BAB v. AC: Is it a war we need?

[K]

Nice. Recharacterize things so no one notices you aren't arguing logically. Nice move, really.

1203370950[/unixtime]]

Lord of the Rings

Yes, LotR, where Sauron strides across the battlefield and devastates entire nations all by himself. Where the presence or absence of a single Ring Wraith spells the salvation or doom of thousands, and where a couple of minor characters have a bet as to how many cloned super soldiers they can kill and Gimli wins it 42 to 41. More major characters shatter castles and raise themselves from the dead. The entire plot revolves around characters being led around by an archangel while they are questing to kill the god of evil, which they do.

I hate to break it to you, but Sauron has an army. I know the movie is really exiting and Sauron is the most interesting thing on the screen, but he really does have a whole army standing behind him.

He doesn't even show up in the trilogy so he might not even exist...it could be the ring the whole time that is moving around armies and Wraiths.

Some exciting plot points do occur and thats what makes exciting low-level play, but the characters in this setting do the vast majority of their work when Gandalf the Plot Device is off screen and the party really is fighting maybe ten orcs at a time. They toss the plot point ring into the plot point volcano and a castle falls down. Maybe they tell the plot point Ents to smash a castle belonging to the guys they would kill if they only knew about it. At no point do any major characters they use their Dragonsmash Attack! to smash any castle.

1203370950[/unixtime]]

Wheel of Time

Are you fucking kidding me? They kill a god in the first book, and subsequent books involve turning entire cities into craters Dragon Ball style.

They killed a mage in the first book. No one worships him and he doesn't grant anyone power and there are no statues of him anywhere. Basically he fails on all the "god criteria".

And yes, at high levels they level cities using artifacts. I really don't care what happens when people use plot devices to change things in a setting, because at any point a plot device can be removed when you don't need it (if you recall, the Crystal Sword gets stolen and the male super Sa-angreal melts after Rand cleanses the Source). Again, at no point is someone using their Super Blasto Attack to melt the city; they are using a plot device which is removed after its creates a plot point.

1203370950[/unixtime]]
And that's not surprising, because that is indeed what D&D was written to be about. It was based on Tolkien's work (and to a lesser extent on the works of Pohl Anderson). And that includes the fact that 10th level characters were able to grind their way through hundreds of orcs or human soldiers. That was written up as the expected encounters in the old modules. When you went on the expedition to the Underdark, you racked up a body count that was four digits long. And when you were done, you killed a fucking goddess!

Yeh, back then Lolth had 86 HPs in a world where the party fighter was doing 1d10+3 damage and the party wizard was doing 10d6 with a Fireball and she had as much raw power as a mid-level demon of today's DnD . You can call something a "god" but we know that back in the day dragons or a pack of wraiths could kill "gods" if they cared.

1203370950[/unixtime]]
People should only advance to higher power levels at the completion of quests and even then only when the players want to roll with a higher powered crowd.

Sure, I've always agreed to that. Whats your point?

1203370950[/unixtime]]
But saying that it shouldn't be in the game at all is short sighted. Not only has it always been in the game, it's in the very source material you are quoting as being your personal inspiration.

Walking around in a god fantasy is unplayable on first principles. You want characters to be gods and enemies to be gods and everyone is only a god when the PCs get to beat them.

Thats not a game or a story, so I don't know how it can be a playable RPG. Seriously.

[Crissa]

Greek and Semetic legends have heroes facing off against heroes - assuming armies having them - and heroes needing armies to best cities and other armies.

Sure, Heracles could knock down buildings by himself, but he wasn't impervious. Sure, Achillies was impervious, but he could only take down so many guys at once. Alexander was never downed in combat, but he still needed an army to not be arrested for being a troublemaker.

Where do villains come from if there is no one the equal of the protagonists? Either you have 'only monsters' or you really do have people, kings, and other lands' heroes who can and will try to stop you.

-Crissa

[JonSetanta]

1203334481[/unixtime]]
...maybe it'd be better to hide until the fallout settles and an answer has been agreed on by the two chief designers.

That was my decision a while ago. It's much more interesting to watch the mini-essays arrive than interrupt any of it.

[Koumei]

Exactly - and besides, I've said my bit and both Frank and K are better at this stuff than I am. So we can let them throw essays at each other, then cheer when there's a result.

[K]

1203384500[/unixtime]]Exactly - and besides, I've said my bit and both Frank and K are better at this stuff than I am. So we can let them throw essays at each other, then cheer when there's a result.

This process usually takes place in person over several days and involves me sitting on Frank's couch or walking his dog, or we do it by phone.

Since he's in medical school and I'm in law school and he's on the wrong continent, this is the slow-motion Matrix version with more explosions and violence.

[Aycarus]

1203391977[/unixtime]]Since he's in medical school and I'm in law school and he's on the wrong continent, this is the slow-motion Matrix version with more explosions and violence.

I could imagine very easily writing this off as "studying" on your part.

[Username17]

I hate to break it to you, but Sauron has an army.

Of course he has an army. He has an army of super soldiers that he created with his own dark power. Also he personally walks around blowing up regiments of super elves with his dark power. He does a lot of crap with his dark power. Morgoth did even more and blew up islands DBZ style.

He does show up in the trilogy. Both in the movie (where he is shown super punching entire squads away like he was a Dynasty Warriors character), and in the books (where it occasionally goes right out off script and starts going into Sauron flashbacks).

And of course, the Silmarillion goes into way more epic crazy. And it's part of the Tolkien universe and it's listed as a source of inspiration on the AD&D books by Gary Gygax.

They killed a mage in the first book. No one worships him and he doesn't grant anyone power and there are no statues of him anywhere. Basically he fails on all the "god criteria".

I take it that you haven't read The Eye of the World recently? It was a stand alone book which was converted into a series after the fact. In the first book he uses a well of uncorrupted Source and fights and defeats The Lord of the Dark, who is the villainous god king of the Trollocs and also the being worshiped by all the evil dudes in the entire setting.

In the later books the guy he defeated was retconned into being one of the dark lord's assistants who runs around Scooby Doo style in a Lord of the Dark outfit. But in the first book it is stated to be the actual Evil God.

Yeh, back then Lolth had 86 HPs in a world where the party fighter was doing 1d10+3 damage and the party wizard was doing 10d6 with a Fireball and she had as much raw power as a mid-level demon of today's DnD .

Actually, she only had 66 hit points. But she was essentially immune to most attack forms (including fireballs and all weapons wielded by low level characters). So she really didn't fit into the power paradigm of today's D&D at all. The only way to defeat her was to beat her with a magic sword, which as you so aptly recall did not do a whole heck of a lot of damage. Despite her 66 hit points, it was an Epic confrontation, because the rules worked differently back then.

Lolth was a Goddess. She granted spells and so on and so forth. And you killed her in the Demon Web Pits. That was the adventure. You can trivialize it as much as you want, but she could kill literally limitless numbers of Orcs and the heroes were expected to kill her in epic combat after chopping their way through a five nation army of literally over a thousand people.

Walking around in a god fantasy is unplayable on first principles.

No it is not. People play Champions. People play Populous. The rules are different, but the game can be played.

You want characters to be gods and enemies to be gods and everyone is only a god when the PCs get to beat them.

I want that to be an option, because it has always been an option before. It's an option in the source material you cited and it's an option in the source material I cited. And it has always been an option in D&D.

If you don't have that option you can and should drop the level system entirely. Levels are for balancing different power levels into the same system. If you don't have different power levels, the levels can and should go away.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

1203391977[/unixtime]]
Since he's in medical school and I'm in law school and he's on the wrong continent, this is the slow-motion Matrix version with more explosions and violence.

And like in the Matrix, the winner gets to jab their verbal hand into the other's statement and overwrite the loser's code.

[RandomCasualty]

1203337220[/unixtime]]The job of an army in this kind of setting is first to beat other armies (Because if heroes are rare, they're likely not even going to be on either side of the fight statistically, unless you are either fighting for or against a major asshole), and they are to repress the populace on behalf of despots. The Persian army's job is to smash smaller armies (IE all of them), commit atrocites on a conquered populace to keep public morale low enough that they can't imagine a revolt working, and then to strip valuables from conquered territory to return home with.

If heroic-scale characters are rare (Which Frank has said he wants), then most governments aren't going to work with heroes in mind as a matter of course. You'll have the odd king who tries to court a legendary hero with money or power, but in general, they don't bother because heroes come and go as they please.

The problem is that heroic level characters have to be common enough that they can be foils to the PCs, so there must be enough of them to do that. If one hero = infinite army men, you are better off just screwing the army and just training heroes. Because if your city gets attacked, you just hire a hero and you become immune to any attacking army. Also basically because heroes can take over a mundane city at will, it stands to reason that all the rulers are going to be heroes. The king is the king not because of the real world feudal requirement of being the commander of the army, but because he can beat any army. And really, even if you can't get ahold of heroes, you can always hire monsters. By having hero level characters exist, it means you've got a sufficient pool of opponents that can challenge them, since that's the point of the game. And once you have that, you're better off just hiring from that pool instead of ever bothering with an army.

If hero level characters exist at all, they basically replace armies. And while I guess you could have people make armies anyway, regardless of the fact that they're totally ineffectual, it really does create a big problem with the believability of the setting. Because really, when heroes can kill armies alone, they have no need to ever lead armies, so armies don't have any important place in the world or even a reason for existing.

Battles between nations are more going to be the king and his court wizard versus the other ruler and the cardinal. Since once you get to the point where your army can't touch someone at all, they aren't worth employing anymore, because the only meaningful battle becomes the battle between heroes. So you'd rather have one extra hero on your side than 50,000 nameless troops who can't do anything to the hero.

[Jacob_Orlove]

That's nonsensical. Most of D&D society is low-level, and faces low-level threats. There are few to no high level guys running around. If there were, they'd either be doing all the real work in the narrative, or they'd overmatch the PCs and crush them, depending on the relative goals of the PCs and the high level heroes. And remember, most games spend most of their time at these low levels. If the players never hit level 10, you don't need 10th level monsters running around in your kingdom.

If you're a high level character (which, for most of the time in most of the games, you won't be), that's boring, so you go somewhere else, where there are giants or dragons or devils or whatever. That can be another plane, deep into the bowels of the earth, to the giant's castles in the clouds, whatever. That's where you put high level foes, and that's where high level heroes go to adventure.

In the low-level kingdoms, there are armies. In the lands of Giants, there are not.

[Voss]

Except in the Forgotten Realms, where low level adventurers trip over high level threats all the time, while the high level adventurers kick back in the towns, villages and cities.

See: anything written by Ed Greenwood. Particularly Spellfire, because nothings better than a 2nd level mage (he gets training in fucking flaming sphere later) and a commoner-turned-rogue adventuring in godsbedamned Myth Drannor and accidentally ending up in the lair of a dracolich.

[K]

1203408485[/unixtime]]

I hate to break it to you, but Sauron has an army.

Of course he has an army. He has an army of super soldiers that he created with his own dark power. Also he personally walks around blowing up regiments of super elves with his dark power. He does a lot of crap with his dark power. Morgoth did even more and blew up islands DBZ style.

He does show up in the trilogy. Both in the movie (where he is shown super punching entire squads away like he was a Dynasty Warriors character), and in the books (where it occasionally goes right out off script and starts going into Sauron flashbacks).

And of course, the Silmarillion goes into way more epic crazy. And it's part of the Tolkien universe and it's listed as a source of inspiration on the AD&D books by Gary Gygax.

Key word: flashbacks.

In the movie its flashbacks and the books are a little fuzzy since I read them several decades ago, but Tolkein's tales make it very clear that you are dealing with legends and history. The Silmarillion is basically just abbreviated legends and not a clear narrative at all.

And thats fine in a novel. In a DnD game, there are actual stats for everything.

In a story, you can call a guy a god and say he's invincible and he can just be a guy who luckily didn't take an arrow in the throat.

In a RPG, we don't have that luxery. We need a playable game that people will emotionally invest in, and there aren't going to make a Silmarillion movie because you can't invest in it.

1203408485[/unixtime]]

They killed a mage in the first book. No one worships him and he doesn't grant anyone power and there are no statues of him anywhere. Basically he fails on all the "god criteria".

I take it that you haven't read The Eye of the World recently? It was a stand alone book which was converted into a series after the fact. In the first book he uses a well of uncorrupted Source and fights and defeats The Lord of the Dark, who is the villainous god king of the Trollocs and also the being worshiped by all the evil dudes in the entire setting.

In the later books the guy he defeated was retconned into being one of the dark lord's assistants who runs around Scooby Doo style in a Lord of the Dark outfit. But in the first book it is stated to be the actual Evil God.

Maybe we read a different book because as far as I can remember they went to the location of one of the Seven Seals of the Dark One, not Shayol Ghul and the Pits of Doom where the Dark One is held, and it wasn't Tarmon Gai'don. There's no retconning that I can see.

A quick look at the wiki doesn't seem to explain or even note any contradictions either. Maybe this is one of those urban legends.

1203408485[/unixtime]]

Yeh, back then Lolth had 86 HPs in a world where the party fighter was doing 1d10+3 damage and the party wizard was doing 10d6 with a Fireball and she had as much raw power as a mid-level demon of today's DnD .

Actually, she only had 66 hit points. But she was essentially immune to most attack forms (including fireballs and all weapons wielded by low level characters). So she really didn't fit into the power paradigm of today's D&D at all. The only way to defeat her was to beat her with a magic sword, which as you so aptly recall did not do a whole heck of a lot of damage. Despite her 66 hit points, it was an Epic confrontation, because the rules worked differently back then.

Lolth was a Goddess. She granted spells and so on and so forth. And you killed her in the Demon Web Pits. That was the adventure. You can trivialize it as much as you want, but she could kill literally limitless numbers of Orcs and the heroes were expected to kill her in epic combat after chopping their way through a five nation army of literally over a thousand people.

Yeh, and we used to let people poke their heads into dark portals that were actually Spheres of Annihilation and watch them die with no save.

Lots of the old adventures have survived in our memories only as examples of crap adventure design.

1203408485[/unixtime]]

Walking around in a god fantasy is unplayable on first principles.

No it is not. People play Champions. People play Populous. The rules are different, but the game can be played.

People play Champions? Seriously? I've never seen that, and I spend a Christmas working at a game store. I think I heard once you played it for a while, but I've never met anyone else.

Populous is actually a great example for my side as well. Its a game with no narrative. There are no characters and no diplomacy. Its as far as an RPG as you can get, and thats essentially what god play is all about.

Which moves on to my next point....

1203408485[/unixtime]]

You want characters to be gods and enemies to be gods and everyone is only a god when the PCs get to beat them.

I want that to be an option, because it has always been an option before. It's an option in the source material you cited and it's an option in the source material I cited. And it has always been an option in D&D.

If you don't have that option you can and should drop the level system entirely. Levels are for balancing different power levels into the same system. If you don't have different power levels, the levels can and should go away.

-Username17

I've been looking at the Red, Blue, Black, and Gold boxes. You know what happens in the Gold box, the one for Immortal play?

You start playing an entirely different game with almost entirely different rules.

It takes a wicked hard quest to get into, and you play in the same world in a very nominal kind of way. You have crazy powers several orders of magnitude past anything in the last three boxes.

If thats what you want, then go for it....but you must understand thats its not the same game.

--------------------

I'm seriously confused about two things:

1. Why do you think that levels must equal total immunity at some point? I mean, if you are tossing 5d6 Fireballs around and have 50 HPs that is a very different power level than having 10 HPs and your best attack is a 1d8+3 swording that requires a to-hit roll, which is different from having 180 HPs and stopping time so you can toss six 15d6 Fireballs.

You can have a lot of raw power and still be worried about stray arrows.

You can have huge variations in personal power and not want to tangle with a whole army without your own army on your side. I mean, if I have 100 HPs and I can destroy an entire combat unit of 40 guys in one turn, and they can do like only do 4d6 damage to me per round, I can destroy a big chunk of an army before I need to retreat. Why is that not enough?

2. Why don't you want other powerful characters to be the setting?

By your comments, you seem to want exactly as many powerful characters in the campaign as it takes to bring the PCs to high level, and the ones much more powerful hide out until the PCs can fight them.

I don't understand that. I mean, I really don't care if the Bleak Mountains are full of manticores and I know that as a 3rd level guy I shouldn't tangle with them, but as 7th level I can probably solo one if I have good armor.

I don't care if the Shire of Sleepy Brook is led by a powerful priesthood of druids and I can't start pushing people around unless I bring an army and a few wizards on the payroll.

I don't even care if a longbearded plot device of a wizard occassionally blows up a castle or drops me a quest.

I mean, the party is important because if even one of us lives in a fight he can bring us back from the dead, and for me that is enough of an advantage that I don't mind if some guy can pop in and insta-kill one or two of us.

The very fact that you want powerful guys to be completely immune to lower-level guys means that your game can't work if characters more powerful than the PCs exist in the campaign.

Essentially, god play can't be in an internally consistent setting. You might as well play Cops and Robbers.

------

PS.

RC said what I meant, but in a clearer way. Good show.

[Username17]

Do you remember the part of the Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf sends all the rest of the team away because they cannot affect the Balrog? Not even the archers?

A Balrog. A demon of the ancient world. This foe is beyond any of you. Run!

He stood and fought because as an Istari he was higher level than the others. He did not even ask the archers to stay on the far side of the bridge and add supporting fire, but merely to run away. Because the Balrog was beyond them and they couldn't help against it.

That is the source material that D&D was based upon.

-Username17

[Koumei]

1203556597[/unixtime]] If one hero = infinite army men, you are better off just screwing the army and just training heroes.

Contrarywise, if an army is better than a hero, then screw the heroes, you have money. Suddenly, all you ever want heroes for are the occasional tasks where armies don't fit, and I'll tell you right now that after Iron Kingdoms, I am never again going to play a game where 75% of the quests/missions involve trudging through the sewers, and your "sexy adventuring garb" includes shit-waders.

Heroes need to be out there, doing their job everywhere, and that means hiring an army can't be a better option.

[Neeek]

1203583617[/unixtime]]
Heroes need to be out there, doing their job everywhere, and that means hiring an army can't be a better option.

Not really. Armies can be useful in that they are big. As in, they take up a lot of space, more space than a hero can defend. If an army can essentially ignore a single hero, taking losses but having overwhelming numbers that just continue past the hero, you've got a situation where the heroes are useful for small-scale combat, survive and contribute to large-scale combat but aren't the end-all be-all of large-scale combat.

If the hero alone can defeat an army, that's fine. The lone hero probably should be able to survive (most of the time), though not defeat the army, but not being able to win is not a problem. The hero plus an army should beat a heroless army, because the rest of the army slows down the enemy long enough for the hero to make the difference.

[RandomCasualty]

1203583617[/unixtime]]

Contrarywise, if an army is better than a hero, then screw the heroes, you have money. Suddenly, all you ever want heroes for are the occasional tasks where armies don't fit, and I'll tell you right now that after Iron Kingdoms, I am never again going to play a game where 75% of the quests/missions involve trudging through the sewers, and your "sexy adventuring garb" includes shit-waders.

Heroes need to be out there, doing their job everywhere, and that means hiring an army can't be a better option.

Well right.

But my point has always been that the counter system should be. Army beats hero. Hero beats monster. Monster beats army.

So your army doesn't work well against stuff like dragons or balrogs. For that shit you need heroes. Of course, any bunch of archers or swordsmen could overwhelm Gandalf and fill him with arrows. That way heroes get hired by the king to take out a monster threat, you may even hire them for wars when the enemy starts hiring monsters to serve in their army.

Basically how it'd work is that monsters would be the only ones who got DR. Heroes could penetrate DR and would get a big amount of hp. So Sauron can kick the shit out of your army, so you need Elrond and Isildur to fight him, but Elrond couldn't take out an army singlehandedly.

Even at low levels, an army is a blunt instrument and not particularly great at doing stuff like going into the old ruin and recovering the artifact or rescuing the kidnapped princess before her captors slit her throat. Like in the real world, moving armies is expensive, and sometimes you're better off with a small unit of elite soldiers to pull off a task than landing a full platoon of grunts.

That's nonsensical. Most of D&D society is low-level, and faces low-level threats. There are few to no high level guys running around. If there were, they'd either be doing all the real work in the narrative, or they'd overmatch the PCs and crush them, depending on the relative goals of the PCs and the high level heroes. And remember, most games spend most of their time at these low levels. If the players never hit level 10, you don't need 10th level monsters running around in your kingdom.

If you're a high level character (which, for most of the time in most of the games, you won't be), that's boring, so you go somewhere else, where there are giants or dragons or devils or whatever. That can be another plane, deep into the bowels of the earth, to the giant's castles in the clouds, whatever. That's where you put high level foes, and that's where high level heroes go to adventure.

In the low-level kingdoms, there are armies. In the lands of Giants, there are not.

The MMORPG style where there happens to be high-level zones and low-level zones isn't going to work. Monsters and NPCs don't magically gather in certain spots for no apparent reason such that the level of the threat is always going to be constant. You may have a few power bases, but I think almost every region is going to have higher level threats and some low level threats, since pretty much some people are going to choose to be the big fish in the small pond, so they go to the low-level zone and just set up a kingdom to rule.

Much like Frank set up in the tomes, you can have adventures on the planes at lower levels. You just happen not to run into balors and pit fiends. And that can happen without their being "pit fiend zone".

Every area should have its high level NPCs to explain why the world hasn't collapsed yet into ruin. The idea is for the PCs to be the only actual "Heroes". All the other high level guys are self serving neutrals or evils. That prevents the world from turning into Forgotten Realms style superhero teams.

If the hero alone can defeat an army, that's fine. The lone hero probably should be able to survive (most of the time), though not defeat the army, but not being able to win is not a problem. The hero plus an army should beat a heroless army, because the rest of the army slows down the enemy long enough for the hero to make the difference.

But this frankly is not how it works at all. Once you have an invulnerable unit, effectively you factor the rest of the shit out of the equation. A group of 2 heroes versus "1 hero and an army" is going to turn into just a 2on1 if the army can't help out at all.

And of course a hero + army beats a heroless army, but that's because a hero alone beats a heroless army, because nobody even cares what the army does. It really sounds like Rifts megaDamage and megaHP all over again. Where you can have infinite guys with assault rifles and kevlar vests, but it don't mean dick against one guy with powered armor, and battles entirely come down to if your powered armor guys beat their powered armor guys. Everyone else is just window dressing. The only difference is that in D&D your low level guys can't even get bazookas or something to harm the mega HP units.

[Orion]

Actually, armies can still be relevant even with invulnerability as long as youn have a fair distribution of levels in the game.

Yeah, no number of level 1 soldiers can win against the level 10 archmage, but the level 10 archmage CAN be taken down by a strike team of several level 7 assassins.

To prevent that, he can hire some level five bodyguards, who collectively are capable of overwhelming said assassins. So the assassins bring a troop of level 3 mercs/apprentices/conjured demons to engage the level five bodyguards, freeing the assassins to strike. Unfortunately, the archmage has surrounded his tower with an army of level 1 orcs, far more than the level three mercs can deal with.

That's why level one orcs are important. (also, as a means of gathering information and resolving minor problems without personal attention)

So, counter systems...



High beats mid beats low beats high:

The most efficient tactic is to finesse your enemies with slightly higher-level foes.

So when the enemy brings the level 1 orcs, you counter with level 3 rangers, and he counters with level five dread knights and you counter with level seven paladins.

Advantages:

-- high-level play is easy to justify, because everbody has an incentive to up the ante
-- Heroes are ineffective against armies, justifying the armies' existence. Note that this doesn't *necessarily* mean the paladins are afraid of the orcs, though it could. It only requires that paladins be an inefficient way to fight orcs. Maybe it's just that 6 seconds salary for a paladin is more than an orc is worth.
-- level-approrpiate encounters are justified. I you're level 7, you're the go-to guy for level seven threats. Lower-level guys would just die, while higher-level guys would be wasting their time.


Low beats mid beats high beats low

In this version, the most efficient tactic is to overwhelm someone with superior numbers and almost equal quality.

So you send demons after the heroes, and elite priests after the demons, and ogres after the priests, and crossbowmen after the ogres.

In this version, the army is the default tactic because it's most efficient. Unlike in the other, where ramping up the tech tree is the major goal, here you don't build high-level units until you need them. Crossbowmen are THE answer until your opponent busts out a Hero who is IMMUNE to crossbowmen. Then, and only then, do you upgrade to knights, wraiths, or dragonriders, whatever is necessary to take the hero down.

-- this system justifies armies handily, and allows for the heor killing an army as a strategic victory
-- lots of interesting strategy, as one tries to keep your lowbies away form the enemies high-level guys, and the heroes try to avoid the demi-heroes.

[Neeek]

1203586607[/unixtime]]
But this frankly is not how it works at all. Once you have an invulnerable unit, effectively you factor the rest of the shit out of the equation. A group of 2 heroes versus "1 hero and an army" is going to turn into just a 2on1 if the army can't help out at all.

You are missing my entire point: Being able to defeat a hero is irrelevant if you can just ignore them. The Army isn't there to beat the hero, it's there to take the area. Beating the hero doesn't matter if you can win without beating the hero. And an unengagable army can do exactly that.

[RandomCasualty]

1203592503[/unixtime]]

You are missing my entire point: Being able to defeat a hero is irrelevant if you can just ignore them. The Army isn't there to beat the hero, it's there to take the area. Beating the hero doesn't matter if you can win without beating the hero. And an unengagable army can do exactly that.

I guess I am missing your point, because I really don't understand it. How do you win if you can't kill someone? I mean if your army just holds position, eventually the hero wipes out all of your troops. You can't kill him and he just keeps chopping away.

So you can kill everyone with the hero, but the fact that you still can't beat the hero makes everything a moot point.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

RC: If you and your pals could personally defeat the armed forces of small nations and take their stuff, why would you ever allow yourself to be hired to do anything? Seriously, I really want the idea of "Economy" to go away fairly quickly in a game that has any chance of becoming epic. It is complete bullshit to think that heroes would take part in conflicts because they were paid to do so. There shouldn't be a gold economy, there shouldn't even be a wish economy. If anything, the "economy" should be goal based: What do you want to do, and what are you willing to do to do it? If your goal is to defend Kingdom X from it's enemies, then fine.

But that's a digression. As to your point, I don't see why heroes would nessissarily be on the front line of every fight. Sure, I can concede the point that from a consistancy standpoint, you're going to have more than three extraordinary people in a standard-size setting. But even that doesn't mean that heroes are best suited or would even consent to being on the front lines of the 53rd retailiatory war between Kingdom A and Kingdom B. That would be about like having the flagship of the US Navy running coast guard missions off the coast of Galveston. Yes, I'm sure they'd make short work of those drugrunners, but there has to be something better for them to do.

Really, PCs and other hero-scale characters in a game like this are basically special ops. They sneak in and assassinate enemy generals so that a siege ends quickly, or they're off trying to find the Sword of Vallhalla so that the guy they like can show it to a crowd and become king before the guy they don't likes men finds it. The party goes after the dragon flying overhead because the fight caught it's interest or the bad guy copped a deal with it.

Or hell, why can't the role of the heroes be to take out the Blackguard who's commanding the other army while their respective forces slice each other to ribbons behind them?

Or maybe the army's a distraction. March across the countryside lighting houses and feilds on fire until the local ruler's pride or coffers force him to react, and while his forces are otherwise occupied, you send heroes in to have a little tete a tete with him.

Or, and this is how I really do see most high-level people handling this situation, the party tells both sides to go fuck themselves, because they'd rather go on an entirely unrelated quest through Baator because the don't give two shits in a dead orc's mouth about either kingdom, and their little war isn't going to affect the world.

This is pretty much the old "Presence of High Level Heroes means you shouldn't have to adventure. Ever" arguement, but backwards. It's pretty much saying that the only thing Heroes should ever do is slum it on the front lines of a battle with all the 1st level Warriors and look for the other teams one or two people who have the high-level gear.

-Desdan

[RandomCasualty]

1203599184[/unixtime]]
RC: If you and your pals could personally defeat the armed forces of small nations and take their stuff, why would you ever allow yourself to be hired to do anything? Seriously, I really want the idea of "Economy" to go away fairly quickly in a game that has any chance of becoming epic. It is complete bullshit to think that heroes would take part in conflicts because they were paid to do so. There shouldn't be a gold economy, there shouldn't even be a wish economy. If anything, the "economy" should be goal based: What do you want to do, and what are you willing to do to do it? If your goal is to defend Kingdom X from it's enemies, then fine.

Well, your goal may well be to expand your own kingdom, if you're that much of a badass that nobody can compete with you in the world, then you're pretty much king yourself.

But that's a digression. As to your point, I don't see why heroes would nessissarily be on the front line of every fight. Sure, I can concede the point that from a consistancy standpoint, you're going to have more than three extraordinary people in a standard-size setting. But even that doesn't mean that heroes are best suited or would even consent to being on the front lines of the 53rd retailiatory war between Kingdom A and Kingdom B. That would be about like having the flagship of the US Navy running coast guard missions off the coast of Galveston. Yes, I'm sure they'd make short work of those drugrunners, but there has to be something better for them to do.

Well, here's the difference. Heroes in D&D don't have operating costs or travel times. The big problem with the flagship running coast guard missions is that it takes a while for the ship to get where it's going and the costs associated with it using bombs, fuel or even just paying its personnel are enormous. There are cheaper ways to accomplish the same thing, or at least close to it.

The thing is that generally hiring a smaller group is cheaper. Shadowrun especially kind of specializes in this mentality. While the corps could declare all out war on each other, they don't, because wars are costly for both sides and they can achieve their means better by keeping costs down and media exposure for combat activities down.

Really, PCs and other hero-scale characters in a game like this are basically special ops. They sneak in and assassinate enemy generals so that a siege ends quickly, or they're off trying to find the Sword of Vallhalla so that the guy they like can show it to a crowd and become king before the guy they don't likes men finds it. The party goes after the dragon flying overhead because the fight caught it's interest or the bad guy copped a deal with it.

Well these are the PCs, but not necessarily other hero-scale characters. If the hero-scale character happens to be head red wizard of Thay or the warrior king of Gondor, you bet he's going to be worried about conquering territory. The idea that for whatever reason, the high level king would rather be sitting on the throne instead of bringing his own special forces to the field is pretty crazy. This is a world where high level people can teleport basically anywhere, so you can be back from the siege of another city in like a day.

Or hell, why can't the role of the heroes be to take out the Blackguard who's commanding the other army while their respective forces slice each other to ribbons behind them?

It can, but again, there's no real point having the army if it can't do anything for you. The question is, who hired the army in the first place and why? If the battle between heroes is all that matters, you're better off just equipping your heroes better, or hiring troops that can actually hurt enemy heroes, like giants or something.

Or, and this is how I really do see most high-level people handling this situation, the party tells both sides to go fuck themselves, because they'd rather go on an entirely unrelated quest through Baator because the don't give two shits in a dead orc's mouth about either kingdom, and their little war isn't going to affect the world.

I don't get it. Why the fuck would they be going to Baator? The whole planeswalker thing makes absolutely no sense to me. This isn't a MMORPG where you're constantly going from zone to zone to find shit to challenge you so you can level up. This is a game where you do shit that matters to you. So defending your homeland and being a hero to the people who know you might be important to some and taking over the world may be important to others. Most people really don't even give a rat's ass what's in Baator or any of the other planes.

This is pretty much the old "Presence of High Level Heroes means you shouldn't have to adventure. Ever" arguement, but backwards. It's pretty much saying that the only thing Heroes should ever do is slum it on the front lines of a battle with all the 1st level Warriors and look for the other teams one or two people who have the high-level gear.

Well no, it doesn't mean there are no adventurers, it actually means that the world is entirely adventurers and classed people and nobody gives a shit about assembling armies of low level guys.

Like I said before, your PCs may not be the only high level people, but they may be the only heroes who do things for altruistic purposes. Just because someone is in danger doesn't mean that there's automatically someone to save them. If you're running Forgotten realms where good high level characters are a dime a dozen, then basically there is no reason to adventure. But that doesn't have to be the case. I actually like having it where the PCs are the only real heroes. Everyone else might be powerful, but they're not particularly interested in the plight of the common man.

Because see, you get jaded in the D&D world. As a high level ruler, you seriously don't give a fuck about common blacksmiths or farmers. Feeding your army and building weapons for them isn't even a concern because you probably don't have one. So most of the time when the village of ElfDale is having problems, the king is just going to tell them to go fuck themselves and keep paying their taxes. And if ElfDale is wiped off the map, the king gets a slight loss of income, but whatever. Maybe if it's cheap enough he can send some heroes, or maybe he just lets the villagers themselves hire the heroes.

And the neutral or evil dickhead king works fine for that situation. And I basically like to run the games like that. Pretty much it works like vampire, as you get more powerful, common folk look like ants to you, and you gradually lose touch with your own humanity. You see thing in bigger and bigger terms and if one of those anthills should suddenly disappear, you don't even care. Mostly being king is just something you do to stroke your own ego anyway. And while you could easily fix the problem going on in ElfDale, you'd rather spend your time with your harem or doing something else enjoyable. And yeah, people can accuse you of being a jaded callous dick, but that's just the way it goes.

The PCs are unique in that they've reached high levels and not lost touch with their own humanity.

[Username17]

High beats mid beats low beats high:

The most efficient tactic is to finesse your enemies with slightly higher-level foes.

So when the enemy brings the level 1 orcs, you counter with level 3 rangers, and he counters with level five dread knights and you counter with level seven paladins.

I think that's a bit backwards. The goal here is for The Dragon to devastate the countryside with burnination. Then for a group of heroes to go kill the dragon and for there to be much rejoicing.

So it actually sounds like the best tactic is to jump powerful guys with groups of slightly less powerful guys or to terrorize large numbers of weak guys with small numbers of the powerful. So at close power scales, victory goes to quantity, and at distant power scales victory goes to quality.

---

Then having large numbers of peons actually matters because in addition to being an acceptable answer to slightly smaller numbers of peons, it is also a good answer to a smaller number of elite troops. And since elite troops in groups is a good answer to might forces in smaller groups, the mighty will want to keep the peons around to act as a buffer against a very real tactic to unseat them.

So groups of Level 1* beat smaller groups of Level 2 beat individuals of Level 3 beat groups of Level 1.

*not necessarily the actual numbers, just topological ordering.

And in that scenario, if the characters get to Level 3 then that's fine because that wouldn't even happen if you didn't want to play the "try to keep squads of Level 2 guys from ganging up on me while working together to take down the Level 4s one at a time" game.

-Username17

[K]

Its still possible for armies to be able to affect dragons and still have heroes be the best way to kill a dragon.

For example, lets say a dragon can kill 200 guys in an army before it is so hurt it needs to fly away. Then, two weeks later when you finally track it down again with your army it is healed up and it can do it again. At that rate you'll never kill the dragon and it doesn't make sense to hunt it with an army.

----

"Payment" of heroes can take many forms. Noble titles, fame, access to the king's information network so he tells you where the good adventures are....these are all things that can't be bought with gold but could buy a heroes help.

Gold is also not useless. It takes time and effort to extract money out of a economy, so just being given a pile of it has value. The king gathers the money to buy heroes just like he uses the money to pay troops, and PCs take the gold because its often hard to hawk a 4,000 lb obsidian statue of a giant frog and they'd like to pay some workers to repair the castle they got as a land grant. Just because the hero is powerful enough to take what he wants doesn't mean that he'll ignore the easier route of just paying people.
----

Invincible characters are a weird thing. In Dominions III, a wargame with RPG elements, one of many tactics is to recruit a powerful hero, equip him with a ton of magic equipment, and then set him loose on the enemy either at the head of an army or all alone.

On the flipside, Dominions III has no save spells that basically autokill individual units, so Supercombatants are really not a big deal.

----------

Do you remember the part of the Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf sends all the rest of the team away because they cannot affect the Balrog? Not even the archers?

Gandalf: A Balrog. A demon of the ancient world. This foe is beyond any of you. Run!

He stood and fought because as an Istari he was higher level than the others. He did not even ask the archers to stay on the far side of the bridge and add supporting fire, but merely to run away. Because the Balrog was beyond them and they couldn't help against it.

That is the source material that D&D was based upon.

Maybe Gandalf was trying to get the Fellowship away from the Balrog because if the Balrog could grab Frodo and take the One Ring the adventure would be over (and the same would happen if the archers stayed behind and let the orcs catch Frodo). Maybe the Balrog was a plot device to get the Fellowship out of Moria because Tolkien wrote himself into a corner and it was a convenient way to get rid of the plot device characters. Maybe Gandalf knew it was going to be a long adventure and everyone was needed and the Balrog could kill 2-3 heroes before it fell and this was a NO RAISING setting (unless you happen to be Galdalf).

Assuming that the Balrog was immune just because Gandalf said something in passing assumes that all characters are one-dimensional and authors never deceive the reader or have characters saying false or misleading things for good reasons.

Neither is true.

[Username17]

So your assumption is that neither the Fellowship nor the readers of the book were given the "real story"?

At this point I'm tapped out. Sorry. Your argument is seriously that actual quotes from your own source material don't count against your argument because... ? Seriously man, what the fucking hell is this shit?

Gandalf says that the Balrog is beyond all of them and they have to run. The Simarillion backs him up entirely in its dry descriptions of what Balrogs were capable of. And you are asking us to discount this without evidence because you'd rather live in a world where there wasn't any source material that ran counter to your concept? Fuck that!

If you want a game where everyone is human scale and there are no uber monsters, there is ample source material for that. It's very Three Hearts and Three Lions, very Master of the Five Magics. And while you can make a very nice skill based system where a starting specialist is easily a match for a powerful and established character within the field of the specialist - that system would not model Lord of the Rings.

Lord of the Rings has fucking Balrogs in it, and Gandalf can fight them and Aragorn can't.

-Username17

[K]

1203621996[/unixtime]]So your assumption is that neither the Fellowship nor the readers of the book were given the "real story"?

At this point I'm tapped out. Sorry. Your argument is seriously that actual quotes from your own source material don't count against your argument because... ? Seriously man, what the fucking hell is this shit?

Gandalf says that the Balrog is beyond all of them and they have to run. The Simarillion backs him up entirely in its dry descriptions of what Balrogs were capable of. And you are asking us to discount this without evidence because you'd rather live in a world where there wasn't any source material that ran counter to your concept? Fuck that!

Yeh, pretty much.

This isn't law or science. Stories aren't perfect truth in any sense and don't have to be taken at face value. Very often two characters will "remember" the same situation in a very different way or the author will tell it in a very different way from two perspectives. Very often the author is trying to evoke an emotion and it doesn't matter if one scene doesn't make sense in relation to the others as long as the part he wants to convey gets through.

If this were real life we'd question the witnesses and get conflicting stories and then we'd ask for proof. We'd assume that a story from thousands of years ago is mostly exaggeration and misrepresentation by storytellers trying to make a more awesome story.

Hell, just read the wiki on Balrogs on Wikipedia. Its great because it shows all the contradictory references to Balrogs written by Tolkien. Just a few examples are: Gandalf only kills the Balrog when Glamdring gets struck by lightning, but earlier stories have Balrogs being killed by elves who don't seem to need anything special except a willingness to stab the thing in the belly. Maybe Balrogs have wings that let them fly, or maybe they don't, or maybe they have wings that don't let them fly. Maybe Balrogs are ethereal and made of fire, but then why did they have the ability to punch Gandalf in the face?

About the only clear thing is that Balrogs are more powerful than dragons and dragons are more powerful than Gandalf and Gandalf is more powerful than a Balrog. Make sense of that crap.

On the flipside, DnD has much in common with both law and science. It has objective numbers and abilities and that can be run through mathematical analysis and game theory and thats a very sciencey thing.

The law is about reading all the evidence and rules, then figuring out what it all means together logically using interpretation of text and sound policy reasons as a means of determining how things should be run. Sound familiar?

I mean, logically, if the Balrog was unbeatable why wasn't it taking entire cities instead of waiting for some guys to rile up the orcs? Hell, why wasn't Gandalf fighting whole armies by himself?

I think you have to suck it up and realize that you aren't going to win arguments where there is any chance at counter-examples and persuasive interpretation. You can go with the STORY and just have Sauron be a dragon and a vampire and a powerful warrior and a great wolf and a handsome man, or you can take the sane option and work out a Sauron that makes any goddamn sense at all.

I characterize things my way and you characterize them in your way and the judges(posters, in this case) figure out which of us is more persuasive. Thats the game.

We don't know if Aragon can fight Balrogs because he never tried. Thats a straight fact with no counter-examples.

We know that none of the characters fought armies alone. Thats a straight fact with no counter-examples. (One can argue that Smaug tried this, but he did die doing it so thats a strong counter-argument for invincibility).

We know that Galdalf sacrificed himself to save the Fellowship. We don't know if that sacrifice was necessary or just an expedient way to remove a threat because he knew he'd come back from the dead.