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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 2466470" data-attributes="member: 4720">No, I don't mean to insult people who want a lower-powered game.  I mean to insult people who read "a game without magic items that still allows the characters to face the same challenges" and somehow thought that the characters should be weaker.  That's an error of expectation at best and a gross logical error at worst.  If Characters + items = able to withstand a given encounter, and I take away the items but tell you the characters are still able to withstand that encounter, then I must have given the characters something to compensate.  If someone can't solve that equation... well I'm glad I don't play the game with them, because the math involved must be excrutiating.  And if it's the error of expectation problem, well that doesn't give people a license to come in here and bitch that their well-labeled root beer doesn't taste enough like cola.And now that I've offended a few dozen more people... will someone define "low powered"?  I'd really like to know what that means.  What are we comparing against each other to determine what's "low"?  Is vanilla D&D low powered at low levels?  After all, a single lucky hit can kill most level 1 characters.  That's actually sort of "realistic" (to use another silly, pointless word in the gaming milieu).  Is it simply low powered if you're throwing lower numbered dice around?  That seems to be the most common definition that I can see.  The other common one seems to be some kind of vague "similarity to the real world" metric.  Of course, no two people seem to share the same metric, so that seems like another meaningless term in these discussions.  The other fallacy I see thrown around is that it's low powered if the characters aren't hitting things very hard, and high powered if the characters are hitting things very hard.  How hard the things hit the characters doesn't seem to be an issue for those people.  OK, so it's low powered if the GM gets to "win" and high powered if the players get to "win."  No wonder power-creeping splatbooks sell so well, but all the GMs are in here bitching that there aren't enough "low powered" games.</blockquote>

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