Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6907026" data-attributes="member: 37579">For the sake of discussion, we'll assume this all is true. It might be, it might not. I'd have to look at where the encounters fall during an adventuring day, the terrain of the encounters, and the like. But I'll just assume you're right.I'm still not going to get too upset about OotA missing the mark with high level play. Again, it was written when the rules had just finished coming out and well before anyone had any experience writing high level 5e encounters. It's not like Green Ronin could just write the adventures like they would for 3e or 4e and assumed that would work. The assumptions of high level play are radically different. For 3e you design high level encounters assuming teleportation and flight are just known, required to even survive. Even Paizo, adventure masters, who have been writing 3.x adventures for far, far longer than WotC, barely ever touch high level play. Because it's hard. And those 3e assumptions don't transfer well as not every PC will have access to flight, buff spells are reduced, high level spells are capped, and the like. Green Ronin (and the like) was also stuck with the monsters in the Monster Manual, which skew super low. Both in terms of presented CR and in terms of actual CR. There's a lot of lowballed monsters. Again, not going to fault WotC for that, as they were adapting monsters as best they could they determining an appropriate CR while the DMG was still in flux.I'm super critical of the effectiveness of the final stretch of the playtest. Because what we saw wasn't really a playtest. We had a 18-month-long public concept test. They barely sat down and actually hammered away at the fine balance, especially for monsters. Because 75% of the attention of the playtest was on the classes (and mostly the big four, with a few stragglers like the bard and sorcerer barely getting any attention at all). And this shows, with the ranger issue and all…This meant monsters never really got playtested per se. And it was hard to test them when the classes were always in flux. You never knew if it was a class balance issue or a monster balance issue. So… with that in mind, I forgiving/ accepting of the lack of high level opponents. They really need to get a feel for how powerful high level PCs are and can be, and then design the high level threats and opponents. After all, the tarrasque was a joke in both 3e, 4e, and Pathfinder upon launch. Because high level threats are always lowballed on launch. The E1-3 series were laughably easy at the time, and it even had to remake the boss (originally presented in the MM) as it was too easy, and the revised version was still easy. (Which I'm using as an example because Mike Shea wrote a blog detailing how much extra oomf had to go into making Orcus a reasonable threat: <a href="http://slyflourish.com/pimp_my_orcus.html" target="_blank">[url]http://slyflourish.com/pimp_my_orcus.html</a>[/URL] And he literally wrote the book on 4e epic level play.)I don't see why 5e would be any different. Because even playtests fall short in this respect, compared with actual games where you and the party have spent a year working together, you know every trick your character can pull, you have great items and boons, and have been saving tricks for a couple sessions. The only way high level play will ever be flawless at launch is when they delay an edition by six months to a year to laboriously play the game. Better high level play comes with time, as people learn how the edition works at the table and not just on the page. </blockquote>

Verification