Shitty character concepts need to die

[FatR]

First off, no he isn't. He hypothetically could be, but he's not. Second off, the power tier of Sauron is seriously not that impressive in D&D terms, because the incredible omnipotence you're ascribing to Gandalf are like third-level spells,

I'm aware of that. It still makes any sort of mundane combatant small in the pants. It still is an autokill against mundane opponents. If you place a magic-user that can do the same shit Gandalf did on page/on screen in a party with a mundane guy, the mundane guy will be outmatched, full stop. Even third-level DnD magic is only remotely balanced with abilities that aren't actually mundane (once you can kill an ogre fair and square you are hardly mundane), but can pretend to be such somewhat convincingly in the context of attrition-based gameplay.

Unless I'm completely losing the thread of the discussion, you and others insist that this can be countered by a mundane guy having a "Leader of Men" role-protected ability. And to that my side (correctly answers), that both Gandalf and its evil counterparts are great leaders of men (or orcs) too, and building the game on the assumption that they will hold themselves back specifically to avoid becoming magical overlords ruling over mundane men is not a good way to build a game. That disregarding the facts that an army of mundane guys is basically worthless past certain level in DnD, and that until good mass combat rules are written having a large bunch of low-level underlings is basically flavor, not something that can seriously hepl on a typical quest.

and Sauron at the height of his power and wearing the One Ring is totally struck down by a mundane prince who's maybe fifth level.

Sauron was struck down by one of the oldest elves (you know, of the sort that can wrestle balrogs to a mutual kill) and two divinely blessed supermen that still wielded magic-science which was gradually lost since then.

[Username17]

Well, that is at least a different argument.

I don't care if you can find an example of a spellcaster who gave orders to mundane troops directly, because it doesn't matter.

Yes it fucking does matter. Remember that the only reason that we're discussing support for mundane characters at all is because there is source material of mundane warrior princes whose asses are repeatedly bailed out of impossible situations because they are in authored fiction and have plot armor. If "existing in the source material" wasn't necessary and sufficient for supporting the character concept, we would be kicking the "mundane swordsman" off the roster of available characters at level 1 instead of waiting for Paragon Paths to do it for us by stealth.

The fact that there are literally thousands of Witch Queens, Sorcerer Lords, Necromancer Generals, Wizard Kings and just plain gang leaders who happen to be Enchanters is of equal weight with 100% of the argument that we should have playable mundane swordsmen at all. So if you even suggest removing the Witch Queens from the game as part of an attempt to balance the mundane swordsmen, you're already fucking up.

What matters is that for purposes of game balance, restricting armies to classes that don't already have a ton of stuff going for them is helpful

No. It isn't. We brought up the higher level challenges you could face at the top of the previous page. Check it out. Having a bunch of tiny men is helpful in the slightest for only a tiny fraction of those challenges. It won't get you to the Moon. it won't get you to the bottom of the Ocean. It won't allow you to adventure in a castle where the air is on fire. It won't allow you to strike at enemies who are hiding in another plane of existence. It just doesn't help. In almost all cases, having extra tiny men is just a special effect for having slightly larger numbers - something we all agree that swordsmen can just conceptually do. Having a squad of archers gives you an excuse to have an AoE attack that you otherwise might not have. Big fucking deal.

and all existing stories can be told using this same paradigm. Precisely zero stories are made impossible using K's model.

No. This is horse shit. We've already talked about Snow White and the Huntsman. It's not terribly good, but I happen to have seen it very recently. Ravenna has both a magical army made of glass shards and illusion and a regular army made of humans with spears. She very successfully orders both of them around when her fighter brother isn't around and also after he is dead. The claim that you can model this as "armies are a non-caster class feature only" is completely false.

The burden of proof is on you to show how you can cover all the source material. We've already shown conclusively that you fucking can't, so you will not succeed at this. The burden of proof is also on you that doing this would be a way to salvage game balance for high level mundane characters. And we all know it fucking wouldn't be. What you have on your hands is a shit idea that you should shut up about because it's obviously a shit idea.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

And to that my side (correctly answers), that both Gandalf and its evil counterparts are great leaders of men (or orcs) too,

Nope. Gandalf leads no men. He gives advice. He doesn't actually command anyone. Further, the mechanics proposed by K are totally and completely capable of making the Witch-King and Sauron happen (and Gandalf if he did lead men). They just have Fighter lackeys who have the actual have-tiny-men abilities and then tell their tiny men to do whatever their wizard overlords tell them to. Seriously, you need to get this straight, because I am really tired of repeating it. This is like the fourth time I have pointed this out.

Sauron was struck down by one of the oldest elves (you know, of the sort that can wrestle balrogs to a mutual kill) and two divinely blessed supermen that still wielded magic-science which was gradually lost since then.

He got hit with a sword and then he died. No one cast any spells and the extent of the magic on Narsil is that it was really well-crafted. Seven-foot tall people exist in real life. They are not magic. They are just tall.

We brought up the higher level challenges you could face at the top of the previous page.

Pay attention:

That said, I agree that even if you structure the mechanics such that armies can gather more resources and occupy more territory than raw caster power possibly can (something which is consistent with large chunks of the source material, and consistent with nearly all of it given only very minor narrative tweaks), it still doesn't really let you storm a castle on a cloud or go to Atlantis.

"Helpful" does not mean "solution to all problems."

The burden of proof is on you to show how you can cover all the source material.

Pay attention:

Even if your dark wizard's army is something non-sentient like skeletons, you can still have a big skeleton with a scary-looking helmet with no INT or CON score but who still gets the minion-having abilities for having all his Fighter levels.

The solution to wanting to have a caster who leads armies under K's model is to give them a sidekick. Just like a lone PC caster should not be equivalent to his entire party, a lone villain with a PC class is going to require a party to support him if he wants to actually be a threat. If his schtick involves being the only sentient being on his team, then that party is just going to be skeletons or shard constructs or whatever.

If your BBEG uses a PC class and he is a legitimate threat who covers all his bases in and out of combat, that means your game balance is terrible. This is true regardless of how many

Given every single one of your objections is something I can answer with a quote from two or three pages ago, I find it hilarious that you're saying I'm making a new argument. You've just failed to address the old one, Frank, because you're wrong.

[Username17]

The solution to wanting to have a caster who leads armies under K's model is to give them a sidekick.

This isn't a solution to anything.

If the sidekick is your sidekick, then the army is still your army for all the fucking difference it makes. Organizationally, they may answer to the general who in turn answers to the president, but the president still gives fucking orders and they are fucking carried out. If your claim is that some sort of requirement for the existence of lackey fighters who don't even get fucking names is going to change anything about the power dynamic: that shit is totally laughable. We call it Saruman's army, anything involving intermediary fighters that you introduce can only either:

• Fuck up the source material by having us call the thing Gothmog's army.
• Not make any fucking difference, because we still call it Saruman's army.

There is no option 3 where for some reason we still call it Saruman's army but it's totes not really Saruman's army because it actually belongs to some other dude.

But beyond even that, there is a fundamental problem with attempting to assign armies as class features to lackeys, which is that BBEGs are higher level than lackeys or player characters are, pretty much by definition. We all understand that the Lich King is higher level than the PCs, and that he is the main bad guy. We also understand that squads of the Lich King's army are supposed to be speed bumps and modest challenges for the PCs repeatedly. If we assign the army to the Lich King's black clad and unnamed marshall, we're actually have committed ourselves to allowing armies sufficient to dispatch squads that can challenge the entire party of PCs to a Marshall who is the same level as the PCs are individually (or at least, less higher level than the Lich King is). Do you not understand how that's a problem?

The higher level the BBEG who nominally owns the army of tiny men, the less unreasonable it is that squads from that army of tiny men can delay or challenge the player characters. The players are facing squads taken from an army that is owned by character that is N levels above them. The bigger N is, the more reasonable that dynamic is. If you insist on having the owner of the army be a lackey of the BBEG, you're making a smaller N. That's bad.

Even if your dark wizard's army is something non-sentient like skeletons, you can still have a big skeleton with a scary-looking helmet with no INT or CON score but who still gets the minion-having abilities for having all his Fighter levels.

You weren't actually serious when you said that, were you? Because that is literally the dumbest thing anyone has said on this thread. And we've had Wrathzog beating the drums about how he wants to play an epic character with no power source, so that's a high bar. A "character" with no Int that can only follow orders from the Necromancer is a minion. It doesn't make any difference, hell it doesn't make any sense to worry about whether one of the unintelligent robots is nominally the "leader" of the others. They are unintelligent robots for fuck's sake!

-Username17

[Aryxbez]

Raising the dead in the first 10 levels should be a big questy deal. Because that way we aren't force feeding every party a Cleric.

However, if at any point in the ten level progression the cleric is written with a revival spell, then you are eventually asking for someone to roll up a cleric at X level. Assuming the amount of effort is less than a major quest, such as casting some 10-hour ritual that can easily get montage'd away opposed to a major quest (which,could become tedious if death is a common occurrence).

I also wondered if for some of the effects, it would need to be blatant death, I believe you've mentioned the idea of PC's being TKO'd out of fight, instead of killed. Instead of simple HP damage, death effects, or maybe str/con stat loss (not so sure on that one) meaning the death penalty, it basically removes them from the fight (still I guess equivalent of coup de graces and like to outright "kill" them). It would also require more than a simple healing spell (maybe a high DC heal check? or class feature with one) to bring a PC back into a fight. Assuming it's much of an option in 1-10th, though I'm sure be some one that'll be kinda like one for the tough PC's, and 11th+ be full of em no doubt.

As well that, within the 1-10 level scope, what would be the range of concepts available? Such as, would Conan be considered only a 1-5th character, a 1-3, a 1-10?? It seems like quite a bit of interesting things are getting reigned back in this 1-10th structure, though I could be wrong.

[BearsAreBrown]

1-10 allows for easier story telling because there is a lot going on above your heads, aka MCguffins.

@all, with 1-10 and 11-20, would you prefer the 10/11 power gap to be in line with the other levels, such that 4 level 10s can fight 2 level 11s? You might level up to level 11 mid adventure and now you're in a new tier but not much changed(i.e. 4th levels spells in 3.5). OR Should there be a forced time skip/montage between levels 10 and 11 where you all discover your super-power source and become Angels/Ressurect as a different color/discover Time Force and the game looks and plays different?

[Schleiermacher]

Definitely the former.

Tiering up should come with some changes to your paradigm (you mentioned 4th level spells, I might go as far as to say 5th level spells), but you should still be playing the same game. The size of the difference between any two adjacent levels should be as constant as it can be made to be.

[Fuchs]

If there are tier, then I think a clear "power up" episode is best. An adventure where people discover new powers to deal with a big bad that is too strong for their usual tactics/powers is a staple of fantasy.

[hyzmarca]

---

If I were engineering a theoretically maximum level kill dudes power, it would be something like -
Destroy Universe (EX): You have read from the Grand Grimoire and know the True Name of the DM. You need only speak it backwards to unmake the setting, consigning all that exists to true oblivion.

So, in other words: Table Flip (Meta): Flip the table over and walk away. Everything is utterly destroyed.

Presumably, it would be plot relevant. If it's a power available to PCs then total destruction of the universe is probably a long-term campaign goal.

[OgreBattle]

---

If I were engineering a theoretically maximum level kill dudes power, it would be something like -
Destroy Universe (EX): You have read from the Grand Grimoire and know the True Name of the DM. You need only speak it backwards to unmake the setting, consigning all that exists to true oblivion.

So, in other words: Table Flip (Meta): Flip the table over and walk away. Everything is utterly destroyed.

Presumably, it would be plot relevant. If it's a power available to PCs then total destruction of the universe is probably a long-term campaign goal.

That was Big-O's final power

[hyzmarca]

Frank, I want you to pay careful attention because you are apparently not getting my actual argument.

I don't care if you can find an example of a spellcaster who gave orders to mundane troops directly, because it doesn't matter. What matters is that for purposes of game balance, restricting armies to classes that don't already have a ton of stuff going for them is helpful, and all existing stories can be told using this same paradigm. Precisely zero stories are made impossible using K's model. Even if Razoul wasn't totally a guy who exists and is in charge of his men and is shown to still be in charge of them independently of Jafar, it wouldn't matter, because you can tell the exact same story if he is. It doesn't matter that the Wicked Witch of the West isn't shown to have a leader of her flying monkeys, because it is trivially easy to invent one. Whining about how one line of a movie doesn't perfectly map to a proposed game mechanic and claiming that this obviates the mechanic is absurd.

The problem is that it makes no fucking difference.

In scenario 1) Bavmorda has an army and hires General Kael to lead it.
In scenario 2) Bavmorda hires General Kael and has an army as a result.

At the end of the day, this doesn't restrict spellcaster power at all, not even slightly.

Any ruling that prevents a spellcaster from giving orders to "troops" but allows her to hire a "lieutenant" or a General" or something does nothing to change the balance of power but it does make keeping your logistics and dragons game straight much more annoying.

[K]

Frank, I want you to pay careful attention because you are apparently not getting my actual argument.

I don't care if you can find an example of a spellcaster who gave orders to mundane troops directly, because it doesn't matter. What matters is that for purposes of game balance, restricting armies to classes that don't already have a ton of stuff going for them is helpful, and all existing stories can be told using this same paradigm. Precisely zero stories are made impossible using K's model. Even if Razoul wasn't totally a guy who exists and is in charge of his men and is shown to still be in charge of them independently of Jafar, it wouldn't matter, because you can tell the exact same story if he is. It doesn't matter that the Wicked Witch of the West isn't shown to have a leader of her flying monkeys, because it is trivially easy to invent one. Whining about how one line of a movie doesn't perfectly map to a proposed game mechanic and claiming that this obviates the mechanic is absurd.

The problem is that it makes no fucking difference.

In scenario 1) Bavmorda has an army and hires General Kael to lead it.
In scenario 2) Bavmorda hires General Kael and has an army as a result.

At the end of the day, this doesn't restrict spellcaster power at all, not even slightly.

Any ruling that prevents a spellcaster from giving orders to "troops" but allows her to hire a "lieutenant" or a General" or something does nothing to change the balance of power but it does make keeping your logistics and dragons game straight much more annoying.

On the NPC side, it doesn't make any real difference other than adding an additional villain that needs to be killed to end the adventure. This is why Frank sounds like a crank... he doesn't have a point to make about games or stories because nothing is lost in the game or the story. He's just trolling.

The benefit is on the PC side. It's an allocation of power for the PCs where fighting guys get to accomplish non-combat goals with his army

That's the benefit: PC guys get a suite of power that spellcasters don't. Then when some spellcaster says "hey, I can totally make a bunch of shard soldiers to win this battle," the fighting PC can say "yeh, but can you tax the hamlets and use those shard soldiers as information gatherers to find the troll lair? No? Well, it looks like I'm the useful guy today."

The second benefit is that PCs now get a little more narrative depth. You can now totally tell a story about getting the Witch-King's general to betray him and turning his army against him, or tell stories about how you assassinated the general to stop the progress of the army, or you had a non-final battle with the Witch-King's forces without having to fight the Witch-King, or any number of potential stories that you couldn't tell without that added character in Team Evil.

The only weakness is that spellcasters don't get access to all the kinds of power. I consider that an important balancing element and not a flaw, but obviously there are people who can't abandon the idea of spellcasters getting all the mundane powers as well as all the magical ones.

[DrPraetor]

there is a fundamental problem with attempting to assign armies as class features

Deliberately taken out of context to change the subject to something interesting.

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

What K wants is a power-source of tactics. Consider the A-Team (or consider General Lee.) Hannibal's power isn't that he has three other guys, and General Lee's power isn't that he has an army. Their power is, when their army fights someone else's army, even against overwhelming odds, they win anyway because their plans are super-good. In the case of General Lee this may have been an actual power, his tactical plans were super-good. In the case of Hannibal this is actually a narrative power - his plans are mostly pretty stupid.

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

So, to close: having tiny men isn't a power restricted to clever general types (who may also be wizards but that's a distinct issue). Having tiny men who actually accomplish anything is. For that matter, declaring "I have a plan!" and having the other player characters accomplish things is an acceptable mundane power that can scale reasonably well (assuming you don't pussy out and make it suck.)

It still needs a lot of help in order to scale - conceptually, you can participate in those high-level adventures if you can arbitrarily declare that you have a really excellent plan in which the other player characters and your gryphon knights coordinate to kill the guard dragon. But, at least in principle, being really good at leading people (or, naturally, leading people who are good) does scale better than many things, and it can be sort-of "mundane". The problem is, it can't really be mundane because you need narrative power to declare that writing "everyone put on mustaches and then jump out and stab him" on a piece of graph paper is a brilliant tactical contribution.

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

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

[echoVanguard]

There's a pretty significant difference between simply having minions or troops and being able to command minions or troops well. Personally, I think that K's assertion that spellcasters should not be able to command troops (or even be able to interact with non-named NPCs) is not only not very good, but downright strange. If you want to effectively limit spellcasters from participating in the Tiny Men minigame, just have a class that grants bonuses to leading your troops that is mutually exclusive with your spellcasting class. That way, armies led by Real Marshals are sufficiently awesome that armies not led by Real Marshals are so terrible as to be irrelevant. That way, you have effectively protected the role of Tiny Men Wrangler without cranking your Cognitive Dissonance meter up beyond 9,000.

That being said, I tend to agree with Frank's assertion that the Tiny Men minigame is primarily tangential to the other arenas of play. It's not a huge deal if the assassin, the diplomat, and the wizard each have an army they can command, but it is a big deal if the wizard can solo the diplomat's army single-handedly while still also being the best at small-scale tactical combat and social interaction and economics and environmental interaction, and making a big stink about wizards commanding armies as anything but trivial seems to really miss the point.

echo

[RadiantPhoenix]

Also, Narsil is an artifact sword from the first age.

One which Aragorn also has.

Yes, and?

Are you still under the impression that I'm currently trying to argue that Gandalf could beat an arbitrarily large group of armed Númenóreans in a straight-up fight by himself?

Isildur cursed an entire kingdom to never rest for around three thousand years (see: Aragorn's future army of ghosts). I don't think that counts as mundane.

Ah, yes, that. Didn't have any application in his Sauron murder, though.

That particularly? Probably not. It does, however, set a strong precedent for him not being entirely mundane in other ways, and clearly defines him as not a mundane character

Would you call a D&D Necromancer not a mundane character just because his preferred attack in combat is swinging the Sword of Kas?

---

Narsil is also the implement he used to cut off the ring.

The exact passage is:

But at last the siege was so strait that Sauron himself came forth; and he wrestled with Gil-Galad and Elendil, and they both were slain, and the sword of Elendil broke under him as he fell. But Sauron also was thrown down, and with the hilt shard of Narsil Isildur cut the Ruling Ring from the hand of Sauron and took it for his own.

• Sauron was defeated in the fight with Gil-Galad and Elendil, although both the Man and the Elf died. Isildur may or may not have actually
• Isildur picked up the hilt of the broken sword and used it to loot the ring from Sauron

---

Also:

• The timeline has Elendil and Gil-Galad's armies laying siege to Barad-dûr seven years before the final duel (RotK appendix B)
• Sauron comes out, as mentioned in the quoted passage, when the siege is the closest to Barad-dûr
• In the Fellowship of the Ring, Elrond says that the final combat between the Last Alliance and Sauron was on the slopes of Mount Doom
• Mount Doom and Barad-dûr are about thirty miles apart according to the map in Return of the King

This strongly implies that Sauron actually personally turned the tide of battle and drove the Last Alliance back about thirty miles.

[K]

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

Well, you have to define what you want high level to look like.

I could easily see a game where a high-level general and his army is necessary to occupy the Cloud Castle and use it's ability to fly, attack cities, use it's Cumulus Forges to build ghost-killing swords, and inspire enough awe in the general populace you are hovering over that they send gifts of gold, information, and virgins.

High-level concepts do exist, and the problem is that you need to define exactly what high-level looks like. DnD, regardless of level, has never had a place for armies, nations, wars, and basically interactions with non-monsters who have more than a single combat's worth of screentime, so the scope of the game is going to look a lot different if you add these things in.

Once you decide what the scope of the game is, giving various characters equivalent abilities is the easy part. You give the general his army that can gather information on big things like lairs, and then give the Wizard his ability to scry on small things like single people. You let the general extract gold from his ownership of lands and fortresses to use for non-combat things like taking enemy strongholds off-camera and you give the Wizard mana-points for living in mystic locations that he can spend on countering enemy magicks like weather control or using his own weather magic.

[echoVanguard]

I really should have read DrP's post before making my own, since he says much of what I said slightly more clearly. But that being said, I have to mention this:

A PC with Hannibal's power will come up with some plan, "let's all wear mustaches and then jump out and stab people!", and it's probably not that good a plan because you're drunk and eating cheetos.

I had a player in a game fairly recently who used this as his go-to plan exclusively. He was an AD&D Thief with the Disguise NWP who took pains to throw together the most ridiculous costumes possible, reasoning (correctly) that anyone who might have identified him would be too busy being flummoxed by his giant fright wig, bright yellow parachute pants, enormous fake mustache, and squeaky shoes to actually remember any *real* identifying features. Eventually the character was so successful with this tactic that he reached name level and started an assassin's guild specializing in the use of this technique; it quickly became common to suddenly see a clown run into a crowd, stab someone, yell "Honk honk!" and run away.

echo

[Dr_Noface]

I would also be for giving "mundane fightards" bonuses to lead tiny dudes rather than restrict wizards from leading entirely. Otherwise every D&D story would be as follows:

1) The Great Wizard Cervix hires General Cocklong to lead an army of vicious bear-owls.
2) Party performs surgical strike to slay General Bigdick
3) Army mills around until Cervix promotes/summons/hires/creates from nothing a new general.
4) Party realizes they should slay the wizard, preferably while he's busy jacking it in Isengard.

I guess it kind of works, just seems kind of dumb.

[K]

I would also be for giving "mundane fightards" bonuses to lead tiny dudes rather than restrict wizards from leading entirely. Otherwise every D&D story would be as follows:

1) The Great Wizard Cervix hires General Cocklong to lead an army of vicious bear-owls.
2) Party performs surgical strike to slay General Bigdick
3) Army mills around until Cervix promotes/summons/hires/creates from nothing a new general.
4) Party realizes they should slay the wizard, preferably while he's busy jacking it in Isengard.

I guess it kind of works, just seems kind of dumb.

If you kill the Wizard first, you still have to kill the General. Remember, it's a Team Evil Party. So you have the kill the General before he finds a way to raise the Wizard. Probably the Spymaster and Head Priest as well.

There is nothing dumb about "must kill all of Team Evil to win the adventure." I'd argue that the whole "kill the leader and it all goes away" is actually a pretty dumb plot for a war narrative with little dramatic possibility.

[Grek]

That seems like a reasonable paradigm. When you get to name level and people start getting army powers, the clerics and wizards get get Cheap Recruitment as their army power, which lets them get half-price troops but little ability to command them while the fighter gets Take Command as their army power, which gives them a small personal army but lets them accept command of allied forces and make them be not shit.

[Wrathzog]

To resolve this bit fast, I'm referring to these links that you can read to here:
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=298681#298681
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=299719#299719

I think my response would still cover what Frank's talking about. A solid set of system level rules and mechanics should keep those sorts of issues from popping up. If you want to deal damage to the ground, it wouldn't actually matter what the source is unless it specifically has rules that would be pertinent in ground destruction (i.e: Mountain Hammer or SOUL DRILL POWER). Given that your rules truly are exhaustive, it should remove the need to Lawyer your way into doing Awesome things.

Mostly in part not because of Bad DM's, but vague/no rules, will give out similar outputs from the DM, as be unsure how to go about it on the fly. Kinda like if you give someone specific orders, easy to carry out, but if you tell them they can do "anything they want", then it's too broad, and might be unsure what to do (kinda same effect of option paralysis).

Yeah, that's definitely an issue; in that sort of situation you want every player and the DM to be on the same page about a lot of stuff or, inevitably, someone ends up all butthurt because three different people read Revelation and they came up with three different interpretations for it (Fuck you, Revelation).

pish poor on your part Wrathzog.

Hurm... you're right.

Goalposts

Awesome; Thank you, Frank.
I need to... really look at this.
Probably in another thread, this one is filled with... armies.

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

Well, everyone wants a piece of the Narrative pie. Yes, I would like it if that pie were more evenly distributed. And while Destiny does have potential as a Power Source, you're right, I will explicitly deny it as my goal.

You do raise an interesting question, though. Why don't Wizards do everything?

[Mistborn]

You do raise an interesting question, though. Why don't Wizards do everything?

Actually Wizards pretty much do everything because the class has the exact opposite conceptual problem of the fighter. The Wizard classes if defined as being bad a swording things and casting all the spells (except for healing). Unlike the fighter who is stragled to death by his limited conceptual space the wizard basically eats everyones lunch.

This is however tangental to the point of this thread. Could everyone just stop talking about spellcasters and maybe take the wizard/fighter/army shitstorm to another thread. This thread is not about how to limit spellcasters.

This thread is about how to get people to dicard low level character concepts like mundane sword guy as they advance in level. Could everyone discuss that instead.

[Foxwarrior]

Lord Mistborn: It seems to me that many people want (unreasonably) large amounts of control over their character's progression. If you're trying to get people to be happy when their character changes drastically from a barbarian into a mindbarian, you need to make them already have wanted this. Probably, this means that you need to make the original character building stage result in the sorts of characters who would enjoy advancing; if you have a game in which "good is a low-level concept", you shouldn't have the Paladin as an available low-level character. I'm not quite sure how to do this with mundane people, but having a "mundane tier" where the most magical you can be is a chemist or a scroll reader might help establish that "wanting to be a magic guy" is not a trait exclusive to scholars and religious nuts.

[Orion]

A "character" with no Int that can only follow orders from the Necromancer is a minion. It doesn't make any difference, hell it doesn't make any sense to worry about whether one of the unintelligent robots is nominally the "leader" of the others. They are unintelligent robots for fuck's sake!
-Username17

[hyzmarca]

A "character" with no Int that can only follow orders from the Necromancer is a minion. It doesn't make any difference, hell it doesn't make any sense to worry about whether one of the unintelligent robots is nominally the "leader" of the others. They are unintelligent robots for fuck's sake!
-Username17

You posted a picture of an intelligent robot.