Bendris Noulg
First Post
Now that's a thread I'd happily read with a far more open mind than some folks have towards Low Magic.Brother MacLaren said:
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Normal/High Magic/Not Gritty How-To
- Thread starter I'm A Banana
- Start date
Dragonblade
Adventurer
I would say that your experience is rather limited.
The most gritty, nasty, you-could-die-at-any-moment game I ever played in was in SHARK's world with a 40th level character. Its all about your DM and the feel they try to create.
In my experience, high level gaming does require significantly more work on the part of the DM and is in fact significantly different in flavor than low level gaming.
High level gaming is much more super-heroic. Stick X-men, Superman, Avengers, etc. stories into a pseudo-medieval world where the trappings of magic replace the trappings of technology and you have high level D&D.
I don't find X-men silly. Fantastic and epic in scope? Yes. Silly? No.
If high level gaming is silly to you, then its unfortunate that you have never had the experience of playing with a DM who understands how to really make it work.
IMO, high level gaming is superior to low-level gaming in the sheer vastness of the options available to both players and DMs.
Some DMs and players prefer low-level gaming as a matter of taste. And more power to them. Others however, prefer low-level gaming simply because it requires much less effort and thought in making and playing characters or adventures. And hey, more power to them too. Different strokes and all that.
The thing that offends me though is the Munchkin label that gets slapped on you if you like high-level gaming.
The most gritty, nasty, you-could-die-at-any-moment game I ever played in was in SHARK's world with a 40th level character. Its all about your DM and the feel they try to create.
In my experience, high level gaming does require significantly more work on the part of the DM and is in fact significantly different in flavor than low level gaming.
High level gaming is much more super-heroic. Stick X-men, Superman, Avengers, etc. stories into a pseudo-medieval world where the trappings of magic replace the trappings of technology and you have high level D&D.
I don't find X-men silly. Fantastic and epic in scope? Yes. Silly? No.
If high level gaming is silly to you, then its unfortunate that you have never had the experience of playing with a DM who understands how to really make it work.
IMO, high level gaming is superior to low-level gaming in the sheer vastness of the options available to both players and DMs.
Some DMs and players prefer low-level gaming as a matter of taste. And more power to them. Others however, prefer low-level gaming simply because it requires much less effort and thought in making and playing characters or adventures. And hey, more power to them too. Different strokes and all that.
The thing that offends me though is the Munchkin label that gets slapped on you if you like high-level gaming.
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Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
Brother MacLaren said:
This is a fantastic idea for a thread. I'm not entirely sure it's the same as this thread's topic (which is more on how to make a fun high-level/magic game that avoids the numerous pitfalls), but I'd love to see someone start this.
Meanwhile, please keep this thread away from criticizing low magic games or DMs (Dragonblade?), and focused on the actual topic mentioned in the first post. Don't complain about other peoples' choices, just discuss what you need to make a high magic game fun for you. I know it's difficult after some of the low/high magic arguments over the last few days, but I'd certainly appreciate keeping this productive.
Thanks.
Incidentally, while I like high-lvl games, I don't especially enjoy really high magic games. It's a fine line, but I like the characters to be more important than their gear.
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Brother MacLaren
Explorer
Piratecat said:
Well, I considered "game gets too silly and world is not believable" to be one of the pitfalls of high-level games. YMMV.
"Escalating arms race of magic and magic counter-measures" is another pitfall - at least in my opinion. Here's one suggestion I've had - add some non-magic counters. Perhaps gold blocks telepathy and mind control, which explains why gold is valuable and why kings wear gold crowns.
Or maybe incorporeal undead cannot enter a house if the threshold is covered by a line of salt (I know that isn't precisely magic and counter-measures, but any game world with incorporeal undead has to explain how life still exists - a spectre could create an army of thousands in a single night and even the DMG demographics don't postulate enough high-level clerics to form an effective defense). I particularly like tweaks that make various historical superstitions or customs suddenly valuable.
Other pitfalls, as noted by the Midget, are getting your players emotionally attatched to their characters, dealing with divination, resurrection, and teleportation magic, and making the PC's fear something as characters.
All of which I agree are challenges in designing interesting high-level games.
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nopantsyet
First Post
Piratecat said:
I couldn't have said it better myself. And believe me, I tried.
After they've been playing the same characters for a period of time, players will often start to rely on the same tricks. Whether it's a certain diplomatic style, spell or item. Create circumstances where they will fare better by an alternate approach. Don't rely on roadblocks that can only be overcome by a single approach or that only require a single action to overcome.
And always have a backup plan or three, even if you are very quick on your feet. Resourceful players can pull the rug out from under your best-laid plans, and if you're not prepared, that's when it's most likely to turn into a high-level blast fest.
Finally, be a rat bastard every opportunity you can. The players are gunning for every NPC and plot you can come up with, and they've got four or more brains to your one. I'm not advising unfair play, but cunning well-planned cruelty. RBDM is not an honorific, it's a way of life.
Dragonblade
Adventurer
Sorry, Piratecat. 
Well, 3rd Edition has done a lot to make high level gaming much more accessible. Every monster in the MM can challenge high level PCs once you add some class levels to them.
The thing is that I don't think high level gaming is really about levels or gear anymore. Presumably the players have amassed enough wealth that treasure isn't such an important consideration.
Also the benefits of increasing a level have diminishing returns the higher level you are. Level 40 is not so much better than level 30. But level 10 is radically different from level 1.
Therefore, at higher levels the focus of the game becomes much more oriented on story-telling. You don't necessarily challenge the players combat-wise, but rather mentally. Role-playing for the sheer joy of playing instead of gaming to win or acquire something.
Well, 3rd Edition has done a lot to make high level gaming much more accessible. Every monster in the MM can challenge high level PCs once you add some class levels to them.
The thing is that I don't think high level gaming is really about levels or gear anymore. Presumably the players have amassed enough wealth that treasure isn't such an important consideration.
Also the benefits of increasing a level have diminishing returns the higher level you are. Level 40 is not so much better than level 30. But level 10 is radically different from level 1.
Therefore, at higher levels the focus of the game becomes much more oriented on story-telling. You don't necessarily challenge the players combat-wise, but rather mentally. Role-playing for the sheer joy of playing instead of gaming to win or acquire something.
Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
Brother MacLaren said:
I think it's a definite risk. I've tried to counter this in a few ways:
- People and NPCs continue to change, but not necessarily get more powerful. Kings die. People get jealous of the PCs, or beholden to them. Old friendly NPCs who once nurtured the party take on new low-level apprentices. Organizations that the PCs once crushed stay at the same strength or weaker, and take aim at smaller targets instead. Nevertheless, these people haven't necessarily levelled just because the PCs have. This goes hand in hand with the concept that people and organizations are still effective in the world, but not necessarily because they have a bajillion levels. Political challenges definitely fall under this category, as does societal pressure, the negative effects of fame, and the utter power of organized religion.
- No powerful NPC in society exists without making ripples. If you've good enough to get that powerful, you're often either famous or notorious. More importantly, you have lots of powerful friends and enemies. When the PCs deal with such a person, they're dealing with all that history as well.
- Ultra-powerful monsters don't just leap out of nowhere. This is especially true for the intelligent ones. If you put LeShay (those uber-elves from the Epic Handbook) into your game, you darn well ought to have a reason why the world isn't under their yoke of oppression. In the same sense, dragons can easily control trade by settling in a mountain pass; killing one should usually set off numerous ripples, just like the death of Smaug did in the Hobbit.
- Sometimes the bad guys fight one another. Don't make the PCs and their allies feel like they're the ones that everyone is always gunning for. Have evil forces besiege a neighboring and hostile kingdom, and watch the ethical debate as to whether the group should help their enemies or not.
- Shake up the status quo. When I get bored with unused parts of my world, I have a bad habit of doing horrible things to them. Barbarian invasions, plagues, natural disasters -- whatever it takes to shake up the political scene and introduce a new element of doubt/mystery into the PCs' knowledge of the area.
- Too many templates are silly. That's a personal opinion, but it's one near and dear to my heart.
How's that for a start? I know I'm missing things.
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Ycore Rixle
First Post
I've played in two high-level long term campaigns, one ten years (1e/2e), one five years and counting. In both, we have had simultaneous "high-magic" and "mystery, suspense, and drama."
In the first campaign, toward the end the characters focused on liberating the world of one player's wife from iron-allergic Siv elves (this was a world intially encountered in the Q1 The Demonweb Pits, through one of those marvelous alternate prime material plane portals). Anyway, the multi-planar nature of the campaign, with the PCs crossing from their plane to the Siv plane, and the Sivs bouncing back from the Abyss to their home plane, made scrying difficult and teleportation very risky (in 3.5e, interplanar teleportation is not possible even with greater teleport). So there were pitched battles for gate points, trips across the Siv homeworld to recruit allies, treachery back home in the players' prime material (one of the wizards own apprentices was corrupted - the player wasn't checking her own allies for allegiance). Basically, there were way, way too many things to scry on or divine in order to keep up with the other side's subterfuges. The players had an archmage (21st level) and a high priest (14th/9th fighter) but even with commune, contact other plane, etc. there were still surprises, because the enemy had a thousand-year-old established empire to rely upon, and the PCs were in charge of only one duchy with just a handful of high-level characters. The PCs' rebel allies on the other world were mostly monks - the Sivs had outlawed metal weapons since they were so allergic to iron - and there was one great scene where an army of monks surprised the Sivs by slow-falling over a cliff and attacking from a flank the Sivs thought secure.
In my current campaign, our last session, the enemy dragon just revealed that he was the dragon disciple's father. Now, had the party done various divinations, they might have been confused by the fact that the dragon "doesn't want to hurt you" - and he didn't want to hurt them, he wanted to convert them. Of course, one doesn't get to be an ancient white by following caprice over rationality, so he would hurt the party - he just wouldn't want to. That alone could have messed up many divinations - not that the party tried.
As for your original points, KM, I would say we handle them like this:
a) Emotional attachment. Level progression is not especially fast in our games, and by the time the characters reach high levels, we've been playing them for several years. That alone, really, takes care of a lot of emotional attachment. But of course the world has to be interesting to keep the game going for several years, and I've found that making interesting NPCs befriending the PCs, making the world consistent and believable and active outside the PCs' actions, and always keeping surprises and recurring events and plot twists plentiful makes for players who are emotionally invested in their characters.
b) Resurrection, teleportation, and divination. I talked about these above; to me, resurrection is the trickiest. We haven't had much trouble with the 3.5 raise spells - we have implicitly assumed that most people die of old age. This is a good argument for large cities - people tend to clump near temples and healers, even though that might make the city a target - it's a balance.
c) Fear is easy. The higher-level a PC gets, the more she has to lose. A 3rd-level PC who loses her +1 sword can do just fine with a masterwork sword she buys to replace it. But an 18th-level paladin who loses his holy avenger - what's he going to use against the marilith now? Not to mention the biggest fear of a PC in one of our high-level campaigns - losing political face. It is amazing what just a little politicking can do to spice up a campaign and make a player interested in something other than BAB.
Finally, I want to say that although I understand what mmadsen means by not "resorting to extensive magical countermeasures -- and that this magical arms race leads to an increasingly implausible, difficult-to-imagine world," I don't think this is a valid argument. Are not magical countermeasures the natural development in a magical world? How then is this implausible? It may be implausible to have a magical arms race in a low-magic world (where there is not sufficient magical power to make such a race worthwhile), but it seems perfectly plausible - even inevitable - that such a magical arms race occur in a high-magic world. Let us not attack high-magic world for faults that are only faults within a low-magic scheme; let us evaluate high-magic worlds according to their own premises and by their own rules.
In the first campaign, toward the end the characters focused on liberating the world of one player's wife from iron-allergic Siv elves (this was a world intially encountered in the Q1 The Demonweb Pits, through one of those marvelous alternate prime material plane portals). Anyway, the multi-planar nature of the campaign, with the PCs crossing from their plane to the Siv plane, and the Sivs bouncing back from the Abyss to their home plane, made scrying difficult and teleportation very risky (in 3.5e, interplanar teleportation is not possible even with greater teleport). So there were pitched battles for gate points, trips across the Siv homeworld to recruit allies, treachery back home in the players' prime material (one of the wizards own apprentices was corrupted - the player wasn't checking her own allies for allegiance). Basically, there were way, way too many things to scry on or divine in order to keep up with the other side's subterfuges. The players had an archmage (21st level) and a high priest (14th/9th fighter) but even with commune, contact other plane, etc. there were still surprises, because the enemy had a thousand-year-old established empire to rely upon, and the PCs were in charge of only one duchy with just a handful of high-level characters. The PCs' rebel allies on the other world were mostly monks - the Sivs had outlawed metal weapons since they were so allergic to iron - and there was one great scene where an army of monks surprised the Sivs by slow-falling over a cliff and attacking from a flank the Sivs thought secure.
In my current campaign, our last session, the enemy dragon just revealed that he was the dragon disciple's father. Now, had the party done various divinations, they might have been confused by the fact that the dragon "doesn't want to hurt you" - and he didn't want to hurt them, he wanted to convert them. Of course, one doesn't get to be an ancient white by following caprice over rationality, so he would hurt the party - he just wouldn't want to. That alone could have messed up many divinations - not that the party tried.
As for your original points, KM, I would say we handle them like this:
a) Emotional attachment. Level progression is not especially fast in our games, and by the time the characters reach high levels, we've been playing them for several years. That alone, really, takes care of a lot of emotional attachment. But of course the world has to be interesting to keep the game going for several years, and I've found that making interesting NPCs befriending the PCs, making the world consistent and believable and active outside the PCs' actions, and always keeping surprises and recurring events and plot twists plentiful makes for players who are emotionally invested in their characters.
b) Resurrection, teleportation, and divination. I talked about these above; to me, resurrection is the trickiest. We haven't had much trouble with the 3.5 raise spells - we have implicitly assumed that most people die of old age. This is a good argument for large cities - people tend to clump near temples and healers, even though that might make the city a target - it's a balance.
c) Fear is easy. The higher-level a PC gets, the more she has to lose. A 3rd-level PC who loses her +1 sword can do just fine with a masterwork sword she buys to replace it. But an 18th-level paladin who loses his holy avenger - what's he going to use against the marilith now? Not to mention the biggest fear of a PC in one of our high-level campaigns - losing political face. It is amazing what just a little politicking can do to spice up a campaign and make a player interested in something other than BAB.
Finally, I want to say that although I understand what mmadsen means by not "resorting to extensive magical countermeasures -- and that this magical arms race leads to an increasingly implausible, difficult-to-imagine world," I don't think this is a valid argument. Are not magical countermeasures the natural development in a magical world? How then is this implausible? It may be implausible to have a magical arms race in a low-magic world (where there is not sufficient magical power to make such a race worthwhile), but it seems perfectly plausible - even inevitable - that such a magical arms race occur in a high-magic world. Let us not attack high-magic world for faults that are only faults within a low-magic scheme; let us evaluate high-magic worlds according to their own premises and by their own rules.
Dragonblade
Adventurer
Wulf Ratbane said:
Wulf said this on the other thread and I think its so important to the debate of high level vs. low that it bears repeating.
I agree with Wulf completely. The thing is people want high level D&D to be mythic. High level D&D is not mythic. Its superheroic. As in X-men.
Its a subtle distinction but a fine one. Once I recognized this, everything about high level gaming, especially all the crazy stuff you don't see in fantasy literature, made much more sense to me. For example, PCs teleporting everywhere, PCs raising each other from the dead, etc.
However, when high level D&D is used in a world that tries to be mythic, it doesn't feel right, like the Midnight setting. And when its used in a world where it does fit, like the Realms, its unmythicness (is that a word?) is emphasized even more and turns off those who want it to be mythic.
Once I realized that high level gaming, especially in a world like the Realms, was really just comicbook superheroes with the serial number filed off, it became much easier to write adventures for.
And the cool thing about 3rd Edition, is that high level gaming can still be gritty. You just have to place the PCs in a big world where they aren't the only high level characters running around. If your mooks are 20th level fighters instead of 1st level warriors, high level gaming keeps all the insane epic coolness but is just as gritty as any low level game.
Trainz
Explorer
Epic level gaming sucks.
(Trolling...
sorry PC !)
Seriously, a few weeks back we retired a level 57 solo game. We started at 13.
At first, this campaign was little more than an exercise to see how epic gaming would work. As we gamed on though, we discovered aspects of role-playing that we didn't experience at lower levels. I'm not talking game mechanics here, I'm talking about the scope of the epic universe, and the political-social ramifications.
IOW, we had a blast.
The game mechanics alone were fun enough to toy with (nothing creates moments of gaming like having a player roll about 400 dmg on a crit, and then having the critter say "that's it ?"). But the larger-than-life aspect was fun. It is true that it was more akin to being a super-hero than anything legendary (it was a SOLO game after all), but it was still quite entertaining.
After the campaign was over, I asked my player what level of gaming he prefered now, and he said "Oh, epic, most definitely". Of course, that's not everybody's bag, and I can understand GM's being intimidated by the number-crunching aspect. The key then, is to limit the high-magic aspect to invade your epic game as much as you're ready to tackle. No more.
In my example, it was a (mostly) single classed fighter, so the "spell" aspect was little used, which made it easy on me. OTOH, even if there was a full-fledged arcanist in the party, the DM could just demand that some spells and effects not be used for a given epic campaign.
"Listen guys, I know you want to play Epic, but I'm not sure I can tackle it, so lets compromise"
I'm sure players would be grateful of a DM being ready to contemplate something than just saying "No, sorry, not IMC".
YMMV, HTH
(Trolling...
sorry PC !)Seriously, a few weeks back we retired a level 57 solo game. We started at 13.
At first, this campaign was little more than an exercise to see how epic gaming would work. As we gamed on though, we discovered aspects of role-playing that we didn't experience at lower levels. I'm not talking game mechanics here, I'm talking about the scope of the epic universe, and the political-social ramifications.
IOW, we had a blast.
The game mechanics alone were fun enough to toy with (nothing creates moments of gaming like having a player roll about 400 dmg on a crit, and then having the critter say "that's it ?"). But the larger-than-life aspect was fun. It is true that it was more akin to being a super-hero than anything legendary (it was a SOLO game after all), but it was still quite entertaining.
After the campaign was over, I asked my player what level of gaming he prefered now, and he said "Oh, epic, most definitely". Of course, that's not everybody's bag, and I can understand GM's being intimidated by the number-crunching aspect. The key then, is to limit the high-magic aspect to invade your epic game as much as you're ready to tackle. No more.
In my example, it was a (mostly) single classed fighter, so the "spell" aspect was little used, which made it easy on me. OTOH, even if there was a full-fledged arcanist in the party, the DM could just demand that some spells and effects not be used for a given epic campaign.
"Listen guys, I know you want to play Epic, but I'm not sure I can tackle it, so lets compromise"
I'm sure players would be grateful of a DM being ready to contemplate something than just saying "No, sorry, not IMC".
YMMV, HTH
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