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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6784250" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right. Again, I have nothing against the idea of a 'high level king' and I'm sure that some ways of gaining a kingdom could net you a lot of XP too. I just think its not necessary to posit that every king is a super heroic level warrior that can take on 10 ordinary men and not really break a sweat.Well, first of all, Cimmeria et al isn't really all that fleshed out. We get a lot of atmospherics, but we never learn much about the actual society or anything like that. Contrast with other fantasy series, Middle Earth has a deep history and cultures, etc. What is there for Conan to be attached to? Even so Howard feels it necessary to construct a background for his character that deliberately isolates him from all positive social influences. His whole tribe is murdered, he's enslaved and chained to a wheel for 10 years, etc. Of course he's a homicidal maniac with no attachments! And obviously you can simply play a game of D&D like that too. I'm not even putting down such a game, but its not like the D&D system can ONLY do that. The argument that "NPCs must be high level to keep order against homicidal PCs" may be a technique for such games, but it isn't some kind of law of D&D that has to be followed. It is part and parcel of a 'shallow' kind of campaign environment where there isn't much of a society and the PCs are basically outsiders with no constraints. It would be, but the point is that even high level PCs in 5e can meet their match, and meet it in the City of Podunk if they aren't careful. It militates towards a more subtle approach to the populace. You may actually care about what they think, how the laws and traditions work, etc. You might be able to slay Good King Fruit Salad with trivial ease, but that doesn't mean you won't be run out of town by 100 knights that were loyal to him a week later. Clearly high level 5e characters have a lot of personal power, but its a lot more like the real world where even the most bad assed special forces dude doesn't just ride into town and declare himself to be King of Dallas or whatever. If you want to run things you have to play by the rules. Maybe you can bend them and rewrite them to some extent, and maybe being a bad ass might come in handy sometimes, but MOST of having power is politics. I imagine it would be that way in 5e too.</blockquote>

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