Shitty character concepts need to die

[Orion]

Nope. Necromancer -> Skeleton :: Geth Consensus -> Prime. There's an incorporeal space wizard and he puppets a lot of mindless thralls. Some of them have auras that buff the others.

[Foxwarrior]

Well, the Geth Consensus isn't any more incorporeal than the internet.

Or, for a more dubious comparison: Geth Consensus->Prime::Supreme Court->Supreme Court Justice

[hyzmarca]

Nope. Necromancer -> Skeleton :: Geth Consensus -> Prime. There's an incorporeal space wizard and he puppets a lot of mindless thralls. Some of them have auras that buff the others.

Incorrect.

A Geth platform, such as a Prime, hosts hundreds of individual programs, enough to be fully sapient on its own, as is demonstrated by Legion.
These programs are constantly being uploaded and downloaded, making this form of consciousness quite alien and bizarre from a human perspective, but they are intelligent. Each platform is essentially a miniature consensus.

[name_here]

Nope. Necromancer -> Skeleton :: Geth Consensus -> Prime. There's an incorporeal space wizard and he puppets a lot of mindless thralls. Some of them have auras that buff the others.

Incorrect.

A Geth platform, such as a Prime, hosts hundreds of individual programs, enough to be fully sapient on its own, as is demonstrated by Legion.
These programs are constantly being uploaded and downloaded, making this form of consciousness quite alien and bizarre from a human perspective, but they are intelligent. Each platform is essentially a miniature consensus.

Incorrect. Legion is the only humanoid Geth platform capable of individual sentience. Primes are only sentient in groups

[Chamomile]

If the sidekick is your sidekick, then the army is still your army for all the fucking difference it makes.

Pay attention:

K's model of mundane lieutenants (or, in the case of less hierarchical parties, mundane allies)

Granted, that was an implication, so at least you've moved away from my having explicitly answered your arguments before you made them. The BBEG's party is hierarchical, with the BBEG on top and everyone else answering to him, and probably a level or two lower. The mundane lieutenant of the BBEG is the BBEG's sidekick not because he's mundane but because he's in the BBEG's party, and this will be true even at level 1 when the mundanes can still keep up with the casters (hypothetically, at least, in a world where casters don't get Color Spray and Sleep at first level). It's totally possible to have a mundane guy as the BBEG and the caster as his sidekick (though whether it's advisable depends on what level you're playing at).

If we assign the army to the Lich King's black clad and unnamed marshall, we're actually have committed ourselves to allowing armies sufficient to dispatch squads that can challenge the entire party of PCs to a Marshall who is the same level as the PCs are individually (or at least, less higher level than the Lich King is). Do you not understand how that's a problem?

Sure I do. It's just not much of a problem. Just make the Marshall higher level than the PCs, but still lower level than the Lich King. If the PCs are level 10, the Marshall is level 12, and the Lich King is level 13, and armies consist of tiny men who are never higher than 5 levels lower than the person commanding them, then the Marshall is sending squads of level 7 mooks after our level 10 party, so he's sending packs of hill giants and their pet dire bears after the party, and the party can respond with Djinni and trained winter wolves or maybe friendly trolls or something. Conceptually, that's fine. Mechanically, the 3.X monster manual is probably not equipped to handle this sort of thing, but a game designed with this paradigm from the start could fix that. In the strategic mini-game, the player's armies are outmatched by higher-level opposition, requiring them to go in and personally cut up the bad guys in order to turn the tide. Since the Marshall's mooks are supposed to challenge the party but not actually stand a chance of winning, the party's mooks aren't even going to scuff the armor of the Marshall, let alone the BBEG.

Alternatively, the Marshall and the PCs are the same level, so the mooks would normally cancel one another out, but the Lich King has some kind of force-multiplier class feature that makes the troops on his side magically stronger and then we get the same situation as before. The good guy wizard has access to the same abilities, but he's a few levels lower, so he can't keep the armies on par with the BBEG on his own.

A "character" with no Int that can only follow orders from the Necromancer is a minion.

And? There is nothing that conceptually prevents a minion from having class features, and since being able to direct a horde of undead is already an arbitrary magical ability that does not exist in real life so there's no reason at all that a non-sentient couldn't have that ability. In fact, in order for party balance to be a thing at all, the Necromancer is going to need an evil party backing him up. If his schtick is that everyone on his team but him is non-sentient, that means he needs to have a fully functioning party of characters all of whom are unintelligent minions except for him. This is true regardless of how your tiny man paradigm works. It also means that a villainous Necromancer needs to have access to tricks that let him summon up minion party members, tricks which regular PC Necromancers do not get to have, because of some plot artifact or by virtue of being willing to cross lines that PCs aren't or because of some restriction on the power (like not being able to leave a certain, small region) which makes it antithetical to adventuring. That is bad, but again, this remains true for as long as the Necromancer is using a PC class at all, regardless of your tiny man paradigm.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Geth-style collective intelligence might actually be a pretty cool way to do undead armies in fantasy RPGs. Neat.

[Caedrus]

RE: No Witch Queens.

Not sure if this point has been brought up yet in the ten pages of discussion, but it seems to me that whether you have an army or not is a rather Elennsar-ish ability, to use the Den's terms. It is much like having the thunder guide PRC's "you're in the news" "powers" or owning an airship as a class feature. It seems strange to me to say that someone's power is to simply possess something that is transferable. If you say that owning an airship is a power, then weirdness occurs when you talk about letting someone else borrow your airship. Likewise, questions arise when you, say, are a leader in a hierarchy of increasingly tiny men and try to promote a spellcaster to a command position. Is it impossible for these men to choose to remain loyal to the spellcaster? Is it impossible for someone without the "has an airship" class feature to go and hijack one because it suffers critical existence failure? Or is it instead a case of you being able to give up your class feature to someone else, pretty much destroying the integrity of the level as a power rating?

The difference is one of granted power vs inherent power... abilities that are inherently a part of you vs abilities that are granted to you by others (or that you could grant to others). Having the skills and knowledge to build an airship is inherent power, having the materials to do so is granted power. Having an army of tiny men is granted power, being able to inspire people to aid you with your social skills is inherent power.

[Winnah]

There is an easy way around the airship conundrum. The airship becomes the character and has the "pilot" class feature.

This way, the Millenium Falcon character gets to participate in the entire of Star Wars campaign, through class feature granted proxies. Sure, it sucks for the members of the party who can't travel through hyperspace, fight space battles and block turbolasers with lighsabres, but...uhhh...that sentence got away from me.

[Caedrus]

There is an easy way around the airship conundrum. The airship becomes the character and has the "pilot" class feature.

This way, the Millenium Falcon character gets to participate in the entire of Star Wars campaign, through class feature granted proxies. Sure, it sucks for the members of the party who can't travel through hyperspace, fight space battles and block turbolasers with lighsabres, but...uhhh...that sentence got away from me.

Then you worry about a different problem... the "situational characters" bit. If your game is mainly about spelunking, being a mount is a problem. If you want to play the Normandy, it has to get a superpowered robot girl body that has just about as many run and gun powers as Garrus Vakarian.

[Winnah]

Being a mount in a spelunking game is not a problem if you also happen to be a giant spider or can fly. But that is a shitty example, because in a game focusing on spelunking, any character that can't climb very well is penalised.

As for playing the Normandy, you start with a crippled pilot that never leaves the cockpit, some engineers and a bunch of redshirts. All off ship adventuring can be facilitated through redshirts. As you become a higher level Normandy, you get a rocket tank, a Cerberus rebuild, artificial intelligence and better crew. Eventually your crew rating is sufficient to put a Robot Infilitrator in the field instead of redshirts or a tank. After that, you can take levels in a prestige class like Asteroid Starbase or Cloud City.

In D&D terms you would play a village. The other PC's can meet in your Inn and you can send a couple of village thugs or a town guard on the adventure with them. As you become a higher level village, you get the option to become a Bandit Hideout or a Flying Castle. High level villages simply become Nations and can field massive armies.

I am almost certain I'm being serious here. Maybe I'm so aspo I can't even read my own sarcasm.

[Caedrus]

Being a mount in a spelunking game is not a problem if you also happen to be a giant spider or can fly. But that is a shitty example, because in a game focusing on spelunking, any character that can't climb very well is penalised.

As for playing the Normandy, you start with a crippled pilot that never leaves the cockpit, some engineers and a bunch of redshirts. All off ship adventuring can be facilitated through redshirts. As you become a higher level Normandy, you get a rocket tank, a Cerberus rebuild, artificial intelligence and better crew. Eventually your crew rating is sufficient to put a Robot Infilitrator in the field instead of redshirts or a tank. After that, you can take levels in a prestige class like Asteroid Starbase or Cloud City.

In D&D terms you would play a village. The other PC's can meet in your Inn and you can send a couple of village thugs or a town guard on the adventure with them. As you become a higher level village, you get the option to become a Bandit Hideout or a Flying Castle. High level villages simply become Nations and can field massive armies.

I am almost certain I'm being serious here. Maybe I'm so aspo I can't even read my own sarcasm.

I suppose it could be doable. This seems a lot like the "you get to play as multiple fighting men" solution. But it seems like a different topic entirely from the issue of wanting to make the single fighting man relevant.

[OgreBattle]

In D&D terms you would play a village. The other PC's can meet in your Inn and you can send a couple of village thugs or a town guard on the adventure with them. As you become a higher level village, you get the option to become a Bandit Hideout or a Flying Castle. High level villages simply become Nations and can field massive armies.

I am almost certain I'm being serious here. Maybe I'm so aspo I can't even read my own sarcasm.

It'd be interesting to see an RTS with more emphasis on the city/fortress building than the army building... though I guess that's what Civ is

[Username17]

What Wrathzog wants is a power-source of narrative. He explicitly denies wanting that, but when you say, "I want to be a plucky mundane who saves the day anyway even though Gandalf is also here", the power you want is narrative. Now, this shouldn't be a problem and the game should have narrative as a power source.

So super generals need a power of narrative as well. A PC with Hannibal's power will come up with some plan, "let's all wear mustaches and then jump out and stab people!", and it's probably not that good a plan because you're drunk and eating cheetos. But Hannibal has a special ability with the narrative power source: when he leads tiny men around, he comes up with brilliant plans and as a result his tiny men actually accomplish something.

I agree with this, I just think that Narrative is still a Heroic Tier power source and cannot really ever be anything more than that. To see why this is true, let's consider the difference between going on an adventure to the Fortress of the Sahuagin at Heroic Tier and at Paragon Tier.

• In Heroic Tier, the Shark Trenches are stage two of the quest, where stage one is a quest to find a chalice/bottle of pills/magic trident/whatever that allows you to go to the bottom of the Ocean without drowning or imploding, and stage two is the part where you actually start fighting shark knights.
• In Paragon Tier, the Shark Trenches are stage one of the quest. You have native abilities that allow you to simply declare that you're going to the bottom of the Ocean without drowning or imploding, so you just do that. Now you fight a whole bunch of shark knights and probably the kraken gets released at some point.

The problem here is that "let's put on mustaches and... go to the bottom of the sea!" is a nonsequitur. No stupid beer-fueled nominally mundane plan is going to get you to the Shark Trenches without some intermediate First Stage where you acquire a quest macguffin that allows you to go there. The narrative power source can at best be used to declare what form the First Stage is going to take: you can declare that it is your "plan" to go raid the alchemist guild for breathing pills or it's your "plan" to go romance the Sea Elf Queen or whatver. But you never ever get to skip that Quest Milestone entirely, which means that you never ever count as a Paragon Tier Character.

And that's why I can't take the whole idea of trying to make tiny men leadership into a role-protected ability of Marshals, Berserkers, and Heroes seriously as a means of boot strapping them into Paragon Tiers. While laying down "leadership based buffs" is something that can trivially be conceived as providing the kinds of numeric combat modifiers that a Paragon Tier character needs, it very definitely fails the test of actually making your character a Paragon Tier Character. You still need some sort of non-mundane problem solving ability, which means that the entire exercise is pointless.

So we can solve both of these issues at once; and can now return to arguing whether it's a good idea to use different resource schemes:
1) The "gryphon general" (an upgraded soldier) is just good at general-ing, so he gives narrative-derived bonuses to his gryphon knights all the time.
2) The "psion knight" (also an upgraded soldier) has ioun stones each of which taps into different thetans which are trapped in the form of the bit from the original Tron. If he wants good general-ing, he has to align one of his ioun stones to the vicious Phlegmak, an alien race which is really good at general-ing, to benefit from their spirit-whispers.

The problem is that while the Gryphon General can stage 1 quest to the Cloud Castle, he can't stage 1 quest to Atlantis, Niefelheim, or the heart of a volcano. The Psion Knight can, presumably by adjusting his ioun stone attunement to resonate with these other environments. The Gryphon General is not now and never ever will be a Paragon Tier character. He's just a reasonably high level Heroic Tier character no matter how big his numbers get.

So while freely admitting that a crazy diversity of resource management schemes is awesome, I also think it's hard to balance and highly unwieldy even in your basic schema, and that the wheels will come off entirely after people start upgrading to paragon paths.

It depends. It depends on a lot of things. For example: let's say you have your Psychic Knight character. He has ioun stones which he attunes to different things. That is sort of like Spell Memorization, in that you have some list of powers you can draw from continuously or repeatedly and you can change your list with some down time. But it doesn't have to directly interact with your Heroic Tier combat resources at all.

• You could have all the powers of the ioun stones be things that provide Paragon Tier defenses and Paragon Tier problem solving abilities and have our example Psychic Knight use his plain old Marshal abilities in combat, just scaled numerically to his higher level. Once he actually gets to Shark Trench, it isn't actually all that important conceptually whether he's a Heroic or Paragon character. At the Paragon level, he's facing more shark knights and probably also a kraken, but if his narrative-based leadership buffs are just bigger, he's fine. He only needs the Paragon Tier powers to kick in to allow him to go on the quest in the first place (and to reach opponents that are out of reach, and to avoid being incinerated by fire auras and so on and so forth).
• You could have the powers of the ioun stones do something totally awesome in battle, but only once in the battle. That kind of harsh limit to your "Paragon Surge" actually makes the character play pretty similarly to the previous description. The battle is one turn longer, and one turn you do your awesome Paragon Surge, and the rest of the turns you do whatever you would have done as a Marshal and your normal resource management system is unaffected.
• You could give the ioun stones special attacks and stuff that were simply dramatically superior to whatever you could do with your Heroic Tier crap. Yes, you might nominally have been a Marshal or a Druid before, but that doesn't fucking matter becuase you're not going to use your Heroic Tier abilities because every round you're going to be shooting colored light out of one of your ioun stones. So your Psychic Knight resource management effectively completely replaces your Marshal resource system.

Or you could decide to have Paragon play be considerably more complicated and potentially a lot more broken by having resource management systems that mix-n-match somehow. Having the character be both a Marshal (using battle orders when the Tide of Battle favors it) and a Psychic Knight (using ioun laser storms when the Tide of Battle is less helpful). And that would be a choice you could make, and it would probably sort itself out into many combinations that were synergistic or counter-synergistic, but at least you'd be segregating the crazy off from the rest of the game by having this happen in Paragon, where people are already accepting quests where the opening act is storming the Gates of Hell.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

One way to handle the "need native abilities to fly/dive" question is to let narrative abilities in the paragon tier handle such. Instead of stating "My plan is to raid the alchemist guild for potions of flying" you simply state "We got a stack of potions from the guild", maybe add some justiication, which could be a raid, or just a "favor called in" from heroic tier or such.

Basically, if it's nothing special for the mage in the paragon tier, then the mundanes should have to jump through hoops to get it either.

[darkmaster]

No stupid beer-fueled nominally mundane plan is going to get you to the Shark Trenches without some intermediate First Stage where you acquire a quest macguffin that allows you to go there. The narrative power source can at best be used to declare what form the First Stage is going to take: you can declare that it is your "plan" to go raid the alchemist guild for breathing pills or it's your "plan" to go romance the Sea Elf Queen or whatver. But you never ever get to skip that Quest Milestone entirely, which means that you never ever count as a Paragon Tier Character.

Not necessarily, I mean the most fantastical things Beowulf ever does are "grab sword off wall" and "be really strong" but according to him he and his friend swam for hours through the deep ocean, during a storm, while being attacked by sea monsters. Now, all we have is his word for that but he does spend quite some time under water when heading to Grendal's Mother's cave. I'd take a really strong guy being able to jump to the castle of the could giants, or swim to the shark trenches, or cut the fabric of space and time to open a portal to the upper planes, or whatever because "he's more bad ass than air/water/the barriers between dimensions."

I'd even be really happy to see the dragoon leaping across entire battle feilds, or the fighter sprinting a similar distance. Heck, in the golden age Superman seriously was just a really strong tough guy who jumped everywhere he went.

[Anguirus]

So if we're defining high level play as "teleport into hell and murder the devil king" then pretty clearly high level play needs magic of some sort in order to show up to the high level adventure. I'm not sure why we can't say that high level play can also look like "besiege the evil capital city, crash the gates and then murder the devil king." And if we're willing to put high level threats on the material plane but put plot obstacles in the way of getting to them then we can give mundane dudes something to do outside of combat. If there are stories that you can't tell without somebody tagged [magic user] (which seems fair) then it seems fair that there should be stories you can't tell without somebody tagged [student of war].

I agree that it is straight up retarded to say that magic users can't have armies but what I don't understand is why we would assume that they just straight up can have armies without the investment of any kind of character resources despite the fact that it provides them with obvious narrative utility (which is why they want them).

"People don't follow magic users" is super dumb because it a.) flies in the face of a lot of source material and b.) ignores the problem of all sorts of magical minions that would never conceivably refuse to follow a magic user but the assumption that anybody knows how to run an army seems equally dumb. You can't meaningfully give me an army because even if you gave me thousands of dudes willing to kill and die for me it wouldn't be an army in any real sense. I simply don't understand the administrative and logistic niceties that makes a bunch of violent dudes an army. The ability to run an army seems like a power-level-relevant ability (if we choose to make it so). So if the magic army is an army at all somebody has some levels in something tagged [student of war]. That can be BBEG's sidekick / underling or it can be BBEG himself but if it is the latter he has taken some levels in a class that grants the ability to actually use the fighting force that he has. Because, seriously, if he's reading Sun Tzu he isn't studying magic as efficiently as if he weren't reading Sun Tzu and because he now has useful new abilities for having read Sun Tzu.

As a result, the types of adventures you can go on is delineated by your party make up. I can't imagine why that would be a bad thing. If you have a [magic user] you can leave the material plane, if you have a [student of war] you can crash castles and shit. Added bonus, if you have both in your party you can crash castles in hell - which is objectively awesome. This, of course, requires that you put high level threats in castles or on large-scale battle fields (or, more broadly, in arenas tagged [student of war]). But that isn't a question of crunch, so much as setting, and I think it can be done pretty easily.

If that is functional you can go on to tag arenas any number of things, including [nature] and [divine], put high level threats in those arenas and say you need similarly tagged party members to get to those threats.

[Kaelik]

I agree that it is straight up retarded to say that magic users can't have armies but what I don't understand is why we would assume that they just straight up can have armies without the investment of any kind of character resources despite the fact that it provides them with obvious narrative utility (which is why they want them).

No one who is advocating for magic users with armies is saying they should get them without expending resources. In stark contrast to the people who explicitly refuse to gain any magical ability at all and yet still have their character be just as good as everyone else's.

(Or god forbid, people who advocate narrative luck mechanics and explicitly refuse to gain any abilities at all of any kind and still have their character be just as good.)

The Necromancer is the quintessential magic army, and he is also not as good at spell casting as the Wizard or Illusionist.

Now, separately, you shouldn't ever have any kind of challenge ever tagged "must be student of war to accomplish this" because sometimes people aren't going to have anyone in their party with the student of war tag.

You can't say "No team of Illusionist/Wizard/Assassin/Rogue, you can't sneak or teleport or sneak and teleport inside to kill the king, because you have to have an army. I guess one of you should have been a Marshal/Necromancer/Enchanter."

"Magic" and "have an army" are not the same thing. One of them every character has or should have, the other lots of viable character types don't have, and therefore should be able to use the utility they do in fact have to accomplish objectives.

[Foxwarrior]

You can't say "No team of Illusionist/Wizard/Assassin/Rogue, you can't sneak or teleport or sneak and teleport inside to kill the king, because you have to have an army. I guess one of you should have been a Marshal/Necromancer/Enchanter."

Anguirius's method of phrasing areas as being tagged is grievously flawed, for the above reason. However, the idea that a class could be defined in terms of the problems they trivialize is potentially more interesting than Frank's assertion that every Paragon class should be able to reach cloud castles, breathe underwater, not catch on fire, and travel between planes.

Of course, this means that abilities have to be defined such that they can be shared.

[Username17]

Not necessarily, I mean the most fantastical things Beowulf ever does are "grab sword off wall" and "be really strong" but according to him he and his friend swam for hours through the deep ocean, during a storm, while being attacked by sea monsters.

The ability to hold your breath for a long time may allow you to have a battle under the sea, but it won't let you adventure under the sea. Beowulf can leap off a ship and fight a kraken in the sea, but he can't go to the bottom of the sea and have a discussion while he's there. The quest is still off limits.

I'm not sure why we can't say that high level play can also look like "besiege the evil capital city, crash the gates and then murder the devil king."

Because other than personal assurances from you that the "numbers" on that are very high, that could be a first level adventure. You are advocating the 4e paradigm, where high level adventures are just low level adventures with pallet swaps. The Kobold chief has been repainted as a Devil king, and all the numbers have been increased by 20 on both sides.

That kind of bullshit is bullshit, and you should be ashamed of yourself for suggesting it. The answer to the question "why can't we just never get new abilities and have all advancement be totally fake?" is "Because that would be totally shitty, as 4th edition D&D conclusively proved!"

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

If you can go to the bottom of the sea, walk around, and talk down there, in what way does it matter that you're underwater?

How is a fight centering on catapults, walls, armies, giants, and dragons (especially catapults) tactically identical to a first level adventure? At first level, are you supposed to be able to run sieges using an army of baby kobolds?

[virgil]

Well, I know of at least one roleplaying game where I can have my character stop by the City of Brass on my morning constitutional, where I will arm-wrestle the ghost of the Turkish army on a bet; and at no point will I have to sully my hands with the practices of such lowborn individuals as wizards.

[K]

I hate to break it to you guys, but exotic settings are purely cosmetic and aren't what defines high level because there is nothing stopping you from using exotic settings at low level. There really is nothing stopping you from having adventures in Cloud Castles because you have an airship. Portals can take you to Hell as easily as planeshifting, and you don't need gills to go underwater.

High level has to be defined by results. High level guys don't just kill the Wytch-King, they take over the kingdom with their army and institute health-care reforms. Battles between high-level characters don't just ruin a throne-room, they demolish a fortress. Those are setting effects.

High level can only be defined as the effect on the setting. Everything else is just cosmetic change in the same way that 4e tried to sell people on orcs with bigger stats being high level enemies, except in this case you put a cosmetic skin on the setting and say "hey man, instead of bigger numbers to be high level, we'll give you a bunch of empty abilities instead that you'll only use for 30 seconds every adventure because they are arbitrary benchmarks for access to the adventure."

[Anguirus]

Because other than personal assurances from you that the "numbers" on that are very high, that could be a first level adventure. You are advocating the 4e paradigm, where high level adventures are just low level adventures with pallet swaps. The Kobold chief has been repainted as a Devil king, and all the numbers have been increased by 20 on both sides.

That kind of bullshit is bullshit, and you should be ashamed of yourself for suggesting it. The answer to the question "why can't we just never get new abilities and have all advancement be totally fake?" is "Because that would be totally shitty, as 4th edition D&D conclusively proved!"

-Username17

First level characters can't depose the evil king. They lack the necessary abilities to do that if the evil king has real political power. Both the abilities that you bring to the table and the scope, scale, and effect of your adventure change meaningfully if you have armies, potentially to the same degree that they change if you can leave the material plane. There's no reason of which I have been made aware that world-altering adventure lives exclusively underwater, or whatever. The setting, not the rules, dictate what is world-altering and what new abilities are required to accomplish those goals. It could totally be the case that underwater there is just a shitty level of Super Mario that everybody hates and that nothing of meaningful consequence actually happens in hell. It could also be the case that everything of consequence happens inside of fortresses that you can't get inside of without an army. The gods could live on a mountain defended by armies of Valkyries or some shit and if you want to totally reshape the world you need to get inside of their fortress first.

[Username17]

First level characters can't depose the evil king. They lack the necessary abilities to do that if the evil king has real political power.

That's not the adventure you described. You described:

besiege the evil capital city, crash the gates and then murder the devil king

The adventure "De-Sauronize the Orcish lands" is a complicated adventure drawing upon oratory, mass patrolling, information gathering, logistics, creation of government institutions, public education to create a new political elite that is neither aligned with the Sauronist political machine nor steeped in Sauronist political theory, and so on and so on. But you didn't suggest that adventure. You suggested the adventure where you:

• Kick in a door.
• Fight some guards.
• Bypass some traps.
• Possibly kick in another door.
• Fight the enemy leader, possibly with some more guards and/or traps.

And that's not just a low level adventure, that's literally the first adventure. Now, you have the first door be "gates", implying that it is a very difficult door to kick in. And you have the enemy leader be a "Devil King", which implies that he is a very difficult enemy leader to fight.

I hate to break it to you guys, but exotic settings are purely cosmetic and aren't what defines high level because there is nothing stopping you from using exotic settings at low level. There really is nothing stopping you from having adventures in Cloud Castles because you have an airship. Portals can take you to Hell as easily as planeshifting, and you don't need gills to go underwater.

The fact that you can adventure anywhere as the second stage of a quest (provided the first stage of the quest gets you to that particular second stage) does not mean that the ability to adventure in those places as the first stage of a quest isn't constitutively a high level thing to do. There is a very very big break between "We can adventure there if we first get Mr. Cavern to give us a sub quest whose result is that we can adventure there" and "We can adventure there by declaring that we are going to do that".

I mean, you seriously might as well claim that raising the dead isn't a high level effect because first level characters can get resurrections handed out as quest rewards. Low level characters can get anything as quest rewards. It is the ability to do these things without fucking questing for it that defines you as high level.

-Username17

[darkmaster]

• Kick in a door.
• Fight some guards.
• Bypass some traps.
• Possibly kick in another door.
• Fight the enemy leader, possibly with some more guards and/or traps.

You do realize that you just listed all of the steps in becoming king of a given place in the usual high fantasy setting. Because, and let's remember, D&D is, by and large, set in the iron age and in the iron age there were two way to become king.

1) Be very popular with your fellow lords so they'd vote fore you.

2) Kick in the teeth of your fellow lords and force them to vote fore you.

For anyone who's played the civil war mission from skyrim you basically pimp into a city, kill a bunch of guards, and put someone friendly to your faction onto the throne. That is exactly how it would work. And no one cares who wins really because most people are dirt farmers and the rest either won or can't voice their complaints because they lost.