Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="KidSnide" data-source="post: 5818138" data-attributes="member: 54710">Here's the issue:  If the PCs gain power at a reasonable rate, early threats become obsolete over time (often a good thing).  Then middle career threats become obsolete, and -- if the game goes long enough -- it's hard to threaten the PCs without resorting to some of the most unusual creatures in the world.  You can wrap up a campaign in this configuration with an epic climax, but it's hard to keep it going without turning the world into silly-town.There are some solutions to this, but they create their own problems:- If you scale up all the enemies with the PCs, you get the Oblivion or the World of Warcraft situation, where the world is either filled with bizarrely powerful and unusual wandering monsters or the territory is now plagued with "abyssal" spiders that look just like the weaker forest spiders but are now super-strong.- If you keep the scaling flat, you get low-level PCs that can affect Orcus and high-level PCs who are in threatened by an orc.  You get an equally silly result and kill the sense of progress.It's worth noting that 4e made some progress towards this with the Solo/Elite/Standard/Minion/Swarm concept.  The same monster could interact with different level PCs with different stats.  First level characters could fight a single ogre as a solo while higher level paragons fight ogre minions or swarms of ogres.  The same monsters continue to populate the game world (and act as useful encounters), but you feel progress because now you're fighting 20 ogres by yourself when you used to have to gang up to take out one.  That's a nice idea, but 4e's implementation required a crap-load of re-stating and killed the sensible-if-not-strictly-required idea that a creatures stats represent objective facts in the gameworld and not merely a method by which a certain set of PCs can interact with that creature.What I'd love to see from D&DN is a system where the "to hit" math is a lot flatter than 4e but not completely flat and the "damage / hit point" math is only somewhat flatter than 4e.  That way, a 10th level character is still a lot more powerful than the orcs he fought at levels 1-3, but a hundred orcs are still a danger if the rest of his party isn't there to back him up.  Similarly, a 3rd level NPC ally armed with a suitably magical weapon could get a lucky hit on Orcus, but it would take a hundred lucky hits for Orcus to be seriously injured.  In other words, I would like to see the Solo/Standard/Minion/Swarm interaction, but without needing special rules to make it work.(Of course, I don't mind if some special rules are available for mass combat.  I just don't want them to be necessary to make the interaction work.)-KS</blockquote>

Verification