Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6245247" data-attributes="member: 17106">This seems contradictory to me. Are the PCs better than everyone else, or is there a significant group of powerful monsters and high-level NPCs that are better than them even when they become very powerful?If that's what you want to do, okay. But there's nothing in the rules that prevents the DM from having characters that are not you take actions that affect you without your knowledge. Especially if your characters are rich and famous.Well, novels are secondary to the game, and a bit of a sketchy area. Seems to me that Drizzt would have the same spell resistance as the rest of his race, though, right? Having not read them, I can't speak to the rest of this. However, if you are expecting the game to match the novels, but the players and DM are not taking any active steps to create that outcome, it seems unlikely to occur to me.I don't buy that. Even using the very conservative DMG demographics, there are plenty of high-level spellcasters in the world of the common races, let alone all the powerful monsters, some of which also have spellcasting classes. Conversely, in Star Trek, it's abundantly clear that most people are civilians who have no idea how technology works, and that defenses and law and order are the responsibility of a small number of people with very (often conveniently) powerful technologies to stop nefarious acts. I don't think there's a huge difference.I see no reason why any character who lived in a world in which the entire D&D monster manual of creatures exists would feel particularly safe in his home without some pretty special defenses. If you're suggesting that that high-level characters can dominate inferior opposition, that's true, because D&D has a very sharp power curve. If you're suggesting that there is no such thing as non-inferior opposition, or that a DM using the rules to create challenges is inappropriate for some unstated reason, I don't buy that.I can only imagine what results that brings. One thing that I think is clear from the entire period since WotC started publishing D&D (I can't speak too much to before that) is that they do not understand their own game all that well. If you're saying that the original DMG really doesn't explain high level play well, or that their magazines published material that didn't use the rules competently, that's probably true. I'm not arguing that.I also, as I'm guessing you're aware, have never had any faith in the ability of some anonymous far-off designer to craft challenges that work reliably for specific D&D groups, regardless of the rules.I do not count either of these things as reflecting on the PHB rules for how characters are built.Really? In my experience a so-called brute would have to be well-off the CR chart to present even a modest challenge to even a very one-dimensional martial PC.How about limiting yourself to a large collection? There are a boatload of well-designed monsters, and ample guidelines for monster advancement using class-based and non-class-based methods. All told, there aren't many things in the MM that can't be made into a legitimate high-level challenge.However, putting custom-designed high-level PCs against generic monsters straight out of the book is an inherently unfair matchup, and often won't work. Given that the challenges are optimized to a similar extent that the PCs are, or even to some significant but lesser extent, they will be a lot more challenging.***But even all of that dodges the bigger issue: walk into a 20' by 20' room and smash the monster who is sitting there doing nothing is not really an appropriate challenge for a high-level character, regardless of what capacities said monster has. I would argue it isn't really appropriate for any character, but especially at high levels, dungeoncrawling breaks down. As well it should.</blockquote>

Verification