Shitty character concepts need to die

[Winnah]

The common english term for having supernatural powers, or using supernatural means to influence the course of events, is Magic.

What matters is what something is, not what it is called.

You don't get to play a mundane character with supernatural powers. I don't care if the definition of warrior is expanded to make them magical. Some people do care about that though. Dressing up some explicitly supernatural power scheme as "not-magic, derp" is not going to convince these people that mundane characters need supernatural powers in order to function in a high level fantasy game, without the intervention of other players or the DM.

[Verisimilitudinous]

Letting people MTP up new abilities based on the flavor of their other abilities is bad thing to allow in the game. It's basically an admission that you have given up on even the idea of game balance.

There isn't even an issue with mundane vs magic flavor if you aren't letting people MTP up things for their powers to do.

Sure, MTP has been the basis of RPGs since their beginnings, but I honestly can't see a downside to removing as much arbitrary, unfair, and frankly lame MTP nonsense that happens where suddenly the DM decides that your explicit abilities don't work because of some MTP reason the DM made up.

I'm guessing you mean Magical Tea Party, but you're just... wow. I mean I get that you want strictly defined abilities so there's less room for argument with random groups, and that's a good thing for a ruleset. But allowing MTP in no way means that you've given up on balance. Would a GM that allows everyone an equal amount of influence in brazen making-shit-up be disallowing balance? How would this be worse than 3E's if-you-are-a-caster-you-do-cool-stuff-if-you-are-not-well-have-fun-being-narratively-worthless-RAW?

[OgreBattle]

harder, better, or faster. Because the vistas opening up before you are simply different.

So that video is I'm pretty sure supposed to be about an evil media conglomerate turning blue people into white people because the demographics for 80s throwback bands in 20XX are all racist against blue people, but I like it better as an 80s throwback band being manufactured whole-cloth, starting with base bodies crafted from blue putty, and the part we're seeing is just the last 20% or so of the whole process.

Theyre aliens wbo were kidnapped and brainwashed to perform for earth, the guy with a spaceship is going to rescue them.

[Chamomile]

Would you describe a man just believing really hard that he could travel the planes, so he does, as magic?

Ironically enough, when someone tries to do something just by believing in it really hard in real life we call it magical thinking.

Also, this is just another stupid semantics debate about what counts as "magic" now. Those are stupid and we should not even think about having another one. Just throw down some definitions and go with it.

[K]

Letting people MTP up new abilities based on the flavor of their other abilities is bad thing to allow in the game. It's basically an admission that you have given up on even the idea of game balance.

There isn't even an issue with mundane vs magic flavor if you aren't letting people MTP up things for their powers to do.

Sure, MTP has been the basis of RPGs since their beginnings, but I honestly can't see a downside to removing as much arbitrary, unfair, and frankly lame MTP nonsense that happens where suddenly the DM decides that your explicit abilities don't work because of some MTP reason the DM made up.

I'm guessing you mean Magical Tea Party, but you're just... wow. I mean I get that you want strictly defined abilities so there's less room for argument with random groups, and that's a good thing for a ruleset. But allowing MTP in no way means that you've given up on balance. Would a GM that allows everyone an equal amount of influence in brazen making-shit-up be disallowing balance? How would this be worse than 3E's if-you-are-a-caster-you-do-cool-stuff-if-you-are-not-well-have-fun-being-narratively-worthless-RAW?

MTP is not balanced. It just isn't, regardless of how little or how much you allow in the game.

There is no "allow equal amounts of MTP." MTP by its nature lends itself to being powerful in the hands of creative people and/or characters with certain kinds of powers and useless for everyone else. MTP is powerful when the DM likes the player and weak when he doesn't. MTP is strong where it helps the DM preserve his plot by fucking over PCs and weak where it hurts his adventure/setting design. MTP is weak in the hands of a character who's gotten a lot of spotlight and strong when it helps an overshadowed character. MTP makes some powers stupidly broken in the hands of some DMs and stupidly useless in the hands of others.

You can't set a power level to MTP because it's not interacting with the system in any way that can be balanced, so including it is setting your game design on fire.

I'll admit that good MTP can make a game more fun, but that comes hand in hand with the fact that bad MTP is the defining trait of shitty RPGs/DMs/players/everything. Bad MTP is also a lot more common by leaps and bounds.

This is why you see people who make 3.x/Pathfinder Wizards who use fireballs and not illusions.... a PC with MTP abilities is no longer playing a game any more and is relying on DM-pity and DM-fairness for his power, and that just doesn't appeal to some RPGers. They feel better with the no-MTP power of weak DnD evocations because at least the power is stable and not dependent on the whims of the DM.

[Stinktopus]

Veri,

Ignoring for the moment that you're here to troll for the goon squad, let's consider your proposition for a moment. You're saying that:

1. Wizards should get reality-warping powers based on being scrawny little nerds who study a lot.

2. Fighters should get equivalent reality-warping powers (like being able to smash a force cage with their cock) by the power of awesome.

Therefore, if I played in your "ideal" system, Fighters and Wizards would have equivalent magical prowess AND Fighters would also be able to whip the tar out of a Wizard by virtue of awesome martial prowess.

So, you want to replace a system where Fighters are irrelevant other than being helpers for the mages with a system where Wizards are fully irrelevant.

But, you might say, let's give Wizards the ability to chant "Ancient spirits of evil... transform this decayed body into the form of Munch-Ra... the EVER... WINNING!!!" and now they've got equivalent martial prowess to the Fighter. So now, the classes are all mechanically identical, just fluffed differently.

Now, you may as well not be playing with any rules other than "whoever rolls highest wins." If that's your game of choice, then great. God bless you and deliver unto you people who want to play that game with you.

The 3E crowd tends to LIKE rules, even when picking them apart. It's like going into the garage and puttering around with some tools. Even if you don't end up building something useful or attractive, you had some fun with process.

[Username17]

MTP is not balanced. It just isn't, regardless of how little or how much you allow in the game.

MTP is however, completely necessary. If you have an ability that makes the ground next to you count as difficult ground because you're interfering with people moving through it (like Mearls' poorly written 3.5 Knight), then you have gained no new MTP options. If you have an ability that makes the ground next to you count as difficult ground because jagged rocks rise out of the ground, then you could put a chair on it and have someone climb that chair so that they could reach a higher shelf.

Because it's a role playing game. If you decide that the low fences are annoying you, you can climb over them or kick them over. If your abilities do things, they actually do things, and then you can do things in the actual world with those things.

Yes, Magical Teaparty is not balanced. And characters who have abilities that produce different physical results are fundamentally better at MTP. But you can't make MTP go away and still have this be a role playing game. You are not going to have rules for how high a shelf you can reach after you stand on a chair after you stack that chair on something else. You're going to have to work that out in game, and that means that the ability to have jagged rocks shoot out of the floor is simply useful in situations where being a guy who can game mechanically interfere with enemy movement is not.

It just is. And if that unfairness bothers you, you need to go play video games where the lack of real interaction with the world makes things less Wild West and more "balanced".

-Username17

[fectin]

You can't describe an action that Conan or Beowulf could take that would allow him to attack an enemy that was in another universe that would cause an impartial audience to conclude that he hadn't used any magic.

"Conan paid the Hassan The Assassin seventeen rubies of incomparable rectitude, and Hassan went away, and a month later Guy McOtherUniverse was found dead in an outhouse."

[Whatever]

That solution is hilarious. So the player continues to nominally play Mundane Dude, but gets the ability to activate various Magic Dudes as his real characters for a given adventure?

[fectin]

Rules codification is like efficiency in an engine: no, you'll never get rid of all power loss/MTP, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't get rid of as much as possible.

[Mistborn]

Once again I feel the need to remind everyone to get back not track. If people want to have the five millionth mundane superpower shitstorm make a new thread for that.

Mundane characters at high levels is a shitty concept. This is not my opinion it is an imutable fact that I am stating for the record. This thread is not a thread for people who want to cover their ears and scream "lalalalalalala can't hear you" when presented with this fact.

Now that we have determined that we can not have mundane characters at high levels with out the game becoming shitty via 3e lack of balance or 4e lack of real advancement how do we deal with this. Or to be more exact how do we get people as they level up to move away from terrible mundane characters and to concepts that are less shitty.

Discuss.

[Anguirus]

Once again I feel the need to remind everyone to get back not track. If people want to have the five millionth mundane superpower shitstorm make a new thread for that.

Mundane characters at high levels is a shitty concept. This is not my opinion it is an imutable fact that I am stating for the record. This thread is not a thread for people who want to cover their ears and scream "lalalalalalala can't hear you" when presented with this fact.

Now that we have determined that we can not have mundane characters at high levels with out the game becoming shitty via 3e lack of balance or 4e lack of real advancement how do we deal with this. Or to be more exact how do we get people as they level up to move away from terrible mundane characters and to concepts that are less shitty.

Discuss.

The petulant dismissal of everything other than what you think or want exhibited by your repeated demands that everybody get back on track and talk about your particular intrests is sort of perfectly mirrored in your childish expectation that you can or should get people to stop liking the things they do like and start liking the things they don't. Seriously, we're at a place in this thread where just about everything about the game is being contested and scrutinized and you want to talk about bullshit presentation nicities.

And before you say anything, no this is not your thread.

[Mistborn]

Seriously, we're at a place in this thread where just about everything about the game is being contested and scrutinized and you want to talk about bullshit presentation nicities.

No. Fuck.

That's not what's Happening in this thread. Just like all the threads preceding it this thread has been full of people demanding in various ways that the game become terrible so they can still be Conan for all 20 levels.

Can this thread not be about explaning to people things they should have pick up in the five million threads we've had on this subject? Can we do something a little more constructive this time?

[Username17]

Actually, yes. If your "mundane" character had the "mundane" ability "has followers who aren't mundane", then you could in fact solve high level problems while you were "mundane". You'd still "have magic", it would just be stored in your "sidekicks". That would be a way to do it. Assuming for the moment that the fact that you were playing Green Hornet and had Kato as a "sidekick" didn't bother you or make you feel like less of a big boy pants hero.

Seventeen rubies and thirty days is obviously not workable though. If your attack takes thirty days to go off, you've already lost the encounter hundreds of times over. Your magic "sidekick" would have to follow you around (or be telepathically in contact, which makes the whole thing even less "mundane flavored").

Even so, still better than what the actual "Let me play bullshit no-phlebtonium characters at high level" people claim to want. Let's look at our latest member of the goon squad, and his laughable demands:

Oh and for examples from modern media that wouldn't be chalked up to 'magic.' Riddick. David Rice from Jumper. Caliban Leandros from Rob Thurman's books (arguable, but I refuse to categorize innate racial features as 'magic' because that's just another narrow-minded conflation of supernatural with 'magic'). Relkin from Rowley's Bazil Broketail later books.

I mean sure, they say that they want to play high level mundane flavored characters, but even when they say they are going to name some they just... don't. For fuck's sake, he name checked four characters. I think you'd be hard pressed to call the first two "high level" by any definition, but it doesn't even matter - those aren't Fantasy characters. It's as much a non sequitur as if he'd namechecked Perry Mason or Stephen Colbert.

As for the two who might actually count, leaving aside discussions of what level they are, you know those are magical characters. Right? For fuck's sake Caliban's entire shtick is that he is half monster and has magic blood. That's the whole reason he's even a character. Every single thing he can do that is of any account is because of magic.

So really what we've established is that the things that the 4rries and Wrathzogs of the world think they want isn't genuine. They rant about being under the thumb of wizards, but they can't actually name things that they want non-magical characters to be doing. What they really want is for there to be enough kinds of magic that they can get to high level without being the same kind of character as anyone else. Verisimilitudinous couldn't actually name any modern fantasy characters that didn't have magic, but he did name some fantasy characters whose magic wasn't "wizardish". So he wants to be a half-fiend or dragon-bonded in order to get access to late game content, which is still magical, but distinctly different from wizardry.

To which I can only say: Sure. Be an Angelic Guardian or a Mind Lord or a Gaea's Avenger or whatever. You don't have to be an Archmage or a Witch Queen to play at high level, you just have to have some fucking magic. If you want to have magic that is skinned as a deep connection to the natural world or an awakening of your demon blood or something rather than something you studied and earned, go fucking nuts. That part of the fluff doesn't matter at all.

But if you think you have a devastating argument that a character who literally doesn't have any magic can be a high level character, you're just fucking wrong.

-Username17

[Ted the Flayer]

That solution is hilarious. So the player continues to nominally play Mundane Dude, but gets the ability to activate various Magic Dudes as his real characters for a given adventure?

I want to play that character now.

[Avoraciopoctules]

That solution is hilarious. So the player continues to nominally play Mundane Dude, but gets the ability to activate various Magic Dudes as his real characters for a given adventure?

I want to play that character now.

I tried playing that character in a couple games. Found a town or get a cushy government job, and then answer at least half your problems with "I hire a couple adventurers to deal with it" or "I post a bounty". It's pretty fun, and it lets you try out a bunch of character types.

[Whatever]

Seventeen rubies and thirty days is obviously not workable though. If your attack takes thirty days to go off, you've already lost the encounter hundreds of times over. Your magic "sidekick" would have to follow you around (or be telepathically in contact, which makes the whole thing even less "mundane flavored").

If it's thirty days for the attack, that's unworkable. But if it's thirty days for the adventure, that's fine. Conan sits around ruling Hyborea or whatever, while the player uses Hassan the Assassin as their character when the party goes to kill Mister Extradimensional.

Let's flesh it out a bit:



So You've Conquered the World

D&D has always had a problem with characters founding, inheriting, or conquering kingdoms. This is because D&D is a game that centers on a party of adventurers. Any time you spend running your fiefdom is time the group doesn't spend adventuring, and vice-versa. You cannot be an Emperor and a wandering murder-hobo, unless you leave someone else in charge of “your" kingdom. Now, that's a fair solution, but there's an alternative: remain on your throne, and send others off to adventure in your stead.

Why Kingdoms?
"A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

We know players should want to rule kingdoms, but it's never clear why they would. If you are Emperor of the Nine Islands, should you get a bonus to character wealth? To NPC reactions? To research and knowledge? Any of those steps on the toes of characters who have invested actual character resources in doing it themselves, but giving the Emperor nothing and pretending that his new clothes are super rad is deeply unsatisfying.

That’s where substitute adventurers come in! Whether you rule a small barony or a huge empire, there are some powerful adventurers in your domain who will serve you, for reasons of their own. When it’s time to adventure, you choose (and, if necessary, create) one such character to play as, while your King remains at home. If you want to name the character Bishop or Rook, or have her be a Knight (or even the Queen), that’s totally fine. Adventuring characters can stay the same from adventure to adventure, or they can change. Your adventuring characters “level up" as your kingdom expands (see below), rather than being based on the personal power of the King. The King does not gain levels, as he spends all his time managing affairs of state (if you know what I mean).

Avoiding Checkmate
"The Sicilian Defense is more than just immunity to Iocane poisoning."

This presents an obvious problem: if everyone is higher level than the King, why not just overthrow him? One solution is to have kingdoms not located in highly magical places. If you’re playing with a traditional D&D cosmology, you could cap the entire Prime Material Plane at CR 8-10 or so. Whatever level you want to cap non-magical characters at. Or you can restrict the powerful enemies to high-magic locations: cloud castles, the hearts of volcanoes, deep beneath the waves, and so on. Whatever you do, high power enemies don’t show up in “settled” territory--which is why people live there in the first place. People interested in developing their own personal magics, rather than ruling others, have to go elsewhere if they want to put themselves to the test. People who don't have personal magics spend their time ruling kingdoms, and must use substitute adventurers when the party goes off to someplace crazy. Magical characters may also take over a kingdom, but are not required to do so. Non-magical characters may also gain magic powers (see "Prestige Classes") if they wish to continue adventuring personally.



Something like that.

[Mask_De_H]

LM, you'll get the thread you want when you have something useful or relevant to say. If you'd lurk the fuck more, maybe you'll find something. The argument you used to cover being a petulant child has already been done, and can be extrapolated from this shit-show of a thread. It is one of the following:

A) You cannot, because what people like Versi want and what people like Frank want are irreconcilable, either personally or mechanically, and require different systems and paradigms. They will fight each other like rabid dogs over these concepts.

B) You do not, and build to the lower power standard. Given Frank's claim that swaths of European myth wouldn't function in higher levels and the standard rebuttal to the no mundanes argument uses European myth, this is a choice that has a large canvas to play in.

C) You do so by making the mundane character cease to exist as a playable concept. Everyone is enhanced in some way. Like Earthdawn, Shadowrun (to an extent) or 4e without the Martial power source.

D) You do so, but lie about it. A "mundane" power source gains superhuman feats as a conceit of being in a fantasy game. This is 4e with a more coherent Martial power source, K's narrative bullshit power source or every shounen anime ever.


So yeah. Now stop typing words, LM.

[Username17]

Given Frank's claim that swaths of European myth wouldn't function in higher levels and the standard rebuttal to the no mundanes argument uses European myth, this is a choice that has a large canvas to play in.

The problem with the "Euro-Myth" argument is that it actually does support uber casters. They often lose in the stories they are in, but whether they lose or not they never, ever lose a fair fight. Koschei cannot be killed by conventional means. That is in his fucking wikipedia entry.

Defeating him requires a long journey and a dangerous quest to a faraway land. And I don't mean "defeating him" in the sense of achieving final victory of your side over his, I mean the simple benchmark of defeating him in the sense of taking on a challenge in an encounter and coming out victorious. That's completely beyond anything any mundane swordsman could ever dream of. He literally cannot lose in a straight fight against any number of mundane characters of any skill.

That is your primary source material for Wizards in European myths. If you bring up European myths, 3e D&D is pretty spot on. Because Wizards > You is pretty much the actual standard in that source material. The idea that non-wizards could compete in a fair contest against a Wizard is radical 21st century communist revisionism.

-Username17

[Verisimilitudinous]

I mean sure, they say that they want to play high level mundane flavored characters, but even when they say they are going to name some they just... don't. For fuck's sake, he name checked four characters. I think you'd be hard pressed to call the first two "high level" by any definition, but it doesn't even matter - those aren't Fantasy characters. It's as much a non sequitur as if he'd namechecked Perry Mason or Stephen Colbert.

When did I say that these were high-level examples? I said that they're people who do supernatural things that cannot be considered magic - they're developed innate talents that have nothing to do with some wizard casting a spell somewhere. If you're going to just make up things that weren't written you probably won't ever get any coherent discourse out of the internet.

As for the two who might actually count, leaving aside discussions of what level they are, you know those are magical characters. Right? For fuck's sake Caliban's entire shtick is that he is half monster and has magic blood. That's the whole reason he's even a character. Every single thing he can do that is of any account is because of magic.

How does he have magic blood? He's half-monster, the monsters aren't 'magical' unless your entire definition of magic is that it is everything not-mundane. In which case I feel really bad for you because your imagination is dead.

So really what we've established is that the things that the 4rries and Wrathzogs of the world think they want isn't genuine. They rant about being under the thumb of wizards, but they can't actually name things that they want non-magical characters to be doing. What they really want is for there to be enough kinds of magic that they can get to high level without being the same kind of character as anyone else. Verisimilitudinous couldn't actually name any modern fantasy characters that didn't have magic, but he did name some fantasy characters whose magic wasn't "wizardish". So he wants to be a half-fiend or dragon-bonded in order to get access to late game content, which is still magical, but distinctly different from wizardry.

See, your problem is that you make a sweeping statement without any proof and expect it to be taken as truth. Is your alternate ego RPGPundit? Because all you've said responding to my list of modern fantasy characters is, "Nuh-uh! They're magic!"

Of course that's because your definition of magic is literally everything that isn't purely normal, but that's your own problem.

To which I can only say: Sure. Be an Angelic Guardian or a Mind Lord or a Gaea's Avenger or whatever. You don't have to be an Archmage or a Witch Queen to play at high level, you just have to have some fucking magic. If you want to have magic that is skinned as a deep connection to the natural world or an awakening of your demon blood or something rather than something you studied and earned, go fucking nuts. That part of the fluff doesn't matter at all.

But if you think you have a devastating argument that a character who literally doesn't have any magic can be a high level character, you're just fucking wrong.

Again, you ram the point home that your imagination is dead.

"Magic is the only way to power, because only magic can be powerful! Why? Because magic is the only way to power, because only magic can be powerful!"

Your mind is so ossified that it is incapable of envisioning anything supernatural as anything other than magic. But why does supernatural have to equal magic? The only answer I can think of is because that's the way 3E did it and you just really, really love 3E.

But why does that have to be the way it always is? Is a Vampire magic (barring Tremere, I suppose)? How about a Werewolf? How about Beowulf? Or Cu Chulainn? This isn't a discussion on level, this is a discussion of people or creatures doing supernatural things that are not magic. You just can't wrap your head around it.

[Username17]

Your mind is so ossified that it is incapable of envisioning anything supernatural as anything other than magic.

Seriously dude: shut the fuck up.
Supernatural things are magical. That's the definition of the actual word.
Seriously Look It The Fuck Up.

My mind is so ossified that I use words according to their actual definitions in the actual dictionaries instead of going the full Humpty Dumpty and using words to mean completely different things that don't convey any information to anyone because they are not part of the shared English Language as used by other speakers in the world.



OK, now that we've established that you're a self important egg who refuses to acknowledge that words have meaning, we can get back to doing what is probably most important in this thread: ignoring every single thing you ever say.

-Username17

[NineInchNall]

Caliban Leandros from Rob Thurman's books (arguable, but I refuse to categorize innate racial features as 'magic' because that's just another narrow-minded conflation of supernatural with 'magic').

For fuck's sake Caliban's entire shtick is that he is half monster and has magic blood. That's the whole reason he's even a character. Every single thing he can do that is of any account is because of magic.

This is exactly what I pointed out before: people are actually totally fine with calling a magical character "mundane" as long as it is, as you say, not the spell casting kind of magic. Magic that comes from race, genetics, gamma radiation, or a yellow sun is totally fine as "mundane". Which is why the damn word is so damn misleading in these damn discussions.

EDIT: Oh, yes, and because people have no ability to comprehend or use words according to their standard, agreed upon meanings.

[Kaelik]

C) You do so by making the mundane character cease to exist as a playable concept. Everyone is enhanced in some way. Like Earthdawn, Shadowrun (to an extent) or 4e without the Martial power source.

D) You do so, but lie about it. A "mundane" power source gains superhuman feats as a conceit of being in a fantasy game. This is 4e with a more coherent Martial power source, K's narrative bullshit power source or every shounen anime ever.

Either you vote Rebublican, or you:

A) Vote Democrat, which is like Nazis.
B) Vote Green, which is like Nazis without Goebel.

What, that analogy is super shitty because it deliberately conflates something with its exact opposite in order to cast negative connotations.

So does yours.

When you use 4e as an example for a type of high level play that is you being a disingenuous cock because:

1) 4e has no high level play of any kind.
2) there is an obviously better example, 3e, that you are purposefully avoiding because you want to cast a negative image.

[kzt]

This isn't a discussion on level, this is a discussion of people or creatures doing supernatural things that are not magic. You just can't wrap your head around it.

That argument makes no sense. Supernatural = Magic. Your argument amounts to you wanting magical creatures or abilities that are not magical.

[Mistborn]

So mundane sword guy is not a high level concept. Let's look over some of the potential sword guy concepts that have some staying power I.E. Phletobitnum.

Supernatural Martial Artist: You do phletobitnumy martial art stuff mastering the secret art of weeaboo fightan' magic. this covers Ki/Chi/and other Eastern martial art's mysticism as well as Shadowdancers.

Gish: This covers any charater who suplaments their swording with some actual magic. Genraly the sorts of magic that help you sword people in the face. Ex. Paladin's and Ranger's.

Bloodline/Transformational: This covers any case where the Phletobitnum is intergated into your body/changes your creature type. There are alot of shitty prestige classes from 3.5 that work like this like the Acolyte of the Skin or Green Star Adept but the concept is salvageable.