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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5164374" data-attributes="member: 4937">Indeed.  However, assuming that EGG and company are asserting that 10th-15th level characters are reasonable high level gaming (and by extension 15th-30th is 'epic' in modern terms, and anything above that is a god), then it follows that against a party of 10th-15th level characters a spell-casting foe that provides a reasonable challenge has to be of higher level than the average members of the party.  Hense, a BBEG wizard or lich might need to be 18th level or higher in order to provide a really legimate challenge as a solo or semi-solo (BBEG + 'minions') encounter.   So, its quite possible to percieve a need for high level spells even if you don't anticipate them seeing much use by PC's.  Afterall, while it might be possible with a stretch to provide a challenge for a party of 10th-15th level characters, it doesn't necessarily hold true that with the same system you can provide a reasonable challenge for 18th-21st level characters.  At some point, you run out of easy scalability.If you look at EGG's theories of play as a whole, I think what EGG was railing against wasn't so much 'high level play' as it was his perception that too many DM's were discouraging what EGG considered 'skillful play' by making attaining high level too easy.  The real heart of his complaint is I think that 'high level play' makes it easy to overcome all challenges with 'character skill' rather than the 'player skill' he thinks that the game should encourage.  EGG is railing against MHism because he thinks (coming from a competitive wargaming background) that ultimately, overcoming a challenge with character skill is less satisfying (and more likely to cause the majority of players to percieve the game as shallow and unrewarding) than overcoming it with player skill.  He's comparing MH to giving one player of a war game a very large army, and then placing him against a series of very weak armies.  And he's deriding the practice of playing the equivalent of 'very large armies' on the grounds that the game rules aren't designed to speedily accomodate, adjudicate, or balance the equivalent of running of 'armies' beyond a certain size.I don't think that it follows that by providing more powerful foes, they were necessarily cateering to the MHers.  If you look at EGG's high level adventurers, they most certainly don't cateer to MH or the sort of players who would be satisfied by MH.</blockquote>

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