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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MoogleEmpMog" data-source="post: 3732518" data-attributes="member: 22882">Low-level play doesn't really resemble Call of Cthulhu, either, though, and mid-level play doesn't at all.  D&D as it stands - and this is largely true of past editions, as well: BECMI even ends with 'Immortal' as the default assumption of where characters will end up, as power players on the godly level - never resembles Call of Cthulhu and does eventually resemble Champions.  Mike said the inverse, which, as I said, runs completely contrary to my experience.Agreed, and I do prefer the game at these levels as well - D&D has not traditionally been a very GOOD supers system. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />But a 14th level D&D character could handle any non-'divine' Mythos creature in combat, slay a shoggoth or hack a hunting horror.  It might not be easy and it wouldn't be safe, but he would be able to pull it off.  Even a 6th level D&D character is at the very least at the upper limits of human potential, able to take on weird and powerful monsters from fey to aberrations to even less-powerful dragons and demons.  WITHIN the sweet spot, D&D PCs exceed human limits and go toe to toe with things that Call of Cthulhu PCs would be mooked by in seconds.So be it.Obviously 4e will cater to your wishes in this regard, and that makes it completely unusable out of the box for MY wishes.Which, ironically, have NOTHING to do with playing at the supers level.  Neither of my preferences - JRPG and Sword and Sorcery - actually require the kind of really esoteric stuff we're talking about.  They do, however, require something other than the baseline Tolkienisms, and this will not initially be available in full form.We differ.LA +1 or LA +0.  Better than an elf, but elves are too weak anyway.  It's not better than a dwarf.It does?  It shows itself as a useful ability - but a "huge problem?"  I can count on zero hands the number of times I've seen PCs use charm person more than a couple of times per day.  Most situations where it's useful, it's incredibly dangerous - because if you get caught, there's a very good chance you'll be imprisoned for it.  You can charm your way out of the trouble you got yourself into, but then you'll be in WORSE trouble if you fail.  You may well have a short trip to the gallows.That's for, say, magicking a merchant or a cleric (especially good luck on the latter; plenty of LN and CN clerics will make their Will saves, fake that they didn't, and cast a cause rather than cure wounds spell.  Using it to sleep with a princess?  Bam - you're dead, right there, if you don't get away with it, for using magic on a member of the royal family and almost certainly causing a diplomatic nightmare in the process.Anyway, Diplomancer (a character with a high Diplomacy skill) can do any of this in 3e more reliably (and eventually, more potently) than your theoretical fey creature.  A sorcerer with charm person can effectively do it most of the time as he gets to higher levels, and can often pull it off even at 1st or 2nd level if he picks his targets carefully - certainly he can do the cleric or the merchant or the bartender or even the princess just as easily; any one of those takes all of one spell, and a sorcerer has at least four.Finally, aside from the 'money as balancing factor' problem with the merchant and cleric examples, what's wrong with any of the situations you described cropping up in game?  Free drinks?  Yee gods, so WHAT?!  Seducing a princess or bribing/charming a guard is risky business, but it's rather in-character for adventurers, so why not?  Charming an orc guard?  What, are we only supposed to kill him and take his stuff, and any other mundane or magical solution is 'problematic?'Frankly, I see no reason charm person wouldn't BE an at-will, or at least per-encounter, spell in 4e.  It's a relatively minor effect with potentially severe drawbacks.Or use racial hit dice to balance their abilities.  Everything you're describing (size/reach, strength and NA, regeneration, beguilement, save or die, immunities to various forms of death) is available to PCs.  None of it is game breaking as a magic item or a spell or a class feature, but Principle forfend it be a racial ability?  The problem here is the tendency to treat race as a tiny package of abilities that modify the character in small ways and class as the be-all and end-all of what he can do.  And again, none of your objections address the fact that ALL OF THOSE THINGS ARE COMPLETELY POSSIBLE IN OTHER GAMES.Racial hit dice are "worse" because the LA system was a kludge imposed after the fact.  They don't have to be.I can't speak to your DM's sanity.  I know MY sanity as a DM will be ill-served by, if I switch to 4e as a matter of course, having to write houserule documents as long as the ones I had for 2e before I abandoned that system.Obviously, if this is the case, I will NOT switch to 4e.  I'll study what is no doubt a brilliant bit of game design (as radically as I disagree with Mike Mearls' apparent vision of what D&D is and/or should be, I consider him the best Tactics/RPG designer and developer working today and know he and the WotC team will execute their design goals extremely well), perhaps play it if others run it, and try to sell material that expands the game back to where it was before what will be for me and the people I play with a crippling, game-killing contraction.And, I become increasingly convinced, I'll GM a Star Wars Saga Edition-derived fantasy rulesset that can use the incredible wealth of material produced for 3e without being shackled to the clunky, overcomplicated system and its blessed bovines.</blockquote>

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