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

[CatharzGodfoot]

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Why risk the social and political upheaval of losing a major battle with your army when you can just hire four guys who can't be killed?

Anyone who actually can't be killed is not going to work for whatever you have to offer them.

Um, why?

I constantly work at jobs where I can't get killed. In fact, I prefer jobs where I can't get killed.

Is the lord's money not good enough? I mean, as a lord, you'd rather pay 20K gold to some adventurers to kill anb army over an afternoon rather than spend the same amount equiping an army with plate and trained horses and supply lines just to risk the embarrassment of losing them.

I think the point was that if the lord can't kill you, you won't do a job for him. You might take his stuff, and you might do whatever he wanted you to do out of charity, but if he holds no power whatsoever you aren't 'working for him'.

Whether the job can kill you or not is a separate issue.

[ckafrica]

I am assuming that weapon users will get area attacks as they reach epic levels or even earlier. Things like sonic slashes and dance of blades a la frenzied diablo barbarian and what not that would be taking out multiple opponents in a single round but would not be as productive against big bosses. Single point attacks will be causing more damage than area effects I assume.

When we get involved with unit combat we need to be thinking in terms of minutes rather than seconds anyways. Via the discussion of feeling epic. We need a mechanic that can easily calculate a type of individual into a "swarm" unit so that mass combat can be done effectively. These statistics should probably be included in a monster stat set as well.

As for K vs Frank's vision. dividing the game into clearly defined stages of power could help.

1-10 is pulp novel heroes who are only in the realms of mere mortals, exceptional as they might be. These guys might take out squads at a time but cannot face entire armies on their own. Adventures would be about saving towns, uncovering plots of murder and deception and playing small roles in much larger battles. Their powers are limited to effecting small groups.

11-20 are heroes of legend. they advisors/champions to kings, if not kings themselves. They fight the hideous monsters that come from the deep, lead armies into war and and take down apocalype cults. Their powers tear down castle walls and allow them to wade into walls of soldiers on their own. Begin to get DR so ordinary opponents become a minimal threat

21-30 are playing with the gods. They act as emmissaries to the gods or their eventual usurpers. They cross the planes at will and forsake the concerns of mere mortals for the celestial battles. I don't even know what these guys should do because this level of play doesn't interest me but I'm sure some like it.
Enough DR to completely ignore most things from the mortal planes

[SphereOfFeetMan]

What about treating a large group of soldiers as making a single area-of-effect attack rather than a bunch of single-target attacks? Instead of abstracting the situation as 100 archers each taking aim at the hero and firing an arrow, you abstract it as 100 archers firing "one volley" into his general area.

...

The biggest potential issue with switching to a different set of mechanics at large scales is that you need to define a point where you make the transition, and players on one side or the other might gain a tactical advantage by exploiting that transition.

The most important part of the abstraction would be to make actually playing the 100 archers the same effectiveness as the 100 Archers Abstraction Attack. That way you can switch between playing individual pieces and abstracting groups. That is a math problem if we are talking about averaging damage and such. But with spells like Wind Wall and FireStorm, and even Fireball, its usually not an issue.

[K]

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1203021058[/unixtime]]

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Anyone who actually can't be killed is not going to work for whatever you have to offer them.

Um, why?

I constantly work at jobs where I can't get killed. In fact, I prefer jobs where I can't get killed.

Is the lord's money not good enough? I mean, as a lord, you'd rather pay 20K gold to some adventurers to kill anb army over an afternoon rather than spend the same amount equiping an army with plate and trained horses and supply lines just to risk the embarrassment of losing them.

I think the point was that if the lord can't kill you, you won't do a job for him. You might take his stuff, and you might do whatever he wanted you to do out of charity, but if he holds no power whatsoever you aren't 'working for him'.

Whether the job can kill you or not is a separate issue.

That makes even less sense.

By those rules you won't work for a lord unless he can kill you, which means he could fight whatever he needs you to kill already and doesn't need you.

[JonSetanta]

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Well, I'll just give you the good news: first, area attacks in New Edition are to be resisted via Fortitude (level + Con) instead of Dodge (level + Dex), exactly for the evasion issue; and, I take it that taking wounds does cause penalties, so an unit would be an entity with a variable number of wounds, that loses members as wounds stack.

Looks good.

And I agree with the concept of a chunk of warriors lumped together as an 'abstraction', dealing damage as a single entitiy. Wounds would subtract from the combat effectiveness of the group.
Simple, better.

Koumei: I prefer Pang Tong (hold Circle and grin) or Zhou Yun (just all round good ranged swings) but my point was that, contrary to Frank's proposal, the characters are not completely immune to mook attacks.
Resistant, yes, but eventually for the hero the 'walls are breached' either through accumulation of wounds or fatigue or just plain outnumbered.

[Aycarus]

RE: Adventurers versus an army

I think the point here, and something that should be emphasized in New Edition is that high level heroes are "above" doing the bidding of a lord and fighting against an invading army. A high level hero should have no use for 20K gps in wealth, or whatever the lord can throw at them. They want Gems of Oblivion, Decks of Many Things and Portal Guns... things that require epic quests to the outer planes to retrieve.

Anyway, my logic is as follows:
1. If the lord can take down the army himself, he doesn't need the adventurers.
2. If the lord can't take down the army himself, we assume then that the adventurers are more powerful than him. Then:
2a. He needs to be able to offer something the adventurers would actually care about. But since the adventurer's are more powerful than him, they can just beat him up and take it anyway.
2b. He can't offer something the adventurers care about. In this case, we can assume that the adventurers are just doing this adventure to stir up some spoon.

2b.P.S. Inevitably, this falls into the category of greater beings screwing around with lesser beings. This might sound like fun, but doesn't make for much of an adventure. Plus it really doesn't sit right from a morality standpoint.

P.P.S. I'm doing science and I'm still alive

[Manxome]

1203049489[/unixtime]]The most important part of the abstraction would be to make actually playing the 100 archers the same effectiveness as the 100 Archers Abstraction Attack. That way you can switch between playing individual pieces and abstracting groups.

But that isn't going to happen, because the mathematics to determine the actual precise effectiveness of 100 archers is complicated and computationally expensive, and the entire point of the abstraction is to avoid that. Even matching the average (if we could) wouldn't guarantee interchangability, because sometimes you lose on average but you're willing to go for the long-shot victory, or willing to sacrifice yourself in order to wound/delay an opponent, so you need to match way more parameters than the average.

But non-idealities shouldn't be new to anyone playing an RPG. What you actually do is make it so that overall effectiveness is "pretty close most of the time" and expect the DM to put his foot down and forbid use of an obviously inappropriate abstraction (or to suffer through rolling 100 archer attacks one at a time for failing to do so).



Regarding the lord who can or cannot kill you:

There's plenty of reasons for mercenary contracts even when the mercenaries can kill the contractor or vice versa.

The mercenaries might be thinking:

• Killing the contractor is more work or more dangerous than fulfilling the contract.
  
• Refraining from killing the contractor means that he might offer you another job in the future, and pay you with something that he doesn't have yet but will acquire in the interim.
  
• Refraining from killing the contractor will encourage other people to contract for your services.
  
• The contractor is keeping the payment in some location or form where you can't find it or can't access it without his approval, even if you kill him.
  
• The contractor hired a whole bunch of other mercenaries/armies that are likely to team up on any small group of mercenaries that betray him (prisoner's dilemma).

The contractor might be thinking:

• My time is valuable--I could handle the task myself, but I'd rather spend the gold on mercenaries than the time of resolving it in person.
  
• Even if the mercenaries are weaker than my other forces, by combining them with my forces I can take down a bigger target (or the same target more safely).
  
• The mercenaries may have specialized skills that can't be duplicated by brute force.
  
• I'm less likely to be held accountable for the actions of these mercenaries than for the actions of my standing army.
  
• Better to pay a higher fixed cost than to risk a major loss--if the mercenaries die, no skin off my nose.

And that's before you even consider things like scruples or uncertainty about their relative strengths.

If there's a massive disparity of strength/resources, then sure, it'll be hard to find a reason for one to hire the other. But they don't need to be equal, just playing the same game.

[Username17]

That makes even less sense.

By those rules you won't work for a lord unless he can kill you, which means he could fight whatever he needs you to kill already and doesn't need you.

That's Leviathan. If society does not threaten the individual, then the individual is not part of society. In the war of all against all that is the natural state of life without government, the individual has won before the first shot is fired.

You do not hire gods to do your bidding. You flatter them, you appeal to their better natures, you tell them that your enemies said naughty things about them. Maybe you shower them with gifts. But you don't fucking hire them because if it comes down to it they could just take your stuff. While in the presence of a god, everything you "own" can be taken from you by the expedient of the god reaching out and taking it. Or ending your life, either way.

We aren't talking modern society. There are no credit limits and no international community with helicopter gunships ready to enforce the value of currency and the rights of private property. There's just you as a physical bag of meat and objects near and on your person which you are willing to fight for. There is no such thing as "ownership" because it's all Murderocracy if people want to go that way.

---

Now, people who are very powerful but still combatable on the human scale may indeed have their loyalties purchased. They may indeed be willing to go fight a rampaging hydra in exchange for the local chief saying that he'll let them walk off with a couple of golden apples without fighting them for it if they do. The chief is willing to do this because he knows that he can't kill the hydra without losing a bunch of his tribe; and the heroes are willing to do this because they know that they can't take the golden apples without seriously risking their lives.

But that's how commerce works in medieval land: a trade occurs because what is being bartered for is more valuable to the trader than what is being bartered away, and the secondary option of simply taking what is being bartered for by force has been deemed to be undesirable for whatever reason.

So no. The existence of Sauron or Bishma as a character who can't be brought low in battle by ordinary soldiers does not mean that kings and queens will necessarily hire such people to fight on their behalf. Such people don't generally have much reason to barter their services to lesser leaders of men at all. They conduct all business in favors and face stabbing - so unless the queen has a really nice ass Sauron is just going to laugh if she shows up and offers him stuff for the use of his battle prowess.

-Username17

[Koumei]

The heroes could also just be nice enough to do it because they care about the place, or because they hate the other guys, or they like risks or whatever.

I mean, at the end of the day, in games I play, we usually accept quests because either we the players want to do this (that's why we're playing), or because the characters are just being nice, or care about these things.

It's not always "Nah, I'll just kill you and take your reward. So there."

[K]

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That makes even less sense.

By those rules you won't work for a lord unless he can kill you, which means he could fight whatever he needs you to kill already and doesn't need you.

That's Leviathan. If society does not threaten the individual, then the individual is not part of society. In the war of all against all that is the natural state of life without government, the individual has won before the first shot is fired.

You do not hire gods to do your bidding. You flatter them, you appeal to their better natures, you tell them that your enemies said naughty things about them. Maybe you shower them with gifts. But you don't fucking hire them because if it comes down to it they could just take your stuff. While in the presence of a god, everything you "own" can be taken from you by the expedient of the god reaching out and taking it. Or ending your life, either way.

We aren't talking modern society. There are no credit limits and no international community with helicopter gunships ready to enforce the value of currency and the rights of private property. There's just you as a physical bag of meat and objects near and on your person which you are willing to fight for. There is no such thing as "ownership" because it's all Murderocracy if people want to go that way.

Actually, we're talking about DnD where there are people to enforce property rights. We call them HEROES. When a village gets burned or the king's treasury gets looted, HEROES who want a society where people can't be asshats at will start hunting down said asshats.

In the actual medieval period, the nobility had armies to enforce their property rights. In DnD, HEROES enforce whatever rights they like. Sometimes, these HEROES are the nobles, and sometimes they are just plucky moralists who really don't like the thought of asshats getting away with stuff.

Even if we posit a setting where being a powerful character means that lesser characters can't hurt you under any circumstances, we still have to have some characters in the setting who can potenially spank the PC, because those guys must exist for there to be villains that the PCs must fight.

There might be villains in the setting who don't want you to screw with the peasants property rights because that screws up their tax scheme, or there might be demon princes who are willing to fight for some powerless guy in exchange for his eternal soul. As long as there can be challenging villains for your PC, by definition there are higher level NPCs who might represent society's interests in stopping asshattery.

Essentially, trying to create a setting where society can't exert power over you is impossible if you also want to have the potential for challenges for PCs.

If might work if the only other powerful things in your setting are unintelligent and powerful animals and your PCs are the only powerful characters in the setting, but thats not a game I want to play and its not DnD. Heck, such a game would work with a number of heroic archetypes like Hercules where everything he fights is just another powerful monster, but once you allow for powerful enemies to be intelligent and have any interests in society, it all falls apart.

[Username17]

Actually, we're talking about DnD where there are people to enforce property rights. We call them HEROES. When a village gets burned or the king's treasury gets looted, HEROES who want a society where people can't be asshats at will start hunting down said asshats.

Are we talking about the HEROES whose actual job is "breaking into people's homes and looting their treasuries" or some other group of D&D HEROES that I don't know about?

-Username17

[Crissa]

Well, that's adventurers, not heroes.

Besides. It's break into the houses of people we don't like, and bring stuff back to the houses of people we do like.

-Crissa

[K]

1203133087[/unixtime]]

Actually, we're talking about DnD where there are people to enforce property rights. We call them HEROES. When a village gets burned or the king's treasury gets looted, HEROES who want a society where people can't be asshats at will start hunting down said asshats.

Are we talking about the HEROES whose actual job is "breaking into people's homes and looting their treasuries" or some other group of D&D HEROES that I don't know about?

-Username17

Excellent work not addressing my points. An almost adequate distraction.

[JonSetanta]

Adventurers have more fun.

[Username17]

No. I fvcking did address your points. This is SPARTA! That's the fvcking point.

Mighty heroes fight your enemies and take their stuff because they hate your enemies, because they like you, or simply because they happen to be looting something and your enemies have cooler stuff or happen to be more convenient to assault. Sure, some adventurers are doing this to make the world a better place, and getting on their good side might involve convincing them that your society is "right" or maybe just sufficiently cool to live in that they don't want to tear it down. And some adventurers like their egos boosted enough that you can win their loyalty with fancy titles and extravagant gifts. But you are not in any meaningful way hiring these people. The financial institutions which lay the foundation for labor and contracts don't exist.

Now, on to the rest of it:

Even if we posit a setting where being a powerful character means that lesser characters can't hurt you under any circumstances, we still have to have some characters in the setting who can potenially spank the PC, because those guys must exist for there to be villains that the PCs must fight.

Of course. But the thing is that the requirements of the genre virtually ensure that the player characters don't follow the dictums of the powerful. The villains are of sufficient power to threaten the PCs yes, but they are also the villains. The players fight those guys. If the good king Daxal can flex his muscles or send his sheriff to beat the villains, then the PCs aren't the protagonists in a medieval setting. The Villains threaten the Shire, the Heroes fight the Villains.

But that also means that the heroes are not held in check by Leviathan in the Shire. This means that definitionally they are not part of the Shire social system unless they rule it. Feudalism persists by the threat of overwhelming force, and if the PCs are killing the dragons and giants which threaten to destroy the society, then they are the prime mover of the medieval society. They are the Lords, and they own all the people by definition.

Essentially, trying to create a setting where society can't exert power over you is impossible if you also want to have the potential for challenges for PCs.

This is exactly wrong. If there are challenges for the PCs, then society has no meaningful power over the characters. If society held the whip hand, the challenges would be for the society rather than for the PCs.

-Username17

[Koumei]

That's one of your funnier posts. Frank. Incidentally, I forgot where we're all dining tonight, could you tell me again?

And I have to agree that traditionally, the king who sends adventurers off is easily killed, and his guards are individually easy to kill, and as a whole, his loyal guards might still be easy (or he could be so cool that he has a lot of loyal guards. Maybe only his most loyal guards include several thousand 8' tall men in powered armour with automatic rocket launchers and power weapons).

The actual armies aren't going to attack you if you waltz into his castle and declare yourself king, though. Firstly, because they're not just lazing around inside the castle, waiting for a challenge, and can't easily charge you, and secondly because they seriously don't care, and will likely accept anyone's money.

So it does seem that heroes/adventurers do as they're *asked* by weaker people all the time. And they habitually disobey anyone as powerful as, or more powerful than, themselves.

Come to think of it, it happens all the time. When the villain does the "I could spare your life if you submit to me" routine, already in a position of power so they know he can back up his threats, they say "Nah" and punch him in the clavicle.

[K]

1203157016[/unixtime]]No. I fvcking did address your points. This is SPARTA! That's the fvcking point.

Actually, 300 helps my points.

Leonidas thinks that because he's a badass he can kill the Persian embassador. Then he insults the seers who are then willing to take bribes. Then he goes against the Senate who refuses to support him. Then he refuses to take Xerxes offer to spare Sparta. Then he dies and Sparta is destroyed.

The lesson is clear: "no matter how much of a badass you are, you can't be an unreasonable douchebag who pretends he doesn't have to be part of society."

1203157016[/unixtime]]Mighty heroes fight your enemies and take their stuff because they hate your enemies, because they like you, or simply because they happen to be looting something and your enemies have cooler stuff or happen to be more convenient to assault. Sure, some adventurers are doing this to make the world a better place, and getting on their good side might involve convincing them that your society is "right" or maybe just sufficiently cool to live in that they don't want to tear it down. And some adventurers like their egos boosted enough that you can win their loyalty with fancy titles and extravagant gifts. But you are not in any meaningful way hiring these people. The financial institutions which lay the foundation for labor and contracts don't exist.

You do know that both contract and property laws started in the feudal period, right?

Cities rise with property and contract law, and thats basically how it works. The society you seem to want is a tribal society where the tribe is like thirty people and being a badass equates to leadership.

1203157016[/unixtime]]
Of course. But the thing is that the requirements of the genre virtually ensure that the player characters don't follow the dictums of the powerful. The villains are of sufficient power to threaten the PCs yes, but they are also the villains. The players fight those guys. If the good king Daxal can flex his muscles or send his sheriff to beat the villains, then the PCs aren't the protagonists in a medieval setting. The Villains threaten the Shire, the Heroes fight the Villains.

But that also means that the heroes are not held in check by Leviathan in the Shire. This means that definitionally they are not part of the Shire social system unless they rule it. Feudalism persists by the threat of overwhelming force, and if the PCs are killing the dragons and giants which threaten to destroy the society, then they are the prime mover of the medieval society. They are the Lords, and they own all the people by definition.

Thats the primary assumption behind your whole argument, and while it sounds good there is no logical support behind it.

You seem to want to assert that society is some kind of mass of weaklings, and singular villains pop up to be whacked down by the heroes, and because of that society lets them lead.

The basic DnD setting has never asserted that. Its always been assumed that there are lots of powerful characters in society who all have an interest in maintaining it and that sometimes its the PCs.

Even if you wanted to create a historical simulator of the feudal period you'd still have powerful characters like churches and priesthoods, nobility, wealthy merchants, and freelancers like criminal organizations. In DnD, you add in unaffiliated mages, villains, monsters that need societies on which to feed, and other adventurers.

As a hero, the fact that you can kill dragons doesn't much to the people in power because they can kill dragons too. They just have better things to do like running society and making sure that the grain from the east gets to the miners in the south and the capital city in the west. Risking their lives for a little glory and potential for treasure doesn't mean much when you already control things and can just tax people.

And if the PCs suddenly decide that they want to take over a city or kingdom, they suddenly are the villains. Noble heroes and rakshasas masquerading as merchants will be gunning for the PCs because hero and villain alike have an incentive for society to run smoothly.

There is a reason why no version of DnD has ever had rules for taking over society. At best they have a "here's how to build an organization" rules, but they've never had a "here's who you have to kill for everyone to think you should be king."

Being a badass has never equated to leadership ability. Even if you can individually kill everyone in town, that doesn't mean they'll work for you. Essentially, warlords of every era are characterized as villains because their societies are so inefficient at keeping at society running.

1203157016[/unixtime]]

Essentially, trying to create a setting where society can't exert power over you is impossible if you also want to have the potential for challenges for PCs.

This is exactly wrong. If there are challenges for the PCs, then society has no meaningful power over the characters. If society held the whip hand, the challenges would be for the society rather than for the PCs.

-Username17

Here's what you want: Inuyasha.

1. There are no cities, kingdoms, or empires in Inuyasha; towns are basically tribes with tens of people.

2. Heroes are the only ones who can fight monsters, and common people can't fight heroes or monsters.

3. Monsters have no society and EVERY monster doesn't have any interest in creating a society bigger than six people.

4. Normal people can't organize because monster attacks are so common.

5. There are around ten heroes in the whole setting, and they don't have an interest in organizing society.


Thats a certain kind of setting. It might even be a fun setting, but there are enough groundrules going in that the vast majority of fantasy stories that people know as DnD can't be played. Once you decide you want cities and empires, you have to allow for other heroes and powerful characters who fight all the monsters the PCs can't get to, and that means they can enforce things like property rights.

I mean, you can also just create a masterbation-fest setting where monsters ONLY appear where the heroes are AND society never imagines that might be better off without a bunch of disrespectful asshats who think that just because they kill a dragon to two they get to run everything (whiich also means that at no point can any non-hero ever threaten a hero so no scrolls or wands or magic items). At that point you can have empires and cities because you've abandoned the whole idea of a logical setting that makes sense.

It sounds lame to play, but I've played worse settings.

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

Now that I've figured out why you want the BAB v. AC war, and knowing how it functions, I can now say with confidence thats it entirely unnecessary to a fantasy roleplaying game with levels like DnD.

[Username17]

Here's what you want: Inuyasha.

Thanks for putting words into my mouth that I never said and don't agree with. What I want is the Legend/Fairy Tale model, because it's a god damn fantasy storytelling game. Of which there are several competing sub-models (and I'd be willing to accept any of them):

• Iron Age Epics - Whether it's the Mahabharata, the Iliad, or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms the period was defined by the actions of great men. Noble birth basically counted for fvck-all save that the nobility got more food and were more likely to grow up into bad assery. Bishma and Lü Bu stride through entire armies and personally chop them to pieces. Armies are generally somewhat smaller in actual effect than the larger monsters and heroes.
  While walled cities throw up armies in the thousands during this period, and Civilization flourishes in the classical sense, the wilderness is still largely unexplored and filled with monsters and witches. It falls to mighty champions to slay monsters and defeat the generals of rival armies in personal combat because other people can't really do that even in large numbers.
  Quote of the day:
  "But... there are only three of you. We have an army."
  "Three is enough."
  
  
• Tales of the Arabian Nights - Let's face it, Alladin never once calls upon Sinbad to help him. Sinbad never gets help from Ali Baba. And none of these guys get meaningful assistance from the city militia. There's weird supernatural shit going on all secret like and normal humans aren't worth crap against it. And most important of all - the heroes are spread so thinly that you'll probably never meet one of them. Cities are huge and civilized and shit, but the heroes kill forty thieves without ever going to the law. The law is just another gang - and the chances of there being a hero in it which can actually solve any of your Djinn or Sorcerer related problems is pretty low.
  Quote of the day:
  "I wish Farruk was here!"
  
  
• Black Forest Tales - This actually is very much like Inu Yasha that you describe. Except that the commonality or lack thereof of monster attacks is irrelevant. Cities and empires are small because it's based on Dark Ages Europe - where the mighty metropolis of London is seriously 20,000 people. If a sorcerer gets pissed off at Hamelin he can just kill all the children and leave. And there's seriously fuck all that the people can do about it because he's a Sorcerer and they are peons. If a dragon comes knocking you don't send the army because that wouldn't work. You send George or Beowulf. And if there isn't a George or Beowulf nearby you just sacrifice a girl every so often to the monster and hope it spares your kingdom.
  Quote of the day:
  "We have made a dark peace with the beast. Why should we allow you to upset the balance?"

The thing you want, where people are actually human sized and have to play by human rules is modern thought. And if we were playing a modern game, I'd be totally down. This kind of thinking works very well for Shadowrun or World of Darkness, but historical legends do not work that way.

What you want is a skill-based unleveled game, where dice pool caps keep everyone in the general numeric field with each other. Magic thus is basically just technology and heroics are never achieved by stomping into the city with the dragon's head and getting declared king. If you have dragon problems you don't wait for a hero, you send in the park rangers to reduce the dragons in the area. The player characters would then be the FBI or the Fish and Wildlife Commission, dedicated to solving crime rather than fighting it. After all, the might of society as a whole is so massive compared to what any villain could hope to achieve that the bad guys do their work in masks at night and attempt to avoid detection rather than challenge cities directly.

That's a game. It could even be a good game. But it's not even relevant for a discussion about what levels should do to player characters.

-Username17

[Koumei]

1203323510[/unixtime]]
Quote of the day:
"But... there are only three of you. We have an army."
"Three is enough."

That sounds an awful lot like the Daleks versus the Cybermen. And I approve of this.

And I'm still trying, amidst the various fantasy - and even modern - fiction I have here, to find a scenario where heroes do as they're told by people or organisations more powerful than them. Even Batman claims the law applies to him, but in any of those instances where he elects to break it (such as, you know, vigilante justice, or kicking a guy for enjoying ice cream), the law can't stop him. He usually obeys every law that isn't related to beating up/killing criminals (based on which era you read/watch), but he seriously elects to do that and that's a good thing, because the police can't tell him what to do.

I only used that example because I just watched Batman Returns. What a classic.

Anyway, it does seem that a strong part of this genre is "The heroes are heroes not because the law/king/militia will slap them into shape if they're naughty, but because they choose to be. Indeed, that's why they're heroes: because they choose to be. They could have been villains, but instead they decided that when someone more powerful comes along and tells them what to do, they say fuck you and kick them in the windpipe."

Yes, in some games it might be a problem that the players decide "lol, fuck the king, let's just kill him and take his stuff." They are now the villains, well done. Perhaps the game is now about the DM sending heroes out to stop them - real heroes who aren't dicks - or the DM says "Don't be a dick, come on guys."

So while I don't mind the idea of the PCs knowing they can't just go around doing whatever they like, I'm going to have to say "They're stronger than the people they listen to, and they go out of their way to annoy/kill people stronger than them." has more precedent in the kind of fantasy D&D is supposed to emulate... or rather, the different kinds of fantasy that it jams together with no thought or delicacy.

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

[RandomCasualty]

The main problem is this logical problem:

The heroes kill the monsters. That's the fundamental concept we want. This means that the army has to lose against the monsters. Otherwise, what's the point.

Now if the heroes can also kill the armies, then why have an army at all?

The thing is that the army has to beat something to even justify its existence. Otherwise a king wouldn't even bother, he'd just hire strike teams of heroes to invade other kingdoms.

Traditionally, I've always though that to take over another kingdom, you use an army, and generally you don't hire heroes to beat an army. You get heroes involved when the enemy kingdom starts getting monsters on its side. Because hero > monster > army > hero.

That seems at least to be the most logical counter system.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

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.

-Desdan

[Voss]

Yep. Armies are there for control of the populace and to bring the taxes /tribute in.

Maybe you'll try to conquer other peoples, but that is rarely sustainable. Actual conquest (rather than tribute taking) tends to cost more than it actually brings in. But hey, sometimes people try, and sometimes they do it in a way they can prop an actual Empire up long enough to to get a stable economy going.

But training some folks to march in unison, throw javelins and probably hit something in a large mass of men, and beat up peasants if they don't hand over the proper amount of rice doesn't mean they can take on serious threats.

[K]

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The thing you want, where people are actually human sized and have to play by human rules is modern thought. And if we were playing a modern game, I'd be totally down. This kind of thinking works very well for Shadowrun or World of Darkness, but historical legends do not work that way.

Right, historical legends don't work that way.

The day that I want historical legends, I'll tell you. You see, I want DnD.... whose source material occasionally draws inspiration from historical legends but is actually based on the fantasy novels written in the last sixty years or so.

Lets look at three wildly popular versions of this source material:

Lord of the Rings(low-level example):
A party of people gather together simply because they figure that they are the only ones that can be trusted. Along the way they get help from powerful wizards, national armies, and the whole time they run from Ringwraiths because they are fucking scary. Surviving the walk is the big chore here and people are awesome warriors and rogues that only fight armies as part of armies. Monsters are evaded as often as they are killed.

Wishsong of Shannara(mid-level example):
A druid comes along, grabs the special girl because she's the only one who can stop the evil book. Her friends come along and they hook up with some others who for various reasons think they can or should help. One guy has a sword that can cut magic and another guy shoots fire from his hands.

As a LofR clone, you have Wraiths, but in this tale people fight Wraiths and kill them. The Wraiths are wicked hard to kill and a guy like Garet Jax the Weapon Master can kill forty foot long giant snakes with ease but he still books it when the gnome army shows up.

Wheel of Time(high-level sample):
While this story starts low level, they quickly ramp up to high level. The three main characters are all awesome in their own way: Rand is a wicked powerful sorcerer and swordsmen who can destroy whole units in battle; Perrin can summon an army of wolves in battle; Mat is a tactical genius with supernatural luck who is the ultimate leader. They get into the fight because they figure they need to do it.

They teleport, they have collections of magic items, and they each lead an army. Individually they are quite awesome but they still make deals.

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

Now, we'll note that at this point no one is killing gods, but a brief look at the source material has "gods" in books like the Conan stories being mid-level demons by DnD standards.

The thing is that no one wants to play historical legends. Books written in that style just don't sell because it reeks of "Mary Sue"-ism.

Shadowrun and WoD are fixed power games. No one ever really gets better. You don't lead armies and everything is so lethal that fighting anything is an exercise in the DM doing his best to not kill you. The scale of your power is restricted.

The DnD setting was created to replicate all the good fantasy stories of the last sixty years. No one is ever unstoppable and the setting encompasses stories where you might spend your whole career in one city OR roam the planes searching through dead civilizations and cities where angels and demons rub shoulders. At low levels you run from dragons, and mid levels you fight dragons, and at high levels you ride dragons. You power grows with time and scope of what you can affect grows.

As far as I can tell, historical legends are just bad fantasy fiction. Every company that has sold DnD had also made a good business selling fantasy fiction in a certain genre, and none of it looked like historical legends.

Go ahead and make that game, but just don't expect anyone to play it. When I want Fairy Tales I'll stop by the children's section of the book store.

[Username17]

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.

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.

I can't comment on the Shannarama books because I find them so astoundingly boring that I have never been able to get more than a few chapters into any of them that have been left at my house over the years.

---

Your own examples (possibly excluding the Druids of Ripping off Tolkien books) are starkly leveled affairs in which the characters advance at a phenomenal rate from initial stages where they run from a couple of beastmen up to the point where they kill giant flaming demon lords in battle.

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!

---

You seem to have selective amnesia where it comes to how thoroughly and unabashedly epic the stories of our youth got, and of what D&D has always been expected to emulate. Yes, low levels involve fighting an ogre or holding off some wolves. But at the high levels you fight your way through 250 hob goblins and then fight the Demon Spider Queen. Cue music.

And if you want to acknowledge that source material, you have to have a system that takes both ends of the spectrum into account. And that is what a level system is for. You give people really stark influxes of power when they go up in level and when they go up high enough they can fight gods and demons.

---

The part where I think we can agree is that D&D lost its way by acting like the gaining of levels should be something that you could expect. Because honestly not everyone likes every power level, so the fact that every power level exists in the game doesn't mean that people will enjoy going through them all.

Some people really don't like saving grandmothers from hungry wolves all Woodsman style because it seems weak and feeble. Other people don't like duking it out with Lolth like they were a Marvel Superhero because they lose touch with the character as a human being whose role they are playing. And that's fine. Going up a level every three and a half game days like in 3.x standard is retarded and world destroying. 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.

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.

-Username17

[Voss]

1203366844[/unixtime]]
The thing is that no one wants to play historical legends.

What the shit is this shit? You may not want to, but you're starting to make totally irrational baseless statements.

Books written in that style just don't sell because it reeks of "Mary Sue"-ism.

Uh... Tolkien, Eddings, late Brust, even that dumb bastard with the S&M fetish... the sword of truth crap. A shitload of manga. And yes, some of TSR's and WotC's crap lines of books have looked like historical legends. Gygax's own series of crap books involved the characters growing up and going after gods, and eventually destroying the entire fucking universe.

Good fairy tales, by the by, won't be anywhere near the children's section. Far too dark and bloody, not the sanitized
Disney shit