Higher level characters ONLY fight orcs

[Minigiant]

Does this mean my PC can stand victorious on top of a pile of orc corpses AND get meaningful xp from it?

Throw in skull hats and I'm sold!

 

[BobTheNob]

One of the technique I have always liked to employ is to occasionally throw enemies at the players which they faced a number of levels ago. The reason being is that so often, but continually upping the ante in terms of what the players face, it can be hard to appreciate character growth. "Who cares if Im +5 better than before...so are the enemies! It just doesnt feel like I have grown".

I did this in our 4e campaign, threw some kobolds at them when they were level 5. Results, it was an absoluate white wash. It was such a one sided event that it instead of characters saying "wow, Im better than before" it was more "that was just a waste of game time".

I know what he is saying. Not literally that Orcs are all you will face, its that you need players to have something to measure themselves against, whilst having that things not be a complete waste of time. Orcs are just a metaphore for what you measure your players against.

 

[Sunseeker]

I disagree. Fighting the same enemies from low levels into high levels can create a sense of connection with the world around you, and gives the opportunity to craft that race almost as another villain. Sure, you don't want to have your players fight ONLY that enemy, but by using the same enemy throughout (even intermittently) you can really tie together a campaign.

I reminds me of LOTR, I think at some point, the occasional Watcher or Balrog just isn't enough to counter the fact that you've by now, easily committed a war-crime in the number of orcs you've killed.

 

[RangerWickett]

I want to fight better orcs.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

That's not the half of it. The reason you fight all orcs, all the time, is that there is now only one playable character race--orc. What do you think orcs do for recreation, anyway? The default setting is a distopian planet where the orcs killed everything else.

 

[Sunseeker]

I want to fight better orcs.

Agreed, at higher levels I want higher challenges, honestly if this can be achieved through giving us more orcs(without simply making them orcs that are tougher to hit and hit harder), I'm okay with that. Rules should exist for improving monsters over the course of the game. We shouldn't be fighting the best orcs at level one or a million of the worst orcs at level 20(though those could be specific encounters, they shouldn't be the majority).

 

[BobTheNob]

I want to fight better orcs.

Be wary though, this can be a two edged sword. You dont want your campaign to develop "Oblivion Syndrome" where as players level, everything around them just gets tougher, and regardless of how many levels they gain, the number of orcs they can kill in a round never improves.

 

[I'm A Banana]

To put it into context, what would you think if I said that I was writing a brand new RPG where the game is designed so that "we want higher-level characters to simply fight more orcs. "

Depends, is that ALL I know about your game, or is your game the newest edition of a game with a 30+ year history of heroic fantasy adventure in which there were definitely more to fight than orcs & more orcs?

I mean, do I have the same expectations from your RPG that I do from D&D5?

If so, AND you said the entire sentence that you quoted in the OP, I would think that this is you telling me you'd like one statblock to be viable for multiple levels.

So I really don't follow your logic, here.

I AM concerned about how much they intend to flatten the power curve. If Orcs remain viable opponents for my level 10 character then there isn't a lot of space to ALSO make gnolls, bugbears, ogres, minotaurs, giants etc viable opponents for my level 10 character.

Oh, I think there's plenty of space.

Because I think the main difference between orcs and gnolls and ogres and bugbears isn't (and shouldn't be) just HD.

Orcs are savage barbarians. Ogres are predatory giants. Bugbears are sneaky thugs. Gnolls are demon-worshipping cannibals. Minotaurs are labyrith-trapped monstrosities.

They can ALL be viable over MULTIPLE levels, and be very different in terms of what they are able to bring to the table in a D&D game.

That's kind of exciting. If orcs don't have to be "replaced" at higher levels, it leaves a lot of room for making sure that my hobgoblins and my goblnis and my bugbears and my orcs and my ogres and my orogs all have something unique to contribute to the scenario.

And I think it's a little disingenuous to take the last half of that sentence out of context and then presume that it will be only true in the most literal and limiting of senses. I imagine anyone posting on a D&D message board probably has enough context to know exactly what Rob meant there.

ALSO I WANT PIE NOW.

 

[pauljathome]

I

Has any edition had such easily defeatable giants?

White box, AD&D, 3.0, 3.5 and Pathfinder all put a smallish group (say 4-10) of giants well within the capabilities of a group of 10th level PCs.

The whole classic AD&D Against the Giants adventures (where the PCs went in and killed whole tribes of Hill, Frost and Fire giants) were for levels 8-12.

In Pathfinder, a Hill giant is CR 7 and even a Fire Giant is only CR 10

I'm not sure about 4th edition.

 

[Dausuul]

I AM concerned about how much they intend to flatten the power curve. If Orcs remain viable opponents for my level 10 character then there isn't a lot of space to ALSO make gnolls, bugbears, ogres, minotaurs, giants etc viable opponents for my level 10 character.

You don't have to flatten the power curve to make orcs viable at high level. You just have to flatten the attack/defense scale, and expand the hit point/damage scale to compensate.

Let's take 4E as an example. Consider a standard level 1 opponent, the goblin warrior, worth 100 XP. A five-person party at 1st level has an XP budget of 500 for an equal-level encounter. So they can take on five goblins.

Now consider the same party at 13th level, with an XP budget of 4000. In theory, this should mean they can take on forty goblins, right? But in practice, that encounter is a nightmare, because so much of the PCs' power gain is tied up in their higher attack and defense values. The PCs hit on anything but a 1, the goblins miss on anything but a 20. So the PCs hack away with their at-wills, laboriously grinding down the goblins' collective 1,160 hit points, while the goblins run around scoring an average of two hits a round for 1d8+2 damage apiece. Snoozefest.

Next, imagine that you keep the same relative power levels--five PCs to forty monsters--but instead of goblin warriors, you use orc warriors. Orc warriors are also worth 100 XP, but they're 9th-level minions instead of 1st-level regular monsters.

Suddenly you've got a good fight again. And the reason is that the 9th-level minions have comparable attack and defense bonuses to the PCs. The power differential comes from the fact that the minions have vastly fewer hit points than the PCs and deal less damage.

The proposal for 5E is this: What if we got rid of most of the attack and defense scaling, and instead relied on hit points and damage for the vast majority of level difference? Then you don't have to worry about the "forty goblins" situation. The goblin warriors will become effectively minions (because PC damage has scaled to the point of being able to kill them in one hit). The relative power levels have not changed; a 13th-level PC is still eight times as strong as a 1st-level one, leaving just as much room for ogres and trolls and giants and such. But the mechanics producing those power levels are different.

(That said, I expect they will, in fact, flatten the power curve some as well. But you don't have to do that in order to get "orcs remain a threat at high levels.")