Setting sweetspot

[Kraydak]

There are a few other threats I could put this in, but I think it deserves its own.

We have heard about WotC increasing the system's mathematical sweet spot. What corresponds to that from a setting point of view, for a 1-shot adventure (what generic setting works best for a 1-shot)? What world design implications does that have for short or long campaigns?

I feel that both adventure flexibility and realism suffer if PCs are too strong compared to the friendly NPCs. You lose the possibility of political/intrigue adventures, and (friendly) NPCs are unimportant to dungeoncrawls. The later being less significant for 1-shots than campaigns, as it means that the NPC community won't be supplying the continuity. (Superhero comics, with immense power disparities, can overcome this by making the heroes have strong relationships with mundanes that are hard to do in an RPG system, and by having the villains actually survive to increase the effective cast). You also have to wonder how NPC communities survive at all in the face of world-ending (to them) threats.

If the PCs are too weak compared to the (local, interested) authorities, then you wonder why the PCs are doing anything, and why people care about them.

All told then, I think you'll find that the "optimal" generic setting for DnD would have the PCs with more projectible and less ablative power than the (local, interested) authorities, but less total strength. If the NPCs have enough 1st level people to overmatch a 3rd level party, the NPCs can fend for themselves if needed *but* would suffer (expensive) deaths against threats the PCs could handle without losses. This provides incentives for PCs to act as heroes, but also allow for back-up if needed, improve setting realism and avoid the PCs walking over the NPCs as if they didn't matter. This, to me, is DnD's adventure setting sweetspot. The PCs are important, but things wouldn't fall to pieces if they left and they have to take the NPCs into account.

The problem then is that DnD's power curve is quite steep. Unless the NPCs level up alongside the PCs (raising the question of where had all to heroes gone before time zero), you will exit the sweet spot unless you change your NPC cast. You can do this by moving the setting (losing continuity) or increasing the scope of the setting (increasing the cast of NPCs to include more powerful ones who were busy off-screen before). In short, you want a fractal campaign world, which at every scale has appropriately scaled NPCs to match but not overpower the PCs. This means you need an excuse for the (powerful, off-screen) NPCs to stay off-screen. A simple, "many threats, few heroes" will work, as well as having the powerful NPCs being prideful enough to avoid lowering themselves and dealing with lesser threats.

 

[the Jester]

Truncated, but:

There are a few other threats I could put this in, but I think it deserves its own...

I feel that both adventure flexibility and realism suffer if PCs are too strong compared to the friendly NPCs. You lose the possibility of political/intrigue adventures, and (friendly) NPCs are unimportant to dungeoncrawls...

If the PCs are too weak compared to the (local, interested) authorities, then you wonder why the PCs are doing anything, and why people care about them.

All told then, I think you'll find that the "optimal" generic setting for DnD would have the PCs with more projectible and less ablative power than the (local, interested) authorities, but less total strength. If the NPCs have enough 1st level people to overmatch a 3rd level party, the NPCs can fend for themselves if needed *but* would suffer (expensive) deaths against threats the PCs could handle without losses. This provides incentives for PCs to act as heroes, but also allow for back-up if needed, improve setting realism and avoid the PCs walking over the NPCs as if they didn't matter...

Unless the NPCs level up alongside the PCs (raising the question of where had all to heroes gone before time zero), you will exit the sweet spot unless you change your NPC cast. You can do this by moving the setting (losing continuity) or increasing the scope of the setting (increasing the cast of NPCs to include more powerful ones who were busy off-screen before). In short, you want a fractal campaign world, which at every scale has appropriately scaled NPCs to match but not overpower the PCs. This means you need an excuse for the (powerful, off-screen) NPCs to stay off-screen. A simple, "many threats, few heroes" will work, as well as having the powerful NPCs being prideful enough to avoid lowering themselves and dealing with lesser threats.

I think that this is a very interesting and thought-provoking position. I agree about a "fractal" campaign world, but I look at level distribution a little bit differently.

In the epic 3.5 game I am running, many of the npcs that the party is on par with are npcs that they have known about since they were, sometimes, 1st level. They simply aren't moving in the same spheres as those epic npcs until they are near their level. For example, Sybele, one of the pcs, at low levels, did some work with a group of elven revolutionaries. One of the highest leaders of the revolution was secretly a beautiful grey elven enchantress professor at the city's college. She is named Estelias, and Sybele occasionally saw her on the campus or in the city, but never interacted with her directly until she was much higher level. Estelias was simply operating on a different level. While Sybele might be concerned with finding out the motivations of the secret orcish spies from Valonia, Estelias would have been concerned with whether Valonia as a nation could be subverted to aid the revolution.

Now, in 4e, we're going to have the "3 tiers" of heroic/paragon/epic. I would suggest that the local non-pc heroes in a given 'point of light' are all heroic or lower level. Paragon-level characters are no longer "local heroes"; they are local legends, who have traveled across multiple 'points of light' and left tales of their prowess in many of them. Traveling merchants, few though they might be, also tell their tales (and likely provided them with some adventures as caravan guards across the hostile wilderness, too!). Epic characters, on the other hand, are the guys who actually build a new empire, create the answer to famine or plague, or otherwise change the world.

One thing I have always felt was nearly required in order to maintain any level of verisimilitude is the idea that there are only so many high level npcs out there. I mean, how many different 20th level characters are out there that nobody's ever heard of? Not too many, imho and imc... except for maybe those that don't want their existence to be known. So the low-level pcs hear stories about the high-level npcs. Maybe at mid-levels they meet one or two of them briefly, either in order to learn some spells, buy a magic item, train, take up a mission, etc. And then at high levels they kill them and take their stuff (or vice-versa, or they marry them, or... whatever).

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

The tiers seem to define what kind of adventure will fit into a certain level range.
This will make it clearer when you're moving out of the "local town hero" range toward the country-former and world-shaker range. They might also be useable to determine what kind of adventurers occupies higher level PCs and why they don't get into the lower-level stuff.

There might be other high level adventurers and heroes around, but you don't really know where they are just now, and what they have to do.
This can be used for heroes of equal level/tier then the PCs. Yes, there was the adventure group that managed to stop the goblin raids on this town. But they left town to visit another area, and little is known about them. Unfortunately, the Ruins of the Castle of Despair weren't spawning undeads every day when they were still around, so they couldn't fix that...
There might be an epic level wizard around in the country, but little is known about his whereabouts, and he probably doesn't know (and possibly doesn't care!) about the Castle of Despair. Which leaves only the PCs to fix this.

Furthermore, the 4E monster rules with differentiation between regular monsters, minions, elites and solos might also serve to provide NPCs that could - in numbers - be as effective as the PCs for a task - but they would also mean costly losses no town will afford if there are wandering heroes around that will do it for glory and gold, probably survive and bring back the treasures to pay the towns ale and whores...

 

[jester47]

This definately deserves its own THREAT...

 

[DocS]

If the PCs are too weak compared to the (local, interested) authorities, then you wonder why the PCs are doing anything, and why people care about them.

A fundamental rule I use in my gaming is "The PC's are out there solving the problems that The Authorities can't."

Placing the party in a power 'sweet spot' where they are just powerful enough to matter but not too powerful to overrule can be a little exacting and possibly heavy-handed.

'Mattering' can be independent of party power. If the party is really really weak, but they are the only ones able to handle the threat for some other reason (pick a cliche', 'They are the prophesied ones', 'they are the only ones who have the artifact/bloodlines needed', 'they know of the threat but no one believes them', 'Narnia is in THEIR wardrobe gosh darnitt!!'), then they will matter no matter how weak they are.

Comparative power level to determine such things can be used, but seems to be the most boring way to tailor. I'd use some innate plot motivation (see above) to establish purpose. At this point, merely tune the power level of the threats to the party, since the 'exclusivity' of the threat to the party has already been established. It's much more interesting if the party matters for reasons completely independent of how they swing a sword or the size of the knobs on the ends of their wizard's staffs.