Shitty character concepts need to die

[Foxwarrior]

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".

No, because the second one is actually "We can adventure there if we first get Mr. Cavern to decide that it exists, and put things worth looking in it."


Can't y'all see that high level is exactly what you define it as? 4e defined it as "a level at which you fight a different set of monsters with a different set of spells", K seems to be defining it as "a level at which you manipulate bigger social systems", and Frank seems to be defining it as "a level where you go on violent vacations without worrying about the price of a ticket."

Perhaps it would be more productive to discuss what parts of the game shouldn't change as people level up.

[Omegonthesane]

[cut for length]

That isn't the big issue - there is nothing about setting an adventure in Hell or on the sea floor that instantly makes it qualitatively different to a "low level adventure" once all the boxes are ticked. You're right to point out that characters need to tick that sort of box to be high-level by the standards typically thrown around here, but that's a necessary condition not a sufficient one. The actual steps taken aren't changed by the scenery, nor is there anything to indicate that King Steve's city-state of Steveopolis can't have high level adventures happen to it either a) at all or b) with greater difficulty than Dispater's Iron City of Dis*.

* this probably isn't an accurate citation of D&D lore, as I'm more familiar with the Iron City of Dis sub-branch of Hell in Crawl than with Dispater's layer of the Nine Hells of Baator.

[K]

Getting to do the adventure is not a reward, quest or otherwise.

This means that raises from the dead, healing, transportation to the adventure, and all of the this other crap being sold as high-level is purely cosmetic. It's no different than the 4e 20th-level Orc.

This means that it doesn't matter how you get it. If attacking the Cloud Castle is as same basic encounter as attacking the Forest Castle, then being able to personally fly is exactly as interesting as having someone fly you there in an airship. The airship doesn't even have to be a separate adventure or task because "I hire a airship at the Skydock" takes exactly as much effort to say as "I cast overland flight on everyone." Any joy you got from personal agency came from the fact that you didn't realize that getting to go on the adventure is an arbitrary benchmark where it doesn't matter how it's being accomplished.

The core of awfulness at the heart of the 4e design was the arms race. They did a numbers arms race where orcs just got bigger numbers until you hit epic level, but the other kind of shit design is the ability arms race. PCs get worse afflictions and so need more powerful heals, enemies get new attacks that require new defenses, adventures are set in more exotic locations and need more exotic forms of transport.... etc.

The problem is that this leads to sameness. The Devil King using his Paragon attacks versus your Paragon defense in Hell is only cosmetically different than using your Heroic Attacks against their Heroic Defenses against the Kobold King in the Blue Forest.

It's literally an "adventure mad-lib." That was the flaw revealed by 4e.

High level has to be defined by scope. This means that higher level combat has to be about killing bigger enemies in effect or number of units, and high level non-combat has to be about being able to affect more of the setting. Low level guys need to be able to kill kings and not be powerful enough to become kings while high level characters need to be able walk into the setting and simply demand fealty from lesser kings (and somewhere between those extremes is the becoming king by killing him or marrying his daughter).

Playing "adventure mad-lib" is the core of why "high-level DnD" has never actually worked, mostly because designers never realized the problem.

[Foxwarrior]

Ah, but you see, K, at a lower level you can simply walk into a town hall and demand fealty from the mayor instead. And if you simplify army combat in the right way, fighting Orc Regiments at level 15 can feel the same as fighting Orcs at level 1.

Personally, I think that the best way to feel like you're getting stronger is to interact with the same challenges in a fundamentally different manner. If at level 1 you scare mayors, and at level 10 you scare kings, nothing of import has changed. But when you had to bow to/sneak past/run away from/painstakingly seduce the king before, being able to simply walk up to the king and say "boo!" becomes much more satisfying.

[Ice9]

I would agree - the difference between low and high level is often defined by the things that stay at a constant level, and thus the relative difference in interacting with those things.

"Hear about the king's proclamation -> Work directly for the king -> Become the king -> Be an emperor and tell kings what to do" is a progression. If you instead focus on a changing target like "Work for the mayor -> Work for the king -> Work for the emperor", then it feels more like a treadmill.

The result of this is that a lot of "high level" elements can be either awesome or shit depending on how they're viewed, and specifically how they relate to the events that happened before.
"Hide when a dragon shows up -> slay the dragon -> gank dragons on your way to the real adventure" is a progression, "slay orcs -> slay dragons -> slay titans" is just a treadmill - but at a given point in time, you may be doing the exact same thing.

Ditto with "hear about floating islands -> launch expeditions to them -> jaunt their casually for the view" vs "travel to forests -> travel to floating islands -> travel to planes".

So - I'm not really sure how you do standalone high-level stuff. You have to frame it so people view it the awesome way, not the shit way. But without former low-level history to draw from, you can only try to convey that through description.

[Anguirus]

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.

-Username17

Setting aside the fact that traveling to hell, which, if I remember correctly, was one of the things we were claiming explicitly needs to be an ability for high level characters is another sort of door-kicking (so much so that we literally have people in this thread advocating that we just let high level mundanes stab their way through reality into hell), I actually agree with you. My vision was far too narrow.

So why don't we give players utility abilities that help with "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 then asymmetrically allocate those utility abilities to mundane classes? None of those things require magic and accomplishing many of them with magic is actually fucking retarded. So heroic tier mundane is "sword guy" and paragon tier mundane is "king of Europa". Then high level divine guy can say "I can go to hell and raise the dead. What can you do?" and high level mundane guy can say "I can besiege any castle and bring lasting peace to the land." They at least seem like they could be made to be comparable but distinct roles depending on how much your story values lasting peace vs defying death. Ultimately no non-combat power (and perhaps not even those) can be evaluated outside of the setting and narrative in which they exist. Raising the dead guy is pretty worthless if the dead just kind of hang around as ghosts that continue to interact with the world and maintain a quality of life.

[K]

Ditto with "hear about floating islands -> launch expeditions to them -> jaunt their casually for the view" vs "travel to forests -> travel to floating islands -> travel to planes".

So - I'm not really sure how you do standalone high-level stuff. You have to frame it so people view it the awesome way, not the shit way. But without former low-level history to draw from, you can only try to convey that through description.

There is also the problem where stuff like exotic locations aren't actually hard-coded as high level.

For example, Planescape is just a setting that says that going to Hell is a thing that 1st level characters might do, and Ravenloft is a setting that cuts the planes entirely out of the game even for 20th level characters.

There really is no reason why people can't have epic adventures in cloud castles at low-level other than trying to pretend that "exotic = level" because you can't figure out a way to actually advance the scope of your game. It's basically the same problem as the 20th level Orc, but you are doing it with flavor instead of numbers.

[OgreBattle]

The problem is that this leads to sameness. The Devil King using his Paragon attacks versus your Paragon defense in Hell is only cosmetically different than using your Heroic Attacks against their Heroic Defenses against the Kobold King in the Blue Forest.

It's literally an "adventure mad-lib." That was the flaw revealed by 4e.

Don't the majority of D&D3e/PF players play in that unoptimized way though?

The Fighter swords the goblin king and the wizard shoots a magic missile

The Fighter artifact swords the lich king and the wizard shoots a lightning bolt (or 4 magic missiles)

[K]

The problem is that this leads to sameness. The Devil King using his Paragon attacks versus your Paragon defense in Hell is only cosmetically different than using your Heroic Attacks against their Heroic Defenses against the Kobold King in the Blue Forest.

It's literally an "adventure mad-lib." That was the flaw revealed by 4e.

Don't the majority of D&D3e/PF players play in that unoptimized way though?

The Fighter swords the goblin king and the wizard shoots a magic missile

The Fighter artifact swords the lich king and the wizard shoots a lightning bolt (or 4 magic missiles)

Sure, but only because that's the easiest and least investment-intensive way to play for both DMs and players.

The Fighter doesn't have any non-combat abilities on his character sheet, and MTPing up some is a fuck-load of work and likely to be entirely DM-fiat. The Wizard is just lucky to mitigate the option paralysis when choosing his spells, and a lot of his non-combat stuff is also DM-fiat. The fact that they choose to use the simple and non-controversial abilities that the DM won't arbitrarily declare is "broken" is not surprising.

Most importantly, the DM doesn't have any guidance when designing the Lich King or the adventure. He's forced to make up the minions and troops compositions, design the maps and non-combat challenges purely by fiat, and then figure out a way to customize the adventure to PC skill-sets that are open-ended for some and extremely limited for others (spellcasters and everyone else, respectively).

This is why published designers constantly complained that high-level adventures were the hardest to design, and also why the one's that were published always included stuff that the core rules didn't even get close to fleshing out (getting your own plane, killing rising gods, weakening BBEGs by winning lesser objectives, fighting armies, gathering information without spells, building communities, etc).

So the $10,000 question is: "if the average beer-and-pretzel gamer had an easy and non-optional suite of non-fiat non-combat powers to interact with the non-combat side of the game and the DM had clear adventure and setting design rules for those non-combat rules to work in, would people still play simple Monster of the Week against progressively bigger monsters instead of interacting with the setting?"

My guess is "no." Playing a system with solid rules is dramatically less work and more empowering than playing MTP.

[Foxwarrior]

So, in computer games, levels serve three purposes:

To Create a Learning Curve: By gaining more abilities over time without making the old ones useless, you can make the game get more and more complex, until it's far too complicated for a new player to make heads or tails of it.

To Change the Game: By replacing or upgrading old abilities into new ones, and boosting The Numbers™ such that old enemies are trivial and new enemies are defeatable, you can freshen up the game in a continuous process.

To Make a Skinner Box: By telling the player that their character has gotten stronger, they don't feel terrible about having spent five hours mindlessly stabbing rats.

But in a TTRPG, you can start at any arbitrary level, and the campaign may or may not involve leveling up. The first option, therefore, doesn't work. The third option is a type of dystopian horror. Unless there's another option I missed, this leaves you with the second option.


I suspect that the bigger problem with 4e's leveling mechanic is the way in which it doesn't change, not the way in which it does; in terms of dungeon crawling, small-scale tactical battles, 4e does enforce some amount of variety by preventing the DM from using the same creatures for too long via the leveling mechanic. It's the way in which it doesn't change that's the problem: Even an RPG that's only about dungeon crawling has social and open-ended puzzle elements as well, and those don't change in any significant way in 4e.

[Stubbazubba]

So if palette swaps are not sufficiently high-level, we're left with the fact that you have to start playing an increasingly different game on an increasingly fundamental level:

• In Heroic Tier, you are hired by someone to accomplish a specific objective, kicking down doors, sneaking around, slaughtering manageable numbers of monsters, and retrieving items. You are almost entirely passive in your goal-setting, just reacting. The game is 10% social, 20% other non-combat, and 70% combat.
• In Paragon Tier, you orchestrate political coups by finding advantages over kings and leveraging them in a social mini-game (while dealing with myriad assassination attempts), lead armies to victory against 4 or 5-digit numbers of enemy troops, and instead of kicking down doors you simply planeshift to a hostile environment that you're no longer susceptible to. Whatever it is, you're starting to set your own goals while still reacting to the actions of others. The game is 30% social, 30% other non-combat, and 40% combat.
• In Epic Tier, you design and successfully implement new governmental or military institutions, rendering war unnecessary and unprofitable, re-write magic itself so other wizards are instantly impotent, become a god and devise grand strategies to maximize the faith of your cult while minimizing the ire you risk from other gods, and all of your individual actions are as simple as kicking down the door was initially, now it's just a question of getting the effects right. You are not opposed so much as you are forced to innovate to solve an existing or potential problem. You're beyond the point where you are compelled by any higher authority, you're playing some flavor of NationStates or Civilization. The game is 5% social, 85% other non-combat, and 10% combat.

So really, we need to move beyond combat. High-level play requires problem-solving mini-games that are way more intense and open-ended while still being very rigorous than what we have available, so this stuff is largely MTP'd so we can skip to more combats. Once we know how these high-level mini-games work, then and only then are we ready to consider what makes a lasting character concept. My guess, though, is that Fighter still isn't one.

[K]

Honestly, I don't think that pure power-ups are ever really satisfying for more than a short time even when you are progressively getting more powerful.

However, setting rewards tend to stick in a way that other rewards don't.

For example, what if your adventures in an area raised your Reputation in the area until you could cash them in for a noble title that had setting-powers or you got a castle or something? What if having adventures actually altered the setting in real ways like your deeds inspiring social movements or political changes?

At the end of the day, people never tell stories about the adventures where their numbers beat some dude's slightly smaller or bigger numbers. They tell stories about cool things they did in the setting (and sometimes they tell stories about unlikely successes or brutal failures, but that's just bragging).

[Username17]

K, if you reject the difference between:

• We can accomplish X by having the MC give us a quest segment where we accomplish X as a reward for completing it.
  
  and
• We can accomplish X by declaring that we use our own abilities to accomplish X.

as a difference between lower and higher levels, then nothing counts as high level. Seriously nothing. In fact, there's no difference between commoners and characters with real classes. Since the MC can give you a quest segment that is doing a fetch quest, favor, or simple appeal to the better nature of a character of arbitrarily higher level of any class, literally any possible effect in the game is available to characters of any level and of any class as the result of a quest segment reward!

The dividing line between "do it yourself" and "go get someone else to do it for you" has to be the line between low level and high level, because it is literally impossible to stop the "someone else" from being high level even when you are low level. No other dividing line is possible to enforce. As long as you accept getting help from high level characters as part of the definition of a low level adventure, your low level adventure is incapable of being distinguished from a high level adventure.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

"Do it yourself" and "get someone to do it for you" are one and the same if it concerns things no one really actually plays out in game anymore at the level they are at. Yes, the first (few) times at low levels the party needs some help getting up in the air, or under water, will likely be an adventure. But after a few times of playing out how to charter an airship or get some potions of flying/fire immunity/water breathing/whatever, that will simply be handwaved away when it comes up again.

It doesn't matter if the warrior has to use a potion and the wizard can cast fly if the warrior getting a potion is so trivial that both players can simply say "I do it".

[Winnah]

Are you fucking serious?

edit: "It's not a problem because the DM can handwave problems, so it is a problem, but not really because, like, fellatio..."

Is the stupididest shit I have read since checking out the comments in Legends and Lore articles.

You realise you're going to have to do this little dance every time something new comes along. I don't give a fuck how you get back to the underwater kelp castle, or the dungeon in the sky, because the game has advanced to bigger and better things, and Muggles Mc Fuckface is still sucking cock for adventure permission slips.

[darkmaster]

Well, piratically, I guess that's true. But it's certainly less metal than the fighter being able to say "I do it" and then jumping/intimidating the fire/holding his breath forever/whatever.

[K]

K, if you reject the difference between:

• We can accomplish X by having the MC give us a quest segment where we accomplish X as a reward for completing it.
  
  and
• We can accomplish X by declaring that we use our own abilities to accomplish X.

as a difference between lower and higher levels, then nothing counts as high level. Seriously nothing. In fact, there's no difference between commoners and characters with real classes. Since the MC can give you a quest segment that is doing a fetch quest, favor, or simple appeal to the better nature of a character of arbitrarily higher level of any class, literally any possible effect in the game is available to characters of any level and of any class as the result of a quest segment reward!

False dichotomy.

You don't have make "getting to the adventure" a quest or a quest segment. It's doesn't even have to be an action more complicated than "we declare it so" if your setting or adventure is designed properly.

The airships can just be rented with gold if your setting says that they can and it's no different than flying yourself and takes as much effort as using some built-in ability. The Hell quest can be set up with a portal to get to Hell by placing the portal in the adventure (see Planescape). The underwater adventure can be started with a pile of water-breathing potions because you are hired by the Alchemists Guild, no additional questing needed.

None of that requires asking higher-level characters or even the DM to do anything if your setting/adventure is designed that way.

You are assuming a game where there is no setting design and no adventure design. That's certainly the way DnD has been done for decades, but it's also one of the reasons why high-level DnD has never worked properly and never will.

What's next? Pretending that a Paladin's ability to have a horse is a real ability because there is no guarantee that the DM or the setting will allow people to buy horses?

[Winnah]

What happens in a sandbox game?

Do all PC's suddenly develop wings, gills and the innate ability to travel to other dimensions, y'know, just in case?

[Fuchs]

Are you fucking serious?

edit: "It's not a problem because the DM can handwave problems, so it is a problem, but not really because, like, fellatio..."

Is the stupididest shit I have read since checking out the comments in Legends and Lore articles.

You realise you're going to have to do this little dance every time something new comes along. I don't give a fuck how you get back to the underwater kelp castle, or the dungeon in the sky, because the game has advanced to bigger and better things, and Muggles Mc Fuckface is still sucking cock for adventure permission slips.

I think ou don't really understand. I am talking about stuff that was done before so often in the campaign at lower levels, it's now routine. As an extreme example: At level 1, fresh out of the slave pits, getting a horse to escape the slaver city is a quest/adventure. At level 10, in the capital of an empire, you simply say "I get a horse". You have so much money, friends, and favors stacked up, there's no way you don't get a horse.

You don't suck cock for adventure permission slips, you simply get them. Cause, and this may surprise you, the GM doesn't want his damn adventure, which he spent hours preparing on, go to waste for want of a permission slip.

It's a normal development in campaigns (as opposed to single-shot adventure): Stuff that was once played out gets handwaved as things progress. When we started our current D&D campaign, we played out gathering money to equip our characters in various ways. Chartering a ship was a major event. Getting a scroll or potion was a small quest. Travelling was something to play out. Now, at higher levels, gear, including scrolls and potions, doesn't even rate a sentence anymore - it's simply assumed to be restocked between adventures. Travelling is, unless the GM has something special planned or wants to foreshadow stuff, a one-sentence montage to "and you arrive".

Really, folks, get on with the damn program: If you have to worry about getting to the adventure because that involves repeating something (casting a spell, getting a potion, hiring a ship) you did way too often as a lower level, then you're not playing high level.

[Username17]

Yes, the first (few) times at low levels the party needs some help getting up in the air, or under water, will likely be an adventure. But after a few times of playing out how to charter an airship or get some potions of flying/fire immunity/water breathing/whatever, that will simply be handwaved away when it comes up again.

Note: after a few times of having a quest where you go get an airship, the next time you need to go up in the air will be several adventures later than the first time you got an airship to take you somewhere. Which means presumably, you'll be higher level.

So really, your statement breaks down to:

• At lower level, you need to have a mini-adventure where you get an airship to take you to a high-up location before you can proceed to have an adventure at that high-up location.
• At higher level, you can handwave the "getting there" portion and proceed straight to fighting Cloud Giants.

Which is exactly what I've been saying.

-Username17

[ishy]

False dichotomy.

You don't have make "getting to the adventure" a quest or a quest segment. It's doesn't even have to be an action more complicated than "we declare it so" if your setting or adventure is designed properly.

The airships can just be rented with gold if your setting says that they can and it's no different than flying yourself and takes as much effort as using some built-in ability. The Hell quest can be set up with a portal to get to Hell by placing the portal in the adventure (see Planescape). The underwater adventure can be started with a pile of water-breathing potions because you are hired by the Alchemists Guild, no additional questing needed.

None of that requires asking higher-level characters or even the DM to do anything if your setting/adventure is designed that way.

You are assuming a game where there is no setting design and no adventure design. That's certainly the way DnD has been done for decades, but it's also one of the reasons why high-level DnD has never worked properly and never will.

What's next? Pretending that a Paladin's ability to have a horse is a real ability because there is no guarantee that the DM or the setting will allow people to buy horses?

What do you think characters and/or monsters should be able to do without the DM throwing the solutions at them? Because it sounds like you are in favour of no stats/abilities for anyone ever, and just let them/the DM make up stuff they can do on the spot.

[K]

What do you think characters and/or monsters should be able to do without the DM throwing the solutions at them? Because it sounds like you are in favour of no stats/abilities for anyone ever, and just let them/the DM make up stuff they can do on the spot.

I don't know why you think that I don't want PCs to to have abilities since I'm literally advocating the opposite.

I want PCs to have real abilities for combat and non-combat, not just cosmetic changes being passed off as abilities. Fighting in a kelp/cloud/Hell castle is a cosmetic change that DnD has spent decades passing off as a power change, and it's not. Those sets can be used for 1st level adventures as easily as 30th as settings like Planescape have proven.

Do people really expect the DM to spend hours crafting adventures that they can't do? Even if you give people travel stuff and pretend that they are real abilities, the DM is still crafting adventures with that fact in mind, and at best you've saved him 30 seconds of design time.

Do people expect the DM to make sandbox settings with a bunch of places to explore, but then not let them go there because they didn't choose a Wizard at character creation?

Do people really think that the ability to fly lets them have adventures in cloud castles the DM has not designed for them?

[K]

• At lower level, you need to have a mini-adventure where you get an airship to take you to a high-up location before you can proceed to have an adventure at that high-up location.

How incredibly tedious is that?

If I never play a logistics-based adventure or mini-quest again, I'll consider myself a happy man. It's a waste of session time that could be better spend on doing actual adventuring.

Shit, I'll take pointless RP with nameless NPCs over logistics.

[Username17]

• At lower level, you need to have a mini-adventure where you get an airship to take you to a high-up location before you can proceed to have an adventure at that high-up location.

How incredibly tedious is that?

If I never play a logistics-based adventure or mini-quest again, I'll consider myself a happy man. It's a waste of session time that could be better spend on doing actual adventuring.

Shit, I'll take pointless RP with nameless NPCs over logistics.

So let me get this straight:

• You refuse to acknowledge that the ability to go to a non-standard location counts as an ability, because you could spend actual table time getting an airship, or a portal, or the use of a water breathing chalice, or the aid of a more powerful character who has the ability to let you get there.
• You don't actually want to spend table time acquiring air ships or portals. Heck, while you find it marginally preferable, you don't even want to spend table time RPing with NPCs who have those abilities.

So your contention is both that having the ability is meaningless and that not having the ability is shitty. That does not compute. At all. If you find not having the ability to be "tedious", then by definition you find having the ability to be a benefit.

-Username17

[Whatever]

Letting you "earn" an ability that makes the game suck less is the kind of shit they do in MMOs. Just make the game not suck, for everyone, starting immediately. Why the fuck would you ever do anything else?