items, then you don't write any magic items for your game.

The acquisition method should be either MTP, either "suck the cock of the MC and maybe you will get an item".

Except that MTP magic item acquisition demonstratively gives more items that none, by level X where X is anything higher than 2. So this statement directly contradicts your previous one.

Useful magic items should unlock the easy mode; like playing with 30 character points instead of 15, maximizing each hit dice or playing gestalt characters.

Well first off, if you play with Gestalt, you are supposed to face challenges as if you were 1.5 your current character levels, so that is not easy mode. Secondly, you should not make something easy mode that will literally happen to 100% of all PCs in 100% of all games.

[MGuy]

You wanted to argue that magic items that have effects that do 'anything' either made someone [capable of beating] 'higher level' [challenges] or didn't do dick and I disagreed because [I am too stupid to be able to read, and cannot understand what the discussion is about].

I agree, you are too stupid to follow this discussion. So please stop. You repeated insistance that the conversation is about whether a PC counts as level 5 or level 6 and totaly inability to understand that the actual conversation is about what challenges you send the PCs against is not interesting, or helpful, or useful, or worth typing on a keyboard.

So stop fucking doing it. Stop. Please go away. Just shut the fuck, and stop talking about something completely irrelevant that no one else is talking about. Make you own thread about how you want stick the level of your PCs up your ass until you orgasm, but stop bringing it up when it is not what this conversation was ever about.

I understand that you don't want to actually defend your point since I smashed it to the ground and instead you want to try to hide behind the weak defense that you either never said something I already quoted you said and this new strange defense that I haven't been on topic when even with your 'crazed'revisions of my statements my point would barely change. I mean about the only thing you've done is back peddled on using 'higher level' as a describing how item acquisition effects characters (which is what I wanted in the first place) but you still haven't addressed anything 'else' I brought up.

[Kaelik]

I understand that you don't want to actually defend your point since I smashed it to the ground and instead you want to try to hide behind the weak defense that you either never said something I already quoted you said and this new strange defense that I haven't been on topic . . . I mean about the only thing you've done is back peddled on using 'higher level' as a describing how item acquisition effects characters (which is what I wanted in the first place)

Being able to claim something is my point does not actually make it my point. I have repeatedly stated over and over to every single post you have made that I don't give a flying fuck whether you call a PC level 1 or level 4, I only care about the challenges they actually face. In fact, if you called a level 1 PC level 4 when they collected enough items my complaint would actually go away.

Call the PCs whatever fucking level you want, I have only ever at any point argued that the challenges they face are what matters for the challenge guidelines you present.

I tell you what, if you stop posting in this thread with your meaningless bullshit I will declare that you "won" the "argument" that a Level 1 PC that casts Gate at will is not level 20, but is in fact still called a level 1 PC, because in fact, I never said otherwise.

but you still haven't addressed anything 'else' I brought up.

I addressed everything else you brought up when you brought it up. Then you stopped bringing it up and I stopped addressing it. You can go back and read my previous addressing or you can reclaim the things that are actually relevant to the discussion (Hint, not what you call a level 1 PC with lots of magic items, only what challenges they can face,) and I will readdress them.