Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2013 11:11 pm
Nope. Necromancer -> Skeleton :: Geth Consensus -> Prime. There's an incorporeal space wizard and he puppets a lot of mindless thralls. Some of them have auras that buff the others.
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Incorrect.Orion wrote:Nope. Necromancer -> Skeleton :: Geth Consensus -> Prime. There's an incorporeal space wizard and he puppets a lot of mindless thralls. Some of them have auras that buff the others.
Incorrect. Legion is the only humanoid Geth platform capable of individual sentience. Primes are only sentient in groupshyzmarca wrote:Incorrect.Orion wrote:Nope. Necromancer -> Skeleton :: Geth Consensus -> Prime. There's an incorporeal space wizard and he puppets a lot of mindless thralls. Some of them have auras that buff the others.
A Geth platform, such as a Prime, hosts hundreds of individual programs, enough to be fully sapient on its own, as is demonstrated by Legion.
These programs are constantly being uploaded and downloaded, making this form of consciousness quite alien and bizarre from a human perspective, but they are intelligent. Each platform is essentially a miniature consensus.
Pay attention:FrankTrollman wrote:If the sidekick is your sidekick, then the army is still your army for all the fucking difference it makes.
Granted, that was an implication, so at least you've moved away from my having explicitly answered your arguments before you made them. The BBEG's party is hierarchical, with the BBEG on top and everyone else answering to him, and probably a level or two lower. The mundane lieutenant of the BBEG is the BBEG's sidekick not because he's mundane but because he's in the BBEG's party, and this will be true even at level 1 when the mundanes can still keep up with the casters (hypothetically, at least, in a world where casters don't get Color Spray and Sleep at first level). It's totally possible to have a mundane guy as the BBEG and the caster as his sidekick (though whether it's advisable depends on what level you're playing at).K's model of mundane lieutenants (or, in the case of less hierarchical parties, mundane allies)
Sure I do. It's just not much of a problem. Just make the Marshall higher level than the PCs, but still lower level than the Lich King. If the PCs are level 10, the Marshall is level 12, and the Lich King is level 13, and armies consist of tiny men who are never higher than 5 levels lower than the person commanding them, then the Marshall is sending squads of level 7 mooks after our level 10 party, so he's sending packs of hill giants and their pet dire bears after the party, and the party can respond with Djinni and trained winter wolves or maybe friendly trolls or something. Conceptually, that's fine. Mechanically, the 3.X monster manual is probably not equipped to handle this sort of thing, but a game designed with this paradigm from the start could fix that. In the strategic mini-game, the player's armies are outmatched by higher-level opposition, requiring them to go in and personally cut up the bad guys in order to turn the tide. Since the Marshall's mooks are supposed to challenge the party but not actually stand a chance of winning, the party's mooks aren't even going to scuff the armor of the Marshall, let alone the BBEG.If we assign the army to the Lich King's black clad and unnamed marshall, we're actually have committed ourselves to allowing armies sufficient to dispatch squads that can challenge the entire party of PCs to a Marshall who is the same level as the PCs are individually (or at least, less higher level than the Lich King is). Do you not understand how that's a problem?
And? There is nothing that conceptually prevents a minion from having class features, and since being able to direct a horde of undead is already an arbitrary magical ability that does not exist in real life so there's no reason at all that a non-sentient couldn't have that ability. In fact, in order for party balance to be a thing at all, the Necromancer is going to need an evil party backing him up. If his schtick is that everyone on his team but him is non-sentient, that means he needs to have a fully functioning party of characters all of whom are unintelligent minions except for him. This is true regardless of how your tiny man paradigm works. It also means that a villainous Necromancer needs to have access to tricks that let him summon up minion party members, tricks which regular PC Necromancers do not get to have, because of some plot artifact or by virtue of being willing to cross lines that PCs aren't or because of some restriction on the power (like not being able to leave a certain, small region) which makes it antithetical to adventuring. That is bad, but again, this remains true for as long as the Necromancer is using a PC class at all, regardless of your tiny man paradigm.A "character" with no Int that can only follow orders from the Necromancer is a minion.
Then you worry about a different problem... the "situational characters" bit. If your game is mainly about spelunking, being a mount is a problem. If you want to play the Normandy, it has to get a superpowered robot girl body that has just about as many run and gun powers as Garrus Vakarian.Winnah wrote:There is an easy way around the airship conundrum. The airship becomes the character and has the "pilot" class feature.
This way, the Millenium Falcon character gets to participate in the entire of Star Wars campaign, through class feature granted proxies. Sure, it sucks for the members of the party who can't travel through hyperspace, fight space battles and block turbolasers with lighsabres, but...uhhh...that sentence got away from me.
I suppose it could be doable. This seems a lot like the "you get to play as multiple fighting men" solution. But it seems like a different topic entirely from the issue of wanting to make the single fighting man relevant.Winnah wrote:Being a mount in a spelunking game is not a problem if you also happen to be a giant spider or can fly. But that is a shitty example, because in a game focusing on spelunking, any character that can't climb very well is penalised.
As for playing the Normandy, you start with a crippled pilot that never leaves the cockpit, some engineers and a bunch of redshirts. All off ship adventuring can be facilitated through redshirts. As you become a higher level Normandy, you get a rocket tank, a Cerberus rebuild, artificial intelligence and better crew. Eventually your crew rating is sufficient to put a Robot Infilitrator in the field instead of redshirts or a tank. After that, you can take levels in a prestige class like Asteroid Starbase or Cloud City.
In D&D terms you would play a village. The other PC's can meet in your Inn and you can send a couple of village thugs or a town guard on the adventure with them. As you become a higher level village, you get the option to become a Bandit Hideout or a Flying Castle. High level villages simply become Nations and can field massive armies.
I am almost certain I'm being serious here. Maybe I'm so aspo I can't even read my own sarcasm.
It'd be interesting to see an RTS with more emphasis on the city/fortress building than the army building... though I guess that's what Civ isWinnah wrote: In D&D terms you would play a village. The other PC's can meet in your Inn and you can send a couple of village thugs or a town guard on the adventure with them. As you become a higher level village, you get the option to become a Bandit Hideout or a Flying Castle. High level villages simply become Nations and can field massive armies.
I am almost certain I'm being serious here. Maybe I'm so aspo I can't even read my own sarcasm.
I agree with this, I just think that Narrative is still a Heroic Tier power source and cannot really ever be anything more than that. To see why this is true, let's consider the difference between going on an adventure to the Fortress of the Sahuagin at Heroic Tier and at Paragon Tier.DrPraetor wrote:
What Wrathzog wants is a power-source of narrative. He explicitly denies wanting that, but when you say, "I want to be a plucky mundane who saves the day anyway even though Gandalf is also here", the power you want is narrative. Now, this shouldn't be a problem and the game should have narrative as a power source.
So super generals need a power of narrative as well. A PC with Hannibal's power will come up with some plan, "let's all wear mustaches and then jump out and stab people!", and it's probably not that good a plan because you're drunk and eating cheetos. But Hannibal has a special ability with the narrative power source: when he leads tiny men around, he comes up with brilliant plans and as a result his tiny men actually accomplish something.
The problem is that while the Gryphon General can stage 1 quest to the Cloud Castle, he can't stage 1 quest to Atlantis, Niefelheim, or the heart of a volcano. The Psion Knight can, presumably by adjusting his ioun stone attunement to resonate with these other environments. The Gryphon General is not now and never ever will be a Paragon Tier character. He's just a reasonably high level Heroic Tier character no matter how big his numbers get.So we can solve both of these issues at once; and can now return to arguing whether it's a good idea to use different resource schemes:
1) The "gryphon general" (an upgraded soldier) is just good at general-ing, so he gives narrative-derived bonuses to his gryphon knights all the time.
2) The "psion knight" (also an upgraded soldier) has ioun stones each of which taps into different thetans which are trapped in the form of the bit from the original Tron. If he wants good general-ing, he has to align one of his ioun stones to the vicious Phlegmak, an alien race which is really good at general-ing, to benefit from their spirit-whispers.
It depends. It depends on a lot of things. For example: let's say you have your Psychic Knight character. He has ioun stones which he attunes to different things. That is sort of like Spell Memorization, in that you have some list of powers you can draw from continuously or repeatedly and you can change your list with some down time. But it doesn't have to directly interact with your Heroic Tier combat resources at all.So while freely admitting that a crazy diversity of resource management schemes is awesome, I also think it's hard to balance and highly unwieldy even in your basic schema, and that the wheels will come off entirely after people start upgrading to paragon paths.
Not necessarily, I mean the most fantastical things Beowulf ever does are "grab sword off wall" and "be really strong" but according to him he and his friend swam for hours through the deep ocean, during a storm, while being attacked by sea monsters. Now, all we have is his word for that but he does spend quite some time under water when heading to Grendal's Mother's cave. I'd take a really strong guy being able to jump to the castle of the could giants, or swim to the shark trenches, or cut the fabric of space and time to open a portal to the upper planes, or whatever because "he's more bad ass than air/water/the barriers between dimensions."FrankTrollman wrote:No stupid beer-fueled nominally mundane plan is going to get you to the Shark Trenches without some intermediate First Stage where you acquire a quest macguffin that allows you to go there. The narrative power source can at best be used to declare what form the First Stage is going to take: you can declare that it is your "plan" to go raid the alchemist guild for breathing pills or it's your "plan" to go romance the Sea Elf Queen or whatver. But you never ever get to skip that Quest Milestone entirely, which means that you never ever count as a Paragon Tier Character.
No one who is advocating for magic users with armies is saying they should get them without expending resources. In stark contrast to the people who explicitly refuse to gain any magical ability at all and yet still have their character be just as good as everyone else's.Anguirus wrote:I agree that it is straight up retarded to say that magic users can't have armies but what I don't understand is why we would assume that they just straight up can have armies without the investment of any kind of character resources despite the fact that it provides them with obvious narrative utility (which is why they want them).
Anguirius's method of phrasing areas as being tagged is grievously flawed, for the above reason. However, the idea that a class could be defined in terms of the problems they trivialize is potentially more interesting than Frank's assertion that every Paragon class should be able to reach cloud castles, breathe underwater, not catch on fire, and travel between planes.Kaelik wrote:You can't say "No team of Illusionist/Wizard/Assassin/Rogue, you can't sneak or teleport or sneak and teleport inside to kill the king, because you have to have an army. I guess one of you should have been a Marshal/Necromancer/Enchanter."
The ability to hold your breath for a long time may allow you to have a battle under the sea, but it won't let you adventure under the sea. Beowulf can leap off a ship and fight a kraken in the sea, but he can't go to the bottom of the sea and have a discussion while he's there. The quest is still off limits.Darkmaster wrote:Not necessarily, I mean the most fantastical things Beowulf ever does are "grab sword off wall" and "be really strong" but according to him he and his friend swam for hours through the deep ocean, during a storm, while being attacked by sea monsters.
Because other than personal assurances from you that the "numbers" on that are very high, that could be a first level adventure. You are advocating the 4e paradigm, where high level adventures are just low level adventures with pallet swaps. The Kobold chief has been repainted as a Devil king, and all the numbers have been increased by 20 on both sides.Anguirus wrote:I'm not sure why we can't say that high level play can also look like "besiege the evil capital city, crash the gates and then murder the devil king."
First level characters can't depose the evil king. They lack the necessary abilities to do that if the evil king has real political power. Both the abilities that you bring to the table and the scope, scale, and effect of your adventure change meaningfully if you have armies, potentially to the same degree that they change if you can leave the material plane. There's no reason of which I have been made aware that world-altering adventure lives exclusively underwater, or whatever. The setting, not the rules, dictate what is world-altering and what new abilities are required to accomplish those goals. It could totally be the case that underwater there is just a shitty level of Super Mario that everybody hates and that nothing of meaningful consequence actually happens in hell. It could also be the case that everything of consequence happens inside of fortresses that you can't get inside of without an army. The gods could live on a mountain defended by armies of Valkyries or some shit and if you want to totally reshape the world you need to get inside of their fortress first.FrankTrollman wrote:
Because other than personal assurances from you that the "numbers" on that are very high, that could be a first level adventure. You are advocating the 4e paradigm, where high level adventures are just low level adventures with pallet swaps. The Kobold chief has been repainted as a Devil king, and all the numbers have been increased by 20 on both sides.
That kind of bullshit is bullshit, and you should be ashamed of yourself for suggesting it. The answer to the question "why can't we just never get new abilities and have all advancement be totally fake?" is "Because that would be totally shitty, as 4th edition D&D conclusively proved!"
-Username17
That's not the adventure you described. You described:Anguirus wrote:First level characters can't depose the evil king. They lack the necessary abilities to do that if the evil king has real political power.
The adventure "De-Sauronize the Orcish lands" is a complicated adventure drawing upon oratory, mass patrolling, information gathering, logistics, creation of government institutions, public education to create a new political elite that is neither aligned with the Sauronist political machine nor steeped in Sauronist political theory, and so on and so on. But you didn't suggest that adventure. You suggested the adventure where you:besiege the evil capital city, crash the gates and then murder the devil king
The fact that you can adventure anywhere as the second stage of a quest (provided the first stage of the quest gets you to that particular second stage) does not mean that the ability to adventure in those places as the first stage of a quest isn't constitutively a high level thing to do. There is a very very big break between "We can adventure there if we first get Mr. Cavern to give us a sub quest whose result is that we can adventure there" and "We can adventure there by declaring that we are going to do that".K wrote:I hate to break it to you guys, but exotic settings are purely cosmetic and aren't what defines high level because there is nothing stopping you from using exotic settings at low level. There really is nothing stopping you from having adventures in Cloud Castles because you have an airship. Portals can take you to Hell as easily as planeshifting, and you don't need gills to go underwater.
You do realize that you just listed all of the steps in becoming king of a given place in the usual high fantasy setting. Because, and let's remember, D&D is, by and large, set in the iron age and in the iron age there were two way to become king.FrankTrollman wrote:
- Kick in a door.
- Fight some guards.
- Bypass some traps.
- Possibly kick in another door.
- Fight the enemy leader, possibly with some more guards and/or traps.