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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 258713" data-attributes="member: 172">Re: ELH--Perspective, Please!SomewhatPrecisely. Do you not remember the infamous Wick rant? His immediate claim was that the core rulebooks were 900 pages of soulless rules.Essentially, yeah. But if you are a regular member of this board, you probably understand what I do: in D&D, it is very often the DM vice the designer who breathes life into a game, we don't need a designer holding our hand to do it. You don't beleive me, drop by the story hour forum and just look at some of the fantasastic vistas that many DMs have created without a designer telling us what stories we want to tell.But in a way, I think we feel the absence of soul here more. Why? In part because even us veteran DMs aren't used to it. This is pretty much virgin territory, at least for those who aren't genuinely power gaming in the teenage powerplay vein. In 2e, forays into double digits were rare because once you were 13th level or so, balors and great wyrm dragons could be grappled with. Few campaigns survived much longer than that for me, or for that matter, any group I knew of. I never had a PC who could cast a 7th level spell in a game that wasn't a teenage munchkin-fest. And even then, it was pretty rare.But 3e comes along, and it's a bit more balanced. My players are 16th level. I have a PC sorcerer in my game who not only can cast 7th level spells, but can now cast 8th. Despite this, a trio of Gelugons is more than a sufficient challenge for 16th level characters, no need pit fiend and balors. Great Wyrm dragons? Fuggitaboudit!Now consider this, and we take the plunge into 21st level characters, and where 9th level spells can be cast with relative impunity, that nice new security blanket that let us open up the throttles a little is gone. It is all very dizzying. And scary.Especially because of that "M" word. You know that term is going to follow this book wherever it goes. People who couldn't resist making a "smackdown" with the old feats, prestige classes, et al., will have a field day with this book. There is lots to be scared of here. We are in the realm of characters with diviniation and trasportation abilities that make the game totally alien to anything that came before. Running a cohesive, substantial, challenging game in this environment will be hard. Making "smack-down" optimized characters will be easy.This book needs a lot of soul to help it overcome that. And to be fair, it has some. Look at the monsters. Look at the 100 epic adventures.But it has some not so good takes, I think. In many places, it just looks like "D&D turned up to 11" -- and it appears that it was intentional! Take a look at the new demographics rules. Take a look at some of the organizations and prestige classes, that throw out high level characters in a rather pedestrian manner, I thought. I don't want a game that is just about power inflation, but seeing god-blooded "celebrities" that have 15th level bard groupies just strikes me as wrong and really not in the epic spirit. I don't care what the prevailing level of the game is; 15th level characters should be nobodies patsies.Anyways, I think the ELH is really ambitious in one sense: it tries to eliminate the idea of a level cap. It tries to blow the field wide open. It's hard not to be scared of the power abuse potential.I think the trick to realizing the potential of the ELH is going to be to remember what Dr. Malcom said: don't think so much about what we could do, think about what we should do.So what SHOULD we do with it? As the quoted thread says, use it like the PH and DMG. In my campaign, I had some very high level characters that never got translated over to 3e becasue of the lack of high level rules. These characters would be in the 21-40 level range (30 was the cap in my old game, but the new multiclass rules push this out somewhat...). I don't really intend to have my players go much higher than 25th level or so... it's not really needed for what I have in mind for my game. However, the ELH will be instrumental in allowing me to create challenges that are always just beyond the PC's reach to keep the pressure on them.For me, that is the real advantage of the ELH, and in particular, the "no limits" thing: no matter how nasty the PCs are, there will always be someone out there who can ruin their day. That is the most important benefit of the ELH, I think.(Well there I blew about half of what I was thinking about throwing in my review...)</blockquote>

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