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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7214286" data-attributes="member: 4937">Your rightness seems to be in your own eyes a non-falsifiable claim.  Also, I quote only to get your attention or to be specific about what I'm addressing.  If anyone wants to read your whole post, it's right there.  I don't feel the need to have whole posted quoted, nor do I see how that clarifies anything.You seem to be taking a lot for granted with respect to play style, campaign demographics and so forth.  There is a noted tendency of 5e writers to get away from the 1-20 adventure path assumptions of 3e in favor of more limited 1e style adventure paths that cover a smaller range of levels.  This suggests that perhaps there is no reason to assume 10th level is just a chump, even if we are talking about silly campaign worlds like FR where in the past every bartender seemed to be 10th level.If 'Isle of the Ape' and 'Bloodstone Mines' are the best examples, then you've lost the argument.   Both are terrible in their own fashion.  'Isle of the Ape' pulls a typical Gygaxian trick of now that you've given the party more power than you can handle, you take it away in various arbitrary fashions - destroying items, removing access to spells or nerfing them.   This is not particularly fun as a more than one off situation.  If you can't allow the players to retain and use their nifty high level abilities to challenge them, then its pretty much proof high level play isn't particularly viable.  Likewise, the Bloodstone mines series is pretty ridiculous, grindy, and arbitrary and has been (rightly) soundly mocked more times than need repeating.  A better example would be 2e's 'Return to the Tomb of Horrors', but even it suffers some problems with needing arbitrary death mechanisms to create challenge - and I don't mean things like the dark fire or the traps, I mean things like 'If this monster that you can't avoid hits you, then you die no save' sort of situations. This is frankly ridiculous.  In 1e we didn't even have a concept of 'solo type monsters'.  The concept didn't really develop until 4e.  But whether we had the concept or not, in 1e a Marilith could very well been used as a solo type encounter - or what we'd now call a 'boss monster' - for a party of say 8th level.  In later editions, simply being CR16 (or whatever) meant that you could use it as a 'solo type monster' for a party of 4 12th to 14th level characters.  Only in 4e did they start playing with the concept of 'solo type monster', and mostly when they did so it was intended to address action economy issues involved with one creature needing more actions in order to address issues like smoothing the damage spikes by spreading the damage and avoiding a solo monster being what you might called 'stun locked' by 'save or suck' effects (which was a problem that was mostly noted in 3e with its robust 'save or suck' spells) and so forth.  The legacy of that is still visible in 'legendary' monsters. But a 1e Type V has multiple attacks, high AC, spell resistance, and immunities and so is in 1e a very good choice as a 'solo type monster' and indeed one of the better ones.   The only thing that is 'wrong' with it is that with just 8+8 HD, it's going to have a very hard time hitting the high AC's expected of high level characters with good equipment, and this renders it more of a mook once you get to 12th level or so.   It's not unreasonable to suggest that a DM with a background in 1e, 2e and 3e would expect a Marilith to be useable as a solo monster.   I suppose the comparison now is that to use a Marilith as a solo monster, you have to pit a party at 8th level or so against a CR 16 monster.  But not only do I suspect that this goes against 5e guidelines, I suspect it throws encounter budgets and XP budgets and so forth all haywire.Fundamentally, for all your claims about how right you are, you still aren't proving 5e as written is particularly viable at high level play, and comparisons to 1e - which also wasn't particularly viable for high level play unless the DM ratcheted down the PCs access to ability scores, player options and equipment or else invented a lot of content - only reinforce the truth of that.Yes, creating good challenges at high level has been a long running problem with D&D, but it is also true that there seems to have been the same lack of play testing high level play we saw in 3e and 4e as well.What exactly are you trying to prove that you are right about?</blockquote>

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