D20 sweet spot (was White Sucks, Fighters nice things, etc.)

[name_here]

Yes, Giga Slave. IIRC it's the next big attack spell she casts. It utterly annihilates everything in the affected area, and the affected area can be the entire universe.

[Username17]

I want a game in which Conan, Elric, Lina Inverse and The White Ninja team up and fight crime in a fantasy mockup of the Holy Roman Empire, spanning a career running from when Lina shoots fire arrows at people and Conan is just a bad-ass guy, to high level where Lina casts Dragon Slave and Conan has to discover he's the Avatar of Crom or whatever in order to keep pace. This game is D&D that becomes the pitch from Exalted - it is the perfect, Platonic D&D that should exist but doesn't.

That is reasonable. A power level that runs betweenGreen Arrow at the low end and Wonder Woman at the high end is a pretty good projected power range for a heroic RPG. Doing it in a fantasy milieu shouldn't be a problem, because fantasy heroics is still the default RPG genre. The problem, as you've noted, is that none of the games actually deliver that.

Fantasy Hero is basically garbage - you can't do fantasy anything if your system can't handle rats. GURPS is point based and probably could have covered the Green Arrow to Wonder Woman range, but its reliance on 1 second combat ticks and impalings and shit make it unsuitable for anything but the most meat grindery of fantasy. Exalted is mostly concerned with the appropriate power range, but it's a flaming piece of fractal poop where every piece of it is as horrible as the whole. Dungeons & Dragons is level based and in theory should be able to cover any power level you want just by starting from a number other than 1, but in reality the game breaks down about the time the player characters reach the Green Arrow level - playing at Wonder Woman level is out of the question because the challenges and character balance are basically gibberish in the high teens levels.

There's no reason it has to be that way, but it is. People have made games that cover the power level you're looking for (ex.: Champions). People have made fantasy games galore. People have even made games with fantasy elements that operate at higher power levels than 3e D&D functions at (ex.: Shadowrun). But no one has made a game where people play super-hero level characters in a fantasy world that isn't shit. I mean, there's 4th edition D&D. But that's lame and also relegates literally everything you do outside of shooting your arrows into Cyclopses to magical teaparty.

Basically it sounds like you want a game that delivered on the promises that Exalted gave when it was created. Which obviously wouldn't look like Exalted at all, save that it might possibly use Dice Pools.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

But no one has made a game where people play super-hero level characters in a fantasy world that isn't shit.

Has anyone even made a fantasy world with superhero level characters that isn't shit? I mean, Japan rolls out three or four such worlds each anime season and almost all of them breakdown in piles of flaming contradiction if you think about the implications for more than five minutes, and the rest maybe make it to ten.

Marvel and DC both pretend that their respective supeer-smart heroes haven't converted the world into a post-scarcity utopia by flat out ignoring the issue.

I suspect a large part of the problem is that massive power disparities between the masses and the chosen powered people are inherently difficult to handle. Marvel and DC, blessed with the backdrop of the modern world simply ignore the problem completely, which leads to absurdities like 'Chuck' still being on the air in a world where Thor can literally walk down the streets. When you have to create the whole world from the ground up its way harder to hide.

And even if you do make a world that more or less holds together at super-hero power levels, you tend to get the problem that one type of power (usually whatever most closely approximates flexible magic) is so superior to everything else that only that kind of power user matters. The Wheel of Time comes to mind here - Matt and Perrin both have complex supernatural abilities, but man did Jordan and Sanderson ever have to jump through hoops to keep them relevant compared to even chump change One Power users.

And making a game is much harder than simply telling stories in such worlds because a game can't handwave the implications of its powers away. If anything, players are almost guaranteed to exploit even the slightest bit of world-breaking potential to the hilt. Worse, a novel world may need to be stable for only a few years, and you can introduce completely world-breaking abilities (in the final WoT battle they fire canons through gateways from within inaccessible caverns) that you can simply ignore by having the credits roll. RPGs not so much. Not for nothing do MMO designers have to periodically go through and nerf certain combos, and they have way more output constraints in play than tabletop ever will.

So I think this is actually a pretty hard design problem.

[Kaelik]

I don't know, to an extent Marvel universe must be at least sort of a post scarcity utopia, because everyone is well fed even the bum crack addicts, and they rebuilt the entire city of New York from an event many many times worse than 9/11 in a few months.

[Username17]

Marvel and DC both pretend that their respective supeer-smart heroes haven't converted the world into a post-scarcity utopia by flat out ignoring the issue.

That's an advantage that Fantasy settings have over modern day ones. There is a historically available set of technological developments that could be appended to a pre-modern world that would have comprehensible effects. In a fantasy world, you could build a railroad or see the tiniest of organisms and discover the germ theory of disease. The world can change and grow and adapt in ways that people can understand because our world and our history have already done so. The players can pacify the local bandits and tame frost to refrigerate food and the world would become more familiar rather than less.

Modern superheroes have to contend with the fact that they live in a "modern" world, and any advances made by the characters make the world less like the modern world. But there are thousands of years of written history about pre-modern worlds. If the main characters make cannons or smelt aluminum the world changes, but it doesn't become any less of a pre-modern world. Where a modern setting has to constantly roll back changes to bring it back into accord with our world's concept of modernity, a pre-modern fantasy does not.

You can make dozens of Terry Pratchett books about adding this or that advance to your fantasy setting and it's still a pre-modern fantasy setting when you're done. Go ahead and have your characters invent nationalism and the constitutional state; that makes you revolutionary for the mid-eighteenth century of our Earth.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

But no one has made a game where people play super-hero level characters in a fantasy world that isn't shit.

Has anyone even made a fantasy world with superhero level characters that isn't shit? I mean, Japan rolls out three or four such worlds each anime season and almost all of them breakdown in piles of flaming contradiction if you think about the implications for more than five minutes, and the rest maybe make it to ten.

Dragon Ball does it pretty well. Bulma is the wealthiest, smartest person in the world and the world runs on her Capsule Corps technology. Senzu beans are used to recover in fights mid-battle, Dragon Balls are used to recover from any global disaster. Mr. Satan gets the credit that the protagonists don't want and in return gives Goku's family large amounts of money, though now Gohan is a part of his family too with marrying Videl.

When cosmic planet destroying gods are involved that Goku and Vegeta can't beat, Earth gets by with having the best food in the 12 universes.

There's a consistent internal logic to the setting even if it's largely made via "whatever Toriyama feels like today"

There's no reason it has to be that way, but it is.

How about a list of "How to massively fuck up your game" so heartbreaker designers can avoid the same pitfalls.

With D&D3e it'd be "didn't playtest after level 6, gave casters world changing abilities"

4e-5e "high level players throw out bigger numbers but don't interact with the world much"

Exalted: "etc."

[Mechalich]

Dragon Ball does it pretty well. Bulma is the wealthiest, smartest person in the world and the world runs on her Capsule Corps technology. Senzu beans are used to recover in fights mid-battle, Dragon Balls are used to recover from any global disaster. Mr. Satan gets the credit that the protagonists don't want and in return gives Goku's family large amounts of money, though now Gohan is a part of his family too with marrying Videl.

When cosmic planet destroying gods are involved that Goku and Vegeta can't beat, Earth gets by with having the best food in the 12 universes.

There's a consistent internal logic to the setting even if it's largely made via "whatever Toriyama feels like today"

Piccolo destroys the moon in one of the first five episodes of DBZ. The implications of this actions - which would cause world wide disaster on an apocalyptic scale - are completely ignored. Also, due to the dragonballs, it is a universe where death is meaningless.

Toriyama wisely mostly plays the universe out for comedy, so consistency is beside the point.

With D&D3e it'd be "didn't playtest after level 6, gave casters world changing abilities"

The thing is, 'super-hero level' more or less translates into world-changing. Making it explicitly impossible to industrialize those abilities helps a lot, but has its own challenges to pull off, isn't a complete solution, and seems to offend a certain type of gamer.

Balancing open-ended abilities is hard. Balancing mind control against extra-dimensional summoning against tech genius in a world where a human can interact with the environment in all the ways a human normally could is never going to be easy.

If you give players the power to change the world they will change it. And the minute they change it significantly the GM is suddenly off the rails of the sourcebooks and trying to map out vast changes to a fantasy world on the fly, which is an epic amount of work even when they change things in a fairly mundane and expected way (like murdering Manshoon in FR). Most fantasy worlds are built on a fairly static framework, a snapshot that becomes less and less useful with every major change.

In some ways this is what you want too. If your game is telling an epic story you want the ability to redraw the map by the time the campaign is over. Maybe design should more willingly acknowledge this, accepting that no setting survives contact with the campaign. However, I know some gaming groups want to stack campaign after campaign onto the same setting even though pretending that nuking Cormyr doesn't have a dramatic impact on Sembia becomes stupid pretty fast.

One trick that does work is to make the setting absurdly massive. In Star Wars, for example, if you blow up a planet, no big deal, there's plenty more. Your characters can alter the lives of billions but since the setting encompasses quadrillions that's okay. Planescape was also kind of like this - you could affect change locally but it was impossible to annihilate demonkind. However this sort of move creates its own problems.

[maglag]

But no one has made a game where people play super-hero level characters in a fantasy world that isn't shit.

Has anyone even made a fantasy world with superhero level characters that isn't shit? I mean, Japan rolls out three or four such worlds each anime season and almost all of them breakdown in piles of flaming contradiction if you think about the implications for more than five minutes, and the rest maybe make it to ten.

Marvel and DC both pretend that their respective supeer-smart heroes haven't converted the world into a post-scarcity utopia by flat out ignoring the issue.

I would say that quite in the contrary, they've tackled the issue multiple times.

The reason why Marvel/DC don't have regular humies with flying cars and whatnot is because super-smart "heroes" are complete dicks basically. They both hoard their super techs for their personal enjoyment while stomping down any other super smart people.

This is, imagine if superman had arrived on Earth at the stone age. Then a tribe discovers smelting and starts forging metal weapons to conquer their neighbours. Superman would crush the "evildoers", trap all smiths, destroy their creations, and the humans would be stuck with wood and stone for tools forever.

I actually remember a "what if" comic that ran into that premise, superman arrives just when the industrial revolution is about to start and crushes pretty much every form of progress in fear the humies may eventually develop a weapon strong enough to actually harm him.

Batman is just about as a dick, having all kind of super gadgets for himself while the Arkham Asylum has so many finance problems that the criminals inside come in and out as they please due to constant budget cuts. That there are still armies of thugs willing to work for the Joker shows that the economic situation in Gotham City is pretty awful, even the cops are pretty underpaid, but Batman keeps insisting that the "solution" is just to keep beating up the guys who can't get a better job.

On the other hand public Healthcare seems to be pretty boss. The Joker must have broken every bone on his body but the public hospitals always fix him back to prime shape after the Batman kicks his ass.

[Username17]

With D&D3e it'd be "didn't playtest after level 6, gave casters world changing abilities"

The playtesting after level 6 is a big problem. Casters having world changing abilities is not.

The world of D&D is deeply depressed, it's just OK for people to make progress.

There is a lot of arable land that is occupied by manticores, players can jolly well clear that out and found new colonies or open up new trade routes. There are a lot of tribes and villages that are autonomous, bending knee only to a local strongman. The players could jolly well conquer/unite them and make a kingdom or a nation state. A majority of people are farming at very low yields or working as unskilled laborers. You could mechanize agriculture and institute a public education system.

Even the supposedly "game breaking" wealth tricks aren't really that big of a deal. If you got three wishes a day and used them all for making gold, that's 75,000 gp a day. Which is a lot. But remember that gold is worth less in D&D land than it is on our Earth, and that would still make your country the fourth largest gold producer on our planet (after China, Australia, and Russia). Not only can we imagine a world where one country makes that much gold, we can imagine a world there three countries make more gold than that and the buying power of gold is higher.

In D&D land, minimum wage is 360 silver pieces a year. At current prices, that's about $1,500 (although silver seems to be a bit more valuable in D&D land than in our world). And most people seem to make that. People join armies for two or three times those wages. An industrial revolution that put people to higher productivity work could easily quadruple peoples' earning power and the consequences wouldn't be weird.

No, the problem is not that world changing abilities were given to the Wizards. The problem is that the DMG doesn't have a chapter about using world changing abilities to progress the world. And the other problem of course is that the non-casters don't have world changing abilities. Even though simple management and leadership could easily change the world considerably more than magical creation shenanigans.

-Username17

[maglag]

The DMG talks about that. It says "There are infernals/aberrations/gods/mad magicians trying to conquer/destroy the world, so the party will be kinda busy dealing with that to try to set up the industrial revolution".

There's also the "ruins of ancient super civilizations are everywhere". So yeah, people tried to change the D&D world before. And they all got curbstomped by something, and all that remains are some artifacts and relics that nobody can replicate.


In our world we're at the top of the food chain, but in D&Dland humanoids may as well be insect colonies when compared to outsiders and whatnot. And although humans are happy to let ant colonies be on their own in some dark spots they don't care about, when an ant colony gets too big and starts spilling in our home, we're gonna call the exterminator and erase that colony from the face of the Earth.

As Frank himself said, the worth of a hero is defined by the threats he faces. And in D&D land hunger and education and healthcare aren't the priorities. Surviving multiplying undeads, horrors, dragons and angry forces of nature is. A single shade escaping out of control will literally bring the apocalypse upon the living, and that's just a CR 2 monster.

Or what, do you think outsiders only exist twiddling their thumbs waiting to be binded by casters and never use their uber powers out of their own initiative?

[Dogbert]

The DMG talks about that. It says "There are infernals/aberrations/gods/mad magicians trying to conquer/destroy the world, so the party will be kinda busy dealing with that to try to set up the industrial revolution".

Yeah, gotta love the self-contradicting narratives in d&d, one of them assuming the PCs are some merry group of knights errant instead of a band of murderous hobos. Furthermore, the more self-sufficient magic the PCs acquire, the less reasons they have to care about the mud ball they live in (and as soon as they can create demiplanes, not even the "the world is where you keep all your stuff" applies).

In addition, depending on the 3.X edition you're playing, the PCs may or may not have access to the Wish economy, which means the PCs will probably be at the disjunctive of either investing in changing the world OR staying in the game, because staying in the game requires constant, heavy investment in the eternal escalation of magic items.

[Omegonthesane]

The DMG talks about that. It says "There are infernals/aberrations/gods/mad magicians trying to conquer/destroy the world, so the party will be kinda busy dealing with that to try to set up the industrial revolution".

Yeah, gotta love the self-contradicting narratives in d&d, one of them assuming the PCs are some merry group of knights errant instead of a band of murderous hobos. Furthermore, the more self-sufficient magic the PCs acquire, the less reasons they have to care about the mud ball they live in (and as soon as they can create demiplanes, not even the "the world is where you keep all your stuff" applies).

In addition, depending on the 3.X edition you're playing, the PCs may or may not have access to the Wish economy, which means the PCs will probably be at the disjunctive of either investing in changing the world OR staying in the game, because staying in the game requires constant, heavy investment in the eternal escalation of magic items.

Part of the point of the wish economy - or at least, one of the effects noted as beneficial - was that it meant gold became worthless for the magic item treadmill, so you could instead invest all things made of gold and lesser magic items into "changing the world".

Also, I thought the main reason for the constant heavy investment in new magic items was ensuring you have the right numbers to defeat enemies with, which is mitigated by Tome scaling bonuses anyway.

[MGuy]

What would rules for starting the industrial revolution in DnD land even look like?

[hyzmarca]

What would rules for starting the industrial revolution in DnD land even look like?

You start with stronghold rules and build out from there.

[Kaelik]

I'm not sure why a world with the ability to beat up manticores in order to make magic items would have an industrial revolution ever.

Seems like the revolution would be learning how to make more useful magic items and then breeding more manticores.

[OgreBattle]

I could see the industrial revolution happening with a -2 INT species like orcs. In that way they can parallel how the civilized Romans saw the british as naked barbarians but fast forward a few centuries and they've got kids crawling into coal mines to fuel progress.

[Mechalich]

If you are using the standard D&D cosmology it is not especially difficult to utilize gateways to elemental planes or specialized demiplanes to produce infinite energy or infinite physical resources. As such you could trigger an industrial revolution if you discovered some pressing need to make vast numbers of some sort of relatively complicated mechanism, like primitive firearms if your setting has them.

But otherwise, most people in a D&D scenario want to industrialize spellcasting and magic item production and the benefits thereof. If allowed, this leads to strange and twisted universes like the Tippyverse.

[hyzmarca]

Honestly, if I was going to industralize in D&D, I'd start with a lot magic setting where everyone caps at level 9 or so. D&D breaks down a lot when you get into the absurdly high levels, which is why most people don't play in those levels.

[Username17]

I'm not sure why a world with the ability to beat up manticores in order to make magic items would have an industrial revolution ever.

Seems like the revolution would be learning how to make more useful magic items and then breeding more manticores.

Our world's industrial revolution centered around turning sheep into wool. I don't see how a revolution around the captive breeding of manticores for industrial useful manticore quills would be unrecognizably different.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

I'm not sure why a world with the ability to beat up manticores in order to make magic items would have an industrial revolution ever.

Seems like the revolution would be learning how to make more useful magic items and then breeding more manticores.

Our world's industrial revolution centered around turning sheep into wool. I don't see how a revolution around the captive breeding of manticores for industrial useful manticore quills would be unrecognizably different.

-Username17

In our world better technology was the path to success every single time, because there is no magic.

In a world where magic exists, and has been the path to success for generations of people seeking a better standard of living, why would they ignore the magical revolution in order to invent a coal powered steam engine when they already have access to infinite heat differential or infinite wind power?

[Username17]

In a world where magic exists, and has been the path to success for generations of people seeking a better standard of living, why would they ignore the magical revolution in order to invent a coal powered steam engine when they already have access to infinite heat differential or infinite wind power?

In a world where purple monkey dishwasher, why wouldn't you give me kisses until your heart stops?

Your premises and conclusions are gibberish. Magic is a an energy source. You can do stuff with it based on your knowledge. It requires and allows capital expenditure to make improve outputs using magical energy. It uses somewhat different rules than coal power, solar power, or geo-thermal power, but it's still industry.

A lot of the industrial revolution wasn't coal powered. Much of it was water powered or wind powered. There are lots of sources of energy, and industrialists used lots of them. Magic allows for several additional power sources, but there's no reason to believe industrialists wouldn't use them or refrain from using others because they had them. Industry has always been an "all of the above" proposition. A magical world simply has more entries above the line.

Which of course makes industry more likely, not less.

-Username17

[tussock]

Man, D&D makes no sense, it'd be like there are there billionaires on earth demanding service cuts for the poor so they can pay even less than 3% tax on the earnings they don't even work for. And also constant war, because that's easy money.

Won't someone think of the peasants?

IRL, we got public eduction because the empires waited too long to crush Prussia's religious fanatic leaders who insisted it would work out because GOD! When they tried, they faced an army with primary school eduction, and it kicked all their asses at once.

We got democracy because it won a lot of wars when you needed most men to go pick up a gun and not run away when people shot at them.

But in D&D, what wins is Wizards and Clerics. They don't care about your army, they can dominate your leadership and get whatever they want, like your army funding cut. You don't have an educated population with technological advances to win a war, you use your Elminster, and whichever country has produced the highest level Elminster probably wins, so monsters and ruins and treasure and stuff are vital and must be protected from the peasantry.

[Judging__Eagle]

One idea that I've been thinking might work with respect towards setting building that conforms to the following common fantasy setting tropes:

-Lots of giant/ancient ruins
-No currently global empires

Was inspired by the "points of power" ideas Frank mentioned for fantasy setting design; based on Dominions: Ascension Wars.

Albeit; with a more After Sundown based simplification. Specifically, every fire that is lit can lead to demon-goblins & fairy-devils spawning in the area. Every time plant of animal matter is consumed, can lead to Elder Things/ Carnivorous Plants & Shoggoths coming from between the stars. Every time a person dies; Zombi or Ghosts could show up of that person. Likely with a caveat that once a creature from the "deeps" has crossed into our "shallows"; more of their kind may soon follow.

Resulting in a situation where communities try to shore up their defenses against unpreventable attacks; and whereby the larger a community is the more likely they are to spark a spawning of enemies that leads to ruin.

[Username17]

-Lots of giant/ancient ruins
-No currently global empires

You don't need to do anything weird to have that be the starting point. D&D posits a lot of bad guys. Some off-world, some underground, and some from just sort of next door. If the world has seen a necromantic uprising, a demon invasion, the conquests of the mind flayers, the tyranny of dragons, the ravages of giants, and whatever the fuck else, why would it need any general prohibition on nation building to explain the current dark age?

The last major empire in your area was shattered and its civilization forced into decline by whatever the last major dark lord that stomped all over your area was. Maybe it was Orcus, maybe it was Vecna, maybe it was one of the unnamed Elder Brains. You know, whatever. The fact is that for all of the bad guys to be a thing, the number of times that the free peoples of the plains have fallen under a specific named shadow is large enough to explain as many ruins and fallen historical empires as you want.

You don't even want to be Warhammer Fantasy, where there's 6 thousand years of TL;DR bullshit about the rise and fall of the Slaan and shit. But D&D really errs on that side of things no matter what you do. Go ahead and put the various empire killers and mass slavers and shit into a timeline and see how many rises and falls you have to account for to cram all that shit in. Start with the Aboleth, and end with Zombie.

-Username17

[FatR]

Discussing on whether warriors and rogues should be the same class is really just splitting hairs. Conan's real class features is not sneaking or cutting off heads, although of course he can do both, but using some sort of hidden meta resource to provide himself with lucky breaks. Whenever Conan gets in a hopeless situation, such as being locked in Tsotha-Lanthi's or Xaltotun's dungeon, or nailed to a cross, or faced with a demon immune to normal weapons, his player invokes an ability that draws attention of an NPC or two to bail him out (this NPC is not necessarily friendly, but at the very least he unwittingly provides Conans with tools needed to save himself). The same goes for many other "badass normal" characters.