Why high level exists, and the problems.

[hogarth]

Most people have a basic assumption that the DM will set the difficulty to a level that they can handle. I don't know about you, but I just don't care about battles I know I can win; however, I do care about battles where I know I'm outmatched and I am trying to pull crap out of my ass to win. In fact, one of the more dramatic campaigns I have been in involved a DM who decided to run one of the more infamous "killer" campaigns and hamstring us with no clerical magic outside a few pre-set items in the adventure and it involved a fair amount of planning and chicanery on our part to sqeek by with survival.

But on the other side of the coin, I played in a 2E campaign with a DM who liked tossing us in trouble over our heads. When we succeeded it was great, but after the 3rd or 4th time of hearing "In the end you were rescued by, oh, let's say...Moe." it got a little tiresome.

That isn't a problem with death as a part of the game, that is just a bad DM.

Don't blame the game because the person running it doesn't know how to. Also the players share in that problem because they should have said something sooner in disagreement of how the fights were going, doesn't matter what game it is.

Shadzar, I'm exaggerating. He was a fine DM; he just subscribed to K's theory that everyone remembers the awesome fights and no one remembers curb-stomping kobolds for the nth time. Which is definitely true; I remember the fights we had with a band of ogre mages and a white dragon much more than the times we curb-stomped a bunch of kobolds.

But the risk is that when you're fighting against the odds, then you'll lose more than you'll win -- that's why it's called "against the odds". Then when you lose, you need to come up with some explanation why the game isn't over (as K suggested in his original post). Each time you have to come up with an explanation, it gets lamer and lamer.

[Josh_Kablack]

My solution to the problems of high level is this: don't let players die, and don't adjust monsters for levels. Make it an essential premise of your game that players don't die

Okay, here's where a whole lot of the argument is coming from:

Within the assumptions of 3.x D&D rules: death is both a real threat and yet merely temporary setback.

Yet within the assumption of most heroic fiction: death tends to be a vague threat at best, but usually pretty permanent - and when it is not that's a central tenet of the story. It is totally a huge frikkin deal and the center of the whole story when Orpheus brings a soul back from Hades and when Belit's Shade returns to defend her true love. When Miracle Max brings Westly back, he has to explain that he's not "all the way dead".

However in 3.x D&D, Reincarnation. Raise Dead, Resurrection, and similar resurrection magics are all spells that PCs are likely to be able to cast themselves, starting as early as 7th level. In many games, PCs will be able to purchase scrolls of such spells or pay for rez services from a healing temple at even lower level. This does help to maintain character continuity and therefore aids gamers in developing both attachment to their characters and in telling lengthy tales about the same character - but at the same time it creates a world so different from most assumptions that it can strain the suspension of disbelief.

The supposed "fix" within 3.x D&D is the various costs of rez magic - expensive material components, level loss/con , reincarnation's random form shifting, and so on. These are all intended to enforce that character death has negative consequences - even though these consequences are far less severe than staying dead.

Outside of the rules, but within one of the most common play styles, character replacement serves as an alternative to rezzing. In low-level games, games without healers or games with anti-rez houserules, the player of a character who dies invariably gets to bring in a new character, at or near the level of the other characters. If players are attached to their characters, and the PCs do not die in groups this serves as a reasonable patch to enforce the finality of death we know from the real world, while still allowing people to continue participating in the game. And while it can get awkward if handled poorly, there are enough works of fiction where important characters die during the story (Théoden, Roy Fokker, Gwen Stacy) that people understand how this works. However if people are not attached to their characters, and/or just curious to try other types of characters out, this method can actually reward players for taking suicidal actions, and that sort if thing can produce its own strains on suspension of disbelief.

[tzor]

I should also point out that mid level combat can also be memorable if the opponents have the power to throw out a trump card; remember killing you is not always the worst thing that can happen.

I was in a very memorable 2E game with the basic boring theme of “Drow taking over the surface world.” In one simple adventure we were protecting the village from attack. The original plan, getting the children in the safety of the church was not working as they were starting to burn the church down. So it was up to the dwarf (don’t ask why it was my character, it might have been dumb luck or location) to get the children out of the building. This I did and there I heard a “click.” There it was, a lovely delayed blast fireball hovering, laughing right at me. I could have belly flopped on the damn thing and not have suffered anything but damn it, I’m a dwarf, in armor and it’s just too far and …

After all the children incinerated horribly in his sight, the normally lawful good dwarf fighter would have loved to draw and quarter any Drow he encountered, except for the Half Drow Paladin that was in the party, of course.

[shadzar]

Shadzar, I'm exaggerating. He was a fine DM; he just subscribed to K's theory that everyone remembers the awesome fights and no one remembers curb-stomping kobolds for the nth time. Which is definitely true; I remember the fights we had with a band of ogre mages and a white dragon much more than the times we curb-stomped a bunch of kobolds.

But the risk is that when you're fighting against the odds, then you'll lose more than you'll win -- that's why it's called "against the odds". Then when you lose, you need to come up with some explanation why the game isn't over (as K suggested in his original post). Each time you have to come up with an explanation, it gets lamer and lamer.

But a big problem exists that isn't exaggeration. Many people do fault a game for a bad DM. So while we may use over-the-top explanations for things, many people DO in fact blame the game, which doesn't help fix the problem of bad DMs.

[Ganbare Gincun]

I had that same thought a couple of days ago both do to prolific posting and general disagreements in most threads.

You're not the only one.

Here here.

[TavishArtair]

I totally remember the time my party curbstomped a hobgoblin fortress.

Mostly because we curbstomped an entire hobgoblin fortress and didn't really have a lot of blasto magic, so we had to run through and chop everyone up, Dynasty Warriors style. And we made a session of it. And there were a few minibosses yeah, which kept it interesting.

But mostly endless killing. I think we seriously downed something on the order of 100 mooks that game.

[TOZ]

We need more games like that. Where the DM says "Congratulations, you killed the entire fucking world."

[CatharzGodfoot]

A low-mid level fire mage/conduit of the lower planes can come close. A few well-placed fireballs in a crowded area (followed by the corpses animating as zombies) can really cascade.