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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9634844" data-attributes="member: 7035894">So that they pose a challenge. Otherwise...what's the point?I wouldn't have them change in terms of their impact on the wider environment - an f5 tornado is an f5 tornado, or whatever. But I would definitely scale their damage so that they remain a significant threat to players.My reasoning is narrative, but also has to do with how I see hit points. To me, hit points are representative of a character's ability to survive, and relatively little of that is physical, at least when it comes to playable species. Instead, I see them as primarily reflecting skill and experience, with a little more toughness thrown in.This is why I don't cap, and in fact increase falling damage exponentially. It's why a high level barbarian who tries to swim through lava will just die pretty much instantly - in my game, I wouldn't even bother rolling damage in that scenario, I'd just tell the player "if they do that, they are dead."So let's take a massive tornado - my reasoning is that human beings, and human being-like species, that are directly hit by one of those are probably going to die. That is a mortal threat, regardless of level, because that's what the story demands, unless we're doing a superhero story where characters are literally becoming physically invulnerable through HP, but that's not something that interests me.It's not a "diving into lava means you die" level of lethality, but it's on par with falling damage. So I'm going to scale the damage so that, regardless of character level it feels like the mortal threat that an f5 tornado is. Higher level characters still have much better odds to survive because they have more tools to work with, and that's as it should be - skill and experience. But in terms of physical threat, they should be very, very afraid of throwing themselves into one.I also very much disagree with phasing out traps and other sorts of challenges as characters level up. At tier 1, they are breaking into a locked warehouse. That is very different from breaking into the archmage's locked vault at tier 4, and players should expect that the difficulty and cleverness of obstacles will have increased - after all, if they got to that level of experience, so have others, and even higher. An archmage isn't going to just put a Chubb lock on the door and be done.So yeah, if they need to break into a locked warehouse at tier 4 then it will be trivial. But not if they are trying to steal Bahamat's treasure or something.</blockquote>

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