D&D after 15th level

[User3]

ok, so I've heard that D&D after 15th level just isn't playable in the least. My question is, could it be made playable? I love the idea of a diety slaying game, and that's just not doable at 15th, is it?

[Brobdingnagian]

Ever play Star Wars d20?

I haven't, but I have played both KotOR and KotOR 2, and if Star Wars d20 operates in generally the same fashion, then it can be done.

See, in KotOR, the numbers scale on a straight mathematical basis, rather than an exponential one. It really is just the same game with bigger numbers and a few new strategies as new abilities become available, rather than the world-destroying power at 15th level in D&D. That makes it playable at higher levels because you can't have a build that could destroy a planet without being such a ridiculously high level that it wouldn't matter anyway.

The thing is, it means the only difference between higher and lower level characters is, in fact, bigger numbers. D&D changes as the game goes on. KotOR (and presumably, SWd20) does not.

That's really the only way I could think of doing it. Sure, it gets boring to keep doing the same thing over and over, but rocket-tag gets boring after a few encounters.

Six in one, half-a-dozen the other.

[PhoneLobster]

KOTOR is pretty severly modified rules, among other exceptions.

Star wars d20 meanwhile is NOT a good example of scaling with increasing levels, they actually threw out a lot of the minimal balance plain d20 had in that regard and made it even crazier.

I mean they have powers which set static DCs dependent on skill checks, and those skills don't have the same DC/skill check result tables, at all... ALSO meanwhile they also have several different unique 'half' save progressions. You can walk into the game and WIN for levels and levels just with static DC grenades... You can become functionally immune to energy (you know, blasters, light sabers, etc...) by taking one feat and pumping your Fort save, its a world of dumbness.

And thats just for starters.

Star wars d20 is a world of stupid in regard to scaling numbers. And frankly what I've seen of the new version is yet to show any clear signs of them actually fixing that either.

[RandomCasualty]

1179806675[/unixtime]]ok, so I've heard that D&D after 15th level just isn't playable in the least. My question is, could it be made playable? I love the idea of a diety slaying game, and that's just not doable at 15th, is it?

Basically to get D&D to run at high or epic levels and not be pure rocket launcher tag, you've got to nerf the heck out of a lot of things.

You're going to be working hard to keep the numbers sane, because that's the number one thing. As brobdinagian said, you've got to make high level into what low level was with bigger numbers. Sure you may throw in a few extra abilities, like flight or even incorporeality, but nothing can be absolute.

Unfortunately, if you're looking to slay deities, you basically can't nerf anything (since deities are uber), and that means you're playing a straight up game of RL tag. Basically if the deity acts first, PCs lose, if the PCs act first, deity is dead.

[Prak]

1179848723[/unixtime]]Unfortunately, if you're looking to slay deities, you basically can't nerf anything (since deities are uber), and that means you're playing a straight up game of RL tag. Basically if the deity acts first, PCs lose, if the PCs act first, deity is dead.

could nothing be done to prevent this? I mean, D&D deals with cultures where it was actually quite possible to walk into a diety's lair and stab it in the face, I mean, it'd be hard, but you could do it, and it was exciting. Could D&D be modified to allow something like this?

[CalibronXXX]

Step one is to out and out banninate things like Astral Projection and Mordenkainen's Disjunction. Step two is to take a good close look at all other 8th and 9th level spells and other potentially untenable things and see if anything else needs to be annihilated or toned down; Craft Contingent Spell for example, that's just way too many available contingent effects. Step three is to make some sort of sane epic spell casting system. If you manage to get that far then you tell me what step four is, because I don't know.

[RandomCasualty]

1179853744[/unixtime]]
could nothing be done to prevent this? I mean, D&D deals with cultures where it was actually quite possible to walk into a diety's lair and stab it in the face, I mean, it'd be hard, but you could do it, and it was exciting. Could D&D be modified to allow something like this?

Well, there's an internal contradiction with how D&D does deity flavor and what the rules say.

D&D deities are supposed to be long-lived. At the very least, they've survived and outlived lots of archmagi, high priests and what not. When a deity dies, it's a once in a thousand years sort of thing. D&D deities are not traditionally a revolving door. They die in special circumstances and that's it. That's the flavor. You really don't go walking into a deity's lair and stab him in the face. I mean you technically could with a plane shift, but D&D assumes you're not going to win, since deities have been around so long, it's assumed they can deal with such incursions.

Now, as far as rules go, combat is deadly. Anything that is stated out can be killed, and rather easily too, depending on the level of rocket launcher tag. D&D combat is also so renewable that you can do it alot. You don't take intense power hits or wounds that take you a while to recover. You can do one battle a day and be fine the next day, so long as you survive.

This leads to the paradox that the PCs aren't the first 15th level characters. In fact, there may well be 20+ guys running around. So if the PCs can kill gods at level 15, why hasn't anyone else done it. I mean, why hasn't the evil wizard they're fighting right now gone and killed the cleric's god to deprive them of spells? Really, if you're powerful enough to take out gods, what's to stop you from going one-by-one and eliminating them all.

It's a fundamental paradigm problem. The thing with most myths that have heroes challenging gods is that the heroes really are the best. There aren't a bunch of guys like Hercules running around in mythical Greece. In D&D, there are lots of high level people and monsters running around, so if 15th level PCs can kill gods, so can a group of balors or solars and from a consistency point of view, that just doesn't work well, at least not for any of the current worlds of D&D. You don't have a new god of justice every other week.

Basically the current D&D paradigm is what I call the giant penis style. Deities have freaking huge stats and arbitrary abilities and are essentially treated similar to major artifacts in the sense that you can only kill them with a plot device. A good example of that is that whole "kill dispater" thread, which turned into a matter of DM arbitration.

Now before you can fix things you've got to drop that paradigm. Here are some alternate paradigms.

The King Paradigm: Gods behave more like a king in chess, They're not particularly powerful, and thus tend to spend their time hiding more than openly revealing themselves. Often times the higher level members of a gods following 15th level and above are better than the god himself, but protect the god because he grants the spells. Gods don't die often because Gods are prudent enough to hide themselves and are effectively cowards.

Revolving Door: Gods aren't so tough, in fact they die all the time. It leads to a sort of revolving door situation where gods are constantly dying and being replaced. When a god dies, his most powerful high cleric gets his power, thus killing gods doesn't necessarily have a big effect on power dynamic.

No Gods, only avatars: Gods don't have true forms that can be killed, instead they have avatars that can manifest on the material plane from time to time. These avatars are what the PCs fight and can kill. This means that gods effectively don't have much of a lair.

Alternately, if you want to stick with the base paradigm, you must make the PCs special in some way, so they find some artifact of godslaying or something to nullify a god's arbitrary powers to make him killable.

[User3]

Or you can just make the PCs the first characters to ever reach the levels that they are at (or perhaps the first since ye olde bygonee dayse).

[CalibronXXX]

1179854758[/unixtime]]
No Gods, only avatars: Gods don't have true forms that can be killed, instead they have avatars that can manifest on the material plane from time to time. These avatars are what the PCs fight and can kill. This means that gods effectively don't have much of a lair.

Perhaps hunting down and killing enough of the god's avatars could weaken him enough to be killable at pre-broken levels?

[RandomCasualty]

1179859213[/unixtime]]Or you can just make the PCs the first characters to ever reach the levels that they are at (or perhaps the first since ye olde bygonee dayse).

The main problem with this is that it takes some high level guys to create most of the magic items that PCs want. So you need to explain who created the +5 sword they find (which normally requires a 15th level creator).

Also the other problem with having PCs who are way above the power level is that it becomes difficult to challenge them with much. Basically they rule the world by that point.

[CalibronXXX]

Once you hit the teens you'll often have a massive power base whether that may be a Kingdom, Demi-plane, trans-planar mercantile business, mages guild or whatever, so ruling the world isn't that big a stretch. On the other hand their are such things as Solars and Pit Fiends, so that doesn't really work.

[User3]

Sure, there are lots of cultures and mythologies in which stabbing a god in the face is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The D&D rules for gods don't support that, but it's easy enough to do.

Just come to grips with the fact that D&D levle 20 characters are actually mroe powerful than most fictional gods, and run a low-level game.

I mean, Thor can seriously be an 1th level barbarian with a +3 thorwing, returning, thundering warhammer that can cast Control Weather.

Apollo is a 10th level bard.

[User3]

http://www.avalanchepress.com/gameRG.php
No god is epic ...

[Cielingcat]

1179870107[/unixtime]]http://www.avalanchepress.com/gameRG.php
No god is epic ...

Is that a Valkyrie on the cover? Because if so I'm totally converting to whatever you call that religion.

[User3]

1179859744[/unixtime]]

1179859213[/unixtime]]Or you can just make the PCs the first characters to ever reach the levels that they are at (or perhaps the first since ye olde bygonee dayse).

The main problem with this is that it takes some high level guys to create most of the magic items that PCs want. So you need to explain who created the +5 sword they find (which normally requires a 15th level creator).

Hence my mention of "ye olde bygonee dayse". It's no problem at all to posit an acient civilization of uberpeople who left all kinds of awesome magical gear just lying around now that they have been gone for eons.

If Solars and Pit Fiends can kill gods, then I imagine there'd be a kind of interplanar detente, where the "nukes" (high CR outsiders) are held in reserve, to ward off attacks by others, rather than being used as a preemptive strike team (because otherwise things would not exist as they currently do). Thus, the players can go fight all those guys, and then the gods themselves.

[Cielingcat]

Or the gods could be CR 24 or something like that. Just make sure to get rid of the upper level dragons, since no one who isn't a retarded dragon fetishist wants them to be more powerful than gods.

[User3]

Is that a Valkyrie on the cover? Because if so I'm totally converting to whatever you call that religion.

No; AFAIK, a wholly fictional daughter of Loki, seemingly created to be depicted by a Heavy Metal artist. If you're considering switching religions, look at their other books; as said someone who did, "they sell covers, not books".

[User3]

1179875922[/unixtime]]

Is that a Valkyrie on the cover? Because if so I'm totally converting to whatever you call that religion.

No; AFAIK, a wholly fictional daughter of Loki, seemingly created to be depicted by a Heavy Metal artist. If you're considering switching religions, look at their other books; as said someone who did, "they sell covers, not books".

I've seen some of their other books. Troo dat, [EDITED].

[Cielingcat]

Wholly fictional? Bah.

[the_taken]

It's all fictional in this head, anyway.

[Catharz]

1179854758[/unixtime]]
The King Paradigm: Gods behave more like a king in chess, They're not particularly powerful, and thus tend to spend their time hiding more than openly revealing themselves. Often times the higher level members of a gods following 15th level and above are better than the god himself, but protect the god because he grants the spells. Gods don't die often because Gods are prudent enough to hide themselves and are effectively cowards.

I like this.

[JonSetanta]

Loki had many children so it's possible this is one of his (albeit unknown..) but if it's Hel then she has either hidden her "decayed half" well or it's a part or parts of her body not readily visible, if you get my drift.

I see the ultimate destination of most high level to Epic D&D games as continuing in greater realms than the beginning campaign world.
It's got to be!
The Outer Planes are the only places with impossible ecosystems and power shifts to support that kind of game.

Also on the subject of nukes, I think of The Outer Planes as timeless places, full of technology from every material world.... there very may well be actual nuclear arsenal and arcane ICBMs or IPBMs (interplanar, yo) at the disposal of angel, devil, and more exotic intelligent spirits.
Never made sense to me that beings thousands of years old, with knowledge from many 'prime' worlds, would never advance from using tooth and claw, or sword and sorcery....
Cell phones, guns, spaceships, all these can mesh well with high level campaigns as long as the settings and plots are consistent and progress without sudden leaps.

[Brobdingnagian]

There's another possibility to running gods:

No Stats, Just Pure Arbitrary Awesome: The gods don't make sense as a human would understand it. There's a whole bunch, and each one of them is, for all intents and purposes, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. For reasons you can't understand, they want followers on the material plane; to this extent, they send outsiders to show mortals an image and a dogma to build a church. The gods don't need worshippers, they just want them. You can never fight a god, because they don't have stats, and so you could never reach their power. These gods may or may not be at war with each other, and it doesn't really matter, because you can't do anything about it.

That's pretty well my take on how gods should work. Of course, you can't go around god-slaying, but in all honesty, if you can kill it, then it's not much of a god. Unless you're also a god.

Really, if you want a god-slaying campaign, you should just make everyone gods and have them work their way up through the ranks to become the Overdeities. But that would require a new rule set entirely.

[CalibronXXX]

1179905543[/unixtime]]Never made sense to me that beings thousands of years old, with knowledge from many 'prime' worlds, would never advance from using tooth and claw, or sword and sorcery....
Cell phones, guns, spaceships, all these can mesh well with high level campaigns as long as the settings and plots are consistent and progress without sudden leaps.

Honestly, I think the Wish economy is to blame, most modern marvels can be roughly replicated by magic items worth less than 15,000 gp; and when all these things are essentially free, there's no reason to develop technology to be able to make them sans-magic.

[User3]

I said "wholly fictional" because I don't know of any child of Loki named Aesa Lokisdottir, and the simple fact there's a patronimic made me suspect even more.

About the "climbing the divine ranks" campaign, just make everyone epic wizards - I hope you wouldn't expect a mythological campaign to make sense all the time. It sure would be arbitrary and awesome enough if people make appropriately crazy spells.