I dislike doubleposting, but I suppose it's better than critting everyone with
wall of text for Over Nine Thousand.
The rest of your post though kinda comes down to learning to gm. Either the gm finds some route that works for the table & the style game they run or everyone hates it for whatever reason till they learn something that works.
Point taken that situation matters, but solutions shouldn't be so
perfectly unique that
nothing whatever can be learned or generalized. Gamemastery is an art. So are cooking, drawing, and music--but there are principles and rules of thumb to all of them. Guidelines, obeyed not slavishly, but because obeying them almost always results in better work. That way, when you DO choose to break them, it's because you're confident things will be better for it. (You can never
know for sure, that's part of the risk of making art.) Consider that "intentionally throwing a TPK at the party is a jerk move" thing I said earlier. A really good DM, with players who know and trust her, probably COULD pull off an intentional TPK...not because doing so is a good idea
normally, but because she's experienced enough to know how to
make it work.
I never got deep enough into 3e to know what Spheres of Power/Might even were (are they a 3.5 thing? never really did 3.5).
It's Pathfinder only. Spheres of Power replaces Vancian spells with Spheres, which are...both far more focused thematically (since "spell" means "basically anything magical" in 3e and its children) and more flexible for "cantrip-like" use (many simple effects cost no spell points), while being overall more costly (getting even 30 spell points is difficult without major effort, and many effects cost 2 or more spell points to cast). Spheres of Might creates an entirely new system of semi-"martial only" Spheres (that is, most of them scale based off BAB), many of which add new movement options and juice up Special Attack Actions, which use only your standard action and not a full-round action, encouraging a more mobile, dynamic battlefield. Both Spherecasters and martial Sphere users can get more Spheres by spending feats--hence the system is a direct power-up to Fighters, who get tons of bonus combat feats.
It's a very neat system. It's just...still shackled to the flaws of 3e. It
does make playing a martial character a lot more interesting at low levels, but at high levels you still run into some problems of "3 spell points and the fight is basically over" if your spellcasters have done their stuff intelligently. It does, however, significantly reduce the punishment factor of multiclassing as a caster (many things use "MSB"--Magic Skill Bonus--which is just the flat sum of your levels in caster classes, analogous to BAB) and generally makes a more flavor-focused character building experience without sacrificing the
detail of character building that fans of 3e love so much.
The underlying principle in 3e of tying every creature in the setting to a quasi-universal and consistent-within-setting mechanical framework is an excellent starting point. That they then went on and kinda butchered the execution doesn't diminish this.
And my point is that that may not be as excellent as you claim. It forces you to ensure, for example, that no character of a certain level can do more than a certain amount of damage, otherwise an ogre
isn't an absolute threat. You don't actually "know"
anything about how dangerous it should be or how it will behave in-world, because a first-level Fighter might blow it away or might get blown away with no meaningful way to assess the likelihood of other. A first-level Bard might be able to persuade a minotaur to abandon its monstrous lifestyle and take up selling fine ceramic dishware, or might not be able to convince it that the sun is shining
when it can see sunlight coming in through the labyrinth's entrance.
That's what I mean by enslavement to the numbers. You commit to those things in that way, and you end up with a trilemma:
1: You shackle what your players are allowed to do. (Some think this is what 4e did; I obviously disagree.)
2: You have a "system" that
supposedly tells you what to expect, but is actually worthless for making any kind of prediction. (This is, demonstrably, what 3e did--CR is just the most
obvious example thereof. "Diplomancy" is another.)
3: You have a "system" that says, "well, if it doesn't work,
you figure it out, you're in charge after all." (Arguably what 5e does, and not exactly much of a "system" either.)
First thing: the whole idea of CR, while possibly helpful for new DMs, isn't something I really subscribe to.
Okay. So why are you so hung up on the threat level presented by a monster always being a fixed thing? "Attack roll" is an abstraction. "Hit points" are an abstraction. "Armor class" is an abstraction. Why do these abstractions need to be turned into the unquestionable bedrock of reality, instead of being recognized as the abstractions they are and leveraged for what utility an abstraction can provide?
Pretending that an abstraction IS reality is exactly how we get the problems 3e has:
players exploiting the fact that an abstraction, no matter how thorough, will never truly correspond to what they're abstracting. That's how you get "whack-a-mole" healing, for instance, because
the only hit point that matters is the last one.
But to say that Grunt the Ogre has 45 hit points doesn't constrain anything.
Yes, it does. It means that a low level character cannot do more than 45 hit points of damage in a single attack, otherwise ogres are pushovers. That, no more and no less, is my point. When you set these numbers, they shape the system: they
define what players are allowed to do. Or else they
don't define what players are allowed to do, and thus abjectly fail to give you the reliable bedrock of "physics" to predict how things should go, whether because the system just tells you nothing (3e), or the system tells you to go with whatever your gut tells you to do anyway (5e).
The irony, of course, is that by having relative numbers, players can do whatever they like. Despite all the rhetoric about 4e taking away the freedom and yadda yadda, at a game design level it's actually the reverse.
There's nothing wrong with assessing threats as relative until-unless that assessment starts forcing mechanical changes; at which point it violates setting consistency.
Why does it have to do that?
Why do the numbers need to be what the creature physically is?
Because then you end up with, in a way, Schroedinger's lock. That particular element of the physical setting in which the characters are supposed to operate becomes inconsistent with itself from one moment to the next, which in my view is unacceptable setting design.
No, you DON'T, and that's one of the key problems here, something you're not getting. Schrödinger's lock is "this lock becomes whatever it needs to be to challenge the party when the party arrives to face it." THAT IS NOT WHAT I SAID. What I said was, "This lock is supposed to be hard for [typical] 5th level characters." Whosoever said that the party HAD to be 5th level when they find it? Populate your world! Give it locks that make sense for the areas they're found in! The only way you're going to get Schrödinger's lock is if YOU put it there!
It isn't identical in threat, not due to anything that's changed about it but due to what's changed about the PCs as they've advanced in level. It still is what it was.
Again: WHY DO THE NUMBERS NEED TO BE WHAT IT PHYSICALLY IS? These are abstractions! The physical entity has its physical properties, yes, but the
abstractions are whatever we as creators decide them to be.
The change is in you, not the gym.<snip>The parallel here is that the change is in the PC, not the ogre or the rat. I don't use threat assessment as a starting point. The creature is what it is and it's up to the players/PCs to figure out its degree of threat. Whcih again means the difference is in the patient (the PC), not the pathogen (the ogre). You've made my point for me, here.
But
nothing physically changes about the teen, or the 2x4, when faced with each of these opponents; and therefore were this a game there's absolutely no reason to change any of the teen's mechanical descriptors.
Except that there ARE reasons, and OF COURSE the change isn't in the thing itself. You have presumed this whole time that these abstraction numbers--accuracy, defenses, combat endurance, etc.--need to be LITERALLY IDENTICAL to the creature itself. Why? We already know that, as Gygax himself put it, it makes no sense that a 10th-level Fighter has flesh tougher than a battle-hardened warhorse. A ten-ton lizard could not fly on wings of comparable length to its body, and certainly could not breathe
ice on things, yet they do. These numbers and properties ALREADY deviate from what is physically true and predictable.
To me they're being measured against the setting as a whole. The setting is more than just the PCs.
Why
should they be? You're not testing the whole setting all the time. The only thing you're testing regularly
is the PCs. Yes, you can absolutely have things that are NOT Schrödinger's locks. (That, incidentally, was why I gave the example in the first place.) But
for a rule system about playing a game as player characters, the only thing that matters is
what the player characters do. Trying to keep a perfect simulation of everything against everything else is just....well, unnecessary effort, for one thing, and directly leads to many of the serious problems of 3e as stated above.
Ditto for the allegedly viable but actually pushover range; the point is that the wider that allegedly-viable range is the better IMO.
I used the word "allegedly" for a reason, as in "NOT viable, but deceiving you into thinking it is." So "allegedly viable but actually pushover" would be no better, other than giving some players that feeling of power for stomping on things a lot.
That's...not really relevant, given that you were
specifically skewering 4e over the (strongly implied) "every encounter should always be in Schrödinger-style lockstep with the party's level" thing. That's why I was balking. Responding with "and 3e, and 5e" to that is missing the point by such a massive degree it calls into question whether you were trying to aim diametrically opposite it.
A death-free adventure in my games is unusual - there's most often one or two - but a TPK is very rare: I've DMed one TPK in 37 years. Also, an average adventure in my games takes about 8-10 sessions to play through, so it's not like there's a death every session*.
The lack of TPKs is
extremely surprising to me, given what I usually hear from other OSR-type fans. As in, having less than 1 TPK every five years would be surprising to most of those folks.
Yeah, I go for a bit more of a gritty style. High adventure and heroism can be fine for a while, but that's all.
Whereas for me it would be perfectly accurate to say, "Yeah, I go for a high adventure and heroism style. Gritty can be fine for a bit, but that's all." The only real exception to that is Shadowrun, and even then I lean toward the lighter-and-softer/brighter-and-hopeful side of it: the world might suck, but if people would STOP being so gritty and selfish, it not only COULD but WOULD get better.
The thing with C-as-A and the setback-rally-recovery-victory pattern in combat is that the pattern becomes very predictable, and thus boring. I remember seeing this in 3e, where it became almost a meme or joke amongst us that if we could get to the third round of combat we'd win no matter what.
Then your DM was(/DMs were) being...not very good, I'm afraid. Because I guarantee you this was NOT the case in any 4e game I've played of meaningful length (more than four sessions). I have had to retreat from fights because "setback-rally-recovery" DIDN'T do enough. I have had fights where no real "rally-recovery" happened, we just eked out a bare-survival victory by the skin of our teeth. And other times where there was no "setback," it was just victory. Or where the "setback" didn't happen until midway through the fight, because the monster wasn't what it seemed!
If your DM was(/DMs were) being THAT predictable,
even in 3e with all its foibles...I'm sorry, I can't believe that ALL the blame rests on the system.
That said, I'm all about unpredictability in combat: re-rolled initiatives each round, fog-of-war, etc.
Oh jeez, rolled initiative each round is just such a
pain though. Talk about bloating fights up, I've seen that easily double the length of a fight. (It's why my W20 storyteller stopped doing that.)
Can't speak for the OP but in my case this isn't true. It more relies on the enemies - the intelligent ones, anyway - making themselves stronger and more threatening than they otherwise might be, through good and smart use of tactics.
That definitely doesn't track with the way most people explain Combat-as-War. It's usually explained with references to Tucker's Kobolds (which, incidentally,
were quite lethal according to the stories), flooding the enemy's stronghold so they all asphyxiate, and otherwise making it so tactics and advantages are
overweeningly lethal when used by the enemy unless thwarted by even-more-lethal tactics and advantages exploited by the PCs.
