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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6145744" data-attributes="member: 87792">Seriously, it sounds as if D&D is the wrong game for you. And of the D&Ds, 4e is the best of them for satisfying you. I'd recommend that for your next campaign you look at <a href="http://www.evilhat.com/home/fate-core/" target="_blank">Fate Core</a> or possibly even Apocalypse World.This makes no sense to me. The DM tools and the player tools are strictly separated - and other than the DMG/DMG2/DM Kit all you ever need to look at are monster manuals.It sounds as if you want heroic tier. Level 1-3 as a starting point and rising to level 10. Paragon tier gets slightly crazy - and each PC is about the equivalent of a platoon of skilled orcs (as opposed to 1 skilled orc at heroic). As a rule of thumb, in 4e character power doubles every 4 levels - in older editions it doubles every 2.I hope "Welcome to D&D" doesn't sound too snarky. Queen of the Demonweb Pits, combating Lolth, was an oD&D/1e module for levels 10-14 first released in 1979. Deities and Demigods (aka the monster manual for munchkins) was released in 1980. And lead to a lot of killed deities. D&D at high level does this. Feature rather than bug - but I've never run a game at epic tier in 4e which is where you'd have to get to to take on a god directly by the MM.Gngk. They errata'd the solo rules to fix this. But yes, it was a mistake in the system.This is one of the design issues with 4e that's intended to encourage tension. Combat is set up with the idea that PCs shrug off damage by spending healing surges, so the damage they take looks a lot worse than it is. But to do this they need to actively spend the surges. Monsters on the other hand are set up to not have to do this to make the damage they've suffered look less than it is - and to prevent the DM having to faff around with healing surges. (3.X and Next are both designed with PC/NPC symmetry in mind). This asymmetry in 4e makes part of the job of the PCs to be able to rescue each other, and when someone goes down it's tense but not utterly overwhelming. A lot of the design goals in 4e revolve round the idea that some of the most exciting moments revolve round trying to prevent a pear shaped situation turning into a catastrophe (hence the three-strikes-and-out skill challenges and the scrabbling round to heal people). One-shotting someone in 4e (and it's slightly easier than it looks) goes against the entire design intent.But of course they never put designers notes into the game. So it's not easy to spot that this is a problem (largely because no monster ever has the ability to one-shot a PC without multiple failed saves).And here things IMO went truly off the rails.Again, it sounds as if you want heroic tier. Preferably before 5th level as a starting point.D&D started off life as a <a href="http://eudaimonaiaclaughter.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/tabletop-roleplaying-games-back-where-we-started/" target="_blank">hacked tabletop wargame</a> in which the intention was to win. And this has remained true throughout the history of D&D - the object isn't to win against the other PCs, it's to overwhelm the opposition. D&D is set up to enable such play (with one of the main criticisms of 4e being that it's balanced - i.e. that it clamps down on power gaming). I think that you either want to be running low level 4e (where there is little room for power gaming - once you cross the level 11 threshold all bets are off) or to be running a different game entirely. (And Next doesn't qualify here).A lot of games (4e is actually one of them) either balance the system meaning powergaming isn't such a problem or go gonzo and near-impossible to break. Again, this is a system problem not a player problem. Building a character is an art - although anyone can netbook a powerful character. And 3e in particular made character building into a game in its own right. When you tell someone who enjoys this type of game that their character is too powerful, it means they succeeded at a game that 3e encouraged massively and 4e didn't eliminate. By asking them to retire their character you've just told them they won. And they won at a fun game that was intended by the designers.If you're playing a fairly well balanced game where this isn't encouraged (again I'm going to point you at Fate Core or Apocalypse World, but heroic tier 4e fits this mold pretty well) powergaming as a problem almost goes away.Sounds as if you have two charming players.I strongly disagree with the idea that it's the encounter golden box that's the problem - see the 3.X strategic problems with barely restricted spellcasting. But yes, disruptive powergaming is often a response to DM storytelling. The players are there to engage with the world - and if the only way to engage with it is disrupt it rather than follow the DM's rails, that's what many do.</blockquote>

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