If all you want to do is dungeon crawl, stay mid-level.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I just can't see an elegant way of mixing what should be two completely different systems.

It seems relatively simple conceptually:

The game is formed of layers. In each layer, there are default values and abilities for a creature; if you don't have something that modifies your values or abilities, you use those; your character sheet is then divided into your abilities in each layer.

Individual adventures happen on some level, and additional sub-adventures on lower layers can be used to model key points in a primary adventure; as you go up in levels, you start having higher-layer adventures more often, and you eventually stop having the lower-layer adventures except as sub-adventures of the higher-layer adventures.

[Avoraciopoctules]

However, the reason the game is built like that is because the rules are really only good for adventuring. Using D&D rules to fight battles or run kingdoms gives shit results. Further, you don't expect the rules to shadowrun to let you build/run characters who run multi-national firms or are heads of state or other crap like that, why should D&D be only half a freaking game becuase you feel the need to make the other half be about some something other than going into dungeons and fighting dragons.

Seriously, there are some very good rulership games. There are sci-fi and fantasy versions of "world in flames" that you could play.

Care to make a few recommendations? After the wall of stupid I ran into in one MC's reinterpretation of Kingmaker and now see looming again on the horizon, I definitely find myself in the market for something like that, and I haven't found a computer game that really works for the purpose.

[Username17]

Dungeons & Dragons is already a hodge podge adding an exploration minigame to a tactical combat minigame. It also has slots in there for an economc/logistics minigame, a mass-combat minigame, a social interaction minigame, and a rulership minigame. Many of these pieces have historically been limited or shitty, but you're not making sense if you are arguing that they don't belong. They were there literally from the beginning.

Remember: the game's first subsystem was actually the mass-combat minigame. The next additions were the tactical combat minigame, the logistics, and then the exploration.

First you had armies of fighting men in big blobby units. Then you added hero units and monsters. Then you added buying and equipping things for and onto the heroes, and only then did you add the part where you explored the dungeon. And yes, the part where you owned a castle and had a kingdom was added after that, but still well before the game coalesced into a recognizable form. Most people call AD&D "first edition", and raising an army and owning a castle was front and center in those rules.

-Username17

[FatR]

The big problem is that most people just want to stab shit, because this is an action game. Superman analogy brought above is valid. Superman still punches people, not meddles in politics. While I personally would love to see a mass-combat or rulership minigame that is not a stealthy way of cockblocking inventive players, I don't think that SimSetting will be well-received as a mandatory part of play. Most players, in my experience, don't even care about the setting lore deeply enough to play something like this.

That said, even if the game remains purely action, scale of conflicts, stakes in them and available forms of resolution should change between levels, no question, and the game should recognize this fact.

[ckafrica]

Remember: the game's first subsystem was actually the mass-combat minigame. The next additions were the tactical combat minigame, the logistics, and then the exploration.

First you had armies of fighting men in big blobby units. Then you added hero units and monsters. Then you added buying and equipping things for and onto the heroes, and only then did you add the part where you explored the dungeon. And yes, the part where you owned a castle and had a kingdom was added after that, but still well before the game coalesced into a recognizable form. Most people call AD&D "first edition", and raising an army and owning a castle was front and center in those rules.

-Username17

But the problem is 3e and 4e don't really have any good rules for running mass combat or owning and running castles. Which means that most of Lagos ideas are crap for the last 2 incarnations of D&D, regardless of whether they would be desirable or not.

Any new D&D edition would really benefit from rules for low-level units to act individual opponents, higher level melee ability to deal effectively with said units, rules for units to support heroes/BBEGs etc. Then you can start telling cool stories beyond small scale tactical combats.

[Username17]

But the problem is 3e and 4e don't really have any good rules for running mass combat or owning and running castles.

Yes. Well, 3e had a Stronghold book, and it was OK, but it was a softcover expansion book.

But the bottom line here is that the "Sweet Spot" theory is bullshit. And "extending the sweet spot" is actually just stagnating the game. 4e especially is basically a reductio of the sweet spot argument and the result is boring as shit.

The fact is that roleplaying games are about kludging in systems so that the characters can do things that aren't covered by the "sweet spot" of the original game. If you don't want to expand from the sweet spot, you should make a board game instead of an RPG.

-Username17

[sabs]

People like to play different mini-games inside of RPGS.

There's roleplaying/acting
There's resource management
There's sim-castle/tower/stronghold
There's tactical war game

They don't all have to have the same system/rules. They just have to be fun and interact in some way.

[PoliteNewb]

The part I don't like is when low-level wankers stick their dicks into high-level play. 4E calling their sad simulation of epic just that is offensive to me because it crowds out stories of actual high-level play. When Andy Collins decides that a Vanilla Action Hero and the things that they can do should be a meaningful focal point for high-level play, this means that you can't actually have high-level plots. There's no terraforming and race creating and whatever because the game has to accommodate people who don't want to do that or aren't aware that they should be doing that.

As has been said before, this entire complaint boils down to "they don't define 'high level' the way I want them to!" Seriously, you're complaining because there are no rules for terraforming and race creating? Why don't you complain that it has no rules for designing spacefaring mecha or tons of other shit that D&D is not about?

Or hell, since it's high-level and the game is about to end anyway you can totally just change the status quo, do a few more adventures if you want, and then just end the game.

So, let me get this straight...you admit that you really only do a few high-level adventures (and in fact, many people never do ANY high-level adventures) before ending the campaign, but you want all this bullshit crammed in there anyway? Why? Is that really a worthwhile use of page space? Especially when it's radically different from the rest of the game? What is served by welding it on?

When you're low level, the exploits of a port city can totally be campaign-defining, to the point where you can look up the names of the bartenders in a book. When you become mid-level things zoom out and you learn more about what's going on in other cities and strongholds and whatever, at the cost of no longer being able to know what every major business in a city is.

You can play a low-level campaign where you travel the breadth of the nation (or even the world), and you can play mid-level campaigns where you spend your entire time in a single city. Those are entirely setting conceits, and not related to level. What you are talking about is entirely different.

But I do think that there is a potential audience interested in the story of how Zondar the Mid-Level Wizard became Zondar the God of Magic.

There is. That audience picks up Raymond E. Feist's novels, or Robert Jordan's, or something. But no, I disagree utterly that there are very many people who want to play a game about people going through wacky-extreme shifts in personal power.

(Lago's laundry list of facts of high level play)

If you like all that shit, you should absolutely find a game that lets you do it. But that game is not D&D. And it has in fact NEVER been D&D. I have played Redbox, 1E, 2E, 3.5...none of them have dealt with any of the shit you just outlined. No multi-year timeframes, no being the incarnation of war, no constant status quo shifts, no army of dragons, no hundreds of thousands of followers, no raising continents. Any of that shit is pretty much in the realm of MTP.

The only version of D&D with a decent mass combat minigame expected a big army to be maybe a thousand guys.

But the problem is 3e and 4e don't really have any good rules for running mass combat or owning and running castles. Which means that most of Lagos ideas are crap for the last 2 incarnations of D&D, regardless of whether they would be desirable or not.

Lago's ideas are crap for EVERY edition of D&D ever published. Seriously. Because he is way beyond "own a castle and run a barony" or "fight a war with my army and the orcish horde", which is something you can seriously do with several editions of D&D (and which, honestly, was the definition of 'high level' for most of D&D's history). He's talking about building planets, not castles...and fighting a war with your army of 10,000 angels against all 666 layers of the Abyss. And D&D has never dealt with that kind of scale.

But the bottom line here is that the "Sweet Spot" theory is bullshit. And "extending the sweet spot" is actually just stagnating the game.

Could not disagree more. What stagnates the game is lack of story advancement and character development, not lack of power advancement.

I think people want some power advancement; it's fun. But I think there is an inherent limit on how much of that is good for the game. And regardless of personal preference, playing a game where power level is mostly static does NOT automatically equal stagnation...this is clear from other genres of fiction/games. There is generally very little power advancement in westerns, for instance, but that does not mean the stories are stagnant or uninteresting. Or crime/detective stories. Or low fantasy mercenaries. Hell, what about Shadowrun? You start as a crook who often sleeps in an alley doing dirty deeds for cash. And at the end of the game, what are you? Quite often, a crook who usually sleeps in a penthouse apartment, doing dirty deeds for cash.
Vertical advancement is a nice reward for gameplay, but the level of vertical advancement Lago is positing is insane.

People like their guy to go from being the brash kid to the ace gunfighter, or the farmboy to the jedi knight, or the peasant hero to the King who pulled the sword out of the stone. But there is a ceiling; the ace gunfighter doesn't eventually become able to gun down armies with magic revolvers...the jedi knight doesn't rewrite the minds of an entire planet...the King with Excalibur is still dealing mostly with the Kingdom, not the entire planet (plus the moon).

But no, I don't think most people really want to play Steve the Crap Farmer who later becomes Steve the God of the Outer Realms with angels who wipe his ass. That shit is ridiculous. And it's especially ridiculous if (as has been pointed out in other threads) that transformation takes place in less than a year, and to multiple people (some of whom are not the PCs).

[Lago PARANOIA]

MGuy, did that answer your question? I can give more 'high-level' stuff if you really want.

The interesting thing about high-level is that character concepts appropriate for a mid-level character can sometimes overpower in raw fighting ability high-level characters. I mean, The Hulk at his strongest is about the same level of raw power as Dr. Doom and Sinestro but he is still strictly a mid-level concept because of how small-time his ambitions and adventures are. To be high-level you need to have the will and ability to permanently alter societies and/or geography over an extended timescale. Because in D&D some of your obstacles to doing this are prismatic dragons the size of castles, you also need a level of kickassery able to oppose these people; meaning that even though conceivably David Xanatos and Green Goblin could do what was in the first sentence they wouldn't be able to in D&D.

So in other words, Superman is not a high-level concept even though he can kick the living shit out of Ares (who is one) since he seriously has no effect on the progression of society. He could easily become a high-level concept if he decided to use his superpowers and what was in the Fortress of Solitude to affect wide-scale social engineering, but as he's portrayed he's not and never will be. Genghis Khan is also not a high-level concept as far as D&D is concerned despite being incredible influential in real life, because his Mongolian hordes would seriously get the shit kicked out of them by a dozen pit fiends.

[Lago PARANOIA]

As has been said before, this entire complaint boils down to "they don't define 'high level' the way I want them to!" Seriously, you're complaining because there are no rules for terraforming and race creating? Why don't you complain that it has no rules for designing spacefaring mecha or tons of other shit that D&D is not about?

Because even though D&D doesn't explicitly have rules for creating islands in the middle of the ocean, that kind of stuff is an extrapolation of stuff they do have rules for. I mean, shit, in the Epic Level handbook there are rules for creating golems of gargantuan to colossal size AND in Faiths and Pantheons lets you build large-sized mecha if you worship Gond. Why is it that big of a stretch to think that if you get enough kickassery you could have legions of skyscraper-sized mecha if you so desired? I mean, shit, Complete Divine had a spell that let you make your own demiplane and it was only 9th level. Is it really that hard to contemplate that Vecna or someone of his level could make a demiplane the size of Rhode Island that was constantly on fire?

So, let me get this straight...you admit that you really only do a few high-level adventures (and in fact, many people never do ANY high-level adventures) before ending the campaign, but you want all this bullshit crammed in there anyway? Why? Is that really a worthwhile use of page space? Especially when it's radically different from the rest of the game? What is served by welding it on?

Uh, no, it's called time compression. You can run a campaign that is about the world exploding in 2 weeks and you killing as many people as possible to harvest their souls and transport it to another planet (which is the bad guy plot in FF7: Dirge of Cerebus). The campaign can arbitrarily last of length from 2 sessions to 50 sessions. But it doesn't matter that the change in status quo is so huge, because that's seriously the end of the game. But the 'end of the campaign' can seriously have more sessions in it than the 200 years it took your peasants to become demigods.

But no, I disagree utterly that there are very many people who want to play a game about people going through wacky-extreme shifts in personal power.

But no, I don't think most people really want to play Steve the Crap Farmer who later becomes Steve the God of the Outer Realms with angels who wipe his ass.

But there is a ceiling; the ace gunfighter doesn't eventually become able to gun down armies with magic revolvers...the jedi knight doesn't rewrite the minds of an entire planet...the King with Excalibur is still dealing mostly with the Kingdom, not the entire planet (plus the moon).

... even though the Epic Level Handbook was one of the more popular sourcebooks of 3rd Edition and this is pretty much Exalted's primary (I'd go as far as to say ONLY) selling point.

[MGuy]

MGuy, did that answer your question? I can give more 'high-level' stuff if you really want.

What? I didn't make another post after your last reply.

[FatR]

There is. That audience picks up Raymond E. Feist's novels, or Robert Jordan's, or something. But no, I disagree utterly that there are very many people who want to play a game about people going through wacky-extreme shifts in personal power.

Here you have lost me. Officially in 3.X Lvl20 power = (Lvl1 power x 756). Or so. I'd call this extreme. And DnD always was like that. You are seriously expected to go from nobody to god-slayer, as long as you pick class that does not have an obsolescence point (for times before 3.X read: wizard). Heck official books and adventures have numerous examples of characters battling and slaying actual gods. Every 3.X AP that ever ran to level 20 or around ended up with saving the world or eliminating a multiversal-scale evil. So DnD, as it is, already covers both power extremes and epic goals.

There is a problem, however. Lago might be going too far in his conclusions, but he is entirely correct, that DnD authors have a fetish for trying to make high-level gameplay exactly the same as low-level gameplay, even though plots and power levels are completely different. 4E is the crystallisation of this approach, but even in 3.X you still had plenty of adventures which tried to treat PCs (socially) like better-armed hobos, or force them to run fucking fetch quests, even though PCs were at the level where they could punch out Godzilla and make reality itself their bitch. This also had a negative impact on mechanics, with the game being unreasonably stingy with with grand-scale effects (the biggest kaboom you can make with DnD spells is pretty damn small compared to what wizards in fiction often pull, even though ability to nuke a city of low-level people in one shot makes you cooler but not more powerful in a world, where people of low enough level are officially supposed to be non-threats anyway), and with abilities that involve interacting with the world in non-stabby ways (casters got a lot of this stuff semi-accidentally because of tradition and their thematic width, everyone else got shafter).

These negatives also stemmed from authors' desire to prevent settings' status quo. And to this desire I can only say: to hell with it. The whole essence of heroic fantasy is leaving a permanent mark on the world. Even Conan eventually became a king. LotR ended with the world changing forever. Most of its ripoffs followed suit, at least to some extent. If you plan that the world will be entirely or mostly the same after a campaign that runs to whatever the max level is, you're doing it wrong. In fact, assumption that the status quo should be kept, is one of the biggest factors that undermine quality of the published high-level adventures. Of course, this ties right back to keeping the gameplay unchanging, because as long as PCs aren't supposed to really impact the world, besides slaying whatever bad guys the plot points them at, you are not obligated to give them abilities to do so, that will make railroading them harder and force a paradigm shift in adventure building.

[hogarth]

This also had a negative impact on mechanics, with the game being unreasonably stingy with with grand-scale effects [..]

FatR -- in your opinion, what's an example of a good game that is not "unreasonably stingy with grand-scale effects"?

[Josh_Kablack]

. I mean, The Hulk at his strongest is about the same level of raw power as Dr. Doom and Sinestro but he is still strictly a mid-level concept because of how small-time his ambitions and adventures are.

I'm guessing you don't actually read The Hulk comic book. The ambitions are decidedly small-scale ("Just wanna be left alone"), but the adventures are frequently crazy high-level multi-planar civilization changing affairs. The dude adventures on sub-atomic worlds; he vows revenge against the entire earth in response to a planet-cracker bomb destroying the kingdom he had just liberated won, NPCs have siphoned off the Hulk's gamma radiation as the primary phlebotinum to make pocket dimensions.

[DSMatticus]

But the bottom line here is that the "Sweet Spot" theory is bullshit. And "extending the sweet spot" is actually just stagnating the game.

Could not disagree more. What stagnates the game is lack of story advancement and character development, not lack of power advancement.

I think you had a language misconnect here - I think what Frank is referring to as the sweet spot is 'dungeoneering' and the tactical combat minigame. 4e doesn't really have rules that cover anything but tactical combats in dungeons (presumably). I don't think he's referring to power advancement at all.

And really, spending your entire career dungeoneering IS a failure of story advancement and character development, because your character goes from level 1 dungeon-delver to level 20 dungeon-delver and that makes no sense because at level 20 he has the spell list to get pissed off and collapse the entire dungeon on itself in like one round, and then go conquer a kingdom. And if the game gives you the ability to do that, then breaks down when you use said ability, something's weird.

[Edit: added quote to clarify what I was talking about]

Or low fantasy mercenaries. Hell, what about Shadowrun? You start as a crook who often sleeps in an alley doing dirty deeds for cash. And at the end of the game, what are you? Quite often, a crook who usually sleeps in a penthouse apartment, doing dirty deeds for cash.

This problem doesn't apply to Shadowrun, because advancing in Shadowrun just makes you a better crook. Nobody expected you to level up into the head of a corporation. That would make no sense, power-wise, story-wise, or character-wise. But in D&D, the power advancement makes no sense with the story or character advancement if all you do is raid dungeons.

[Edit: little extra note] And I realize 4e is supposed to be relatively power stagnant in mechanics (it is - heroic, paragon, and epic tier don't change much, AT ALL), but it is not power stagnant in fluff. Your character is supposed to advance from generic thief to master cat burglar to a trickster so powerful he fools the fates. And the only difference between those two is "my attacks do slightly more damage now than they did a few levels ago." You advance in fluff power, and stay the same in mechanic power. If everything 4e was had been fluffed as heroic tier, it would have been more appropriate. It still would have been boring as hell, but it would have made at least some sense.

"At my fingertips lies infinite power. I can teleport anywhere in existence in the span of seconds, and when I arrive I can fling meteors from the heavens that would level castles - or if I would rather not waste my ever so valuable time on the likes of you, with a snap of my fingers I can summon any creature you can imagine, and many your frail mind could not, to do so in my stead. Now, let's go stab some titans in the face, take their shit, and sell it so I can buy a +6 headband of intellect."

[Lago PARANOIA]

There is a problem, however. Lago might be going too far in his conclusions, but he is entirely correct, that DnD authors have a fetish for trying to make high-level gameplay exactly the same as low-level gameplay, even though plots and power levels are completely different.

I'm curious, where do you think that I went too far? I mean my idea isn't exactly unprecedented; isn't the ultimate goal in Exalted to get enough power to shape Creation how you want? I mean the gap in power, civilization, and phlebtonium between the 1st Age and what's going on right now is so immense that not even the Justice League with the Avenger's help could realize that vision in a timespan less than that of decades, but you and your merry band of Solar assholes are seriously supposed to accomplish that within a reasonable timescape.

One of the best things I've ever read from WotC was a web enhancement for 3.0E Deities and Demigods was how a stinking beggar became a literal god and outlined his advancement at key points. It's not like the game doesn't expect a similar story not to happen again and it's not even like that's supposed to be the immediate end of the game; Hextor and Vecna totally have stats and superpowers and whatnot and there are even rules for what happen if they die or if they want to exercise their divine muscle. They're pretty incomplete, true, but it's not like challenging the gods and playing Civilization with their powers is completely out of left field for D&D.

[Lago PARANOIA]

FatR -- in your opinion, what's an example of a good game that is not "unreasonably stingy with grand-scale effects"?

You didn't ask me, but Mutants and Masterminds d20 from 2nd Edition onwards lets you play with really strong grand-scale effects without comment due to how the Time and Value Scale progression works. It's really not that hard to create a PL 12 character that can completely frost over a city with one blast, nor does it break the game (because PL 7-12 people would get a chance to fight back). Granted, the game does still kind of suck but the reason for it sucking is how shallow the tactical minigame is once you strip out most of the effects that made d20 any interesting at all. The fluff and scale is one of the few selling points.

[DSMatticus]

Lago, this isn't exalted. And there really aren't any good rules for messing with deities. Certainly, they have stats, and most of those stats include a "kill you" ability. Okay, only some do actually, but that just shows how bad and inconsistent the rules are. You're right that high-level dungeoneering is stupid. That doesn't mean high-level play is about the ascention to god-dom. It's about the ascension to rulership. These are two completely different scales. You aren't even talking about high-level D&D play, you're talking about beyond high-level play. Possibly even beyond epic play. And since D&D epic play sucks and is written even worse than high-level play, D&D's epic play doesn't exist (we have purged it from our collective memories, yes?).

But yeah, let's break it down into a few tiers:
Low tier. You stab goblins in the face and dungeoneer.
Mid tier. Your dungeons possibly save the world or something. Also, you probably have some people drooling over how badass you are and will follow you everywhere and do what you say. You probably have a castle the local lord gave you to stop you from deciding his castle was a 'dungeon' worth raiding.
High tier. You collapse dungeons with uber magicks if they prove problematic, and you can have a kingdom at this point. Seriously - you can destroy them, so presumably you can take one.
Epic tier. Worlds tremble before your might. No one stands up to you, and you can seriously take over the prime. Or probably any other plane, eventually.
God tier. You can destroy the prime. Or make a new one. Or make everything purple. Why not? You said so, so it's gonna happen.

D&D high-level play is high tier. You are talking about epic tier and god tier. There are very poorly defined rules for epic tier, and pretty much no good rules for god tier. And D&D has never been about epic or god tier. D&D has pretty much always stopped at ruling kingdoms (maybe stopped before that, at baronies). But yes, with the amount of power in 3.5, you should be able to rule a kingdom by level 20. And the game ends at level 20 - I mean, you can advance past it with the epic rules, but those were a crappy addition that really had no part in the game.

[Username17]

Lago, this isn't exalted. And there really aren't any good rules for messing with deities. Certainly, they have stats, and most of those stats include a "kill you" ability.

See: Reasoning, Circular

The god fighting rules in 3e suck monkey butt. But in AD&D and OD&D they worked well enough that people did it on a regular basis.

-Username17

[FatR]

FatR -- in your opinion, what's an example of a good game that is not "unreasonably stingy with grand-scale effects"?

I don't have a personal experience of such game I consider good, unfortunately. I can hovewer, name a couple that have grand-scale effects fitting just fine, but blow ass/are mediocre for unrelated reasons. Exalted has a lot of grand-scale effect that affect up to entire countries. They are overcosted for their impact on people you might actually care about, but that's the problem with the system as a whole. Same can be said of Scion, except as far as I know Scion mechanics fall apart before you get to really impressive stuff. Mutants&Masterminds is already mentioned. I guess any good supers game should fit, but I have touched only M&M 2E.

[FatR]

I'm curious, where do you think that I went too far? I mean my idea isn't exactly unprecedented; isn't the ultimate goal in Exalted to get enough power to shape Creation how you want?

I think that while shift from dungeon crawling to leading actual wars, with a mass combat system, is natural, mandatory introduction of a rulership/SimWorld minigame is not. Players like to have bad-ass stronghold or to end wars with a flash of diplomancy, but they get bored when forced to administering these strongholds or to engage in political games. So when I GMed DnD I introduced trusty NPCs, capable of running PCs' domains, dealing with routine problems, and ensuring that the projects PCs started run smoothly, while PCs are off beating on doomsday cults and interplanar invasions. Not sure if any examples from GMing Exalted are valid, because by the time any of my PCs there got really powerful and influential I started to hate the system enough to MTP most everything.

I mean the gap in power, civilization, and phlebtonium between the 1st Age and what's going on right now is so immense that not even the Justice League with the Avenger's help could realize that vision in a timespan less than that of decades, but you and your merry band of Solar assholes are seriously supposed to accomplish that within a reasonable timescape.

Exalted always lie . Well, actually, if you exploit, IIRC, a combination of Imbue Amalgam spell and Solar Craft you can make self-replicating servants that crank out magical shit at ridiculous and ever-increasing rate. But I doubt authors accounted for that, and magical shit from actual books you can craft is actually boring, clunky and unimpressive, save for a handful of accidental gems.

[DSMatticus]

The god fighting rules in 3e suck monkey butt. But in AD&D and OD&D they worked well enough that people did it on a regular basis.

That's because in AD&D and OD&D gods were conceptualized completely differently. Gods really just weren't that powerful. They weren't supposed to be. They were supposed to have the sort of power that a high-level character could walk up to them and trade blows with them, even though that same high-level character was really only some random badass baron. Which means AD&D and OD&D gods weren't really much more powerful than typical mortal rulers, they just had better PR campaigns.

That expectation, that D&D gods were on par with the higher end of mortal rulers, got completely tossed out in 3.0 and 3.5. Now, those gods are conceptualized as untouchable by high-level characters. And the stat blocks and their abilities try to reflect this. Was this a bad decision? Well, that's a matter of taste. I kind of want to say yes - if 20 was supposed to be the end of the game, it would be perfectly reasonable to put deities in there as a reasonable thing to fight. I think they were afraid to because they realized how crazily unpredictable high-level fights could be and what sort of cheese they'd put in their own game, and putting gods in and watching them get obliterated instantly by slightly clever wizards would have just shown everyone what a hilarious failure they'd done at high-level.

But that wasn't really my point. I wasn't trying to say, "the rules suck, so it's bad and we shouldn't do it." We can design completely new rules systems for gods and epic play that actually work. What I really wanted to get at is that Lago is talking about a wide range of things, each of which should actually be happening at a different point of the game. Lago's idea of high-level play actually breaks down into at least two distinct realms of play, and I feel like it could be three or four. Just because we've stopped dungeoneering doesn't mean the progression from there is straight to god.

E.g.: The characters enter the wish economy, and probably stop dungeoneering. They've had a little barony for some time now, but with this huge influx of resources now available to them they turn their little barony into a kingdom. Expanding this barony into a kingdom into an empire should probably take them through level 11 through level 20. Possibly, by the end of 20 their empire could literally be expanding into other planes.

Fortunately, the rules that let you run a barony/kingdom/empire can probably be easily applied to run bigger, multiplanar empires, and it's really just a matter of time and creativity as the character expands. We should probably just hand out feats instead of levels at this point, a la E6 style, or we're faced with the task of redesigning an epic system from scratch that actually works, and that's not really necessary because level 20 characters are powerful enough to do everything we expect from them in this phase of play.

At some point, the character is going to have a lot of people in his empire, and if you follow the believers -> divine power route, there's no reason he can't muster up enough to give himself some divine spark. Now we need to design a deity system, probably based on the existing divine system, but less broken. The character still gets feats instead of levelling up, but also gets divine spark for accomplishing major plot goals that expand his domain (and possibly loses it for failing them).

That broke down into two-three different subsystems inside of D&D before we got to having the characters become and tangle with actual gods. And that's my point - we shouldn't talk about it like it's all one single realm of play. It is several very distinct realms of play, and we can (and have to) address each one individually.

I think that while shift from dungeon crawling to leading actual wars, with a mass combat system, is natural, mandatory introduction of a rulership/SimWorld minigame is not. Players like to have bad-ass stronghold or to end wars with a flash of diplomancy, but they get bored when forced to administering these strongholds or to engage in political games.

Well, yeah, but that doesn't mean the subsystem shouldn't exist. The subsystem just needs to be sufficiently simple, quick, and abstract that people don't get sick of it. I mean, look at the rules for running a business (regular or Tome, preferably Tome). They completely ignore the logistics of the business, yet you can still have the business and you still have to solve business problems. That's what we'd want to do with the kingdom - "your kingdom makes this much money, produces an army of this size, and causes these sorts of problems every so often or else you make less money and produce less of an army. You can do things like this, this, or this to have it make more money or produce a bigger army." The system should exist, it's just a lot of it has to be implicit, not explicit.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I think that while shift from dungeon crawling to leading actual wars, with a mass combat system, is natural, mandatory introduction of a rulership/SimWorld minigame is not. Players like to have bad-ass stronghold or to end wars with a flash of diplomancy, but they get bored when forced to administering these strongholds or to engage in political games.

I thought that wargames with an extensive pre-battle administration phase pretty common. I can think of quite a few games that have no life outside of warfields, but they also tend to be really shallow and narrow: Risk, Metal Marines, Advance Wars, etc.

[Wrathzog]

It seems relatively simple conceptually:

The game is formed of layers....
more stuff...
...
Layers!

I can kind of see where you're going with this but how do you decide what goes in what layers? How does each layer interact? At what point do you stop worrying about the lower layers?
I might need pictures before I can wrap my head around the idea.

And before we continue, did anyone play Birthright? How was the transition between being an adventurer and being a ruler handled?

[A Man In Black]

The big problem is that most people just want to stab shit, because this is an action game. Superman analogy brought above is valid. Superman still punches people, not meddles in politics.

Except that you totally do have best-selling, critically-acclaimed comics like the Authority, which are basically "What if the Justice League meddled in politics?" (Admittedly, it's about as nuanced and insightful as your average superhero comics, but whaddyagonnado.)

What the hell would be wrong with something along the lines of tabletop Spore/Black & White that plugs into a workable high-level magic system? No, it's not like things D&D has done before, but who cares as long as it's awesome.