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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9106575" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Ok, then for you the game can stop advancement at 5th or 10th level or somewhere in between. You have no need or use for the high level stuff, it sounds like.  You can just not use it.One thing that Conan has in common with D&D characters is that he is capable of going toe to toe with and killing supernatural foes which possess strength beyond that of any mortal man.  Conan himself is capable of wrestling with gorillas and the equivalent, and winning.  He is a human being whose capabilities are heroic (in the Greek sense).  Greater than ordinary men.How MUCH greater is left ambiguous.  Short stories don't quantify the way game rules do.But we expect high level D&D fighters to be able to go toe to toe with 50 foot dragons and 20 foot tall giants and not just get squished when one of the latter hits them.  That's inherent in the game and always has been.You may not care what Gygax wrote about high level characters being imbued with divine favor and protection and durability, but that's part of the assumptions the game is based on and has been since the 70s.I like using Int saves as well.  That's what I do in my Five Torches Deep & B/X mashup.  One article I found useful in adjudicating illusions is Dragon #130's Hold Onto Your Illusions!  The mechanics in there are designed for 1E AD&D, but the conceptual framework is, I think, still useful for DMs adjudicating them in any edition.Sure.  But D&D has always been, at higher levels, a game about superheroes.  "Superhero" was the level title of an 8th level Fighter from 1974-1989.  And a 4th level Fighter is a Hero.  Not just an ordinary man with a sword.Even 5th edition explicitly tells us, when talking about the tiers of play.  If you don't want characters to have superheroic capabilities, you can cap advancement at lower levels (like the Epic 6 variant on 3rd ed), or you can always play games more explicitly modeled on real world combat, like RuneQuest.  I'm not saying you can't play D&D, but your expectations seem to be in direct conflict with it.Paladins are no more physically supernatural than Fighters, except where specified (immunity to disease, for example, at the level where they get that).  And it's quite clear from context that most of the same folks who argue that Fighters shouldn't be capable of physical feats beyond those of real world athletes do make the same argument about Paladins and any other human-ish character operating without the aid of a spell or magic item.I would argue that it's implicit in the retention of the concepts of hit points and saving throws.  And in the design of a game in which a 6 foot  tall Fighter is intended to be able to face and defeat, in direct physical combat, a 20 foot giant.  Or multiple such giants, at higher levels!And this is a challenge of D&D trying to be all things to all people.  Choosing to have humans in it which ground the fiction and make it feel more relatable, but also having those humans be capable of things no real-world human could do.This is a statement of opinion, predicated on choosing to adjudicate and interpret the rules in ridiculous ways.If the DM and players are consistent in describing hit points the way Gygax and the rulebooks have told us to, there is much less of an issue.  "Your character's hit points define how tough your character is in combat and other dangerous situations", the 5E PH tells us on page 6.  "Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck" it says on page 196.Recovery has gotten faster.  To better represent heroic fiction in which a character can have a deadly duel whose outcome is in doubt, then a chase, and then another deadly battle, without needing to take a week or a month to rest between them.  Which was perennially an issue with D&D and its relatively slow HP recovery rules going back to the 70s.  Many players were drawn in by the promise of playing characters like those they enjoy in heroic fantasy fiction, then disappointed when their characters couldn't perform the same kind of deeds at the same kind of pace.  So the game has progressively sped up healing to better support player expectations and desires.People who choose to use the hit point rules to simulate, say, stabbing yourself in the leg outside of combat (in a manner which in the real world would cause lasting injury and mobility impairment), are choosing to misapply the rules to something they were never intended to simulate.Well, to be fair, the rules are also written so that non-casters get more special abilities nowadays, so they're not as dependent on gear.It's an interesting approach.  I don't think you're going to be able to sell the majority of the D&D-playing market on nerfing wizards into the ground.I think the better approach is just to keep everyone more mundane and mortal at lower levels, and let them get progressively more heroic and finally superheroic at higher levels.  Folks who want a mundane game can stick to lower levels and optionally house rules like Epic 6, and/or simply play other games which aren't designed to be superheroic the way D&D is (and always has been).</blockquote>

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