NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 6068456" data-attributes="member: 58416">Maybe it's just me, but I more commonly remember Conan simply hacking the evil magic user's body apart.My answer to a lot of what you proposed is quite simply that real life doesn't have CRs and/or levels.  Against an ancient dragon (or similarly strong foe,) you either need to be that strong yourself or find enough people willing to help you that you have a hope of bringing the thing down.  The latter is something which is pretty well supported in the fiction which D&D was inspired by; Smaug was worthy of facing an army by himself.  That's really not the point though.Yes, magic bends reality.  As such, that tends to trump means which rely on the rules of reality because magic need not abide by those rules.  However, there are several game systems which have found excellent ways of dealing with that simply by having magic systems which make more sense in the context of the game world and the fiction of the game.  One example is having casting a spell cost Fatigue Points (or something similar.)  While there are optional rules for D&D which introduce magic points or spell pool systems, that's the not the same thing.  FP is associated with the body and becoming tired; casting spells physically tires you because it is taxing to warp the fabric of reality.  A wizard can still cast when FP is drained, but doing so is potentially very harmful and starts to burn HP (or comes with other problems.)  On the other side of the coin, FP can be used for non-magical things as well; the fighter can push his body to deliver more force with a blow or to add a little more oomph into an effort to jump over something.  I also think part of the problem is due to what encounter design has become in D&D.  Sure, I think it's cool that we have a codified way to say "ok, this many monsters means this challenge."  What I don't think is cool is that the 'encounter' has become another unit of measure within the game.  Characters are now measured in how many encounters they can get through.  While I do see merit in that, I think it has created the problem of the D&D Workday and needing to make sure all classes interact with the measuring unit of encounter the same way.  If the world is your encounter and things grow more organically from play, I believe it starts to matter less that the wizard can rewrite reality a limited number of times because burning all of your juice for doing so leaves you in a weakened state.  Granted, there is then the argument that "well, then everybody just rests when the wizard can't keep going."  I think that's only true in a game where the wizard is so much better than the fighter that the fighter can't hack it without the wizard.  If both feel more equal, it becomes less of an issue.  Likewise, if -as a GM- the group is aware that the world beyond their characters doesn't stop moving just because the party has, I think that helps too.</blockquote>

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