paradox42's crazy cosmology

[Raithe the Dreamer]

Superb choice! XAOS from Greek mythology could be another potential example of such.

Other figures throughout Greek mythology could work here, too, depending on how you wanted to order a particular universe. They were rather fond of the personification of abstract principles, really. Chaos is the main one, but the Theogony also has a few more, like Eros and Eris. I'd have to dig out my copy to get the full list though. There's a whole handful of them that spawn from Chaos.

So where's Entropy on the scale? Were any of our First Ones actually Relationals or Fundamentals?

 

[paradox42]

So where's Entropy on the scale? Were any of our First Ones actually Relationals or Fundamentals?

The actual six First Ones were Fate (KR 18), Time (KR 18 but with more QP and HD than Fate), Matter (KR 19), Spirit (KR 20), Thought (KR 22 but split-personality so that each was effectively only KR 11), and Entropy (KR 24). As you learned in one of the last sessions, of course, all of the Sources were effectively Relationals with 120 DR and 11 KR apiece.

 

[paradox42]

...And Eternity

So at last, we reach the top of the pile, and the Demiurge and its progenitors are all the entities left to describe. Here, my pseudoscience explanations begin to fail, because beings of this level are so far beyond anything we mortals can directly deal with that mere words can surely not suffice. But, as the British say, let's have a go anyway.

Even during the full game, including the end session on January 30th of this year, the PCs never directly met the Demiurge itself- in fact, the only Eternals they did meet (if one doesn't count monsters like the Nehaschimic Dragons I threw at them, or the Neutronium Golem) were a strange old man whose true identity they never guessed (I intended him to be a Lipika- the ex-Supreme Beings who act as caretakers of the Akashic Record) and the progenitor of their own flawed Reality, who gave Its name as SEPHIROSOPHIA. The true nature of the Demiurge was also never explained to them, other than giving them the notion that it was sort of a "Sidereal" for all of Reality itself, but of course that's not accurate either given that it's actually of a different order of being altogether.

This is at least in part because I myself never really worked out the details. I'll digress here back into the history of my musings upon beings greater than gods, and explain what little is left to tell regarding Originals as I conceived them before the IH. My conception of these beings was deeply involved with a history I had for the "Incomplete Creation" that the game was assumed to be taking place in; I wrote a backstory which today looks suspiciously Judeo-Christian (though perhaps that's not inappropriate since the game concept of Eternals is heavily influenced by the Aeons in Gnostic Christianity).

Basically, I said that there was a massive "world" which was the first creation, dubbed simply Origin, and it was made by beings called Originals who came to this corner of existence from elsewhere (in fact, only they are allowed to travel into and out of Incomplete Creation and others like it in my old rules set). The Originals created a series or race of lesser beings to help them maintain and build upon Origin, called the "Secondaries" because they were second. Of course, the Secondaries rebelled for no explained reason, and destroyed Origin as well as most of the Originals; the Originals for their part annihilated all but one of the Secondaries (and that one escaped because it managed to hide somehow). The remaining 19 Originals repaired what little they could of the remaining portions of Origin, and this became the Voidsphere, the two Opposers, and the 19 multiverses, and they then created "Tertiary" beings (the Sidereals, in modern terms) who were later named Old Ones by the still lesser inhabitants of the reality-pockets they watched over. Eventually, the last Secondary showed itself, after turning a group of Tertiaries to its side, and started a new war which ended with its destruction (after being confined in the Positive Opposer, thus explaining why Positive energy is always proof against evil in any multiverse) and the destruction of most of its friends among the Tertiaries. Only 7 Originals were left after this, and they were tired of dealing with this existence after the war- so they left Incomplete Creation behind, "never" to return.

Reading the story today, along with the few rules I wrote to deal with the powers of the Originals, several things jump out at me. The most important of these is that I clearly didn't think much about what a being like an Original could actually do with power able to create worlds larger than whole multiverses- my rules did say that Originals could simply ignore any attack sent against them by Power Points, or Life Points, but if that was the case, then how did any of the Secondaries or Tertiaries actually kill them? On a related topic, this is the first inkling in my old rules that these entities were so powerful that they could deal with true infinities- a concept that UK also adopted for his Eternals. The third thing to jump out at me is that the notion of that one Secondary working in secret to corrupt others away from the "goodness" of the Originals looks a lot like the Gnostic idea of the Demiurge trying to keep humans from achieving "gnosis" with true Eternity and the Aeons who dwell within it. The last thing to jump out at me is that, if these beings were immune to attacks, and didn't have any possible method of using their own special points to attack (truth: the rules state that the Originals can't use their version of Life Points for any sort of attack or combat), then what the Hells would one base a game featuring them on, exactly? It doesn't really make for exciting story possibilities.

The rules written down in that old notebook of mine don't state point-blank that Old Ones are made of quantum probability, but I know that I had the concept in mind even then- and the rules do say that there are "theories" regarding it and that it's "more fundamental." I'm pretty sure I wrote them that way because I intended that if I ever ran a game featuring Old Ones vs. PC Immortals, I wanted to keep the secret of the true nature of the Old Ones back for an exciting in-game reveal, but that's irrelevant now. What's relevant is that, when the notebook gets around to discussing the nature of the Originals, all it says is "Originals, in their elementary form, are thought to exist as pure intelligence with no housing whatsoever." And that's the best I ever came up with to describe what they really are.

Today, given the science-looking puzzle I've cobbled together explaining the nature and existence of the Sidereals so well, I still have no good answer to the question- but I have one possible avenue for explanation. Modern information theory, as formulated by Shannon in the 1940s IIRC, essentially states that information is the reverse of entropy. Now, some scientists today suggest that our own universe may in some manner be a construct of "pure information" at its most fundamental level; that is, beneath all the talk of particles and waves and quantum probability and strings, what's really going on is a process of bits and qubits (the quantum version of bits, used in quantum computing) interacting with each other and somehow producing everything we see and think and are. If this (admittedly vague and unsupported) idea has truth in it, then this substrate of pure information would be the "next step" of "fundamental-ness" beyond the quantum probability that I postulated Sidereals to be made of. In other words, Sidereals and everything they create or do are merely "programs" running on some underlying substrate that gives them an arena to live and work in, and everything builds on that base of information exchanges to produce the Reality that we see. Of course, if that substrate can produce intelligence at all (which it demonstrably can, since the Sidereals are clearly intelligent, as are the beings such as gods and mortals that they create to live within themselves), then it's not much of a leap to suggest that it might be intelligent itself. It might be conscious of everything taking place within its own "body" of information.

This notion, of each Eternal being literally a "body of information," also gels well with what I (through SEPHIROSOPHIA) told the PCs at the end of the campaign: that if they passed through the Final Gate, the "stories growing within them" would have a chance to "grow" and "Become." Stories are really just constructs of information, after all. If the true meaning of Eternal existence is a move to becoming pure information, and the idea is that the information of one's own mind acquires life and Reality in its own right, then surely this explains SEPH's comment: any stories growing within the minds of a being who (literally) writes its mark upon Eternity must become as real and alive as the being who is doing the writing. Simply by passing through such a portal, and becoming Eternal, a being would begin to spin stories and lives living within the information substrate that is its new "body." This, then, is the ultimate meaning of Transcendence. Doesn't sound so bad, eh?

Enough of esoteric speculations. Most of you probably didn't do more than skim all that anyway, did you? You're wondering what rules I came up with for the Demiurge and greater Eternals. I adopted UK's "stages" of Demiurgedom for my Reality, and built on that to produce the Time Lords and higher ones. Here it is:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Demiurge Stage I (120 DR, 26 KR, 1 TR): 40000 HD, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage I (120 DR, 27 KR, 1 TR): 40000 HD, 200,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage I (120 DR, 28 KR, 1 TR): 40000 HD, 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage I (120 DR, 29 KR, 1 TR): 40000 HD, 600,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage I (120 DR, 30 KR, 1 TR): 40000 HD, 800,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 31 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 32 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 1,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 33 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 34 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 35 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 36 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 37 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 38 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 39 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 40 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 41 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 42 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 16,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 43 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 44 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 45 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 46 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 47 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 48 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 49 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 50 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 90,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Time Lord/Aeon (120 DR, 50 KR, 4 TR): 100000 HD, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Time Lord/Aeon (120 DR, 50 KR, 5 TR): 100000 HD, 120,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Time Lord/Aeon (120 DR, 50 KR, 6 TR): 100000 HD, 160,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
High Lord/Duad (120 DR, 50 KR, 7 TR): 200000 HD, 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
High Lord/Duad (120 DR, 50 KR, 8 TR): 200000 HD, 220,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
High Lord/Duad (120 DR, 50 KR, 9 TR): 200000 HD, 260,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
High Lord/Triad (120 DR, 50 KR, 10 TR): 300000 HD, 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
etc...

Yes, I end the real Table stored in the file on my PC with that "Etc." It's open-ended, just like the IH system itself. Honestly, not much need be said here, except that "TR" of course stands for "Transcendental Rank," and you'd essentially use the IH templates except for adjusting as usual for the much higher divine bonuses involved in my system. DR and KR were explained before, but TR is easy enough to extrapolate from them: each TR grants a +36 divine bonus to everything, +72 to all six ability scores, a Transcendental Ability (or 6 Cosmics, or 36 Divines, or 216 feats), and +180 Level Adjustment. I also decided to cap the number of KR at 50, since that's the point where a Demiurge reaches maximum growth before it can take the 4th TR and become a true Time Lord. I opted not to add DR or KR to any High Lord, because my concept of those beings is that when multiple Realities merge to produce one, only one consciousness is dominant- and that consciousness would remember its own history as a Demiurge above any other, so it would only have the DR and KR that it had during that growth. The TR, of course, are additive, and open-ended.

No being with TR was ever given full stats for my game, though I did put in skeleton-stats for the Demiurge (just in case) and for SEPHIROSOPHIA its creator. SEPHIROSOPHIA was postulated as having 150,000 hit dice, 150 sextillion QP, and therefore TR 5. I never actually decided what Transcendentals it had, precisely, figuring that the players would be scared off from fighting it by its 150,000 HD and clearly overwhelming power (and of course, I was correct).

 

[Pssthpok]

too many feats....

 

[Upper_Krust]

Hiya matey!

Enough of esoteric speculations. Most of you probably didn't do more than skim all that anyway, did you?

I see everything.

You're wondering what rules I came up with for the Demiurge and greater Eternals. I adopted UK's "stages" of Demiurgedom for my Reality, and built on that to produce the Time Lords and higher ones. Here it is:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Demiurge Stage I (120 DR, 26 KR, 1 TR): 40000 HD, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP

I am wondering how the heck such a thing would be statted. I mean I thought after about 100 Hit Dice that things started to grind down (as regards creation).

Don't want to derail things, but i think when people see the new size rules in the Vampire Bestiary that they'll believe that finally there is a system which can handle the inherent ridiculousness of really big monsters without the need for really big math.

For me, the only element of contention at this point is where to ultimately set the cap (on both level and size).

So my question to you is "would the game be more attractive if you take all the math out of it (relatively speaking that is)?" I mean from what you have said about your campaign is that it was more about planning combat than actual combat itself. Just curious to hear your take on things vis-a-vis this thread/your campaign.

 

[paradox42]

I am wondering how the heck such a thing would be statted.

Carefully.

I mean I thought after about 100 Hit Dice that things started to grind down (as regards creation).

People who don't have the attention to/flair for details that I do often get bogged down in situations that I merely find enjoyably challenging/engaging; I'm a very unusual specimen that way. I only have one or two friends who honestly would want to bother statting up something that big "properly" (meaning, taking note of all the little details). The real key with it IMO is to make extensive use of shortcuts, such as having feat packages picked out, or knowing the "endlessly stackable" feats like Epic Toughness by heart so you can just easily add large numbers of them to whatever critter you need to fill thousands of feat slots for with simple multiplication. For a 40K HD critter, I'd likely spend most of the feats on Armor Skin, Improved Toughness/Epic Toughness, and stuff like that, and it'd really be a matter of deciding on the ratio I want for defense vs. offense. The feats granting individual abilities like Power Attack or Extend Spell are small enough in number that a creature with so many feat slots can be reaonably assumed to have them all, if you want to. That cuts decision time down considerably. Of course, this means that creatures that get big enough tend to all have the same abilities, but that's really how things should be when you're talking about things that are billions of years (or more) old and hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than gods. The differences then are not in the feats, but in the abilities that are appropriate to the being's tier: in this case, Eternal/Transcendental.

Don't want to derail things, but i think when people see the new size rules in the Vampire Bestiary that they'll believe that finally there is a system which can handle the inherent ridiculousness of really big monsters without the need for really big math.

Good luck! It'll be interesting to read the results.

So my question to you is "would the game be more attractive if you take all the math out of it (relatively speaking that is)?"

All the math? Certainly not. A certain amount of math is necessary to avoid the game becoming a case of rock-paper-scissors, or coin flips. It's a question of how much math is appropriate to deal with whatever situation is at hand. The primary reason I dislike 4th Edition, recall, is that it's too simplistic. I agree that 3.X needed simplifying at high levels, but 4E went way too far for me. It made everything homogenized such that the game doesn't "feel" different enough to be interesting at high levels vs. low levels. Oversimplification became the problem that broke the camel's back, for me (and for others in my play group who have since adopted Pathfinder for their new games). I like complexity. If the game isn't complex at all, then it doesn't feel "real," and suspension of disbelief (which the game really depends on to work) fails to occur.

I mean from what you have said about your campaign is that it was more about planning combat than actual combat itself.

Not actually true- the overplanning was really just the way my players preferred to do things. We had two or three serious powergamers, depending on how you define that term, and one of those guys was a type who was honestly in the game to "win," hands down. He hated to lose anything, and therefore would be unhappy if he didn't spend as much time as it was even remotely possible to spend making sure he had every possible advantage in a given combat. At ultra-high levels, this degenerated into spending several sessions using divination after divination after database access after clairsentient power-use after... (you get the idea) until he was satisfied that he had all the information about a potential enemy that he could possibly get in advance, and that all of that enemy's weaknesses were analyzed from as many perspectives as it was possible to analyze them from, and thus no matter what the enemy did he'd be ready with a counter for it (or better still, to prevent it from even being able to act in the first place).

In other words, this had nothing to do with the system I was using and everything to do with the players I had in the group. I'm quite certain that even if we'd been using a game where divinations didn't exist, this player would have been forming careful tactical plans with all the other party members and analyzing them to death for any situation he could conceive of, and altering said plans after every actual battle to refine them for the next one. He's just as detail-oriented as I am, in his way, so it's in his nature to plan things that precisely.

In the case of the now-finished game, the fact that the party did have access to powerful divination stuff meant that they analyzed all potential enemies in advance of actually deciding whether to antagonize them enough to attack/start a combat in the first place: the most egregious case of this was when they actually used time travel to go into the future by a few centuries, and once there, travel across the fifth dimension to get a statistical picture over 14,000 separate timelines of how various possible attack plans for one enemy worked out for their group. They ended up going back to their starting point and then using a different plan entirely to take the enemy out without giving it any chance at all to even notice their attack until it was too late (this was against the Hungry Void galaxy, if you were wondering).

 

[Raithe the Dreamer]

I am wondering how the heck such a thing would be statted. I mean I thought after about 100 Hit Dice that things started to grind down (as regards creation).

As one of the players in paradox's game that especially likes the numbers aspect (who is normally relatively on the power-gamer side of things, but failed at it time and time again due to overall unfamiliarity with Ascension), 100 HD is easy! Now sure, every time we gained a batch of levels (which was typically around 100-200 HD at a time), I spent 8-10 hours over the course of a week working out what I wanted to do with them, but I had fun with it. We were encouraged to "diversify" as deities, so that we could encompass more things and be appropriate deities for more types of characters, so it was a lot of fun digging through books and finding classes that fit a deity's flavor and expanded their "kit" in some way.

Now, we had at least one player who really never bothered to keep up. I just don't think it was that interesting to him. I believe his character never got officially statted up beyond about 100 HD.

So my question to you is "would the game be more attractive if you take all the math out of it (relatively speaking that is)?" I mean from what you have said about your campaign is that it was more about planning combat than actual combat itself. Just curious to hear your take on things vis-a-vis this thread/your campaign.

As paradox has already said: absolutely not. I look at 4E and it looks inherently *boring* personally. I do agree that high level play in 3E could get pretty ridiculous and that some streamlining would be welcome, but at the same time, 4E completely removed what made the metagame interesting. Characters are all the same except in flavor, primarily: what they can do mechanically is all essentially cut and paste with different names, with the occasional d6 traded for a knockback effect or some other such thing.

Sure, from a role-play perspective, you can still tell the same sort of stories with any system (though I do think in some ways 4E is a little handicapped because it castrated full casters so much--as a DM that feels rather limiting to me). From a roll-play perspective, though...there aren't really that many mechanical options that are exciting. Some players like all the complexity in the world and loved classes like the Wizard in 3.x, and other characters just wanted to say "I attack," and be done with it. They actually don't *want* powers and stuff to manage. 3.x (and previous editions of D&D) have embraced both of those desires in some ways, whereas 4E completely abandons any real choice in *how* you play as a player.

Sorry to contribute to the derail. >.>

 

[Khisanth the Ancient]

It's interesting how Gnostic a lot of computer/information technology people can sound ... there's a strong analogy between some of the transhumanist strands and the Gnostic notions of transcendence. The same idea of physical matter as something bad to be escaped, etc.

What's relevant is that, when the notebook gets around to discussing the nature of the Originals, all it says is "Originals, in their elementary form, are thought to exist as pure intelligence with no housing whatsoever." And that's the best I ever came up with to describe what they really are.

Cool. Makes me think of E. E. Smith's "pure intellectuals" in the Skylark of Space series, but that's because I read too much early science fiction

(In that series, there are six "orders" of energies; ordinary electromagnetic radiation is the first, cosmic rays [they didn't know that they were high-energy particles in the 20s] are the second, third and above are entirely hypothetical energies, with the highest order being pure thought; the "pure intellectuals" are beings entirely of thought that can 'transcend' humans into their own state.)

Most of you probably didn't do more than skim all that anyway, did you?

Nah, I thought it was very interesting.

Demiurge Stage I (120 DR, 26 KR, 1 TR): 40000 HD, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.

So even the most basic Demiurge would have 120 + 26 x 6 + 1 x 36 = +312 divine bonus? Wow.

No being with TR was ever given full stats for my game, though I did put in skeleton-stats for the Demiurge (just in case)

What Stage demiurge was it?

 

[Upper_Krust]

Hiya mate!

Carefully.

People who don't have the attention to/flair for details that I do often get bogged down in situations that I merely find enjoyably challenging/engaging; I'm a very unusual specimen that way. I only have one or two friends who honestly would want to bother statting up something that big "properly" (meaning, taking note of all the little details). The real key with it IMO is to make extensive use of shortcuts, such as having feat packages picked out, or knowing the "endlessly stackable" feats like Epic Toughness by heart so you can just easily add large numbers of them to whatever critter you need to fill thousands of feat slots for with simple multiplication. For a 40K HD critter, I'd likely spend most of the feats on Armor Skin, Improved Toughness/Epic Toughness, and stuff like that, and it'd really be a matter of deciding on the ratio I want for defense vs. offense. The feats granting individual abilities like Power Attack or Extend Spell are small enough in number that a creature with so many feat slots can be reaonably assumed to have them all, if you want to. That cuts decision time down considerably. Of course, this means that creatures that get big enough tend to all have the same abilities, but that's really how things should be when you're talking about things that are billions of years (or more) old and hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than gods. The differences then are not in the feats, but in the abilities that are appropriate to the being's tier: in this case, Eternal/Transcendental.

That (bolded & underlined) to me seems little different than 4E's approach. In fact the only difference would be 4E doesn't add the headache of having to work out/factor/remember every feat in the game.

Good luck! It'll be interesting to read the results.

Thanks.

All the math? Certainly not.

Well obviously I meant comparitively. 4E still has math it just doesn't have 'silly' math.

A certain amount of math is necessary to avoid the game becoming a case of rock-paper-scissors, or coin flips. It's a question of how much math is appropriate to deal with whatever situation is at hand. The primary reason I dislike 4th Edition, recall, is that it's too simplistic. I agree that 3.X needed simplifying at high levels, but 4E went way too far for me. It made everything homogenized such that the game doesn't "feel" different enough to be interesting at high levels vs. low levels. Oversimplification became the problem that broke the camel's back, for me (and for others in my play group who have since adopted Pathfinder for their new games). I like complexity. If the game isn't complex at all, then it doesn't feel "real," and suspension of disbelief (which the game really depends on to work) fails to occur.

4E is plenty complex, but not overtly so.

Not actually true- the overplanning was really just the way my players preferred to do things. We had two or three serious powergamers, depending on how you define that term, and one of those guys was a type who was honestly in the game to "win," hands down. He hated to lose anything, and therefore would be unhappy if he didn't spend as much time as it was even remotely possible to spend making sure he had every possible advantage in a given combat.

Sounds like me playing 1E/2E. I was a big fan of prep.

I'm quite certain that even if we'd been using a game where divinations didn't exist, this player would have been forming careful tactical plans with all the other party members and analyzing them to death for any situation he could conceive of, and altering said plans after every actual battle to refine them for the next one. He's just as detail-oriented as I am, in his way, so it's in his nature to plan things that precisely.

See to me this is one of the reasons why 4E trumps 3E, because its FAR more tactical and thus better rewards smart play (as opposed to simply rewarding industrious play).

 

[Upper_Krust]

Hey there Raithe the Dreamer!

As one of the players in paradox's game that especially likes the numbers aspect (who is normally relatively on the power-gamer side of things, but failed at it time and time again due to overall unfamiliarity with Ascension), 100 HD is easy! Now sure, every time we gained a batch of levels (which was typically around 100-200 HD at a time), I spent 8-10 hours over the course of a week working out what I wanted to do with them, but I had fun with it. We were encouraged to "diversify" as deities, so that we could encompass more things and be appropriate deities for more types of characters, so it was a lot of fun digging through books and finding classes that fit a deity's flavor and expanded their "kit" in some way.

Let me just clarify; I'm talking about the creation of opponents from the perspective of the DM/Game Designer in that you must create multiple such opponents. Not from the perspective of the Player who only needs to look after a single character (for most players).

Design of the game at a certain point felt less rewarding and more of a chore. Many of the shortcuts I created (maven and omnicompetent for example) were an attempt to reduce the grind (for myself and DMs).

Now, we had at least one player who really never bothered to keep up. I just don't think it was that interesting to him. I believe his character never got officially statted up beyond about 100 HD.

As paradox has already said: absolutely not. I look at 4E and it looks inherently *boring* personally.

It might look boring but it plays brilliantly.

I do agree that high level play in 3E could get pretty ridiculous and that some streamlining would be welcome, but at the same time, 4E completely removed what made the metagame interesting. Characters are all the same except in flavor, primarily: what they can do mechanically is all essentially cut and paste with different names, with the occasional d6 traded for a knockback effect or some other such thing.

I think WotC have and are addressing the class diversity issue with the 2nd and 3rd Players Handbooks. While I agree a lot of the mechanical fundamentals of the Classes are similar in 4E, the clearer definition of their roles is refreshing. Added to which the vastly superior balance of 4E both in terms of classes and combat.

Sure, from a role-play perspective, you can still tell the same sort of stories with any system (though I do think in some ways 4E is a little handicapped because it castrated full casters so much--as a DM that feels rather limiting to me).

They really needed it. Casters were far too dominant in 3E.

From a roll-play perspective, though...there aren't really that many mechanical options that are exciting. Some players like all the complexity in the world and loved classes like the Wizard in 3.x, and other characters just wanted to say "I attack," and be done with it. They actually don't *want* powers and stuff to manage. 3.x (and previous editions of D&D) have embraced both of those desires in some ways, whereas 4E completely abandons any real choice in *how* you play as a player.

Seems to me, what you are saying is that if you want diversity in 3E play a caster and if you want no diversity play any other class.

4E is different in that all the classes have a measure of diversity existing somewhere in between the 3E caster - non-caster paradigm.

Sorry to contribute to the derail. >.>

Me too.