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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5393540" data-attributes="member: 58197">I believe I see what you're getting at here, and it's certainly a legitimate approach; if I understand you correctly, it's the idea that the stats in D&D do not reflect any fixed underlying reality. They are simply a way to handle the interaction of these PCs, with these monsters, at this moment in time.From this point of view, it might be more accurate to say that the Necromancer of the North is neither a level 8 elite nor a level 29 solo; he is what he is within the game world, a purely narrative entity. His stats will be determined at the moment the party faces him, like a quantum waveform collapsing. (Or, more realistically, they will be determined the night before the party faces him, when the DM sits down to stat him out.)Like I said, this is a legitimate approach, and it's one I flirted with to some extent when 4E was released. However, I've pulled back from it since, because it's massively counterintuitive and it sacrifices much of the usefulness of having rules in the first place.Suppose the party hears that mind flayers have taken up residence under their home city. The PCs have fought mind flayers before. Now they need to decide what to do. Do they just shrug and say, "Let the city watch handle it?" Do they go after the flayers on their own? Or do they organize a militia and lead them into the tunnels?If the rules are consistent--if they are at least a fair approximation of the underlying reality of the game world--then the players can answer these questions based on their own experience. They know that mind flayers gave them a tough fight in mid-Paragon and they were trouncing city watchmen at low Heroic, so asking the watch to handle it is tantamount to murder*. They also know that mind flayers have blast attacks and illusion powers that would make a low-level militia force more hindrance than help.If, however, the rules are merely a transitory illusion, the players have no such capability. They are entirely dependent on the DM to frame the situation for them and evaluate their options. That puts an extra burden on the DM, reduces player agency, and slows down the game (since the players have to constantly ask "How does X stack up against Y?"). It also creates a lot of potential for immersion-breaking moments, when the players' instinctive expectation that AC 30 is AC 30 runs up against the reality that AC 30 is whatever the DM says it is at this moment in time.And in the case of monster power levels, it seems like a bit of a Red Queen's Race. If monsters level up to keep pace with the PCs, then why are the PCs leveling up at all? Why not just stay the same level from start to finish and cut out all the number-crunching? If the problem is PCs getting bored with their abilities, just hand out new abilities without increasing the overall power level, E6-style.[size=-2]*One could argue this is metagame thinking, but I disagree. It's players using the rules as a convenient shorthand for what their characters know about mind flayer combat capabilities. Metagaming happens when the players use their knowledge of the rulebooks in ways their characters could not possibly do, e.g., a player who's read the Monster Manual knowing the vulnerabilities of a monster her character has never heard of.[/size]</blockquote>

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