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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
The challenges of high level adventure design.
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<blockquote data-quote="Jefe Bergenstein" data-source="post: 8930368" data-attributes="member: 31506"><p>Because I've seem them "umm akshually" in like every martial debate. They're technically right. If you force a bloated number of encounters, martials deal more damage and casters do run out of resources. It doesn't come organically in play though and requires you to grind through a bunch of filler encounters whose only purpose is wasting resources (and my time). High level casters have ways to get around forced encounters and change the world unilaterally. Martials do scutwork ticking off HP. Everyone gets skills but magic always trumps skill in D&D. Outside of antimagic, which I don't think I've ever actually seen in a published adventures but seems to get trotted out like it is common on boards.</p><p></p><p>I do not believe high level D&D works simply because the narrative capabilities of party members are so wildly different. Until you solve that, high level published adventures will continue to have trouble because a party of four Angel Summoners will laugh at something four BMX Bandits cannot hope to deal with. When one group just gets to say stuff happens, and the other has to beg permission, how does an author create a challenge for both parties? Look at stuff like Find the Path, which basically obsoletes chunks of certain adventures from level 11+ with a bit of reading or a history check. So now an adventure needs to either counter this possibility, assume that the players have it and just get to the next location, or waste a bunch of pagecount dealing with how the mundane losers get to the fireworks factory. Legend Lore is another spell that's going to need to be taken into account in most adventures. 20th level casters are almost co DM's when it comes to narrative control compared to a 20th level fighter.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jefe Bergenstein, post: 8930368, member: 31506"] Because I've seem them "umm akshually" in like every martial debate. They're technically right. If you force a bloated number of encounters, martials deal more damage and casters do run out of resources. It doesn't come organically in play though and requires you to grind through a bunch of filler encounters whose only purpose is wasting resources (and my time). High level casters have ways to get around forced encounters and change the world unilaterally. Martials do scutwork ticking off HP. Everyone gets skills but magic always trumps skill in D&D. Outside of antimagic, which I don't think I've ever actually seen in a published adventures but seems to get trotted out like it is common on boards. I do not believe high level D&D works simply because the narrative capabilities of party members are so wildly different. Until you solve that, high level published adventures will continue to have trouble because a party of four Angel Summoners will laugh at something four BMX Bandits cannot hope to deal with. When one group just gets to say stuff happens, and the other has to beg permission, how does an author create a challenge for both parties? Look at stuff like Find the Path, which basically obsoletes chunks of certain adventures from level 11+ with a bit of reading or a history check. So now an adventure needs to either counter this possibility, assume that the players have it and just get to the next location, or waste a bunch of pagecount dealing with how the mundane losers get to the fireworks factory. Legend Lore is another spell that's going to need to be taken into account in most adventures. 20th level casters are almost co DM's when it comes to narrative control compared to a 20th level fighter. [/QUOTE]
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