Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cronocke" data-source="post: 6347744" data-attributes="member: 63379">I'm saying that when you have people able to summon black tentacles from the ether, creating illusory terrain, calling forth powerful creatures from other planes of existence, etc. then everyone needs to operate at that level.D&D is two games strapped together very awkwardly. One is a game of wizards and priests slinging powerful spells back and forth, altering reality around them and dueling with powerful avatars of demons and evil gods. The other is a game of swordsmen and thieves fighting kobolds and orcs. The entire game is balanced around the first group's existence, with the second group more of an afterthought. Sure, you can very carefully portion out encounters so everyone fights only the threats that they are most suited for, but it requires a lot of handholding to work properly.If "as realistic as possible given the fantasy conceits" is really one of your tone preferences, why are you playing D&D in favor of, say, the Black Company d20 game, or Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, or something else? Flying invisible summoning batteries are quite outlandish, after all.The gun is advantageous at ranges of 20+ feet in real life. Closer than that, the knife has advantage, as the video showed. Situational modifiers that make different weapons better or worse are fine, to me. But if one sword does twice as much damage every time, regardless of who swings it, and the only tradeoff is a minor cost increase, why does the other sword exist?Gandalf went toe to toe with a balrog by collapsing the bridge under it to weaken it and having a magical ability to come back from the dead that the balrog didn't. Frodo had a magic ring and a dagger of orc-kin-slaying, and spent a lot of the story weakened by the ring's effects so he was unable to fight. I'm not saying that "being an angel" isn't awesome, but as far as what the books and movies showed us, it really wasn't that impressive.I sincerely doubt that. CR exists for a reason - to make encounters work with that wide of a level discrepancy basically requires throwing out the concept of CR and assigning different enemies to different characters or something along those lines. If you really had everyone having fun and being productive in combat, you either spent a lot of time working on the fights - which is commendable - or you had players used to being useless in the adventure and mostly just enjoying hanging out with friends, which is sadly all too believable.This is one of the things I find cool about non-D&D-derived games - combat is not the default assumption, it is only one method of advancing a scene. Further, combat role and out-of-combat versatility being unrelated is also a great thing - you want to be a philosophizing warrior poet? You can! You want to be a brutal thug who literally breaks into jewelry stores and steals things messily? You can! You want to be an idiot savant who knows how to use hexes and witchcraft but doesn't know how to tie his shoelaces? You can!</blockquote>

Verification