Rules, Rules, Rules (Legends & Lore)

[Gryph]

Very true. My Paragon tier Dragonborn Fighter with Scion of Arkhosia for his Paragon Path had an overland flight speed of 12. I was good at climbing, but didn't really need to be anymore. I could just fly up, and then put in a piton and drop a rope to the rest of the party.



Exactly. If you always want mundane things to be a challenge, then end your campaigns in the Heroic tier. Paragon and Epic are meant to be played as if your characters are living legends. Heck, just look at the descriptions on some of those Epic Destinies! Undying Warrior? Demi-God? These characters are beyond being simply mortal, and should routinely be crushing entire armies under their boot...but a simple oiled rope should be able to stop them?!?!

And if that cool Paragon Path or ED gives them a way to trivialize the getting over the obstacle then more power to them. To me, Undying Warrior doesn't imply oiled rope climbing champion.

In many cases they do spend resources on it. A Fighter has 3 skill choices, one of which might go to Athletics if he wants to be good at climbing. He must also bump his STR score every level in order to remain good at it and keep up with the scaling. Yes, he was probably going to do that anyway since it's his primary stat, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a resource.

Even without "spending resources", and just relying on natural level scaling, characters don't get as powerful as you seem to think. A Wizard with a starting 8 in STR is going to have a -1 to climb at level 1. He'll have difficulty even climbing a simple rope (I know, we had one in our party like that once...had to use a STR check to haul him up the wall with a rope around his waist, which was not very "heroic").

At level 21, he'll have a 10 in STR, and a +10 bonus due to the half-level increase. So now, this Wizard that has been adventuring for years at this point, fighting alongside his companions and bringing nations to their knees, and is perhaps now preparing to create a dimensional gate to the Far Realm to fight the Mind Flayer scourge, can finally climb a rope pretty easily. Climbing up a rough cliff wall though? That's still moderately difficult and would be helped quite a bit by having some decent climbing gear.

How is this something that's utterly breaking the game? Sure, the Fighter can climb even sheer, smooth surfaces with ease, but that's his job! How many times have we seen the warrior in armor scaling the outside of the castle? Or climbing the cliff to surprise his enemies? Heck, how many times have you seen images of real life free climbers doing unthinkable things with their bare hands? A 21st level Fighter is so much more than these real life examples, and should be able to accomplish those tasks with ease!

Yep the fighter who keeps improving his strength will find it easier to climb as he levels the way I set DCs. The level 21 Wizard still has a strength of 8 and is still carrying some gear and I think he should still struggle to climb a rope. Let him use some of his now vast magically resources to overcome the challenge, it's ridiculous for him to be trying to climb.

By level 21, the typical fighter will have spent about as much time doing challenging climbs as a good weekend for an expert free climber. I find the notion that slaughtering my foes with my weapons makes me a better climber, to be laughable.

If you like the super hero style of high level play that's cool and I would never try to talk you out of it. I prefer my heroes to still be mortal, even at high levels.

 

[Ryujin]

I think this is a good example of the inherent problems with so much number scaling in 3 & 4E as you advance in levels. You want a standardized DC chart to reflect the difficulties of climbing any particular surface. However, because (in 4E for example) the numbers to PCs skills creep so high that as Ryujin said... by mid-Paragon a good PC no longer needs to roll to succeed. Thus we've lost a possible avenue for dramatic tension.

The only other option therefore is to make the DCs for climbing fluid... so that as a PC becomes more skilled, they still are required to make Climb checks. But at that point we get the situation where a wall that was a certain DC at 1st level has now morphed into a wall that is this new higher DC... not necessarily because the wall is more difficult, but merely because the DM wanted to present a challenge to the PC. It breaks a lot of reality in that way (unless the DM tries to get around it by taking standard DC walls and then modifying the DCs by throwing all kinds of oils, wind, darkness etc. etc. in attempts to raise the DCs so they present a challenge... but at some point when every wall is like that, it becomes kinda stupid).

It's a catch-22. How do you create DCs for non-supernatural events that don't become obsolete at some point because a PC advances past it? And what kind of challenges can you throw up instead that don't involve either heaping all manner of ridiculous modifiers to try and make the action more difficult. Or how do you explain away the changes in DC that come not from an action actually being more narratively difficult, but rather just from a fluid DC table put into place to keep the "dice rolling game" an active part of D&D throughout all levels?

The Heroic character will be climbing a mountain.

The Paragon character will be climbing a mountain during a thunderstorm, at night, with water sluicing down it.

The Epic character will be climbing a mountain that is telling him that he's going to fall, while it dynamically moves the handholds.

 

[mneme]

Hmm. A neat hack here would be to say that trained skills go up normally, but untrained ones don't. Then for skill difficulty targets, keep easy targets at the level 1 difficulty, and average moderate difficulties such that they're halfway between their level 1 difficulty and the at-level difficulty, but keep the hard (and worse) difficulties the same.

Wizards shouldn't really get better at climbing as they go up in levels, but they -should- go up at arcana and delve deeper into the secrets of history.

This would hurt JoaT bards badly, though (possibly deservedly).

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think this is wrong:

The game needs rules. They form the basis of the shared reality that allows everyone to participate in the same game.​

But maybe I don't understand what he means by "shared reality".

The 'shared reality' is whatever the story is that the DM and players are creating together.

In order to accomplish this group creation, you need parameters (or 'rules') that keep the story contained, cohesive, and on track. These can either be explicit rules (like your D&D rulebooks are) or implicit parameters that come with just keeping the story from getting out of hand.

So for instance... implicit parameters on this group storytelling might be things like "each player talks one at a time", "you can't change the genre of the story in the middle of it", "the DM is the only one who can be the omniscient narrator", "if someone needs to go to the bathroom the story will be put on hold until they get back" etc. etc. Without everyone implicit accepting these 'rules' of story creation from the get-go... you can't guarantee that the story you all are telling will remain on track. Because at some point, someone could choose to start telling a completely new tale in the middle of the one already being done just for the hell of it. Then the rest of the group has to decide where to go from there, since there are no 'rules' to shape the progression of the work they are doing.

 

[Gortle]

If you like the super hero style of high level play that's cool and I would never try to talk you out of it. I prefer my heroes to still be mortal, even at high levels.

Then you should stick to a heroic level range in your campaign.

At Paragon levels and above magic is going to get ridiculous, and the abilities of nonmagical PCs has to as well to keep some form of parity.

 

[Gortle]

This is why I don't rate walls and other physical objects with a 3e style static DC. I rate them by the DC chart categories; easy, medium, hard and very hard (hard + 5). For the most part I don't accept the notion that simply levelling makes you able to overcome such obstacles easier so I prefer them to always be relatively rated.

I find the jumping rules particularly silly as by Paragon they make world record setting long jumps trivially easy for a trained character in full armor.

If the players want to make such tasks increasingly easy as they level I expect them to spend some resources on it, skill focus, appropriate magic items, etc.

I disagree. It seems perfectly reasonable to me when half the party has fly or teleport at this level.

It is a problem for the designers and GMs is to continue to find physical skill challenges as levels go up. Some more examples in the rules of what you can do with a skill would be useful.

The primary ablity of acrobatics is to escape from restraints. There are so many easier ways of doing that rather than a skill check that my gaming group considers it to be one of the most useless skills.

 

[SageMinerve]

I think this is a good example of the inherent problems with so much number scaling in 3 & 4E as you advance in levels. You want a standardized DC chart to reflect the difficulties of climbing any particular surface. However, because (in 4E for example) the numbers to PCs skills creep so high that as Ryujin said... by mid-Paragon a good PC no longer needs to roll to succeed. Thus we've lost a possible avenue for dramatic tension.

The only other option therefore is to make the DCs for climbing fluid... so that as a PC becomes more skilled, they still are required to make Climb checks. But at that point we get the situation where a wall that was a certain DC at 1st level has now morphed into a wall that is this new higher DC... not necessarily because the wall is more difficult, but merely because the DM wanted to present a challenge to the PC. It breaks a lot of reality in that way (unless the DM tries to get around it by taking standard DC walls and then modifying the DCs by throwing all kinds of oils, wind, darkness etc. etc. in attempts to raise the DCs so they present a challenge... but at some point when every wall is like that, it becomes kinda stupid).

It's a catch-22. How do you create DCs for non-supernatural events that don't become obsolete at some point because a PC advances past it? And what kind of challenges can you throw up instead that don't involve either heaping all manner of ridiculous modifiers to try and make the action more difficult. Or how do you explain away the changes in DC that come not from an action actually being more narratively difficult, but rather just from a fluid DC table put into place to keep the "dice rolling game" an active part of D&D throughout all levels?

This is why I think that, for the most part, skills shouldn't scale up with level. You're a level 9 fighter, not a level 9 mountaineer, so why the +4?

I would maybe allow PCs to train once for each tier. So you could have a heroic training, a paragon training and an epic training (maybe +5 each, haven't thought it out). This allows players to feel the evolution of their character while keeping PCs skill levels in check with "mundane" skill levels.

 

[Gryph]

Then you should stick to a heroic level range in your campaign.

At Paragon levels and above magic is going to get ridiculous, and the abilities of nonmagical PCs has to as well to keep some form of parity.

Perhaps so, I honestly don't think this edition scales across the upper teens levels and beyond any better than the previous editions.

Or maybe I can continue to use inherent bonuses and a lower overall level of magic in my campaign to preserve a gritty more Swords and Sorcery feel since that vibe seems to be appealing to my players and I.

Thanks for the pronouncement, though, really.

 

[mneme]

[MENTION=88663]Gizella[/MENTION]: I have to disagree about the primary ability of acrobatics. The primary ability is to stunt--Acrobatics and Athletics are by far the primary stunt skills, letting you make up and pull off death defying feats in and out of combat.

But while I'm fine with things as they are, I have to admit that the "everything gets better, yes, even that" effect of the half level bonus is really a solution in search of a problem. Because of the half level, everything you want to be a factor at higher levels has to be harder, stronger, more difficult, even when it doesn't make much sense. Sure, you can come up with an explanation for why the 30th level wizard is able to jump 2 squares without breathing hard; why the 30th level Barbarian is hugely knowledgable about history, nature, and arcana (which admitedly made sense for Conan, but I'd argue that ti's not true of -all- larger than life heroes), and so on.

But really, the reason is so that the difficulty tables will make sense. It should be possible for a wizard to make a level appropriate Stealth check that's simple enough or with enough help; it should be possible for the group to pass a difficult group Endurance check without everyone being trained in Endurance; it should be possible for any character to have a chance at passing a level appropriate moderate check. Remember the difficulty tables--the ones that were revised with the Essentials book so they'd be grouped around expected character difficulty, not the over-simplistic assumptions that there would never be greater than a 10 point skill gap? -That- is the best place to make sure that characters can succeed on level appropriate challenges. You don't -have- to have the half level bonus to all skills; you can just make sure the system scales character appropriate challenges. And you don't have to give everyone half level to make sure they can succeed on group checks and appropriate assisted checks; you just need rules that allow aids to grant a bigger bonus when it's a trained person assisting an untrained person (because that really makes sense).

Sure, higher level characters will be able to do otherwise impossible things. But that doesn't mean they all have to be able to do the -same- impossible things. If you preserve some levels of incapability from low levels; rather than having everyone going from being good at some things and terrible at others to being great at some things and only good at others, you end up with more character differentiation and a world that makes a little more sense. And the thing is, the nature of feats and powers is that the characters -will- be a lot more capable at 30th level than they were at 1st. The wizard will be able to charm people using suggestion and glib tongue; the warlock will be able to teleport, some characters will even be able to fly! But that doesn't mean they can't be bad at at least -some- things.

 

[delericho]

This is why I think that, for the most part, skills shouldn't scale up with level.

In principle, I agree with you. I was always a proponent of keeping skill points in the game.

But in practice... skill points are just a hassle. A fixed progression (or maybe a choice of fixed progressions) is so much more efficient that I just can't argue with it any more.