The Gaming Den

I didn't run an E12 campaign in the sense of the cosmos only having level 12 things, but my campaign was planned to meet its natural end with a level 12ish party.

Having someone who knew the rules far better than I ever will left me worried I couldn't keep up the challenge enough to be interesting; letting everyone have cohorts... was definitely a mistake, even if I actually liked the idea that the main heroes had an entire caravan of just their non-combatant servants.

As time goes on I realize that I can tolerate 3.X and Pathfinder games less and less. I understand that there's oodles of monsters and NPCs pre-written, but I can guarantee that many of them are not built correctly so I end up doing a lot of the work myself. And the swinginess of the D20 system, the switching out of prepared spell slots, etc makes higher level games too stressful to run in comparison to other RPGs.

The enjoyment I get out of the labor of playing or GMing in 3rd Edition can be easily gotten in other RPGs with less time and effort.

'speculative fiction setting that uses the plot development tropes of post-Gygax D&D but everyone tops out in power at around a 9th-level 3E D&D wizard' is literally the most common kind of TTRPG setting there is. I'm baffled why people keep bringing it up as some kind of novel idea. It's fucking not. It's the least original idea we have for TTRPG settings, GET ANOTHER FUCKING IDEA.

I thought topping out in power at around a 5th or 7th level 3e D&D wizard was more common?

What do you want, a setting where every mud farmer knows Teleport and Fabricate?

Foxwarrior wrote:What do you want, a setting where every mud farmer knows Teleport and Fabricate?

You know, that would at least be ORIGINAL. The current status quo of every other fantasy game being where creating a tower out of stone is a once-in-a-generation power reserved for the best of the mages?

SEEN IT.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

Foxwarrior wrote:What do you want, a setting where every mud farmer knows Teleport and Fabricate?

You know, that would at least be ORIGINAL. The current status quo of every other fantasy game being where creating a tower out of stone is a once-in-a-generation power reserved for the best of the mages?

SEEN IT.

Be the change you wish to see.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

Foxwarrior wrote:What do you want, a setting where every mud farmer knows Teleport and Fabricate?

You know, that would at least be ORIGINAL. The current status quo of every other fantasy game being where creating a tower out of stone is a once-in-a-generation power reserved for the best of the mages?

SEEN IT.

I mean, if you're just bothered by that low standard, then

a) that's what I was trying to get at with my phb wizard nostalgia, those wizards can do a lot of cool things which end up being super rare or nonexistent in newer games.

And b) Gempunks of course has a setting with an empire where every city spans half a continent due to extensive use of portals, as well as another one where the people in charge are regularly killed or brought back to life.[/i]

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

Foxwarrior wrote:What do you want, a setting where every mud farmer knows Teleport and Fabricate?

You know, that would at least be ORIGINAL. The current status quo of every other fantasy game being where creating a tower out of stone is a once-in-a-generation power reserved for the best of the mages?

SEEN IT.

I like that setting

Mask_De_H wrote:Be the change you wish to see.

Best thing about this thought-terminating cliche? It can apply to literally anything. Someone tells you that they're sick of the bad foreign cuisine in their city / endless superhero movies / interminable pixel art games / cookie-cutter pornography? You can just bleat out 'be the change you wish to see'.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

Mask_De_H wrote:Be the change you wish to see.

Best thing about this thought-terminating cliche? It can apply to literally anything. Someone tells you that they're sick of the bad foreign cuisine in their city / endless superhero movies / interminable pixel art games / cookie-cutter pornography? You can just bleat out 'be the change you wish to see'.

How would you imagine a session in such a setting going? I figure it'd be kinda like Star Trek, depending on how readily available such magitech is to everyone or anyone

OgreBattle: Just off of the top of my head, Naruto, Legend of Korra, and Fairy Tail. Or even, with some interpretation, MLP:FiM.

Lago wrote: Legend of Korra

Despite having only watched the first season of this (but all of TLA), I really want to take it apart. Avatar seems to me like a lot of those live action comic book shows, where characters tend to cap out at about sixth level sorcerers. Sometimes they get stronger, but it's more like the strength of ten sixth level sorcerers than like the strength of one ninth level wizard. Things like lightning bolt and super tremorsense get a lot more mundane in Legend of Korra but it's not like Polymorph, teleport, contact other plane spam, or magic jar were showing up much.

9th level wizards are craaaazy and I wonder whether you've really seen as many games about them as you say.

WTF? I didn't say that I saw that many games about them. I'm saying that games about them would be much more original than the pablum people have been talking about the last two pages.

Well, you said

Lago wrote:everyone tops out in power at around a 9th-level 3E D&D wizard

And if people topped out in power all the way up at 9th-level 3E D&D wizard heights more often, that'd be a breath of fresh air.

But instead we get things like 5e and PF2, where you could run Avatar-style magical worlds by just setting people to level 10+ more often, but you don't get up to 9th-level 3E D&D wizard strength without picking at whatever handful of exploits they forgot to remove.

Foxwarrior wrote:But instead we get things like 5e and PF2, where you could run Avatar-style magical worlds by just setting people to level 10+ more often, but you don't get up to 9th-level 3E D&D wizard strength without picking at whatever handful of exploits they forgot to remove.

You need to do a lot more work than just setting all of the peasants to level 10 and calling it a day. You need to completely rewrite the setting from scratch. For example, you need to answer the question of: why do we still have feudalism?

Well, do we still have feudalism?

If we do, maybe it's the divine right of Kings. Like, Vecna or Gruumsh or Yeenoghu come up from heaven and go: "I think you deserve to be King, here, have some Balors." Also, armies beat individuals in 5e and I bet that doesn't change when the armies are made of level 10 characters.

It doesn't sound exactly feudal maybe, but what if 1% of characters are tenth level clerics and there's no food supply besides created food?

Was Edo period Japan still feudal? It was a cool place to live

Foxwarrior wrote:Also, armies beat individuals in 5e and I bet that doesn't change when the armies are made of level 10 characters.

So fucking what? That's because the 5E D&D setting writers don't care to examine how the mechanics affect their setting.

They imagine their setting as a handful of increasingly invincible individuals lording over less powerful people. They enforce this in their writing of modules and setting books. And the fact that the mechanics don't support this in 5E D&D doesn't mean shit.

If the game writers say that cities of tens of thousands of people with well-equipped militias and guilds are terrified of the tarrasque and can't do shit about it, guess what? They're right and you're wrong, because they control the narrative and don't give a shit about your useless, self-satisfied math and analysis.

Lago wrote:If the game writers say that cities of tens of thousands of people with well-equipped militias and guilds are terrified of the tarrasque and can't do shit about it, guess what? They're right and you're wrong, because they control the narrative and don't give a shit about your useless, self-satisfied math and analysis.

I mean, if you take that stance, then the setting is still feudal despite the minimum level being 10 instead of 1 because I say so. Super easy.

And that's my fucking point. TTRPG settings that:

A) Take place in a speculative fiction setting, usually but not always medieval fantasy.
B) Has an upper limit for its fantastical elements to be less impressive than modern technology.
C) Further narrow casts its more fantastical elements into a minority to make the impact of B even less relevant to the metafiction of the setting.

Are literally the most common TTRPG settings in the market.

And yes, I've seen fantasy settings where the mechanics support the narrative conclusion (Torchbearer, 4E D&D) and ones where the mechanics DON'T support the narrative conclusion (3.5E D&D) but the narrative arc overrides the mechanics. The narrative impact is still the same in the game as she is played.

Foxwarrior wrote:I think you deserve to be King, here, have some Balors.

Now that's an interesting setting conceit. I imagine that the Balors are distributed to whoever most exemplifies a given god's philosophy, and some of those philosophies are nonsense, so that really adds texture to a setting.

(I also think everyone getting Teleportation + Create Food & Water is interesting, but I think I'd rather actually play a Star Trek RPG.)

jt wrote:(I also think everyone getting Teleportation + Create Food & Water is interesting, but I think I'd rather actually play a Star Trek RPG.)

I recall way back in the day that EmperorTippy had plans on publishing his TippyVerse into a 3rd party setting. Has anything come of that, even as far as GiantITP posting?

I think there was something beyond this, but don't immediately see a sig link to anything further and nothing on a quick web search.

Tippy's proposed setting is predicated on the notion that 17th level arcane spellcasters don't inherently consider such petty concerns as conquering the entire Prime Material to be beneath their notice, much less expertise.

(More precisely, he states in the thread "Remove permanent Teleportation Circles and a Tippyverse will never form in the first place." That spell is Sor/Wiz 9 in the edition that he was working with.)

And to a degree on the idea that armies even matter in RAW D&D, particularly as it thinks shadesteel golems (CR 11) are not roadkill to any target that a 17th level wizard deems worthy of their effort to oppose.

Perhaps high level casters go off to form their own worlds and occasionally invade others realms and that’s why there’s angels demons and so on