The break-down in believability at higher levels of play

[Ringlerun]

I don't think he normally gets called in to rescue cats, however. Nor does he go looking for cats to rescue. He does it because he's a nice guy and he happened to be flying past when the cat got stuck, just as a high-level party might take five minutes out of its day to wipe out a handful of goblin marauders in the town they happen to be staying in en route to the Desert of Doom.

You could give all the goblins wands of lightning. Then see if it takes the players longer than 5min to mob them up.

If you ask me, Superman's traditional priorities as a do-gooder are a little messed up anyway. He spends most of his time fighting petty crime in one American city, while war, famine, and disease ravage whole countries. But that's just me.

He does stop the odd alien invasion or planet busting asteroid. But i don't think he has a foreign policy.

 

[korjik]

A recent conversation with my brother turned into a full-blown philosophical debate on the nature of RPGs and I found the whole thing extremely interesting and would rather like to open it up to another forum. So here goes ...

In essence, the discussion arose from my brother voicing his concern over the higher levels of play in fantasy RPGs (we play both 4e and Pathfinder) and his feeling that playing at those levels becomes increasingly unbelievable and untenable. His point is that characters are called upon to deal with threats and menaces that are so powerful that it is hard to understand why they have not already overrun the local area, the nation, the world. You can see his point. A party of 18th-level characters (not even particularly high-level, see; not these days) might be called upon to deal with an incursion of demons or what-have-you. Those demons are demonstrably powerful (excuse the pun) and it does bring us to ask why they have not already overthrown the local regime and taken control of everything under the sun.

Give your world a history. What prevented the prior incursions were the great heroes of myth and legend.

Or what about the player characters themselves? At high levels, these become extraordinarily powerful. Fantastically so. What is to stop *them* from taking over the world?

There is always another group of heroes.

There is also the issue of why threats are balanced against the characters. Surely, in a more realistic world, the more capable (higher-level) heroes will be called upon to deal with any given threat. Assume for a moment that the campaign world is populated by dozens of adventurer types, if not hundreds (and the mere fact that the local tavern always seems to have two or three standing by whenever a party member gets himself or herself killed seems to suggest this is the case!). They cannot all be the same level, surely? So why not subscribe to 'shock and awe' tactics and send in your most powerful heroes to deal with threats at little to no risk? Why the brinkmanship of having these greenhorns do it, where there is clearly a risk that they may fail?

This would be the reason that high level characters are so hard to find. After the 400th time that the wizard is interrupted by some problem that is obviously beneath them, they are going to start making it harder to find them. That is also assuming that the wizard dosent just start turning messengers into newts

My own answers to all these questions and concerns can be summed up in just two words: "narrative" and "solipsism". The demons in question have not already overthrown the local regime because the heroes are entering the story at just the right time and should be able to prevent them from doing so; it is all part of the narrative. High-level characters do not (normally) carry out coups d'etat for a number of reasons, be it alignment, political/social involvement or mere disinclination. I have no doubt that they *could* but most never would. And who is to say that there *are* any adventurer-types of a higher level than the current party that could deal more easily with the current threat?

A bit of a meta-solution. Also the reason why your brother is a bit offput. There are subtler ways to do it.

This last point, the solipsistic view of the campaign world, took hold in my mind and appeared, to me at least, to explain away all these concerns and issues. There is no threat other than the current one. Only the current narrative counts. There are no heroes other than the ones in the party (okay and some other story-relevant NPCs).

I personally find this to be more of a breaker than lots of heroes. For one thing, it makes the 'conquer all' choice alot easier for the party. That aside tho, I just think that the world is a big place, and there is no reason that there would not be lots of groups of adventurers working on all their own quests.

I should say, in defence of my brother, that he is not wholly disillusioned by RPGs and about to kick the hobby. He still very much enjoys playing and will do so for many years to come no doubt, not least because he has now recruited his children into it! His problem is really that his willing suspension of disbelief is more difficult to maintain at the higher levels of play. And even that is not to say that he *won't* play there, but he is reluctant to do so and will avoid it if possible.

This could all reduce down to a debate on GNS theory, of course.

Any thoughts?

I am puzzled as to why a game with magic and monsters is believable at low level but not high. All of the elements are the same in both.

Of course, if it is just that he dosent like the 'demon incursion' type campaigns, then maybe you should look to different types of adventures.

 

[Aramax]

It's a GAME!

 

[Ron]

As many posters already observed, you can rationalize this in several different ways. However, it is more likely to assume that your brother will not buy any of those explanations as they all require a lot of suspension of belief. I'll explore the possibility he would rather enjoy more down to the earth adventures as I believe it is, foremost, a question of taste.

 

[the Jester]

This last point, the solipsistic view of the campaign world, took hold in my mind and appeared, to me at least, to explain away all these concerns and issues. There is no threat other than the current one. Only the current narrative counts. There are no heroes other than the ones in the party (okay and some other story-relevant NPCs).

Since it appears most of your concerns have already been answered in the way I would answer them, I just want to speak to this bit.

UGH.

I vastly prefer my game world, as a player or dm, to feel as if it exists outside of the pcs. I love it when stuff happens around them as well as because of or to them. "Holy crap, the neighboring kingdom is having a revolution!" "Is that an adventure for us?" "Are you kidding? Do you want to fight peasants with no treasure in the fields and streets for years??"

VS.

"So it has been five years, has anything happened in the neighboring kingdom?" "Uh, yeah, they... um... signed a trade deal with your kingdom last winter."

 

[kitsune9]

The failure is actually in setting/world building.
If you solely focus on the power levels at hand and have the power and abilities of encounter solely scale with levels, you´re creating that problem.

This can be countered by integrating high-level stuff and threads early on in the game, foreshadowing events that could happen.

Three examples could be:
- While a very low-level party does overland travel, they witness a great old red dragon devastate an village a bit further along the road. All they can do is help the survivors.
- While in a major town, a full blown demon incursion starts and they see other high-level characters spring into action, battling a balor while they handle some lemures.
- Rumors and Gossip. Just tell small stories of things that happen in another place or another time.

I agree with Codwyn here. Just having encounters matched to the party's level is kind of jarring.

For the DM, they should plan as what the "big threats" are have them work toward their plans of world domination / destruction / etc, pretty much as the beginning of the campaign. A well-written adventure path takes a lot of this work out for the DM so they can see who the real mover and shakers are at the end of the campaign path and then reasonably think as to what they are doing when the PC's are at 1st level. So when the players are adventuring from 1st to 18th level and ready to take on your ultimate villains, then along the way of the campaign, the PC's should have seen or experience some of the big threat's handiwork and machinations.

Another approach is the inherent nature of the campaign world itself as being balanced by both forces of powerful evil and powerful good. Take the Forgotten Realms for instance. We know that in 3.x, it was just filled to the bring with high-level and epic-level threats. So how come they didn't just try to bowl the world over? They are, but they are being opposed constantly by equally powerful and epic-level good guys. This is the inherent design (for good or ill) that the players can buy-in on suspending their belief. When it's the PC's turn in the campaign world, it will involve the one threat that saw an "opening" and is moving forward with a plan and the PC's the only ones at the time able to stop it.

Other campaign worlds has the bad guys pretty much already won. Ravenloft, Obsidian Twilight, Midnight are all campaign settings. Evil creating more evil is now the status quo and the PC's role in the world is survival or finding some way to put a cork in all of it.

Also, a problem with high-level believability rests that we don't see how literature treats it very often. Most of the fantasy literature that we read involves characters who just get by, are luckly to have their longsword +1 and fight things like ogres as their really tough opponents. We have FR novels and some Dragonlance novels that give a higher-level treatment, but that's about it. What are other novels? I'm a big fan of the Wheel of Time series. There are a lot of high-level stuff that goes on the novels the pretty much the whole series starts out with yokels from the farmlands becoming kings and powerful mages to defeat a great evil. But what was the great evil doing in all that time? Well, the great evil is in prison, but his super tough followers are very busy in the whole campaign. They start wars, they engage in petty schemes to one-up each other, and they spend most of their time working behind agents instead of exposing themselves. There's a valid reason to work in the shadows instead of exposing themselves. If they did, they would likely be attacked by the other evil baddies and / or opposed by a powerful group of mages called Aes Sedai.

So when I plan a campaign, I do think as to who the major villain is from the outset, their most powerful minions and then work out what the plan is and what they need to do. As the players progress through the campaign, they will see those works or plans come into fruition. They will be able to stop a few of them in which the minions will take notice and then have to switch to putting-out-fires mode.

 

[Stoat]

It's a GAME!

Shhhh. You'll give away the secret.

 

[fumetti]

Superman deals with bank robbers and rescues cats so i disagree with you there

You touch on something very important.

Writers have Superman rescue cats not because it is an entertaining challenge, but to lay a public foundation as to Superman's humble and generous personality.

So maybe DMs should start throwing in the occassional walk-through scenario just to increase characters' popularity.

 

[Mort]

So maybe DMs should start throwing in the occassional walk-through scenario just to increase characters' popularity.

Or even because the "walk through scenario" happens to be there. Players really like to see how far they've come.

Early in my 3e campaign the players were waylayed by a highwayman and his crew. The guy took much of their gold and some items as "payment" for coming through "his territory."
Cut to many years (and 12 levels) later. The players were passing through the same area (which they now owned/were the rightful lords/ladies of), they again got waylaid - only this time the highwayman looked on in horror as his entire crew got taken out in about 30 seconds (it would have been much faster but the players were almost playing it for laughs and going for subdual). The players then gave the highwayman a choice, work for them as a tax collector (they needed one) or spend some time in their newley aquired dungeons.

The highwayman and crew started out more powerful than the group, but the group went off worldbeating, while the highwayman stuck to waylaying passsengers. This was one of those things that really added to the atmosphere for the players.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Ignoring the higher levels reasons, which have already been asnwered, who says that the PCs are the only power-level appropriate ones who could have stopped that local goblin threat? I never do.

A prior group tried, and died. But that's why the "massive" goblin threat is now whittled down to something that a 2nd level group can manage. And there is another, less honorable party that is also trying to kill goblins just for the reward. They are distracting the goblins "over there" while the PCs do their thing. We just aren't usually talking about this on camera, other than a few passing references, or maybe a three-way fight with the mercenary group and a large goblin raid.

Of course, in our usual somewhat sandbox style of game, the PCs might lose a few members or even totally fail themselves. Then as far as we are concerned, we did play one of those other groups on camera. So we get some new characters and deal with the situation as it is now. An occasional dose of this really goes a long ways in establishing some real feeling for finding that dead wizard NPC a few months later.

This is the S. M. Stirling answer to the problem, as voiced in a conversation by two of the main characters in the trilogy he did starting with "Dies the Fire." One of them asked the other (paraphrasing here), "It sounds so improbable that we made it through this, how was it even possible." And the other ones answers, "It sounds improbable because out of all the people who died, we were the ones who did make it. Everyone who made it through this disaster has an improbable story."

To varying degrees, rules in roleplaying games are designed so that you spend more time on the improbable stories, and less time on the more realistic ones. The overall results only seem jarring though, if you ignore all the assumed failures that must have accompanied the successes.