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

[RadiantPhoenix]

You don't send untrained peasants against things beyond their CR, that would be stupid.

First, you have some minions train your candidates a bit, so they're all proficient in at least some method of doing battle. Next, you send them in small groups against level appropriate challenges, and have some minions bail them out if and only if they seem like they're about to actually die. Finally, after whatever number of encounters is appropriate, you test them and compare their capabilities to their previous ones. The ones who improve a bunch are the ones who leveled up. The ones who didn't level up get to be low-priority guards or something.

[Novembermike]

You don't send untrained peasants against things beyond their CR, that would be stupid.

First, you have some minions train your candidates a bit, so they're all proficient in at least some method of doing battle. Next, you send them in small groups against level appropriate challenges, and have some minions bail them out if and only if they seem like they're about to actually die. Finally, after whatever number of encounters is appropriate, you test them and compare their capabilities to their previous ones. The ones who improve a bunch are the ones who leveled up. The ones who didn't level up get to be low-priority guards or something.

I'm pretty sure that this is the definition of metagame.

[RadiantPhoenix]

First, you try to teach someone something you want them to know (killing stuff, math, whatever).

Second, you give them some problems to work on (boars in the forest, math problems, etc)

Finally, you test them and compare the results to where they were beforehand. One would expect the people who improved the most to be the ones who are best at learning that lesson.

Basically, you're making an adventurer school. I do not see how this is metagaming.

[DSMatticus]

People with PC level's are not fated. They're just schmoes who levelled up and had access to appropriate training (or self-trained). But that sort of training is rare, so most people level up in classes where training is common (commoner, expert, etc, etc). The NPC classes. The shit classes.

What's more, you can totally take a lameass commoner and retrain them into a badass. There are rules for retraining levels. Except most commoners have the stat array 10,10,10,10,10,10 or some equivalent, so they suck. But there are a few gems, and like RadiantPhoenix says, you create a school that trains these people, and the ones who take to the training (a commoner being retrained into a fighter who has 18 str will overcome his challenges faster than a commoner with 10 str) continue onwards. The others get booted out.

And you really can level up without going into the woods and stabbing boars, or having the mentor and apprentice feat. You just have to defeat challenges - those challenges don't even have to be potentially fatal. Completing tasks in training is a fine "encounter" for which you can get XP. If you've ever been in a nonlethal duel with your character's archrival, did you get experience for whooping his arse? I would hope so. But you were never in any danger of anything other than humiliation. And your trainees are in danger of nothing other than going back to being turnip farmers (which is probably a lot worse than your humiliation).

So, yeah. Schools work just fine, and it's not metagaming. Your school puts forth challenges for NPC's, and the ones who overcome them gain experience, and then level up, and then they overcome the challenges easier, and you see this and you move them on to the next phase of training [edit: changed level to 'phase of training' to make this less ambiguous].

[Novembermike]

First, you try to teach someone something you want them to know (killing stuff, math, whatever).

Second, you give them some problems to work on (boars in the forest, math problems, etc)

Finally, you test them and compare the results to where they were beforehand. One would expect the people who improved the most to be the ones who are best at learning that lesson.

Basically, you're making an adventurer school. I do not see how this is metagaming.

Except this doesn't hold true for life and death stuff. Studies of the effectiveness of soldiers have shown that Veterans who haven't had a chance to retrain perform worse than green soldiers. Life and death situations tend to reinforce bad habits. The real learning occurs when people actually train.

Basically, you're training gives you an adventurer school for PCs. It mimics the form of DnD adventures and expects the trainees to be rewarded for that. It has almost no resemblance to reality and is the height of metagaming.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Basically, you're training gives you an adventurer school for PCs. It mimics the form of DnD adventures and expects the trainees to be rewarded for that. It has almost no resemblance to reality and is the height of metagaming.

It has almost no resemblance to our reality. That's fine, because our reality doesn't involve flying dinosaurs or people who can set things on fire by wiggling their nose. The D&D 'verse operates according to its own laws, and suggesting that the inhabitants can't come to understand those laws and make use of them is stupid.

[Wrathzog]

This thread moves too damn fast.

That's just my point. D&D doesn't have rules for all those things, the army managing aspect is mutually exclusive for what D&D tries to do. The basic assumption in D&D is that mass combat is basically a waste of time because combat is won and lost by superheroes (aka big monsters and high level humanoids).

I'm saying that it Needs rules for all of those things. It is something that needs to be created.
Also, mass combat should be won or lost by super heroes but it doesn't make mass combat pointless. Wars will still happen because for every super hero on the battlefield, there are tens of thousands of normal people with spears. That may not threaten individual heroes, but it sure as shit threatens society and the country-side.
If I was to make mass combat rules, I would use Dynasty Warriors as the basis. If I could emulate that sort of feeling, I would consider it a success.

Do you seriously want to be the guy ordering a bunch of tanks to try to stop godzilla just so they can get their asses kicked or would you rather be Kratos who runs up and rips Godzilla's head off?

What's wrong with wanting to be both?

First none of those methods guantee you any kind of political power. Diplomacy cannot make people hand you the keys to a kingdom. When these things work they include significant handwaving and "narrative bonus" being part of the game.
Second that is not what was being proposed by Lago et. al at all. They were saying that being the most powerful guy in the room lets you grab power by force if you want it. However, this is only true because of the very way we have written our rules. Therefore, this is a bullshit reason. If we didn't want this we could change the rules to something else and get a different result.

Sure they do. Every single one of those options I brought up can work and they work explicitly. Magic Jar is probably the most obvious because you literally become the King. Yes, there is a Narrative bonus in that you now rule a kingdom and have direct access to all of its people and resources... how is that a problem?

Your second point is inane because A) It doesn't matter how you get political power and B) are you seriously telling me that we need to explicitly spell out in the PHB that "players should not attempt to rule a kingdom because we're too lazy to account for it?"

Thirdly is the thing that is where we are in conflict. I don't think that having support for running empires and planes or whatever is really neccessary or beneficial. They will take a lot of time and effort. They won't have a lot of interface with our existing rules because our existing rules are for a totally different style of game.
I wouldn't mind a seperate game. IF that game is owned by the property owner of D&D then it can have a tie in where you can "port" in a D&D character as a faction leader. Sure.

Support for this can seriously come down to One Self-Contained Splat Book per layer. All of the layers should be playable on their own while allowing for interaction between adjacent layers. Obviously, you may think this is a bad idea... but if all you're going to do is run around in dungeons, it doesn't effect you. At all. You shouldn't care either way.

But Lago's Idea that high level D&D should be some other game is what I find frustrating because I am fine just playing D&D with high level characters.

Then get out of the thread. Seriously. You don't like what you're stepping in. We Get it. Move on.

DnD has always been a pretty decent set of rules for combat and a bunch of really dumb rules for roleplaying. Diplomacy doesn't work, the skill system in general is worthless (an average Fighter can pick two of Jumping, Climbing, Swimming and Intimidation, for example) and there aren't any consistent rules for things like how people react to a retired war hero who's part of the underclass.

Whelp. We have a board filled with amateur game designers. Whatever shall we do about this perceived issue?

[DSMatticus]

Novembermike, actually, I just pointed out how overcoming benchmarks in a training program can be considered an encounter you can defeat (the nonlethality of it is meaningless), and therefore you can get XP for training in any fashion. Really. Not going out and killing boars, but sitting in rank and file shouting, "YES, DRILL SERGEANT," and putting arrows in little targets and hitting little planks of wood (as long as they have some challenge they must meet or face negative consequences).

PC's go out and level up by stabbing things in the face. They could easily be the exception, not the norm.

Also, the experience system has never, nor ever will, model the real world. What, do you want veterans to gain negative levels as they campaign, and work those off by retraining? Also, veterans losing proficiency is an unfair example. They aren't losing experience, they're falling behind on practice. Training is drill after drill after drill. Veterans don't drill everyday, they're busy being actively deployed. Retraining drills those skills back into them. That's not something the D&D experience system models (constant repetitive practice raising proficiency temporarily). It just assumes that high-level PC's, in their downtime, are constantly practicing and maintaining those skills.

[Novembermike]

Basically, you're training gives you an adventurer school for PCs. It mimics the form of DnD adventures and expects the trainees to be rewarded for that. It has almost no resemblance to reality and is the height of metagaming.

It has almost no resemblance to our reality. That's fine, because our reality doesn't involve flying dinosaurs or people who can set things on fire by wiggling their nose. The D&D 'verse operates according to its own laws, and suggesting that the inhabitants can't come to understand those laws and make use of them is stupid.

It resembles a game system, not a reality. Hell, it's even inconsistent with earlier editions of DnD that required you to find a trainer and spend some time ironing out what you'd learned.

[Novembermike]

Also, the experience system has never, nor ever will, model the real world. What, do you want veterans to gain negative levels as they campaign, and work those off by retraining? Also, veterans losing proficiency is an unfair example. They aren't losing experience, they're falling behind on practice. Training is drill after drill after drill. Veterans don't drill everyday, they're busy being actively deployed. Retraining drills those skills back into them. That's not something the D&D experience system models (constant repetitive practice raising proficiency temporarily). It just assumes that high-level PC's, in their downtime, are constantly practicing and maintaining those skills.

It's almost as if DnD doesn't work particularly well for simulating the training and upkeep of armies *gasp*.

I'm just pointing out that trying to model a lot of the kingdom level stuff with DnD isn't going to work. At all. There are plenty of systems that can make it work, FATE could do it pretty easily in the abstract, GURPS can do the fine details (you'd have to hack it together a bit, but it'd at least be internally consistent) and you could probably use some wargames for it as well if you wanted. DnD just doens't do a great job of it, though.

[violence in the media]

Also, veterans losing proficiency is an unfair example. They aren't losing experience, they're falling behind on practice. Training is drill after drill after drill. Veterans don't drill everyday, they're busy being actively deployed. Retraining drills those skills back into them. That's not something the D&D experience system models (constant repetitive practice raising proficiency temporarily). It just assumes that high-level PC's, in their downtime, are constantly practicing and maintaining those skills.

I forget which thread it was mentioned in, but with regards to the idea of level gain happening too fast and there not being enough downtime between adventures, maybe that could be solved with some rule that mandated X training per Y time period per Z levels to stave off the accumulation of negative levels? Perhaps the rule is as simple as 8 hours of training per level per month. Maybe the rule is slightly more complex to include a measurement of how much time is allowed to pass between training sessions before incurring negative levels; how many negative levels you can acquire at max; how short or long training sessions are allowed to be; and what is required to remove those negative levels once you start your regimen again.

Maybe high-level characters (like Olympians, professional athletes, or world-class musicians) have to train all the time in order to maintain that level of ability? This could be why you see kings and other people tending to be lower level as they try to strike an appropriate balance between the demands of practice and everything else they need to do. This would have the added benefit of also making minions, hirelings, assistants, and a base of operations more important, as they could do things for you while you keep yourself in top form.

Under this paradigm, you'd necessarily need to accept that high-level adventurers blitz the shit out of any task they take on. Taking two weeks to camel caravan somewhere is what you do when you're 3rd level and have the time to spare. If you're 15th level and some adventure takes you two weeks to complete, you're going to come back with a couple of negative levels and be unprepared for the next threat until you can train up again.

Then again, this idea could be pure rubbish.

[DSMatticus]

Novembermike, well that's missing the point.

As a matter of fact, I just showed how realistic training works in a D&D world. You can put shmucks through a training program and get better shmucks. The only thing you don't get is shmucks that gradually turn into worse shmucks when they aren't being trained. And that's completely fine, because those rules would be unfun. Flinging fireballs is even more unrealistic, and nobody complains.

It isn't even clear that people gradually depreciating in personal skill is an accurate model of what you're expressing - but whatever it's modelling, we can implement that really easily. "For each season a unit spends in the field, it suffers a cumulative morale penalty of -1 to d20 rolls. This penalty can be removed at a rate of -2 per season in training." Voila, we now have army-size units that get worse as they spend time in the field, and get better when they spend seasons training. It's probably not a good mechanic from a game design standpoint, but it completely represents the idea you had.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. "There currently aren't rules that work, so there cannot be rules that work?" We can make the rules.

[Novembermike]

Novembermike, well that's missing the point.

As a matter of fact, I just showed how realistic training works in a D&D world.

How is it realistic? The DnD mechanics don't describe how the world works, they're an abstraction and one that becomes useless as you approach a larger scale (due to complexity and inaccuracy). You just showed me how training would work under the DnD level based abstraction, but you haven't shown why that abstraction is useful for large armies.

It isn't even clear that people gradually depreciating in personal skill is an accurate model of what you're expressing - but whatever it's modelling, we can implement that really easily. "For each season a unit spends in the field, it suffers a cumulative morale penalty of -1 to d20 rolls. This penalty can be removed at a rate of -2 per season in training." Voila, we now have army-size units that get worse as they spend time in the field, and get better when they spend seasons training. It's probably not a good mechanic from a game design standpoint, but it completely represents the idea you had.

You have a model, but it's almost certainly a terrible one. Why is it -1 per season? Why -2 per season of training? Why are you using seasons?

I'm not sure what you're getting at. "There currently aren't rules that work, so there cannot be rules that work?" We can make the rules.

The DnD abstraction is pretty terrible for this. D20 + modifier vs target provides a pretty bad RNG. The level system is also pretty bad for armies where you generally want something closer to wargames where units have some basic stats, a few special abilities and not much else in an attempt to limit complexity.

[Dogbert]

Funny thing.

I may have missed a post or two, but I think no one has mentioned so far how so many people seem to want nothing to do with the mid-endgame, because at that point the PCs have tools to "break the game." Thus, for those people, the dungeon crawl game de-facto finishes at mid-game, which I think partially proves Lago's point.

While I'd have loved to see a 3E Birthright book back when I still cared for d20, I understand that most people would prefer it as an option, not part of the main package.

[Novembermike]

Funny thing.

I may have missed a post or two, but I think no one has mentioned so far how so many people seem to want nothing to do with the mid-endgame, because at that point the PCs have tools to "break the game." Thus, for those people, the dungeon crawl game de-facto finishes at mid-game, which I think partially proves Lago's point.

While I'd have loved to see a 3E Birthright book back when I still cared for d20, I understand that most people would prefer it as an option, not part of the main package.

The problem is that high level play breaks the dungeon crawl without giving anything compelling to replace it.

[DSMatticus]

You have a model, but it's almost certainly a terrible one. Why is it -1 per season? Why -2 per season of training? Why are you using seasons?

Seasons? Absolutely no reason. We can define it at months - that rule is designed to fit snugly into a rules subset for governing armies that handles fluctuating morale over larger spans of time. That unit of time chosen for this subset is seasons in this example. It literally 100% does not matter, it can be changed, and as long as the other rules we make for that subset work on the same timefrime, it so does not cause problems. [edit: oops, I missed the 'not', hah]

Why -1 per season? Why do fighters get +1 bab a level? What are you even fucking asking? That we justify every numerical abstraction of the real world with real data? No. That's stupid. If you don't expect that of every number in the game (and you don't, becuse otherwise the entire game makes no sense to you), there's no reason to expect it of this single number. It's a balance point, to reflect the phenomenon you described, since you mentioned it - units deteriorating over time in the field from their peak potential. Two units of time in the field can be counter-acted in one unit of time at training. If this doesn't match design balance intentions or reflect that phenomenon, those numbers can be changed until they fit what you want. This is called design. I pointed out that a complaint you made can tangibly be accounted for in a D&D armies game.

How is it realistic? The DnD mechanics don't describe how the world works, they're an abstraction and one that becomes useless as you approach a larger scale (due to complexity and inaccuracy). You just showed me how training would work under the DnD level based abstraction, but you haven't shown why that abstraction is useful for large armies.

Oh, I don't care how it's useful for large armies. I don't think that was even my point - someone called 'training' a metagame, and I pointed out how training NPC's is not at all metagame, and D&D models it in a way you can say, "I wait for them to improve" without having to watch their XP totals like you're genre-savvy. If you want, we can build tools that turn training into large scale and work at an army level. We really can. "A training school is an X gold investment. It requires an upkeep of Y gold each unit of time W, and training a level 1 warrior costs 1 person and Z gold, and it can train V such people each unit of time Z". Blah blah blah. We probably don't even care about most of that shit, and can make it even simpler. Again, this is something that can be clearly defined in the whole "making rules for this subsystem" phase, this is an example of how it could work. Not the only example, an example.

The DnD abstraction is pretty terrible for this. D20 + modifier vs target provides a pretty bad RNG. The level system is also pretty bad for armies where you generally want something closer to wargames where units have some basic stats, a few special abilities and not much else in an attempt to limit complexity.

The level system literally does not have to be in play in the army minigame. You can exclude it, because there's no reason to expect your army is going to eventually produce a PC-esque hero - it's just as likely that the high end of your army dies and is replaced by your low end at a reasonable flow. And from there, you can just assume XP is broadly static and the level system leaves. Your army quality is determined by something else, like training, and we can model 'unit experience', by giving +1 morale bonuses to veteran units.

The training was to take big groups of people like 100 useless commoners, and make an army of 100 level 1 warriors. If it's really good training, maybe 80 level 1 warriors and 20 level 2 warriors.

Again, all you've really said is "there currently aren't good rules, so there can never be good rules."

P.S., d20 + mod vs target was a bad RNG in every subsystem, including being a murdeorus hobo. It's a very wide-range and very unstable. It works just as well for the wargame as it worked everywhere else, which is "adequately." I would prefer 3d6 instead of d20, personally, a la the unearthed arcana rules. But the fact stands, it works as well there as it does anywhere else, as long as mods and targets don't hugely diverge in their growth rate.

[FatR]

Except this doesn't hold true for life and death stuff. Studies of the effectiveness of soldiers have shown that Veterans who haven't had a chance to retrain perform worse than green soldiers. Life and death situations tend to reinforce bad habits. The real learning occurs when people actually train.

This is a pile of bullshit you've pulled out of your ass. Examination of groups where you can relatively easily track performance of individual people, like fighter pilots, show, that actual combat experience, and particularly a successful combat experience, improves performance by alot.

Basically, you're training gives you an adventurer school for PCs. It mimics the form of DnD adventures and expects the trainees to be rewarded for that. It has almost no resemblance to reality and is the height of metagaming.

And anyway DnD has almost no resemblance to reality as well, idiot. Any and all realism-based arguments related to fighting abilities become automatically invalid the second a character is expected to beat an ogre in fair and square melee combat. Not because "rules are abstraction" or some shit. Because the game expects you to casually do humanly impossible feats.

[RadiantPhoenix]

It has almost no resemblance to reality and is the height of metagaming.

"It worked for me" is not metagaming. Knowing that it doesn't work that way for most people might be, but probably isn't, because most of the people your character knows probable aren't PCs, and thus aren't advancing that fast, which would be really noticeable even by the time you're mid-level.

[Novembermike]

Why -1 per season? Why do fighters get +1 bab a level? What are you even fucking asking? That we justify every numerical abstraction of the real world with real data? No. That's stupid. If you don't expect that of every number in the game (and you don't, becuse otherwise the entire game makes no sense to you), there's no reason to expect it of this single number. It's a balance point, to reflect the phenomenon you described, since you mentioned it - units deteriorating over time in the field from their peak potential. Two units of time in the field can be counter-acted in one unit of time at training. If this doesn't match design balance intentions or reflect that phenomenon, those numbers can be changed until they fit what you want. This is called design. I pointed out that a complaint you made can tangibly be accounted for in a D&D armies game.

P.S., d20 + mod vs target was a bad RNG in every subsystem, including being a murdeorus hobo. It's a very wide-range and very unstable. It works just as well for the wargame as it worked everywhere else, which is "adequately." I would prefer 3d6 instead of d20, personally, a la the unearthed arcana rules. But the fact stands, it works as well there as it does anywhere else, as long as mods and targets don't hugely diverge in their growth rate.

OK, I don't think I have a huge problem with what you're saying. My point is that DnD isn't all that well designed for a lot of this stuff.

This is a pile of bullshit you've pulled out of your ass. Examination of groups where you can relatively easily track performance of individual people, like fighter pilots, show, that actual combat experience, and particularly a successful combat experience, improves performance by alot.

After retraining. Also, fighter pilots have tons of psychological tests ensuring that they find people that can deal well with stress. I'll try to find the combat effectiveness statistics for WWII though, specifically the North African veterans that fought in later engagements.

"It worked for me" is not metagaming. Knowing that it doesn't work that way for most people might be, but probably isn't, because most of the people your character knows probable aren't PCs, and thus aren't advancing that fast, which would be really noticeable even by the time you're mid-level.

It didn't work for you, though. IIRC the in-game explanation has always been that your character goes through training. How logical is it for a wizard to learn new spells by killing monsters? You're looking at it from the perspective of the player, who never sees the boring stuff (which is metagaming).

[Omegonthesane]

...Never seen a damn thing in 3.5, or in 4E, that states any sort of assumption that your levelling up requires anything more or less than that you go out and kill things. And if you do need to train to get the XP working, then so what? You just add that to the training regime of the NPCs, they are then doing exactly what worked for you, and would have to be anyway even if you were using a metagame method of working this out.

To be fair, I don't know 4E half as well as 3.5, it might have had something about retraining.