Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 3412489" data-attributes="member: 18280">I'll see if I can pull the issue for you, but I have to admit upfront that I have a lot of things in boxes right now.  It was an article on the use of divination spells, early in the 3.0 days, that specifically noted to Scry the mook (who has a lower Will save) instead of the master.  Good advice in that article, actually.(If anyone here has it handy, you'd save me much digging through boxes.)Yes, and it is compounded by the fact that the EL guidelines break down when you're considering masses of low-CR creatures against higher-level parties (as you mention also).Or, it could be that the designer read the advice about scaling CR/EL based upon party resources, and assumed (falsely, in your case) that a party that couldn't leave the dungeon or craft items was unlikely to have the resources to meet opponents of the same EL as normal.  Which is, IMHO, exactly in keeping with the guidelines.  It just so happens that the guidelines, as levels increase, become rougher approximations than they were at lower levels.Sure.  What I am suggesting, though, is that it is harder to drop the ball at lower levels, and easier to drop the ball at higher levels.  This is true in every edition of the game, not just 3.x.  Woe to the DM who tries to cut his teeth on a high level adventure.  Back in 1e (UA included), I had a friend who decided to start his DMing carreer with 14-16th level characters (he gave us an XP amount).  We were to fight our way to the lower planes and confront Tiamat.  Instead, what we did was B-S-T (1e version) and mopped the floor with Tiamat and her cronies in two rounds.  And we survived, relatively unscathed.Sure it does.  The writer is, presumably, trying to take into account the lack of resources of the PCs.  In the WLD, not only will the average party not meet the per-level wealth guidelines, but they won't have the opportunity to optimize their gear.  This skews effective APL, and thus needs to be taken into account when determining appropriate EL.  As level increases, so does the effect of PC resources.  A 5th level fighter who lacks average wealth per level is not nearly as hampered as a 20th level fighter.  In a setting like the WLD, the percentage of average wealth-by-level that you have presumably drops as well, from 100% (when they enter the dungeon) to whatever it is when they (hopefully) leave.  The un-optomized 5th level fighter is presumably closer to the optomized 5th level fighter than the un-optomized 15th level fighter is to the optomized one.And that, I think, is where the problem with this region began.  It is also, I think, "close to following the guidelines in the DMG", although as I said previously I don't have that book here to quote.Sure.  But how many of them continue to publish and sell?  Poor game designers leave broken corpses.  I find it hard to believe that game designers were simply chosen at random to create the WLD, given the amount of resources allocated to (and the price point of) the project.  Jim Pinto agrees that they dropped the ball with this section, but surely Jim Pinto is above average, and surely he took at least 10 minutes to peruse the section.It seems reasonable to assume that the section was OKed for some reason, even if play later proves that reason wrong.I agree.  You know that I agree; that the reason that I haven't yet really delved into the WLD a second time is because of the huge amount of rewriting I deem it to need.I simply disagree that your first reaction was wrong.  These guys are flipping powerful.  Your second reaction (this region sucks) may not be wrong either....but that doesn't mean that your first reaction was.  The WLD makes changes to the base assumptions (and brings them to your attention in the introduction, including some suggested means of dealing with those changes).  The writers attempt to compensate for the changes in those assumptions.  This is harder as the levels increase, because there is a cumulative effect involved.  I suspect that, if we had access to the WLD writers' guidelines, we might know exactly why the ball was dropped in that section, and hence exactly why said ball-dropping was missed by the editor.(This may be good evidence that the 3.X engine can handle a low-resource setting without nearly as much adjustment as some have argued, though.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> )</blockquote>

Verification