Justifying high level 'guards', 'pirates', 'soldiers', 'assassins', etc.

[Irda Ranger]

When you build your encounters for your game
you can do it however you want, as I stated earlier.

This is where you and I (and others) part ways. The way we play D&D the DM is bound to certain rules as surely as Odysseus is bound to the mast. We cannot build an encounter "however we want"; we must build it according to the mutual agreement between DM and PC about how the world works.

I get paid to play wargames. Damned if I'm going to do it in my spare time.

Now we come to the crux of the disagreement. You have emotional hangups that we don't. Please don't assume that the rest of us play wargames professionally. We do it in our spare time, and so we are looking for different things in D&D than you are. How we choose to play D&D has ZERO to do with our inability to realize the "correct" way of doing it and everything to do with the fact that we're looking to get different things out of it.

 

[IceFractal]

The counter to this...

Your character isn't going to have any conception of levels, or think it's weird that he can't beat up on the guards now without a care in the world.

Is this:

"Hey... what do you mean, we are the only ones who can save the city? Last week, when we got falsely accused of trying to kill the emperor we were outfought by the palace guards, and harried by the city guard until we could escpae and clear our name. If we can handle the Red Dragon, then they can handle him as well- they handled us. What do you mean, they are powerless against the dragon?"

If the PCs only fought the town guards, then it wouldn't be at all odd for the guards to level as fast as the PCs. However, the PCs fight monsters. And those monsters have a clear heirarchy. Fighting an Orc is not the same thing as fighting the Tarrasque. You can't pretend that there's only a minor power difference between someone who has a tough time defeating a couple wolves and someone who managed to stomp though an army of demons and force Orcus to retreat.


While NPCs don't have exact levels tattooed on their heads, they do have a relative heirarchy. For instance:
Party fights guards, basically a tie. Party ~= Guards.
Party fights Ogre, forced to retreat. Ogre > Party, Ogre > Guards.
Several levels later, party fights group of Ogres, defeats them handily. Party > Ogre.
Party fights a Dragon, barely able to survive. Dragon > Ogre.
Several levels later, party fights several Dragons, and wins. Party > Dragon.
...
Party goes back to town and gets in a fight with similar guards. Now the PCs know that Dragon > Ogre > Guards, and they can defeat dragons by the dozen. So if you suddenly say the guards are roughly as tough as the party, that's going to be nonsensical not only to the players, but to their characters.


Modern Day Example:
On the way to work, you sometimes pass a homeless guy who asks you for spare change. Then one day you win the lottery and become a multimillionaire. On your way back to work (to quit), you pass the same homeless guy, except he's now a moderately wealthy executive who asks you for a spare million dollars to buy a yacht. But he's still sitting on the curb next to a shopping cart, with a cardboard sign.

 

[Snoweel]

I prefer entertaining (which may entail challenging plots) adventures to challenging encounters.

Do you feel you can't have both?

And most of us have a different take on the game than you do.

And I'm sure most of us have a different take on the game than you or anyone else does. Unless you're claiming to be part of a monolith?

I think it's fair to say that no two people game exactly alike. But nice appeal to the masses anyway.

And we are paying attention to what you've been writing.

I don't think you are.

I think you've built up so much preconceived resistance to 4e that you're unwilling to try and look at it from a different point of view. You're married to your gripe that "OMFG TEH WHOLE WORLD LEVELS AT THE SAME TIME!!!!!!!1!!!"" and can't see that the mechanics now serve the game, not the other way around.

We disagree with you.

Obviously.

And it is a matter of us not wanting that sort of game, not a matter of us not understanding your points.

My point is that you can have any sort of game you want. You create the campaign world, you write the adventures, you build the encounters.

You do all this with your own view of how the world works and when it comes time for the PCs (the protagonists of the story, remember?) to swing their swords you start with the question "How challenging would this encounter be?"

If you're attached to the idea that a party of 15th level characters pwnz0r 100 pirates then you can handle it in a number of ways, depending on how much time (preparation and gaming time) you've got or whether anyone could be arsed rolling a combat involving 100+ combatants.

If you really want to roll initiative, attacks, saving throws and damage for 100 3rd level pirates against your 15th level PCs then fill your boots. The rules are there, it's all very straightforward. Nobody's going to stop you.

Just bear in mind that your PCs aren't really going to be chalenged. If you're happy with that and your players are too then go for it. But you could save a lot of time and dice rolling by turning the encounter into a skill challenge (or a series of them).

How about if your PCs meet the Pirate King's honour guard? Tougher pirates right?

How tough? Can you really give an absolute answer? Are they 5th level? 8th level? 10th level? 15th level? Are your players ever going to know without fighting them? Will it kill your verisimilitude if the pirates are 5th level or 15th? What the **** is a level anyway?

Decide how tough you want the encounter to be ('easy', 'normal', 'hard') and then build the encounter around the PCs. It'll be a bit of a downer if you come to the climactic battle and your 15th level party mauls the Pirate King and his mates in 2 rounds because you decided they just had to be 5th level.

This is where you and I (and others) part ways.

Surely you mean "This is where you (and others) and I (and others) part ways"?

The way we play D&D the DM is bound to certain rules as surely as Odysseus is bound to the mast. We cannot build an encounter "however we want"; we must build it according to the mutual agreement between DM and PC about how the world works.

How is that any different to what I've said?

Now we come to the crux of the disagreement. You have emotional hangups that we don't.

I might have emotional hangups but they've got nothing to do with your understanding of D&D 4e.

Please don't assume that the rest of us play wargames professionally. We do it in our spare time, and so we are looking for different things in D&D than you are. How we choose to play D&D has ZERO to do with our inability to realize the "correct" way of doing it and everything to do with the fact that we're looking to get different things out of it.

I'm not sure that the majority of people who play D&D do want a wargame. I'm talking about rules to simulate theatre-level conflict.

Sure they've popped up from time to time in the past but they don't exactly fly off the shelves do they?

I mean, I'm hardly one to subscribe to the rational actor approach to capitalism, and I'm firmly convinced the majority of consumers are dupes, but ultimately the market is driven by demand.

If people really wanted a wargame there'd be something decent on the market, don't you think?

Party goes back to town and gets in a fight with similar guards. Now the PCs know that Dragon > Ogre > Guards, and they can defeat dragons by the dozen. So if you suddenly say the guards are roughly as tough as the party, that's going to be nonsensical not only to the players, but to their characters.


Modern Day Example:
On the way to work, you sometimes pass a homeless guy who asks you for spare change. Then one day you win the lottery and become a multimillionaire. On your way back to work (to quit), you pass the same homeless guy, except he's now a moderately wealthy executive who asks you for a spare million dollars to buy a yacht. But he's still sitting on the curb next to a shopping cart, with a cardboard sign.

Funny.

You've made it clear what you think I'm trying to say but I ask you to look a bit closer.

I don't for a second suggest that town guards and the like should level at the same rate as the party. I believe I've made that clear.

What I am saying is this - town guards should be a varying challenge for a range of party levels.

This is what the PCs will notice.. how hard the guards are to fight. They won't see the guards' levels or any of the numbers, they will only see how hard or easy the fight is.

Who determines how hard the fight is? The gaming group. There are several different schools on how tough a 1st level PC is. Is it a kid with a sword? A highly trained soldier? Something in between?

That's for the group to decide beforehand.

So with your party's expectations in mind, the DM builds an encounter featuring the PCs and the town guard.

How tough are four guards against four 1st-level PCs? 'Hard', 'normal', 'easy'?

That's up to you. Choose your difficulty level and then assign levels. If you have levels in mind first then the difficulty level is decided for you. Easy.

How about 10th level characters? Are four guards an 'easy' encounter? No challenge at all? How many is 'easy'? Ten? Twenty?

Your call.

Just keep it in mind that if you decide you're not happy with 'no challenge at all' (which you can still play out using the combat rules, or turn into a skill challenge, or narrate through the encounter) and instead want the encounter to be 'easy' then you have to give the guards levels (or should I say "levels") that enable them to at least be a token threat to the PCs.

Then you make them X-level minions and off you go. Easy encounter. Your heroic, dragon-slaying party wiping the floor with a bunch of guards (4 x 10th level PCs vs 20 x 7th level minions = 'easy' encounter).

At what point of that encounter are the players or their characters going to wonder about metagame concepts like 'levels'?

But if that doesn't sit well with you then assign the guards whichever level makes you happy and resolve the encounter to your heart's content. Flip a coin, whatever. I don't really care.

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

First, I decide if the encounter is going to easy, medium or hard. Then, I create the stats for the encounter. I scale everyone practically in the game. Meaning, climbing a wall at 1st level is no different than 14th level. The same goes for foes; I simply increase their level and abilities as according to the DMG for scaling monsters.


The "Oblivion Effect" failed in Oblivion because mundane foes were replaced with really, really strange foes that used to not wander around. In application for 4E, I use the Easy,Medium,Hard DC table for all skill challenges and "climbing walls, bluffing guards", therefore ignoring the DCs as set by the Player's Handbook. I scale damage in accord with the foe's level depending if I want it to be an easy romp, a middling fight or a complete challenge.

In my games, the only thing that high levels truly equates to for PCs is dynamism and more options (via Powers and Feats). A Paragon hero is always going to be just as susceptable to falling off of a ladder as a 1st level character (but the caveat is that he will always be better than mundane folk).

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

. DMG chapters 4 and 5 are your friends. You can build an encounter as challenging as you need it to be.

THIS,

 

[Delta]

If you want the pirates to be a combat challenge they need to be able to hit your PCs. That requires their levels be within a certain range of the player characters (no more than 4 below according to the DMG).

First, I don't play 4E and I won't pay money to own any of the books. So no references to 4E will be useful to me. I'm assuming this discussion is relevant to any edition of D&D (as per the OP).

Second, you keep saying we "need this" and "need that" and it's untrue. All you need is the fact that natural 20's automatically hit anything, and enough of a pirate army to pile up the natural 20's probabilistically.

So fine, play the game a different way, that's cool. All I'm doing is playing by the 1E DMG where army captains are 8th level maximum (p. 30), city guard leaders are 5th level maximum (191), and the leader of a pirate fleet is 10th level maximum (MM p. 67). Just don't sit there and tell me I "need" to do things your way because I really don't.

 

[pemerton]

The problem with the "do not bother with thinking, all is just relative to the PCs" approach is that not everyone is swallowing this in every situation.

Snoweel is not saying "do not bother with thinking." S/he (? - the tone of the posts suggests a man to me) is saying that the 4e rules probably won't produce an optimal RPGing experience if level is treated as a measure of something ingame. Rather, it is a character-building and encounter-building device.

Now we come to the crux of the disagreement. You have emotional hangups that we don't. Please don't assume that the rest of us play wargames professionally. We do it in our spare time, and so we are looking for different things in D&D than you are. How we choose to play D&D has ZERO to do with our inability to realize the "correct" way of doing it and everything to do with the fact that we're looking to get different things out of it.

I don't think that Snoweel is questioning your gaming preferences. S/he is saying that it is wrong to say that it makes no sense for high-level PCs to face predominantly high-level NPCs. This only makes no sense under a certain assumption about the ingame meaning of levels, which 4e is not designed around.

4e levels are intended as a meta-game device, for encounter and character building.m Treating them as measures of ingame prowess seems apt to produce a slighly wonky play experience.

I think that 4e does have aspects of character/NPC build that are meant to correlate to ingame phenomena, namely, Heroic, Paragon and Epic tiers. It also gives a slight nod to the simulationist reading of levels, by suggesting (via the monsters listed in the MM) that PCs at different tiers should be facing different sorts of challenges (eg the Underdark monsters such as Drow, Mind Flayers and Grimlocks seem to be mostly paragon-level threats), thus meaning that no play group is forced to confront the non-simulationist understanding of levels.

In my games, the only thing that high levels truly equates to for PCs is dynamism and more options (via Powers and Feats). A Paragon hero is always going to be just as susceptable to falling off of a ladder as a 1st level character (but the caveat is that he will always be better than mundane folk).

I think that the Heroic/Paragon/Epic distinction is intended to have some sort of ingame meaning (and Paragon PCs probably don't climb many ladders, so that particular issue can be dodged - just as the transition to the Underdark allows dodging the whole "what does level mean" issue to a certain extent).

No, here's the option you're overlooking: There could be more of them. Hundreds of them. In an armada of ships.

That's exactly how it worked in core OD&D/1E. Ideally you'd want a new combat mechanic that easily dealt with that scale, however. (As was provided with things like original Chainmail/ Swords & Spells/ Battlesystem.)

The problem with this is that it has the following implication: the reward for having your D&D character level successfully is to get to play a different game (a wargame rather than an RPG). That's not necessarily a recipe for a popular game. I certainly know that it wouldn't interest me.

 

[Irda Ranger]

I think you've built up so much preconceived resistance to 4e that you're unwilling to try and look at it from a different point of view.

Oh? Is that what you think?

Forgive me. Analysis of motive and behaviour is part of my job and it often intrudes into my hobbies.

I’m going to guess what you do professionally and hope that you're professional attempts at analysis show better results than you've shown here so far. Otherwise I fear for the safety of Australia. There are some things you’re just not grokking.

• The OP asked "How do you justify 16th level castle guardsman?", and many folks answered "We don't, because they'd simply never be 16th level in our campaign." The way we play D&D, NPCs' levels are determined by the shared assumptions among the group of how the game world "is".
• Many who has posted here start encounter design with the question "Given how I've explained the world to my PCs, how tough should these guys be?" For run of the mill pirates, assassins and guards that usually means levels 1-5. NPC levels don’t scale with the PCs levels at all.
• This has nothing to do with 4E, or our assumptions about the edition. It has to do with D&D, and how we choose to play. 4E is just a different set of rules for playing the same game we’ve been playing for decades now.
• We understand where you’re coming from. For those of us who have played Oblivion we’ve even experienced it. And we do not like it.
• We can give “absolute answers” about what level certain NPCs are, and our players can too. NPC "level" is the ability to challenge PCs of a similar level. PCs know that most city guards will be levels 1-4. If those guards suddenly pose a challenge to 15th level PCs, yes, the players will notice. They’re not idiots. And they’ll rightly ask me “Dude, WTF?”
• My players (and I, and others here) expect the world to show some consistency from one game session to the next, rather than warp and twist from one day to the next. That’s how we like it. That’s how we’ve played it for many years. And the fact that we’re playing 4E these days has nothing to do with it.

 

[Irda Ranger]

4e levels are intended as a meta-game device, for encounter and character building.m Treating them as measures of ingame prowess seems apt to produce a slighly wonky play experience.

Can you summarize the difference between "Encounter difficulty" and "In game prowess"?

As far as I can tell, they're the same thing. NPCs capable of presenting a challenging encounter to 16th level PCs possess a great deal of "in game prowess". Unless you subscribe to the philosophy that NPC toughness can vary from one day to the next (which I do not - I expect a little consistency in my worlds), NPCs that can fight 16th level PCs can wipe the floor with 99% of the population, and my players expect the in-game world to reflect that.

The problem with this is that it has the following implication: the reward for having your D&D character level successfully is to get to play a different game (a wargame rather than an RPG). That's not necessarily a recipe for a popular game. I certainly know that it wouldn't interest me.

How does switching from fighting Orcs to fighting Drow suddenly make D&D a wargame?

Further, I think the 4E DMG (and posts from the designers) was pretty clear about the fact that different Tiers will have different styles of play. If you don't want to graduate to Paragon Tier style adventures, cap level advancement at 10th level and play the 4E equivalent of E6.

 

[Staffan]

• Many who has posted here start encounter design with the question "Given how I've explained the world to my PCs, how tough should these guys be?" For run of the mill pirates, assassins and guards that usually means levels 1-5. NPC levels don’t scale with the PCs levels at all.

This is mostly where I stand, except I allow "different perspectives" on what would be the same "stock" NPC. This is pretty much as shown in the MM: a level 4 party might go up against an orc tribe and fight, among other things, orc raiders (level 3) and orc berserkers (level 4). Later in their career (level 8-9), they are fighting an ogre tribe that has ogre savages and skirmishers (level 8), but the tribe also has a bunch of enslaved orc warriors (level 9 minions) they use for cannon fodder.

These orcs could very well have been survivors of the original tribe, but instead of being level 3-4 "full" monsters, they are now level 9 minions. They supposedly offer roughly the same threat value (150 XP for orc raiders and 100 XP for orc warriors), but as minions they work better against higher-level PCs.