NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6284807" data-attributes="member: 4937">More or less, yes.  I'm not sure that I would go as far as to say that there is a single fixed set of tiers or the differentiations that define them, but that as I understand the concept of 'tiers' they ought to represent real changes in perspective on or relationship with the world around them.  The example of the PC going from itinerent adventurer to lord of a dominion is one which is historically part of D&D and archetypal to fantasy fiction whether we are speaking of Theseus, Beowulf, Conan, or the characters within The Lord of the Rings.  As such, it is the perspective I'm appealing to most often, but there may be others. Well, more or less, yes though I wouldn't put it in those exact terms.  A game which just involved bigger and bigger numbers and somewhat greater tactical options could certainly stay compelling, but it wouldn't to me feel like it had fulfilled its full promise.   The analogy here would be that beyond about 30th level in WoW or Diablo III when you fill up your tactical bar with options, game play more or less doesn't change all the way up to the maximum level at 70 or 80 or whereever it is now.   The numbers get bigger, the NPCs get flavor of greater relevance to the setting, but you are still doing basically the same thing, right down to collecting 12 bear hides from level equivalent bears.  In fact, the problem is so severe in that game, one way to read between the lines of WoW is that the character actually never levels up and was just as epic and powerful from basically day 1 - all the numbers are meaningless and exist only in the metagame.   I've never played a PnP game that quite reached that level, but I have played many - and talked to players who were in many others - where the only difference between what they did at say 3rd level and what they did at 18th was the HD of the monsters they faced.  Yes.  Of your summations, that's probably the closest to what I feel.   To me, taking down a tribe of goblins and defeating a goblin king, and defeating a horde of demons led by a demon lord is functionally equivalent and has no real significant difference in feel - certainly not enough to delinate them into different tiers of play.   I can make some observations on why it might feel different to some people, for example that I'd bet the average slain goblin king is nameless, has no prior relationship to the PC's and has no body of lore about him before the PC's are asked to defeat him.   Whereas, with something like Orcus, the player brings that body of knowledge to the scene so that it has inherent depth by virtue of player knowledge gained outside of play.  But this is as much to say that I think that the difference in feel is related to poor DMing technique and not to something inherently more epic about bigger numbers and flavor of greater scope.  I'd like to think that when the PC's finally take down my BBEG Keeropus, if they do, that it will feel epic not because of the fact that he's an archmage, or because they are slinging mightier swords and spells, but because by the point that they do so, they'll have through the course of play developed a relationship to him in some fashion.  But I doubt that it will be a greater thrill necessarily than when they took down Sarga Danth in the foundry, or Tarkus in the Greater Catacombs of Amalteen, because in those cases I had built that relationship between the PC's and the villain.Another reason that it might feel differently to some people is that many campaigns end before high level play, so often people have little or no experience taking down demon lords whereas killing goblin kings might have become rather ho-hum.  What is exciting is therefore the novelty of facing down Orcus in his bone palace.  But I've been playing 30+ years now, and while I've never faced Orcus I've certainly faced plenty of high level powerful foes.  I might enjoy dungeon crawling through the bone palace and fighting against Orcus a great deal and for the merits of that sort of play, especially if done well, but it wouldn't feel 'epic' to me in a sense that killing a goblin king didn't also.</blockquote>

Verification