Celebrim
Legend
This is forked from the thread on 'What's the Rush' to deal with a subtopic that has come up, which can be thought of as, "How high of level do you need to be to be a realistic member of your chosen profession?" and the related question, "How high of a level do you need to be to be a leader in your chosen profession?"
In the other thread, the example profession is 'pirate', but the actual skills in question are 'sailor'.
So my contention is that D&D in every edition, at least until 3e after which I'm not longer experienced enough to know, maintained the idea that the low levels corresponded to a casual level of realism and the capabilities of low level characters were the capabilities of ordinary people around you. And, the ordinary people around you were generally 0th, 1st, and 2nd level characters with a smattering of higher level characters who had extraordinary abilities that would astound ordinary persons - Olympic atheletes, special forces soldiers, leaders in academic fields, etc. However, even these extraordinary persons were at most 4th or 6th level characters. Characters more powerful than that weren't merely ordinary, or extraordinary, or even heroic. They were super-heroic - the title an 8th level fighter 1e was 'superhero'.
So as I see it:
0th level: Apprentice level characters. Characters who are still acquiring the basic skills they need to perform a job. Most DMs don't make you play through this, though it could be a fun change.
1st level: Novice. You've just completed your education, and you have the basic skills to do the job.
2nd level: Veteren. You've got advanced training or significant actual experience.
3rd level: Expert.
4th level: Master/Hero. You've reached the commonly recognized pinnacle of your profession. You are a big fish in any small pond. You are capable of astonishing feats of skill and/or prowess.
5th level: Elevated Master: Other masters of your profession look up to you.
6th level: Grandmaster/Myrmidon. Einstein, Newton, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Miyamoto, Cyrano de Bergerac, etc.
7th level: Characters of this level or higher basically have no correspondance in the real world. This is cinematic action movie hero level: James Bond, Zorro, John McClane, Rambo, Blondie/The Man with No Name, Captain Jack Sparrow, etc.
8th level: Super heroes. This is your supporting cast superhero. In an ensemble action movie, the leader might have this level. In an action movie series, the protagonist might level up to this as the action gets more and more over the top. In a superhero story, this is the level of friends and sidekicks or the level of superheroes just starting out. Robin for example. This also might be the level of minor supervillains or the henchmen of major supervillains. You can keep going up from here, but as no real world professions require this level of skill it's not necessary. The characters going up from here exist only as literary, romanticized, or superheroic examples of the type.
So let's go back to the specific question, "What level do you need to be a pirate captain?"
Well, 'captain' is a tricky term. Any one who commands their own boat is a captain, and is addressed as captain and is sovereign when on that boat. There are never two captains of a boat. If another captain comes aboard, he is temporarily breveted to higher rank so that there is no confusion over who is the captain. But conversely, a low ranking officer aboard his own vessel is a captain while aboard it. The guy who commands a fishing boat is its captain. So all you really need to be a captain is a boat and sufficient skill that others in your profession recognize that you are the best man for the job. What's the minimum level in D&D where we'd expect that to be true?
Second. At 2nd level you've got enough loot to buy most mundane equipment - like a small sailing vessel - and you are now skilled enough that novice characters (1st level 'pirates', whatever the class) agree you are the best man for the job. This is pretty easy to imagine. You have 4 PC 'officers', a small boat, and these officers hire on a small crew of whatever is typical for your demographics - commoners, warriors, experts, fighters, etc. The hirelings that they can recruit are novices because the PC's don't have the reputation or obvious skill to convince experts to trust them with their lives, and if they did hire on they'd want to be treated as peers or even to take charge. But at this level you are now 'a captain', and if you and your crew plunder things you are a 'pirate captain'. How realistic is this under the rules?
Consider the question of navigation. According to the rules, to navigate in open water you need to make a DC 17 skill check. If you fail your check 3 times in a row, you become lost at sea. Is that viable for a second level character? Well, a 2nd level character can have 5 ranks in a skill, plus a useful tool giving a +2 bonus, plus let's say a +2 bonus from their relevant ability score. This gives a +9 on the check. If they really care about the skill, they could have taken a feat to enhance it (and often another relevant skill) for another +2 bonus, giving a total of +11 on the check. Can a 2nd level character with a +9 bonus on a skill check manage to navigate open water? Most of the time. They'll probably try to avoid going more than a day or two on open water, avoid bad weather, and stick to the coast most of the time but already at 2nd level we can see that can sail a boat.
What about the question of command? Do you need to intimidate a hireling to get a hireling to respond to your commands? According to he RAW, no you don't. You only need to use intimidate to get someone who doesn't want to obey you to do so. Your hirelings almost by definition have agreed to obey you. You'd only need to try to intimidate them in extraordinary circumstances - and you certainly don't want to do it often, because each time you do it whether you succeed or fail, your crew gets more surely and more rebellious by the RAW. I'd argue that most good leaders have almost no ranks in Intimidate. It's just not that useful of a skill for leader types. But again, as we showed with navigation, even a 2nd level character has a reasonably good chance of being intimidating. In particular, if you are the lawful authority on the boat, and everyone has agreed to put themselves under you, this is ordinarily a decent reason to provide a circumstance bonus. Afterall, if someone comes and gets in your face and yells at you, its going to make a really big difference how you respond if they are wearing the uniform of a gunnery sergeant. And its going to make even more of a difference if you are a civilian off base whom they have no right to yell at, or if you are on base and wearing a private's stripe on your soldier. Ability to command is relative to rank. Sergants don't obey captains because captains are scarier than they are. They obey captains because that's part of their job.
In general, pretty much any skill will end up looking like this if we investigate it. You are reasonably compotent if you can pass about a DC 15 skill check most of the time. A DC of 15 represents a task requiring considerable skill. Most things of higher DC represent things like Craft, Search, or Open Locks were you can really take your time on the task and spend a long time on it (take 20).
It's very important that the game actually work like this. If it doesn't, it doesn't just mean that you have to wait until action hero or superhero level to be basically compotent. It means that every NPC out there making a living for themselves needs to also be action hero level to do their job. If it isn't true that you can command a boat at 2nd level, then every teamster, woodcutter, fisherman or merchant out there also has to have action movie hero capabilities. And if this is really the case, if basically ordinary people in the setting are superheroes, then what you've done is said that all the levels below 8th level are "apprentice levels" and perforce probably should be skipped in the way we usually ship playing a 0th level character. It also means that in addition to mundane tasks like commanding a boat, everyone in the setting is capable of action movie hero feats of leaping out of burning buildings and swinging through windows or surviving falls from 100' up - even the ordinary commoner on the street, or the ordinary fisherman on a boat. It means that it takes an 8th level or higher character to have a reasonable chance to not get their butt kicked by a couple of farmers (which might expain the 'housecat problem'), and what I think it will tend to encourage players who view the world this way is to say, "Well, the rules only apply to PCs, and not NPCs."
So, back to the question of a "pirate captain", we've got a small boat - maybe a 37' sloop or a small rowed galley of 12 oars depending on your settings tech level - and a small crew of 8-12 hirelings at 2nd level. But most players thinking "pirate captain", probably mean some bigger boat - something like they sea in the movies. What level do you need for that? Well, first of all, if by 'pirate' you are thinking some romanticized age of pirate criminals ship from near the end of the Great Age of Sail, like for example Pirates of the Carribean, then the tech level you are thinking of is well beyond traditional D&D which is grounded in 13th century technology or earlier. Even your Great Age of Pirates setting - your Dread Pirate Roberts or Captain Blood - is 17th century tech. By pirate of psuedo-medieval era, or a typical D&D equipment list, you should be thinking something more like a Viking raider. So to even have 'pirate' like you are thinking of, we are going to need to expand at least the price lists for available boats, and depending on how much versimilitude we want we are probably going to need equipment lists and rules for gunpowder and smoothbore cannon at least.
It's also worth noting that real pirates in the age of pirate criminals - your Blackbeards or Captain Kidds - didn't operate like Holliwood pirates. (Imagine that, Holliwood gets it wrong.) They didn't have big multigun frigates, didn't do a lot of sailing in open water if they could help it, didn't engage in artillery duels if they could help it, didn't try to fight naval vessels, and typically used small manueverable vessels crammed with as many cutthroats as they could to quickly board a small target and overwhelm its small crew in a boarding action. The era of pirates with big multigun ships, sailing in open water, engaging in artillery duels and fighting the naval vessels of foriegn powers was actually 100-200 years earlier in the golden age of pirates when pirates were backed monetarily and politically by nations as an instrument of virtually unrestricted warfare. D&D differentiates this class of pirate as 'buccaneers'. If you've played Sid Meier's Pirates, it's set in that era.
Anyway, so suppose though you have introduced a full range of great age of sail sailing vessels, complete with cannon or its versimlitude equivalent (magical weapons, wink wink 'balistas', etc.), in order to capture the idea of pirates from movies. What level are the captains aboard those ships? Well, really the answer is 'whatever you want'. If you are going for 'it looks like a summer blockbuster', then probably 7th level and up. If you are going for, 'it looks at casual inspection like historical pirates', then the answer is probably closer to 4th level and up. Remember, 4th level represents a 'hero' or an acknowledged master in their field. There aren't many of these characters around, but there are enough of them that they will compete for the right to captain the most desirable vessels. A second level character doesn't command enough respect to be entrusted with such a large vessel. While there aren't many 4th level characters in the setting, there are enough that if you've got a couple 100 sailors together, there are going to be at least a few. Even in a low level demographics world where most everyone is 0th or 1st level, you wouldnt' expect the captain of such a ship to be 2nd level. The most desirable ships in the setting probably have at least 5th or 6th level captains under even conservative demographics, not because you need to be that level, but because of simple economics.
And a couple of hundred is in fact the crew of these great age of sail multigun ships. Unlike in Holiwood, you can't successfully sail a 32 gun frigate to Tortuga with a crew of 2. You can't even do it with a crew of 2, plus the comic sidekick, the kick butt token girl pirate, and 20 extras that appear in the film - much less man multiple 12lber cannons and perform a 13 gun broadside while sailing the ship (since each cannon needs a crew of like 7, plus a powder boy retrieving ammunition).
You might be inclined to argue that you need Leadership to crew a ship. But this turns out to fail the same test. NPCs dont' need leadership to crew a ship. If they did, every merchantman would need a 6th level captain with the leadership feat, and once again that implies that every ordinary merchant captain has the skills of John McClain, 1st level and even 4th level characters are still apprentices, and that we should probably skip the first 6-8 levels in the same way we skip 0th level apprentices. Leadership feats give you particular bonuses with regard to how you relate to certain NPCs, but there is nothing that prevents a character - whether PC or NPC - from just continuing the practice of hiring hirelings including as D&D has always allowed, expert hirelings. (I'm going to avoid going into a long rant about just how badly designed the Leadership feat actually is.) One of the basic rules of D&D is unless the rules specifically prohibit something, it's permitted. Leadership permits acquiring loyal followers and henchmen, but it does not forbid acquiring hirelings by other means. A 32 gun frigate actually has a crew of like 270. If you pretend that you are being strict by the RAW and that the rules forbid you having followers without a leadership feat, then they forbid crewing a 'pirate ship' at all, since even with a leadership score of 25 you won't have enough followers to crew the ship!!! In fact, this isn't a strict reading of the RAW, it's a conveinent reading for advancing a certain argument, but it has nothing to do with the rules.
One complaint that you still might have at this point is that unless your character's class is Rogue or Expert, you probably dont' have enough skill points to cover every job a sailor might want to do well. This complaint is essentially again grounded in 'Holiwood reality' of the Pirates of the Carribean where a ship meant for 200 or 400 crew and ran as a business has the CEO doing every job on the ship by himself. In reality, most captains did nothing of the sort. While the captain might also be the pilot, and might be decent at it, it was more usual to employ a skilled hireling in the role of pilot or navigator. This hireling in turn might be very good at plotting a course, but know almost nothing about handling a sword. Likewise, the captain might know quite a bit about how to provision a ship and get the best prices for all the goods, but it was more usual to employ an expert hireling as the ship's quartermaster not only to do the job well or better, but simply because the captain didn't have the time to be the quartermaster, the pilot, the navigator, the surgeon, the carpenter, the boson, the lookout, and the cook all at the same time - and no one expected him to. All these NPC specialists can easily be very good at a particular skill or set of skills by 3rd or 4th level - it's not hard to out do a PC on a narrow set of skills at very low level just by focusing on nothing else. If you want to be able to do all of that, you aren't really asking to be a 'pirate captain'. What you are really asking to be is a 'pirate captain superhero'. D&D can handle a profession request, like 'pirate captain' from a quite low level. But it can never handle 'superhero' from a quite low level. This is because D&D is intended to start from the level of casual realism and move up into cinematic heros, superheroes, and eventually virtual demigods (justice league founders level stuff).
In the other thread, the example profession is 'pirate', but the actual skills in question are 'sailor'.
So my contention is that D&D in every edition, at least until 3e after which I'm not longer experienced enough to know, maintained the idea that the low levels corresponded to a casual level of realism and the capabilities of low level characters were the capabilities of ordinary people around you. And, the ordinary people around you were generally 0th, 1st, and 2nd level characters with a smattering of higher level characters who had extraordinary abilities that would astound ordinary persons - Olympic atheletes, special forces soldiers, leaders in academic fields, etc. However, even these extraordinary persons were at most 4th or 6th level characters. Characters more powerful than that weren't merely ordinary, or extraordinary, or even heroic. They were super-heroic - the title an 8th level fighter 1e was 'superhero'.
So as I see it:
0th level: Apprentice level characters. Characters who are still acquiring the basic skills they need to perform a job. Most DMs don't make you play through this, though it could be a fun change.
1st level: Novice. You've just completed your education, and you have the basic skills to do the job.
2nd level: Veteren. You've got advanced training or significant actual experience.
3rd level: Expert.
4th level: Master/Hero. You've reached the commonly recognized pinnacle of your profession. You are a big fish in any small pond. You are capable of astonishing feats of skill and/or prowess.
5th level: Elevated Master: Other masters of your profession look up to you.
6th level: Grandmaster/Myrmidon. Einstein, Newton, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Miyamoto, Cyrano de Bergerac, etc.
7th level: Characters of this level or higher basically have no correspondance in the real world. This is cinematic action movie hero level: James Bond, Zorro, John McClane, Rambo, Blondie/The Man with No Name, Captain Jack Sparrow, etc.
8th level: Super heroes. This is your supporting cast superhero. In an ensemble action movie, the leader might have this level. In an action movie series, the protagonist might level up to this as the action gets more and more over the top. In a superhero story, this is the level of friends and sidekicks or the level of superheroes just starting out. Robin for example. This also might be the level of minor supervillains or the henchmen of major supervillains. You can keep going up from here, but as no real world professions require this level of skill it's not necessary. The characters going up from here exist only as literary, romanticized, or superheroic examples of the type.
So let's go back to the specific question, "What level do you need to be a pirate captain?"
Well, 'captain' is a tricky term. Any one who commands their own boat is a captain, and is addressed as captain and is sovereign when on that boat. There are never two captains of a boat. If another captain comes aboard, he is temporarily breveted to higher rank so that there is no confusion over who is the captain. But conversely, a low ranking officer aboard his own vessel is a captain while aboard it. The guy who commands a fishing boat is its captain. So all you really need to be a captain is a boat and sufficient skill that others in your profession recognize that you are the best man for the job. What's the minimum level in D&D where we'd expect that to be true?
Second. At 2nd level you've got enough loot to buy most mundane equipment - like a small sailing vessel - and you are now skilled enough that novice characters (1st level 'pirates', whatever the class) agree you are the best man for the job. This is pretty easy to imagine. You have 4 PC 'officers', a small boat, and these officers hire on a small crew of whatever is typical for your demographics - commoners, warriors, experts, fighters, etc. The hirelings that they can recruit are novices because the PC's don't have the reputation or obvious skill to convince experts to trust them with their lives, and if they did hire on they'd want to be treated as peers or even to take charge. But at this level you are now 'a captain', and if you and your crew plunder things you are a 'pirate captain'. How realistic is this under the rules?
Consider the question of navigation. According to the rules, to navigate in open water you need to make a DC 17 skill check. If you fail your check 3 times in a row, you become lost at sea. Is that viable for a second level character? Well, a 2nd level character can have 5 ranks in a skill, plus a useful tool giving a +2 bonus, plus let's say a +2 bonus from their relevant ability score. This gives a +9 on the check. If they really care about the skill, they could have taken a feat to enhance it (and often another relevant skill) for another +2 bonus, giving a total of +11 on the check. Can a 2nd level character with a +9 bonus on a skill check manage to navigate open water? Most of the time. They'll probably try to avoid going more than a day or two on open water, avoid bad weather, and stick to the coast most of the time but already at 2nd level we can see that can sail a boat.
What about the question of command? Do you need to intimidate a hireling to get a hireling to respond to your commands? According to he RAW, no you don't. You only need to use intimidate to get someone who doesn't want to obey you to do so. Your hirelings almost by definition have agreed to obey you. You'd only need to try to intimidate them in extraordinary circumstances - and you certainly don't want to do it often, because each time you do it whether you succeed or fail, your crew gets more surely and more rebellious by the RAW. I'd argue that most good leaders have almost no ranks in Intimidate. It's just not that useful of a skill for leader types. But again, as we showed with navigation, even a 2nd level character has a reasonably good chance of being intimidating. In particular, if you are the lawful authority on the boat, and everyone has agreed to put themselves under you, this is ordinarily a decent reason to provide a circumstance bonus. Afterall, if someone comes and gets in your face and yells at you, its going to make a really big difference how you respond if they are wearing the uniform of a gunnery sergeant. And its going to make even more of a difference if you are a civilian off base whom they have no right to yell at, or if you are on base and wearing a private's stripe on your soldier. Ability to command is relative to rank. Sergants don't obey captains because captains are scarier than they are. They obey captains because that's part of their job.
In general, pretty much any skill will end up looking like this if we investigate it. You are reasonably compotent if you can pass about a DC 15 skill check most of the time. A DC of 15 represents a task requiring considerable skill. Most things of higher DC represent things like Craft, Search, or Open Locks were you can really take your time on the task and spend a long time on it (take 20).
It's very important that the game actually work like this. If it doesn't, it doesn't just mean that you have to wait until action hero or superhero level to be basically compotent. It means that every NPC out there making a living for themselves needs to also be action hero level to do their job. If it isn't true that you can command a boat at 2nd level, then every teamster, woodcutter, fisherman or merchant out there also has to have action movie hero capabilities. And if this is really the case, if basically ordinary people in the setting are superheroes, then what you've done is said that all the levels below 8th level are "apprentice levels" and perforce probably should be skipped in the way we usually ship playing a 0th level character. It also means that in addition to mundane tasks like commanding a boat, everyone in the setting is capable of action movie hero feats of leaping out of burning buildings and swinging through windows or surviving falls from 100' up - even the ordinary commoner on the street, or the ordinary fisherman on a boat. It means that it takes an 8th level or higher character to have a reasonable chance to not get their butt kicked by a couple of farmers (which might expain the 'housecat problem'), and what I think it will tend to encourage players who view the world this way is to say, "Well, the rules only apply to PCs, and not NPCs."
So, back to the question of a "pirate captain", we've got a small boat - maybe a 37' sloop or a small rowed galley of 12 oars depending on your settings tech level - and a small crew of 8-12 hirelings at 2nd level. But most players thinking "pirate captain", probably mean some bigger boat - something like they sea in the movies. What level do you need for that? Well, first of all, if by 'pirate' you are thinking some romanticized age of pirate criminals ship from near the end of the Great Age of Sail, like for example Pirates of the Carribean, then the tech level you are thinking of is well beyond traditional D&D which is grounded in 13th century technology or earlier. Even your Great Age of Pirates setting - your Dread Pirate Roberts or Captain Blood - is 17th century tech. By pirate of psuedo-medieval era, or a typical D&D equipment list, you should be thinking something more like a Viking raider. So to even have 'pirate' like you are thinking of, we are going to need to expand at least the price lists for available boats, and depending on how much versimilitude we want we are probably going to need equipment lists and rules for gunpowder and smoothbore cannon at least.
It's also worth noting that real pirates in the age of pirate criminals - your Blackbeards or Captain Kidds - didn't operate like Holliwood pirates. (Imagine that, Holliwood gets it wrong.) They didn't have big multigun frigates, didn't do a lot of sailing in open water if they could help it, didn't engage in artillery duels if they could help it, didn't try to fight naval vessels, and typically used small manueverable vessels crammed with as many cutthroats as they could to quickly board a small target and overwhelm its small crew in a boarding action. The era of pirates with big multigun ships, sailing in open water, engaging in artillery duels and fighting the naval vessels of foriegn powers was actually 100-200 years earlier in the golden age of pirates when pirates were backed monetarily and politically by nations as an instrument of virtually unrestricted warfare. D&D differentiates this class of pirate as 'buccaneers'. If you've played Sid Meier's Pirates, it's set in that era.
Anyway, so suppose though you have introduced a full range of great age of sail sailing vessels, complete with cannon or its versimlitude equivalent (magical weapons, wink wink 'balistas', etc.), in order to capture the idea of pirates from movies. What level are the captains aboard those ships? Well, really the answer is 'whatever you want'. If you are going for 'it looks like a summer blockbuster', then probably 7th level and up. If you are going for, 'it looks at casual inspection like historical pirates', then the answer is probably closer to 4th level and up. Remember, 4th level represents a 'hero' or an acknowledged master in their field. There aren't many of these characters around, but there are enough of them that they will compete for the right to captain the most desirable vessels. A second level character doesn't command enough respect to be entrusted with such a large vessel. While there aren't many 4th level characters in the setting, there are enough that if you've got a couple 100 sailors together, there are going to be at least a few. Even in a low level demographics world where most everyone is 0th or 1st level, you wouldnt' expect the captain of such a ship to be 2nd level. The most desirable ships in the setting probably have at least 5th or 6th level captains under even conservative demographics, not because you need to be that level, but because of simple economics.
And a couple of hundred is in fact the crew of these great age of sail multigun ships. Unlike in Holiwood, you can't successfully sail a 32 gun frigate to Tortuga with a crew of 2. You can't even do it with a crew of 2, plus the comic sidekick, the kick butt token girl pirate, and 20 extras that appear in the film - much less man multiple 12lber cannons and perform a 13 gun broadside while sailing the ship (since each cannon needs a crew of like 7, plus a powder boy retrieving ammunition).
You might be inclined to argue that you need Leadership to crew a ship. But this turns out to fail the same test. NPCs dont' need leadership to crew a ship. If they did, every merchantman would need a 6th level captain with the leadership feat, and once again that implies that every ordinary merchant captain has the skills of John McClain, 1st level and even 4th level characters are still apprentices, and that we should probably skip the first 6-8 levels in the same way we skip 0th level apprentices. Leadership feats give you particular bonuses with regard to how you relate to certain NPCs, but there is nothing that prevents a character - whether PC or NPC - from just continuing the practice of hiring hirelings including as D&D has always allowed, expert hirelings. (I'm going to avoid going into a long rant about just how badly designed the Leadership feat actually is.) One of the basic rules of D&D is unless the rules specifically prohibit something, it's permitted. Leadership permits acquiring loyal followers and henchmen, but it does not forbid acquiring hirelings by other means. A 32 gun frigate actually has a crew of like 270. If you pretend that you are being strict by the RAW and that the rules forbid you having followers without a leadership feat, then they forbid crewing a 'pirate ship' at all, since even with a leadership score of 25 you won't have enough followers to crew the ship!!! In fact, this isn't a strict reading of the RAW, it's a conveinent reading for advancing a certain argument, but it has nothing to do with the rules.
One complaint that you still might have at this point is that unless your character's class is Rogue or Expert, you probably dont' have enough skill points to cover every job a sailor might want to do well. This complaint is essentially again grounded in 'Holiwood reality' of the Pirates of the Carribean where a ship meant for 200 or 400 crew and ran as a business has the CEO doing every job on the ship by himself. In reality, most captains did nothing of the sort. While the captain might also be the pilot, and might be decent at it, it was more usual to employ a skilled hireling in the role of pilot or navigator. This hireling in turn might be very good at plotting a course, but know almost nothing about handling a sword. Likewise, the captain might know quite a bit about how to provision a ship and get the best prices for all the goods, but it was more usual to employ an expert hireling as the ship's quartermaster not only to do the job well or better, but simply because the captain didn't have the time to be the quartermaster, the pilot, the navigator, the surgeon, the carpenter, the boson, the lookout, and the cook all at the same time - and no one expected him to. All these NPC specialists can easily be very good at a particular skill or set of skills by 3rd or 4th level - it's not hard to out do a PC on a narrow set of skills at very low level just by focusing on nothing else. If you want to be able to do all of that, you aren't really asking to be a 'pirate captain'. What you are really asking to be is a 'pirate captain superhero'. D&D can handle a profession request, like 'pirate captain' from a quite low level. But it can never handle 'superhero' from a quite low level. This is because D&D is intended to start from the level of casual realism and move up into cinematic heros, superheroes, and eventually virtual demigods (justice league founders level stuff).
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