D&D 5E Why FR Is "Hated"

[Lanefan]

I had to check; yes, yes we are in the D&D forum. The NPCs leveling at the same rate as PCs is wholly unbelievable ...

Absolutely and completely disagree.

The PCs are not the only adventurers in the game world (well, unless you're running a very unusual game world); and it's entirely reasonable to think that other adventurers* are also out there meeting with success and gaining levels just like the PCs are. On the flip side, it's also reasonable to think that these sort of people often top out about the same level as PCs do, for the same kinds of reasons.

* - among these are people's replacement PCs that just haven't been met yet.

Beyond that, the truly stratospheric level numbers usually belong to individuals who have spent a ve-ery long time acquiring them. That available time usually comes from one (or more?) of three places:

- being an Elf
- being an undead (an undead that spends its time acquiring levels can be very scary!)
- having repeated access to no-penalty anti-aging magics (or in fact being immortal, pretty much the same thing)

Lanefan

 

[Shasarak]

WotC only produces one of those settings; the others are ogl conversions by other companies. Their success or failure does not hurt WotCs bottom line, and if they sell a few more PHBs because of it, so much the better.

The question is, how much does WotC want to complete against itself. First off, how many settings are we supporting? 2, 3, 5? What level of support are we talking, one and done campaign book, supplements and player books, full adventures? Which settings? What should the return rate be for sales on a setting like Ravenloft, Dark Sun, or Eberron?

I'm pretty sure WotC has looked at this; they tried both during 3e (with two unique product lines complete with adventures and supplements) and 4e (limited support for a setting a year) and I'm wagering neither model supports the return on investment...

I am sure that we all worry about how many gold plated hot tubs the WotC execs can buy every year. Obviously that is the main concern we have in our minds when discussing RPGs: whether or not they make their acceptable RoI.

And frankly if that is their main concern then maybe they should just stick with their safe option.

 

[Maxperson]

So, in other words, you aren't interested in understanding why other people have problems.

No. That's not true at all. I notice you dodged left that time.

The issues is some players want to play in a world where Joe the Fighter is the hero, where his name will be the one used in stories that reverberate through history. In Forgotten Realms, the feeling is that Elminster and Drizzt are the characters that the stories are written about, and the player's characters will be no one even in the fictional world, that anything they did could and would have been done by the NPCs.

That makes no sense. Stories are only written about Elminster and Drizzt because they did things. They get written about the PCs for the same reason. Elminster and Drizzt have nothing to do with the stories written about the PCs. The PCs stories will be even greater and more renowned.

I had to check; yes, yes we are in the D&D forum. The NPCs leveling at the same rate as PCs is wholly unbelievable, and barring that, E6 is more believable than 35th level NPCs running around.

I don't remember introducing you to Mr. Strawman. Why bring him up here? I said nothing about leveling at the same rate. I said it's wholly unbelievable to think that the PCs will be the only high level people in the world. It could have taken those NPCs 100x longer to get there. They are still there.

Yeah, overemphasis on level probably misses the point. As I said, the high-level good NPCs in DLA had notes that they weren't going to go out and adventure. The more activist NPCs are a problem that static NPCs aren't. There was no one in the setting that was going to take over for the War of the Lance PCs.

No, level does not miss the point. You don't write stories about a level 1 guard. You write them about high level NPCs and PCs. You are also missing that you don't become a high level NPC by sitting around sipping wine. You get there by adventuring. Those high level NPCs in Dragonlance may not be adventuring any longer, but they did so prior to that and I'm sure stories were told, even if they weren't spelled out in the setting books.

And part of it isn't strictly about levels; it matters that you open the FRCS and the first real content is Elminister, and that the text is regularly interrupted by a half-page devoted to an NPC. It's saying that these are the characters who are important in the setting. I can't name any NPCs in Golarion or Eberron or Planescape (except the Lady of Pain) or Spelljammer, but you mention Forgotten Realms, and Drizzt and Elminister come up.

No, it doesn't say that at all. It implies that he's the sage telling the story in the book you are about to read. Because, you know, he's the sage that tells stories.

 

[Shasarak]

It's not a question of diluting the brand as much as dividing the market. That's one of several problems faced by TSR based on WotC's analysis of TSR's business when they were planning to buy them out. Lisa Stevens then of WotC and now of Paizo was one of the people conducting that analysis and their conclusion was that supporting too many setting lines divided the market up too far for most of them to be profitable. That and TSR did a really bad job of determining if those products really had sufficient demand, whether they were being sold with prices set high enough to cover their costs, and more.

Every resource they devote to a second line is a resource not furthering a single more profitable line.

Selling more then one setting is no more dividing the market then selling Coke and Diet Coke or World of Warcraft and Diablo is dividing their markets.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I guess I don't get the objections over the NPCs like Elminster and Drizzt overshadowing the PCs. (And Drizzt isn't really known outside the Sword Coast. I remember Jarlaxle going east and trying ro pretend to be Drizzt and just getting funny looks).

I would actually be surprised if a world didn’t have famous adventurers of higher level than me. That doesn't take away from my story and the people and places I save.

Does Harry Potter feel overshadowed because Dumbledore is around? Is the role of Frodo and Sam somehow lessened because Gandalf and Aragorn exist? Does Daredevil or Batman decide not to put on the rights tonight because, really, Thor and Superman are around to take care of it?

Are we not allowed to write in these universes because "Harry Potter will take care of it?"

Plenty of people have managed to write greay stories and adventures in various IP universes. I play in plenty of Star Wars games. The universe is a big place, and heroes can't be everywhere at once. Others have to step up.

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Well, yes and no and maybe.

Let us take for a moment the Marvel and DC movies. For example, Suicide Squad. A magic witch lady destroys a city, levels military installations, and is literally pronouncing the end of the world for... A week? I mean they have time to grab the squad, fly them in and have almost a day long trek through the city.

Where were Flash and Batman? Both are fast enough to have made it to the scene (I think superman is pretending to be dead at this point? I'm not sure I skipped that movie because friends told me it wasn't worth it). Did they just decide "Well, surely someone else will take care of that. I'm too busy punching jewel thieves to bother with an end of the world event"

You can watch and enjoy the movie, but eventually that thought creeps in, and then it becomes a problem because until I hear otherwise, the reason is that it didn't fit the story and so we kind of just brushed it under the rug.

Similar thing with Avengers. I had no problems with Avengers when it came out, but now the universe has expanded to include a problem. Why didn't any of the sorcerers fight to save New York? One of the seals that protects reality is in New York, it might be important that that isn't destroyed by an alien invasion or a nuke.


Turning this to DnD there are two additional problems.

1) Much like the Flash but even worse, time and distance do not stop powerful wizards from getting to the scene. They need six seconds and a location and they are there. Information gathering would seem to be an issue, but if the gods are already sending signs and portents then they could do the same to the 20th level wizard as they could to the crazy old priest that the party knows.

2) If it is a world or reality ending event, and there is enough lead time, why aren't they there? If the answer is "They were doing something else" then what a lot of players end up hearing is "They were dealing with a more important problem than what you were dealing with". Which lowers how impressive your feats just were.


And that lead time part is the key. If you are the only people on the scene when the bomber you've been chasing says "By the way did I mention my crazy lover is a nuclear physicist?" and the situation goes from "people are going to die" to "everyone is going to die" then it makes sense the big guns aren't going to be able to arrive on the scene before it is resolved.

But it also makes sense for the heroes to call upon those that are more powerful than them when the bad stuff starts happening. In one of our games, I as a player told a survivor of a demon attack to go and tell the city guard and the churches that we were on the trail of a possible Major Demon summoned into the region and that as a military officer I was calling in for back up. We were like level 4 or 5 at the time. It made perfect sense for us to call for reinforcements (Which didn't come because the stupid fool told them "monster attack" costing us the lives of a PC and three of the four guards who actually did show up... stupid NPC) because a powerful demon wandering the countryside is "majorly bad news" and we were not powerful enough to reliably stop it. In fact, we ran from it, because we could not hurt it. I'm still not clear what happened to it after our warlock exploded.



So, when we find that a lost and forgotten god has been summoned to this realm and is literally tearing reality apart. We aren't going to take chances. We call in everyone we can who can feasibly do something about this. Which brings us back around to the problem. Once you get to a certain scale of threat, or a threat that falls within a specific area guarded by a powerful NPC (If I'm in MArvel's New York there is literally a dozen different superheros who should be getting involved with Godzilla stomping Brooklyn) then these NPCs logically need to come out, and they can be so powerful that it becomes them solving the problem, because solving these problems is what they are meant to do.

That makes no sense. Stories are only written about Elminster and Drizzt because they did things. They get written about the PCs for the same reason. Elminster and Drizzt have nothing to do with the stories written about the PCs. The PCs stories will be even greater and more renowned.

Will they though?


I have two games where I'm a player. One is on hiatus at level 8. Other than the demon mentioned above.... we killed a giant. My character found a lost little girl.

Most of our other adventures involve going to a place where no realizes something bad is going on, killing everything there and me trying to convince the party to head back to our base, where we are mercenaries, so we can get paying jobs that will improve our rep.

How do we know where to go if no one knows things are going on? One time, it was horrific nightmares a PC had. The other times people showed up to kill us for seemingly no reason, and we followed the bread crumbs back to the guy who wanted us dead.


The other game is actually far worse, and we're almost level 15. We've literally changed the landscape of the world, but we never tell anybody because we're running off to the next thing. We'll dive in this tomb, grab this brain in a jar, kill some ancient bad stuff, and move on. Generally, no one is any wiser. We closed a long open portal to Hell, and the only reason anyone is even aware the portal existed is because my character told people it was safe to go back into the forest... and they had no idea there was any danger in the first place. Because the forest spirit which demanded our help (in a "your friends head will explode if you don't come" sort of way) kept everyone away from the portal and the devils corralled in, so no one knew it existed.


Call it DMing style if you like, this is two separate DMs. Maybe, within the world, some people will eventually start learning our names, but the common people already know who the great heroes are. And we aren't it, because to the public eye, we've done nothing.

 

[MackMcMacky]

Absolutely and completely disagree.

The PCs are not the only adventurers in the game world (well, unless you're running a very unusual game world); and it's entirely reasonable to think that other adventurers* are also out there meeting with success and gaining levels just like the PCs are. On the flip side, it's also reasonable to think that these sort of people often top out about the same level as PCs do, for the same kinds of reasons.

* - among these are people's replacement PCs that just haven't been met yet.

Beyond that, the truly stratospheric level numbers usually belong to individuals who have spent a ve-ery long time acquiring them. That available time usually comes from one (or more?) of three places:

- being an Elf
- being an undead (an undead that spends its time acquiring levels can be very scary!)
- having repeated access to no-penalty anti-aging magics (or in fact being immortal, pretty much the same thing)

Lanefan

The rules serve the DM and his notion of a campaign. There is no hard-wired rule that high level characters are elves or anything else. If someone wants to run a campaign where humans represent the pinnacle of awesomeness and no other PC race can rise above 8th level they can. Many players won't like it though. As a player I can say that having some NPCs who are "racing" my party in XP could be cool. However, it's kinda cool to eventually get to where you can hang with the master swordsman who was 8 levels higher than you were in the beginning of the campaign. NPC levels is as much about aesthetics as math.

 

[MackMcMacky]

No, it doesn't say that at all. It implies that he's the sage telling the story in the book you are about to read. Because, you know, he's the sage that tells stories.

And if we dislike that sage because he doesn't "do" it for us, didn't like how the sage was used in previous works, and feel like they are wasting our money devoting references to said disliked sage...

 

[Maxperson]

Will they though?

It's 100% up to the players and DM. Nobody can stop it from happening, especially text on a piece of paper. If the group doesn't want to be overshadowed, it isn't overshadowed and can't be.

I have two games where I'm a player. One is on hiatus at level 8. Other than the demon mentioned above.... we killed a giant. My character found a lost little girl.

Most of our other adventures involve going to a place where no realizes something bad is going on, killing everything there and me trying to convince the party to head back to our base, where we are mercenaries, so we can get paying jobs that will improve our rep.

How do we know where to go if no one knows things are going on? One time, it was horrific nightmares a PC had. The other times people showed up to kill us for seemingly no reason, and we followed the bread crumbs back to the guy who wanted us dead.

The other game is actually far worse, and we're almost level 15. We've literally changed the landscape of the world, but we never tell anybody because we're running off to the next thing. We'll dive in this tomb, grab this brain in a jar, kill some ancient bad stuff, and move on. Generally, no one is any wiser. We closed a long open portal to Hell, and the only reason anyone is even aware the portal existed is because my character told people it was safe to go back into the forest... and they had no idea there was any danger in the first place. Because the forest spirit which demanded our help (in a "your friends head will explode if you don't come" sort of way) kept everyone away from the portal and the devils corralled in, so no one knew it existed.

Call it DMing style if you like, this is two separate DMs. Maybe, within the world, some people will eventually start learning our names, but the common people already know who the great heroes are. And we aren't it, because to the public eye, we've done nothing.

8th level really isn't high enough to be making stories except in rare circumstances. It generally takes a Beren and Luthien, or Elminster, or Mordenkainen. 15th level is about where those kinds of stories start.

 

[Maxperson]

And if we dislike that sage because he doesn't "do" it for us, didn't like how the sage was used in previous works, and feel like they are wasting our money devoting references to said disliked sage...

Then don't use him. Elminster sits in the background of my Realms. He has been used 3 times by me since 1e. Twice because the players sought him out for knowledge. Once as a quest giver by me since the PCs were in the area.

 

[Shasarak]

Call it DMing style if you like, this is two separate DMs. Maybe, within the world, some people will eventually start learning our names, but the common people already know who the great heroes are. And we aren't it, because to the public eye, we've done nothing.

Its funny I never really think about my characters being famous, they are usually too busy trying to stay alive long enough to get the phat loot and if they happen to save the world most likely it is because the world is where they happen to keep their stuff.