Azgulor said:
I had heard that this aspect of D&D was going to be amplified but I was hoping it wouldn't be the case. Sorry, but putting "saving cities or small kingdoms" on par with "jaunting to other planes"? Adventurers go from saving villages to traveling to other planes?
I think you are reading a bit too much into Rich Bakers statement. It appears to me that he is saying that at that range of levels, the general nature of the adventures your going on will change. I am guessing that the Paragon Tier is less about visiting the planes than it is about interacting with villains from those planes.
A 3rd level character is going to be much less powerful than a 8th level character. But I do not think that as soon as you hit level 11, your adventures will go from putting an evil thieves guild out of business to storming the gates of hell. But perhaps instead of a thieves guild led by a Neutral Evil Halfling Rogue, the guild is being led by a Neutral Evil devil who has a motive a bit more complicated than 'steal money from people and kill those who do not give it up'. In any event, I suspect that the planar stuff does not start to become a factor until the mid to upper end of the Paragon tier.
Also, saving a small kingdom may very well be on par with visiting other planes, depending on what your definition of a small kingdom is, and what you are saving it from. Are we talking about a kingdom with 40 000 subjects, or 400 000? Are we talking about an area of 80 square miles, or 300 square miles? 1000 square miles? Relative terms are not very informative. Also, saving a kingdom of 400 000 people from an invading army in the 10's of thousands is one thing. Saving a kingdom of 40 000 from some escaped minor (ie: 6 hd) demons is another.
The more relevant thing to take from Rich Bakers comments, I think, is that by the time you hit the Paragon tier, you are now the kind of hero that people start looking for to solve their problems, and the problems are of a sort that are no longer strictly local in scale. As a player you should no longer simply wander into a tavern and hear about a local crisis in most cases. If you do hear about it in a Tavern, it is probably a week or so of hard travel away, and a pretty bad problem. And if you are there as the crises begins, it is the kind of thing everyone will have heard of. If Orcs raid a nearby farm or town, that is a Heroic problem. If a massive Orcish horde sacks and besiges the king in his own city / castle, that is a Paragon problem.
END COMMUNICATION
