It seems to me that it is really just the D&D concept of character progression in general that is doing the dictating here, isn't it? I mean you can't just fight orcs all day every day for your whole career in AD&D, but nobody would call this a problem with the game 'dictating the fiction' (IE telling the DM to put in Ogres at some point). So it hardly seems like a criticism of any specific version of the game.
Agreed. The idea of PC progression, in some form or other, seems pretty integral to D&D. Whether that's modelled through DC scaling, or damage/hit-point/condition scaling, or both (4e uses both) seems like a technical matter rather than an issue of deep principle.
That's not to say that some people mightn't prefer one form of technical implementation over another, but I find it hard to imagine seeing it as an issue of
principle that (say) a minion's mechanical buffer against automatic one-shotting consist in it having more than 1 hp rather than having a "level-appropriate" AC.
Nor is something like Cave Slime so critical an element of the game that saying it is being dictated really makes that much sense. You can leave out Cave Slime, nobody will miss it. You can use it once at one level and decree that in your world all Cave Slime is level 10, nobody will even raise an eyebrow. Frankly I doubt in all my time of DMing 4e I ever used one of these terrain types more than once anyway, so the whole thing is one of those mountainous molehills.
I think the issue of
actual vs
counterfactual is a big deal for some players/posters who don't like 4e.
In the context of Cave Slime, for instance, it is a big deal that the rulebook
permits and
contemplates the existence of 20th level as well as 10th level Cave Slime, and the fact that you don't actually use it in your game doesn't resolve that concern.
You can see it also in [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]'s concern about the hobgoblin phalanxes statted as swarms. It is
possible, within the game rules, that instead of using a 3x3 swarm to represent around three dozen hobgoblins in a phalanx, I might have dropped down 36 hobgoblin minions instead. Undoubtedly that combat would have turned out differently (and personally I think less interestingly). The fact that the game permits or contemplates this possibility matters, in Saelorn's view, to the actual resolution of the actual situation that I framed.
And you can see it in [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]'s response to the 10-level Neverwinter campaign: the fact that the system as a whole contemplates 30 levels of progression casts a shadow over that game, even though the Neverwinter book explicitly states that it is set up for a 10-level campaign that includes the fiction that a default game would include only in paragon. I think you can also see it in KM's concern that there is nothing inherent in the game's mechanics to prevent running demigods vs demon kings using 1st level stats, or framing the Secret Diary of Vecna as a hard challenge for 5th level PCs if that is what the fiction of the campaign calls for.
From my point of view, these counterfactuals aren't a problem. What matters to a given campaign isn't what might have been done with respect to fiction and mechanics, but what was done.
I'm cool with 5e's way of handling the same situation - lower level critters naturally become one-turn-kills due to the way damage scales.
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It hides the meta-effect well, but has the same effect. A little more dice rolling and math perhaps, but I think this even adds to the feeling of accomplishment - a recognition that it is as much about the high score of a big damage roll as it is about the in-game and in-fiction effect of a dead monster.
I think this has to be player-relative. Given how meta- the hit point and damage systems are, scaling them rather than AC doesn't seem to me to hide any meta-effects.
And similarly I don't feel that it is more of an accomplishment to gain levels, and therefore boost my damage, rather than gain levels, and therefore boost my ability to hit higher ACs. Bigger damage dice/bonus and bigger to-hit bonus are, divorced from fiction, just numbers. And in the fiction of either game, they represent the same thing: getting more powerful, mechanically mediated through the XP/level system.
