Out-leveling the base setting?

[K]

Having a 'high level setting' is fine. I disagree with the idea of forcing characters to abandon their world in search of greater challenges, but it should be an option.

In Dark Sun, for example, the high-level setting is fairly different: rather than adventuring around dealing with bandits and desert monsters while trying to avoid notice of the templars, you're doing politics with sorcerer kings from your lava-shrouded forest or your templar-defended city-state.

That doesn't mean that the world has changed. The nature of the game is different. Ideally, leveling up should integrate characters more and more into the setting. As the character develops, the game adapts.

I' d argue that it does.

One of the core assumptions I'm designing is the simple idea that level should equal power. This means that the power of characters to affect the setting also needs to be tied to level.

In a russian-doll setting like Forgotten Realms, individual PCs can attain any level of power up to living god without changing any core conceits; in a setting like Dark Sun or Ravenloft the setting ends once you are a credible threat to a Darklord or a Sorcerer King since your power directly conflicts with the core conceits of the setting. Sure, in Dark Sun that happens at 15th level and in Ravenloft it happens at 6th level, but it does happen.

I mean, Ravenloft is not Ravenloft when a Darklord is a joke, and Dark Sun is a different setting entirely if you can clean out all the Sorcerer Kings in a week. That means once you reach a certain power level you either play in a new setting or deal with the fact that you need to build a new setting out of the bones of the old.

[K]

If you're dead set on having a world where teleportation can't solve all your travel problems and you need to sail around on steam ships - you need to use a rule system where teleportation actually doesn't solve all your damn travel problems.

The problem with that is that if you hardcode that into your system, you reduce the number of similar settings that can use your system.

It works if you say "No Wizard class in this setting because they get teleports and this is an Airship setting."

It fails when you say "No airships in any setting run by this system because teleport is a potential power."

[Lago PARANOIA]

Quick aside, what was the reason for getting rid of the whole 'you don't end up exactly where you want to be?' teleporting error of 2nd Edition?

I mean, I understand how bullshit and arbitrary that was and why they got rid of it. But it seems like more people despise how it makes airships worthless and the teleport ambush the king. So why didn't they make it such that they give teleporting a quadratic chance of putting you off-destination the further you take it, unless very specific precautions are taken?

For example, teleporting anywhere from 1 mile to 5 miles places you 1d8x10 feet away from your intended destination. 5 to 50 miles places you 1d4 miles away from where you wanted to go. 50 to 500 miles places you 2d10 miles away from where you wanted to go.

Adventurers wanting to get somewhere in a hurry really fast would use that spell and suck up the risk. But if teleportation worked in that way then no merchant would use it to regularly transport goods, since there's a chance your goods would end up in the harbor or in the hands of bandits. Teleportation becomes something used for smuggling or as a premium to people who want their goods right away.

Similarly for teleportation circles, they have a weight limit per day depending on their construction. For example, most commercials circle could only teleport 1500 lbs. of crap in a 24 hour period. If you want to use the city's, you either pay out the ass for a ticket you have to use at a certain time of day or get to high enough level and build one your own damn self. For transporting goods in a city, it's possible but so unwieldly that people just put their crap on airships.

[erik]

D&D hasn't had anything approaching real rules for PCs becoming campaign bigwigs since 2e, and you know why?

In 3e Legend Lore pretty well implied that at level 11 you are a legendary bad ass. Incidentally that is about the time that most primary casters have figured out that they can win the game.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/legendLore.htm

If the person, place, or thing is not of legendary importance, you gain no information. As a rule of thumb, characters who are 11th level and higher are “legendary,” as are the sorts of creatures they contend with, the major magic items they wield, and the places where they perform their key deeds.

I think a good DM can make either solution work, i.e. a Russian doll setting where the bigger baddies start coming out of the wood work once they are level appropriate, oooor find reasons to go plane hopping at higher levels and sample the riches of other settings.

Once the players get big enough, famous enough, the adventures can start coming to them.

• Their kingdom becomes threatened by a roving band of pirates on airships.
• The princess is kidnapped by githyanki who ransom her on the condition of the players wiping out a githerzai stronghold.
• A magical disease is spreading across the country faster than clerics can cure it, rendering the afflicted persons mute (which is also hampering the remove disease efforts as clerics fall victim).
• One morning the sun stops showing up and is replaced by a giant planet that yours is now the new moon of. All the stars and constellations are different now as well. Who moved the damn planet?
• As you summon a Djinn to get your pimp on, he cries that someone's killing all the Djinn and he is one of the last. Find out who is fucking with the wish economy.




'Sup peoples.

[Manxome]

For example, teleporting anywhere from 1 mile to 5 miles places you 1d8x10 feet away from your intended destination. 5 to 50 miles places you 1d4 miles away from where you wanted to go. 50 to 500 miles places you 2d10 miles away from where you wanted to go.

So if you're capable of casting teleport 3 times in rapid succession, you can reach a destination 500 miles away with negligible error, as long as you don't die/get incapacitated instantly at an intermediate destination?

Ending up in a "random" place seems kind of dangerous. If the area you're teleporting into isn't actually totally mapped out, then what's actually happening is the DM is put on the spot to make up what kind of situation you teleport into--then if he makes it dangerous, he's a dick, and if he doesn't, then there's no real risk. Plus, you either have to let people randomly end up encased in stone or in mid-air (in which case virtually any error is probably totally unacceptable), or you need rules describing what possible random destinations are valid or invalid, and those sound hard to write in a non-abusable fashion.

Though having an incentive to dig out tunnels all around your fortress so that people that try to teleport in have a high risk of effectively being captured automatically would be interesting...


There are, of course, lots of other ways for limiting teleportation that have appeared in various stories...

• True Game (?) has people who can teleport, but only to places they've already been, or places they can see with a certain minimum precision (no teleporting to the moon even if you have line-of-sight). You can set up teleport ambushes only if you can lure your target to a place that you controled at some time in the past, and a telescope effectively allows you to teleport farther.
• Myst lets you create teleportation items that are easily transportable and infinitely reusable, but they can only send people to the place where they were created, and you can't take the item with you when you use it (so someone else can follow you, unless you use it over a vat of acid or something). Also, the items only work while they're in a different world from the one in which they were created, so you nominally can't teleport to another location in the same world, but that's not really important because you can bypass it by teleporting out and back in.
• Many stories let you create things in pairs that remain linked no matter where you take them. This is usually used for communication (e.g. ansibles in Ender's Game), but there's no reason you couldn't do it for travel. Then, not only do you have to somehow get an item to your destination before you can teleport there, but you risk ending up in the wrong place if someone moved your destination node. But the important thing here is probably that you can just search an area for teleport rings (or whatever), and if you don't find any, you can be reasonably sure that no one is going to teleport in on you.
• Many stories have barriers or devices that obstruct teleportation. So you can guard yourself from teleport ambushes by lining the walls of your home with lead or by placing transport inhibitors every 100 feet or something. If you make it so that you can't teleport over/under a particular substance (or if it projects the anti-teleportation effect over some sort of area), rather than merely being unable to teleport through it, then you can have large geographic areas that are naturally resistant to travel by teleportation.

[JonSetanta]

'Sup peoples.

Yo. What's up.
Welcome back to Ragetown, Population: handful of xenophobes.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So if you're capable of casting teleport 3 times in rapid succession, you can reach a destination 500 miles away with negligible error, as long as you don't die/get incapacitated instantly at an intermediate destination?

Ending up in a "random" place seems kind of dangerous. If the area you're teleporting into isn't actually totally mapped out, then what's actually happening is the DM is put on the spot to make up what kind of situation you teleport into--then if he makes it dangerous, he's a dick, and if he doesn't, then there's no real risk. Plus, you either have to let people randomly end up encased in stone or in mid-air (in which case virtually any error is probably totally unacceptable), or you need rules describing what possible random destinations are valid or invalid, and those sound hard to write in a non-abusable fashion.

Though having an incentive to dig out tunnels all around your fortress so that people that try to teleport in have a high risk of effectively being captured automatically would be interesting...

Manxome, I totally agree with everything you said here.

I was just coming up with ways so that the world can still have airships and merchant flseets in a world with teleport.

Now, yes, if the PCs want an accurate teleport they're expected to Xeno's Paradox their way into an acceptable distance. That's fine, they're player characters. If the DM decides they meet a dangerous encounter, that's also fine--it works out the same as if the PCs decided to travel the good, old-fashioned way.

I don't think PCs should face unavoidable instant-death by teleport. However, if they want to teleport to a desert island or a sky castle or a harbor city, taking precautions is the name of the game. If you're feeling extra generous, right before the spell goes off the caster has an exact idea of where they're going to end up and can cancel the spell at that time, at a cost of not being able to teleport for an arbitrary length of time. Or whatever.

[Username17]

If you're dead set on having a world where teleportation can't solve all your travel problems and you need to sail around on steam ships - you need to use a rule system where teleportation actually doesn't solve all your damn travel problems.

The problem with that is that if you hardcode that into your system, you reduce the number of similar settings that can use your system.

That's a damn lie. The vast majority of "D&D" settings don't work at all under D&D rules. Forgotten Realms would collapse under its own weight moments after being subjected to the forces supposedly acting upon it. The supposed detente that exists between high level characters is nonsensical considering that the actual D&D rules are written to support raiding and assassination as the most useful tactic.

Greyhawk was never intended to make any sense with any rule set, and it doesn't. Eberron was a failed setting start to finish because it always specifically ignored high level effects during world building. Ravenloft only works in D&D mechanics because it specifically ejects you from the setting any time you become mid-level.

Dark Sun actually functions, because it really is a howling desert where people scrabble together a living while raiders run around performing rocket-launcher-tag ambushes on each other to obtain limited resources while Sorcerer Kings have super-lockdown on partially planar locked fortresses full of candy and dancing women that they don't bother to trade or even allow people in the outside hellscape to even see. That's a plausible model for D&D mechanics and world building. It's basically the only one.

Which gets us back to the main point: D&D rules don't really support settings like Kalamar or Iron Kingdoms. If you apply the rules to those settings, those settings fall apart double quick. People pretend that those settings are addressed by D&D rules and then use DM Fiat to hold them together. And of course people are going to do that anyway. Whatever rules you make, people will shoehorn them into running some other homebrew game world from time to time, and you can't stop them and wouldn't want to. But your rules should at the very least support the actual core setting, because that way people might have an idea of what kind of rule changes they might need to institute in order to run a different setting.

-Username17

[virgil]

Granted, Dark Sun works as well as it does because of its isolation to remove clerics and planar anything from players, so it's certainly not standard D&D rules.

[Lago PARANOIA]

BUT FRANK YOU FORGOTZ THE MYSIDIA AND TEH DRAGONLANCE.

they madez two arcade gamez based in the mysidia-verse, you should respectz itz

[Draco_Argentum]

It fails when you say "No airships in any setting run by this system because teleport is a potential power."

But that is true. If you want the PCs to spend the whole game using airships to travel you can't give them teleport.

Its not just DM fiat that holds setting together though. Its player fiat too. Every time the PCs don't just wish themselves arbitrarily rich is essentially the same as the DM ignoring the implications of high level magic.

[K]

The established settings use their own conceits.

Forgotten Realms uses the idea that high level mages are immediately targeted by other high level mages which may or may not be The Magister or the Chosen of Mystra who police all mojo, therefore the effects of powerful magic are very limited on society since everyone is playing cloak and dagger and trying to stay away from the magic police or at least the magic robbers like liches and Zhents.

Greyhawk just assumes that there are only a handful of powerful mages at all and they happen to not care about society. Mordenkainen doesn't rule a city because he just doesn't want to, and the same goes double for the rest of the Eight.

And those are lame but functioning limits on the core rules of DnD in regards to their effect on your setting, but they don't work that well in the face of players who see fighting the Chosen as a good chance for XP and loot, and they won't work at all if you begin to equate level with a minimum amount of power over society.

Hence, this thread.

[Cynic]

What was that about not having anything that doesn't give you castles and governance and shit?

One of hte most annoying artifacts in the game is the Deck of Many things.

I dont' knwo which card it was but it gives you lands, castles, bullshit like that.

This is hardcoded into the main rule system. yes, this isn't to the level where we are Accountants and Real Estate Agents. but it gives you the shit.

So don't go around saying that the game doesn't have options.


Arms & Equipment had options for building large ships, and land vessels and airships and pricing guidelines. You could use these by wish economy time if you wanted to build armadas.

So there, you have your castles if your dm monte halled you into a deck of many things. You have an armada if you really wanted. hell you don't even need the deck of many things. If you really wanted it, you could fabricate a lot of ironwood whatever vehicles you wanted and you've got yourself an army.

So D&D had options.

and there were a couple other splatbooks that did shit like army combat and manning yoru keeps and shit. so fvk off with this 3e doesn't allow this bullshit.

[virgil]

Don't forget the price guidelines, crafting rules, etc that were in the core three books. I'll admit that they weren't well done, but there was an attempt made.

[Cynic]

There's a joke that runs within our party.

Every time we run a joke session or have a quicky game where the guards sends us out to kill the goblins outside the city, we wonder, why can't we just take over your tiny little podunk city again?

take out a coupla guards, Hold a knife to the mayor's throat, easily done, right?

That's a nice low level game right there. :-D

[Tequila Sunrise]

I love how you singled me out be for laughter and your mischaracterization of me as the only person wanting these things, TS.

I singled you out because you're the one who comes up with the most patently absurd foaming-at-the-mouth complaints, by far. "D&D doesn't let me build a castle, D&D doesn't let me attract peasants, D&D doesn't let me be a hero!" BS. D&D lets you do all those things and more. How, you ask? It's a little thing we RPG gamers call a DUNGEON MASTER.

Okay, okay, to be fair maybe you've never had the benefit of playing under a halfway decent DM. But if that's the case, you need to tell your DM to go back to his real video games, then you need to find a DM who possesses the rudimentary common sense to know that he can in fact give you setting-related goodies even if the rule books don't have rules for it, and then you can stop bitching that D&D doesn't let you affect the world or become a hero or whatever other thing you think you can't have.

The D&D rule books mostly are, and always have been, a guide to combat, not a set of all-encompassing instruction manuals for simulating reality. If you don't like it, play another game; I hear that HERO has tons of details like that. Or you know what? You could write your own damn RPG exactly the way you want it, if you think D&D sucks so much.

TS

[IGTN]

Oberoni Fallacy.

Just because the DM can hand you castles and peasants and land and all that stuff doesn't mean that the rules give you those, it means your DM does. 3rd edition has rules by which you can get something not entirely unlike those (Landlord feat in the SBG gives you a castle; Leadership gives you soldiers and administrators. Going from soldiers to peasants is a lot easier than getting peasants on your own). 4th does not.

3rd might even be toned down from 2nd; as a class feature, sufficiently leveled Fighters, Thieves, and Clerics got castles and armies; guildhalls; and temples, respectively. IIRC the Fighter got the best army (theirs had decent levels and numbers), and a castle with it, with the Thief getting a few, leveled (like 4th-level) guys and being responsible for making his own guildhall, and the Cleric getting a whole mess of 0-level (means NPC-classed in 3E) congregants who build him a temple. Druids had to become the head of the global druidic hierarchy in order to advance to 15th level, and they'd already been advancing in the hierarchy before then.

That lets you affect the world. The DM saying "sure, you can have some lands" doesn't; that's the DM deciding that you get to affect the rules, not the rules giving you an effect on the world.

3rd, of course, added in a worse problem, by giving GP price tags to both magic items and castles. It's only advantageous to squat in a castle after throwing the previous occupants out the window until you can flip it and take the cash to your local magic mart.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I singled you out because you're the one who comes up with the most patently absurd foaming-at-the-mouth complaints, by far. "D&D doesn't let me build a castle, D&D doesn't let me attract peasants, D&D doesn't let me be a hero!" BS. D&D lets you do all those things and more. How, you ask? It's a little thing we RPG gamers call a DUNGEON MASTER.

Did you just Oberoni Fallacy me?

that's some gud lawgik thar

[JonSetanta]

Oberoni Fallacy.

Sometimes, although moreso all the time, I wonder if overuse of Oberoni is leading us to believe that DMs have no say in their own campaigns.

As in, they're not even allowed to change setting specifics because doing so would be a fallacy.
The extreme end: rules lawyering.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Sometimes, although moreso all the time, I wonder if overuse of Oberoni is leading us to believe that DMs have no say in their own campaigns.

There's a difference, you know, in inventing rules to make the game more enjoyable and inventing rules to keep the game from crashing.

[JonSetanta]

There's a difference, you know, in inventing rules to make the game more enjoyable and inventing rules to keep the game from crashing.

There's a blurry area between the two.
I don't disagree with you there, but it's getting on my nerves that some extremes concerning Oberoni come down to:

1. Extremely emotional people claiming that a game is balanced because the DM can just fix it.
2. Extremely logical people claiming any DM intervention to game mechanics is commiting a fallacy (not that there's mention of it here, specifically), proceeding to multiquote the shit out of a forum for the sake of busting an argumentive nut.

One can educate the Oberoni-oblivious only so far before coming across a wall of resistance. Hey, maybe there's too much ego at stake or maybe they are just stubborn, but the point is that Oberoni debates will only end in a BAWWWfest (ban-fest?) when both sides refuse to back down.

[Lago PARANOIA]

One can educate the Oberoni-oblivious only so far before coming across a wall of resistance. Hey, maybe there's too much ego at stake or maybe they are just stubborn, but the point is that Oberoni debates will only end in a BAWWWfest (ban-fest?) when both sides refuse to back down.

I think some progress might be made if they explained why people are against there being rules for things like this.

And then they need to explain what's stopping them from altering the rule as they see fit anyway. I mean, they were planning to invent some rules to cover this situation beforehand, why are they so upset that there's now precedence? That should support their project of jazzing up the rules to make the game more fun, right?

[Absentminded_Wizard]

3rd might even be toned down from 2nd; as a class feature, sufficiently leveled Fighters, Thieves, and Clerics got castles and armies; guildhalls; and temples, respectively. IIRC the Fighter got the best army (theirs had decent levels and numbers), and a castle with it, with the Thief getting a few, leveled (like 4th-level) guys and being responsible for making his own guildhall, and the Cleric getting a whole mess of 0-level (means NPC-classed in 3E) congregants who build him a temple. Druids had to become the head of the global druidic hierarchy in order to advance to 15th level, and they'd already been advancing in the hierarchy before then.

Actually, you had to finance the building of the castle/temple with your own money before you could attract followers. BD&D also allowed wizards to build a tower and get 1d4 low-level apprentice wizards.

The interesting thing about 4e's dungeon-crawl-uber-alles mentality is that the POL setting supports this idea more than Greyhawk or Mystara. Most of the world is wilderness overrun with monsters. In that setting, there's plenty of room to build new castles and establish baronies, as well as more incentive for the powers that be to want to expand their territory. Furthermore, responsibility can provide a more plausible motivation for continued adventuring than an inexhaustible hunger for gold. While low-level characters adventure for treasure, their higher-level counterparts adventure because the monsters threaten their subjects, economy, or political position.

[erik]

I singled you out because you're the one who comes up with the most patently absurd foaming-at-the-mouth complaints, by far. "D&D doesn't let me build a castle, D&D doesn't let me attract peasants, D&D doesn't let me be a hero!" BS. D&D lets you do all those things and more. How, you ask? It's a little thing we RPG gamers call a DUNGEON MASTER.

Did you just Oberoni Fallacy me?

that's some gud lawgik thar

I don't think that they did. There's lots of things not covered by the rules that still should happen. There's no rules in 4e on how long it takes to go shit, and where you find toilet paper to wipe with and so forth (or maybe there is, I dunno anything about 4e yet)... but I wouldn't begrudge a DM for winging it if a player insisted on roleplaying it out. I also wouldn't begrudge the DM for putting the game on hold indefinitely at that point in order to play Smash Brothers, but that's another matter.

Oberoni Fallacy is about correcting mechanics via DM as a solution, rather than inventing mechanics via DM as a solution... right?

Now, if 4e actually had mechanics for building castles and nations and such, and they simply did not work without DM intervention, that would be Oberoni Fallacy through and through... but if the rules simply don't exist, then I'd say that it is obviously in the purview of the DM and intentionally so.

As a player or DM I don't really need and especially don't want any hard and fast rules about making castles and kingdoms. I'll wing it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

As a player or DM I don't really need and especially don't want any hard and fast rules about making castles and kingdoms. I'll wing it.

You also need to explain why you're against people wanting this common activity. If you were planning to use your own rules anyway, then what the fuck's wrong with there being rules anyway, even if they're crappy?