clockworkjoe
First Post
It seems to me that the central problem of high level games, characters, and campaigns isn't that any given element is 'unbalanced', but that the more power and elements not found in real life in a game, the harder it is to play and GM.
Simply put, the more supernatural elements you have in a game, the harder it is to find the right balance between munchkin-too-easy games and killer GM-too lethal games. This is due to the fact that each additional supernatural element in a game has to be carefully thought out and developed in a game world for it to make sense.
It's one thing to base a game on one supernatural element. Movies, TV, and books do it all the time. The creator only has to think out how that one supernatural element changes reality. For example, let's say you make a campaign based on the premise that anyone with a psychic 'gift' can use ley lines to teleport.
Now you have to think out how this affects your campaign world. How does every political organization, government, religion, and other cultural institution react to it? How common is it? How is it used? And so forth. This is the sort of thing every GM does.
But let's take it one step further. Let's take a generic psuedo-medieval society and give it just the stuff in the three core D&D 3E books. Magic, monsters, and extraordinary skills and feats. How can you figure out how any given society would react to literally hundreds of supernatural powers being given to them? A single wizard in D&D can kill with a word, teleport, fly, turn invisible and perform all kinds of wondrous acts. In order to accurately reflect how this would affect a campaign world, the GM has to look at every spell and monster and analyze it.
This is practically impossible. This is akin to predicting how a given technology will change our society in the next 100 years or more.
But at low levels, this isn't a problem. Players have few powers and those powers are relatively weak. But as so many GMS have found out, players do unimaginable things when they get enough magical juice.
Plan an adventure where the players have to break into a castle and kill the evil king? Better rethink it, since the party wizard just figured out how to teleport the king into the bottom of the ocean.
And so forth.
And as players accumulate more and more power, it becomes harder and harder to predict how the party will attack a given challenge.
Thus the problem.
The question then becomes, how does one address this issue?
My suggestions
1. Don't let players stockpile supernatural powers forever. While they should be able to get better at the things they do frequently, they should also get worse at the things they don't do very well. This is a rules issue and any revisions need extensive playtesting.
2. Throw out monsters far more dangerous than they are and otherwise challenge. Instead of throwing a lot of little encounters, I prefer to throw out really hard (by the CR chart) encounters and see how well they do. I toss out a CR 12 hydra. They polymorph it into a turtle, no sweat. (At 9th level). They get ambushed by a mind flayer and 3 dire ape pets. Then things get more interesting and when they kill that thing, they earned the exp and gold for it. This is my style and YMMV
3. Figure out how standard magic would change society and battle. This is something we could contribute to.
Whee
Simply put, the more supernatural elements you have in a game, the harder it is to find the right balance between munchkin-too-easy games and killer GM-too lethal games. This is due to the fact that each additional supernatural element in a game has to be carefully thought out and developed in a game world for it to make sense.
It's one thing to base a game on one supernatural element. Movies, TV, and books do it all the time. The creator only has to think out how that one supernatural element changes reality. For example, let's say you make a campaign based on the premise that anyone with a psychic 'gift' can use ley lines to teleport.
Now you have to think out how this affects your campaign world. How does every political organization, government, religion, and other cultural institution react to it? How common is it? How is it used? And so forth. This is the sort of thing every GM does.
But let's take it one step further. Let's take a generic psuedo-medieval society and give it just the stuff in the three core D&D 3E books. Magic, monsters, and extraordinary skills and feats. How can you figure out how any given society would react to literally hundreds of supernatural powers being given to them? A single wizard in D&D can kill with a word, teleport, fly, turn invisible and perform all kinds of wondrous acts. In order to accurately reflect how this would affect a campaign world, the GM has to look at every spell and monster and analyze it.
This is practically impossible. This is akin to predicting how a given technology will change our society in the next 100 years or more.
But at low levels, this isn't a problem. Players have few powers and those powers are relatively weak. But as so many GMS have found out, players do unimaginable things when they get enough magical juice.
Plan an adventure where the players have to break into a castle and kill the evil king? Better rethink it, since the party wizard just figured out how to teleport the king into the bottom of the ocean.
And so forth.
And as players accumulate more and more power, it becomes harder and harder to predict how the party will attack a given challenge.
Thus the problem.
The question then becomes, how does one address this issue?
My suggestions
1. Don't let players stockpile supernatural powers forever. While they should be able to get better at the things they do frequently, they should also get worse at the things they don't do very well. This is a rules issue and any revisions need extensive playtesting.
2. Throw out monsters far more dangerous than they are and otherwise challenge. Instead of throwing a lot of little encounters, I prefer to throw out really hard (by the CR chart) encounters and see how well they do. I toss out a CR 12 hydra. They polymorph it into a turtle, no sweat. (At 9th level). They get ambushed by a mind flayer and 3 dire ape pets. Then things get more interesting and when they kill that thing, they earned the exp and gold for it. This is my style and YMMV
3. Figure out how standard magic would change society and battle. This is something we could contribute to.
Whee