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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4486660" data-attributes="member: 42582">I musn't have been clear - I agree with this. This is what I meant when I talked about a "nod to the simulationists".My wargame comment was directed at Delta - in the quote from Delta that my reply was posted beneath, Delta talked about using a new mechanical system (eg Chainmail) to play out fights between Superheroes and hundreds of normals.I'm not objecting to ingame consistency. Thus, I want a consistent answer to the question whether or not a given NPC can wipe the floor with 99% of the population. But the answer to this question turns on the NPC's ingame prowess. And I think that, in answering this question, the game can toleratee a degree of flexibility in the correlation of stat block to ingame reality.To give one example - I don't think it follows from the fact that the PCs can more-or-less handle a fight with a 12 level Adult Green Dragon, and then have a bit of trouble against the level 13 Drow encounter set out on p 95 of the MM, that we have to infer that that Drow patrol could itself have taken on and beaten the Green Dragon. The fact that the game mechanics give the PCs the advantage over the dragon needn't be taken to correspond to entirely to the ingame prowess of the PCs - it might be taken as a narrative conceit, intended to yield the ingame outcome that it is the PCs who are the dragon slayers of the world.Obviously that sort of flexibility is limited in what it will allow for - I think that the tiers of play can be seen as setting rough boundaries on the tolerable slippage between game and metagame in this respect.Related to this idea of slippage between game and metagame: the exponential growth in game-mechanical power of PCs is, in part, a consequence of the desire to have a certain sort of reward system that stresses character build as the main vehicle by which rewards are played out (in this respect, a very strong contrast can be drawn with a game like classic Traveller). This, in turn, mandates that monsters be statted with the same mathematical spread, if the game is to work.But the ingame interpretation of these variations in capability will probably be more credible, and less gonzo, if the numbers are taken to be compressed a bit. Again, the tiers provide a rough guide here. A paragon PC should, in the gameworld, have more prowess than a heroic PC. But the degree of ingame increase in power needn't correspond to the mathematical transformation on the character sheet, the purpose of which is mostly to serve a metagame purpose of rewarding the player.</blockquote>

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