The Final Chapter begins...
Chapter 6: Paragon Campaigns
Having just written up full campaign arcs that went from Heroic to Paragon to Epic, the book is
now going to tell us what they think Paragon play is actually supposed to entail. This probably should have come earlier in the book. Maybe even the beginning, but certainly not the end. It's hard to say whether things meet the design specifications if you don't say what those specifications are until the end. But whatever, it's here now and we'll talk about it.
The idea is that in Heroic play you go into kiddie dungeons and fight basic mobs, and at Paragon "bold horizons unfold". I am totally and completely on board with that sentiment. Unfortunately, as was discussed in chapter two, at least one of the "bold horizons" they are fond of in 4e is "the Orcs are naked and eyeless now", which is more pitiful than bold. This chapter is split into three sections, and two of them are about Sigil, which is not encouraging.
See, I would welcome "plane hopping" as a declaration of "Paragon Tier". That would make sense, because you are now moving between different universes and can sandbox around like in the time machine example from Chapter 5. Also, I like Sigil. At least, I like a number of versions of Sigil that have been produced (most explicitly the one in Planescape: Torment, which is pretty awesome). But the defining concept of Sigil is that it opens up planar adventures
to low level characters. Sigil has no-violence zones in which you are allowed to talk to and interact with big hoodoo demons and angels, but they aren't allowed to kill you with a word. Sigil has portals all over it, such that characters who have no actual abilities to go anywhere or do anything remarkably superheroric can nonetheless have a portal appear that can take them to any other world. High level stuff
exists in Sigil, and high level planar adventures
also exist. But Sigil was literally created in order to facilitate
low level planar adventure, meaning that putting it in as the Paragon Tier example setting is... not encouraging.
But anyway, the first of the three sections is about what Paragon Tier means to the authors. This is... very schizophrenic. Here's a bit I really like: they say that
only characters who are Paragon will have the abilities to participate in campaigns built around high level stuff. And heck, I might as well give you their actual list.
DMG2 wrote:• high-level politics.
• grand-scale military engagements.
• sustained adventures in the Underdark or similarly hostile locations.
• world-hopping adventure.
• alternate realities.
• time travel.
Frankly, that sounds awesome. Except for the Underdark thing, which I still don't even understand as a cutoff, because apparently ordinary Dwarves and Drow simply
live there and you can honest to goodness play them at first level. But while I really like the sentiment, allow me to remind the gentle reader of what
actually happens when you turn Paragon tier:
- • You get +1 to all your ability scores.
• You get a new "feat" and are allowed to pick of the Paragon list. Such as Plate Armor Specialization... that gives you +1 to your AC while wearing Plate Armor.
• You get to select a Paragon Path and get the starting Paragon Class Features. So for example as a Rogue you could become a "Dagger Master", which means that you would then have the ability to reroll an attack or damage roll with a dagger attack instead of acting twice, and you score a critical hit with dagger attacks on three whole numbers on the d20.
• You get a another attack that can be used once per combat. This brings your total attacks you can use before you fall back to your at-will spam from 3 to 4. The Daggermaster gets an encounter attack that is actually a bonus attack that triggers when he gets a critical hit, which on average now happens by around turn 7 of an encounter (and being a triggered bonus attack, it does not actually increase the number of rounds before you are spamming your at-will attacks).
That is, admittedly, more than happens at levels 2-10. But I'm not actually seeing the part where any of these changes let you lead armies, travel through time, or engage in high level politics. You get some various sundry +1s of d20 rolls and you get slightly better at stabbing people with a knife.
None of that is actually particularly envelope pushing. Indeed, right after they write down that list of cool things that supposedly "only" can be dealt with by heroes with Paragon Tier abilities, they walk it back:
DMG2 wrote:This is not to say that you can't run these types of campaigns with PCs who have not yet attained the paragon tier.
This is the kind of scenario thing that can only be drowned away with sweet and medium proof drinks.
So we've established then, that Paragon isn't really an actual
thing, so much as a
state of mind. There's no actual game mechanical support for characters being able to influence the world any more spectacularly in Paragon than they can in Heroic, but the book strongly suggests that you magic tea party up some more expansive
feeling adventures in order to provide the
illusion that characters had progressed into more world affecting and world traveling heroes by becoming Paragon. This is best exemplified by the statement in "Gaining Influence" that when characters turn Paragon level, "they attract the attention of top local leaders." Characters don't get better diplomancy scores or have followers or anything. It's just that like in a video game, the doors to the council chambers are
open when you're 11th level instead of being
closed like they were at 10th level. And the NPCs inside will talk to you instead of having the default response of "I'm too busy with council matters" or "Welcome to Corneria" or whatever.
There's some discussion of how to run a game where one character is a lord and the other characters aren't. Or where multiple characters have powerbases. And this is welcome, but it's all in the ivory tower speculative discussion level, because 4th edition D&D characters still don't have any
abilities to actually do these things. This is the DMG2, and it would have been totally the right book to put in rules or even guidelines for running a business or controlling a thieve's guild or being mayor, archmage, bishop, or count. But it doesn't.
There's some discussion of how to run a game where the characters are involved in big wars. This would also be welcome, except that their suggestion for doing it in-game is "why don't you run it as a Skill Challenge?" And of course, the answer to
that is "because Skill Challenges are the most non-functional mechanic ever written for Dungeons & Dragons,
including the ones that couldn't be linguistically parsed in the first place, and I do not want to run this, or anything, as a Skill Challenge because that would give me cancer."
There's a bit on the Underdark. This is pretty hard to take seriously, because I still can't see how this is different from a low level zone. We are told that Dwarves might be "ungenerous and suspicious", but can't Elves or Tieflings be that way too? Dwarves are a fucking player character race. This segues directly into a discussion about how you can have areas that are as inhospitable as the Underdark on the surface, and gives examples of cursed lands, hordelands (by which they mean "Central Asia", kingdoms of evil, undead armies (by which they mean "areas post-zombie apocalypse"), and streets of anarchy (by which they mean "Paris during the terror"). But really this seems to be fairly thin gruel. There's basically two sections back to back about how in Paragon play you could be doing basically exactly what you were doing in Heroic play but have it require a physically longer walk to get back to a town where you can buy stuff. That's... hard to take seriously. What makes it even harder to take seriously is how they chin scratch about how hard it would be to have enough food when town is a long walk back and you are
constantly having to fight and kill the local wildlife. Problem Solved.
There is a section on world hopping. This is a big disappointment going in, because the presentation isn't "now the players have a bigger sandbox", it's "now you can run disjointed, episodic adventures that don't even pretend to have any continuity because they happen on different worlds". I like Sliders as a concept as much as the next guy, but I don't regard a lack of continuity as being a new mightier vista in any real sense. They further split this into a section on hopping between parallel worlds and a section on hopping between time junctures. The time travel section is mostly just admonishing you that you should write some time travel rules and decide if and how paradoxes are resolved. I like Chronotrigger a lot, but there isn't any meat here. It's basically just a frank admission that making time travel games is kind of hard followed by telling the reader that the authors of the book do not have any intention of doing any of that work for you. And that's the whole section.
So to recap, the authors believe that Paragon play should open up new backgrounds for adventures that are largely inconsequential palette swaps. Also, they believe that palette swapping NPCs from mayor to baron is enough to make the players feel important. They also suggest opening up political, warfare, and management minigames, but don't actually
have any of those in this book or anywhere else in this edition. And finally, they suggest that the primary advantage of more "sandboxy" forms of travel is that you can make things even more episodic and less consequential than 4e encounters already were. Sigh.
After that, we get into a description of Sigil. It's 24 pages and covers a lot of ground in a modestly superficial fashion. It has lists of NPCs that include people you haven't given a shit about for a long time like
Kylie the tout. While it does do sufficient amounts of Lady of Pain wanking to identify this as Sigil discussion, it doesn't really go into the part of Sigil that was really fun: the Factions. The only ones that get a writeup are the Sons of Mercy, which comes with a disclaimer that they don't have any official power and are limitedly effective.
All in all, I find Sigil rather hard to take seriously as an iconic Paragon location. There's explicitly
no powerbase worth rising up in or even taking over. The Sigil Advisory Council as written is basically just the highschool spirit committee, and rising to the top of it would just let you pick the theme for prom. You can buy high level stuff here, and you can find portals to various other dimensions that you could have higher level adventures in - but you could just as easily buy low level stuff here and find portals that took you to low level adventures on equally distant worlds.
There's a 12 page adventure at the end of the book. It introduces Sigil, and you fight Paragon tier monsters, and you get paid in epic currency (astral diamond). But the paragon tier monsters don't really do anything amazingly special. We're talking about undead dudes and giant spiders with, get this,
bigger numbers. Also the adventure is fundamentally "protect the food caravan", which is I'm pretty sure the generic 1st level introductory adventure. I don't remember exactly how many times I've done "protect the caravan" as a way to get characters to together (both as a player and as a DM), but it's a lot. It's a "first adventure" that is cliche almost to the point of "you meet in a tavern" and slightly more cliche than "villain makes unreasonable demands in town square". It really doesn't bring the "Paragon is different" vibe they should have been reaching for.
And that's the book. The book says it wants you to be running organizations, fighting wars, playing politics, and sandboxing bigger locations. And this is the actual "Dungeon Master's Guide 2", so the place you'd expect to
find the rules for all that stuff would be... in this book. But they aren't here. More than anything, this book seems like a 222 page pitch for making a DMG2 rather than the actual DMG2 itself. The one really rule-centric chapter is chapter 3 which was their last chance to fix Skill Challenges and they blew it on reprinting bullshit web articles on how Skill Challenges could be made more complicated in various stupid, useless ways.
The book was a failure. A failure because they didn't even
try to move the rules forward. And that's the whole book.
-Username17