Will DMs Need to Plan the PC Strategy?

[HeinorNY]

It basically bothers me that things like flying over a swamp instead of walking through it and cracking open locks are things which are apparently equal to defeating Pit Fiends and ruling countries.

You mean, like killing a Balor in an ancient dwarven city and then still having to find a fast horse to save the day?
Nah, that doesn't bother me at all.

If you can't even bypass something like a small chasm, then you aren't an archmage, no matter what the level says.

The Gray Wanderer disagrees with you

 

[robertliguori]

You mean, like killing a Balor in an ancient dwarven city and then still having to find a fast horse to save the day?
Nah, that doesn't bother me at all.

The Gray Wanderer disagrees with you

Hah. Of course the Grey Wanderer could get across a chasm. He just makes a fireworks-powered rocket, shoots himself across, and waits for Eru to reincarnate what's left of his body on the other side.

Of course, given the D&D baggage placed on the term 'archmage', I wouldn't put any of the Istari at that rank. None of them demonstrated particularly great levels of skill or leveled ability. Middle-Earth was just an E6 (or possibly E8) world.

Now, that being said, I like high power curves. I like the fact that D&D isn't Iron Heroes. I like the fact that you need to read the rules, and think about them, and that if you go into a situation with the wrong mental metaphors, you are SoL, and that the players can gain a great advantage by subverting the paradigm of a given challenge. To me, the ability of flying creatures and long-range attack spells to kick battles into the modern paradigm of close air support and artillery, and especially to do so when you have a castle, 50 mages, one wyrmling dragon, and 10,000 orcs beating down your doors, is unquestionably a design feature, not a bug. I like scry-and-die as the logical evolution of power-to-a-point tactics; it, in conjunction with abjurations like Forbiddance, give perfect reasons for high-level characters to limit their activities outside of warded areas; this could be the day those enemies you didn't know you had teleport in and gank you horribly. I really like that instead of building a fortress with a built-in weakness that the party must find, I can build a fortress, design it as best I can, and watch the party probe its defenses, found a weakness I actually overlooked, and organically and honestly go forth and kick ass.

Now, that being said, I'm also looking greatly forward to 4E. 4E, with its paradigm of mostly-at-will abilities, looks like the first test for world-building will be to scour the low-level at-will or per-encounter abilities, and see which have exploitable effects. What happens when a dragonborn alchemist starts harvesting his exhaled acid, or makes use of his electrical breath weapon to facilitate chemical reactions (such as electroplating)? What are the ramifications of Eladrin teleportation?

Power and ability systems with a lot of interacting fiddly bits interest me. "The world just works this way, regardless of the implications of the rest of the world that say it shouldn't." does the polar opposite of interesting me.

 

[Iron Sky]

It basically bothers me that things like flying over a swamp instead of walking through it and cracking open locks are things which are apparently equal to defeating Pit Fiends and ruling countries. What the heck good is it to level up and achieve new "tiers" of power, if it just means bigger numbers on your blasting spells? If you can't even bypass something like a small chasm, then you aren't an archmage, no matter what the level says.

Personally, I'd much rather play a game where an archmage = Gandalf. If Gandalf had flown over the bridge of Khazad'dum in the movie, I'd have gotten up and walked out.

Sure DnD magic is - in most games - more prevalent than in Middle Earth, but I've never really thought of that as a selling point(more often a turn-off). Personally I like Middle Earth much more than 90% of the other fantasy worlds I've read(off the top of my head the other 10% contains Exalted and Robert Jordan's Song of Ice and Fire).

If 4E's version of an "archmage" is more like Gandalf I'll be happy.

I play DnD (and roleplaying in general) in part for its cool cinematics. Gandalf has always evoked more interest, wonder, and coolness than 3.5's invisible, displaced, mirror-imaged wizard insta-killing things...

All else aside, if 4E makes high-level combat feel Epic and not like Russian Roulette with a 20-chambered revolver, I'm sold (and might even enjoy/keep playing a high-level game).

EDIT: ainitan beat me to the Gandalf reference, but it still stands.

 

[Henry]

One could explain the "nerfing of magic" another way in the context of the game world's reality:

Instantaneous effects, or effects that only last for a few seconds, are much easier for wizards and gods to accomplish: They only put strain on reality for a few moments before dissipating. Examples include magic missile spells, flame bursts, holy lance (or whatever it's called), etc. Even sleep and other "save ends" spells reflect spells that only work for a few seconds; in fact, their durations themselves are flaky, depending on the strength of magic in a given area (presence or lack of a "ley line"), depending on the will of the victim, and just plain chaos in the area. The teleports and the like at low level are quite fleeting, in fact even relying on clear paths and sight to work even their limited ranges. The higher the level, the bigger the boom, it doesn't matter -- because the magic effect is over and done a second or two after it begins.

Then you have the spells with longer durations -- invisibility, flights, longer teleports, etc. These spells last longer, but it's because they're far more complicated, they require skilled practitioners to cast them. They're Advanced Calculus to the lower level spells' algebra, because they're attempting to warp reality and KEEP it warped. Flight's of little use unless it lasts more than a round or so - and it's a Herculean effort to keep reality reliably warped for any length of time.

So it's not a matter of "I'm just bending a little light compared to filling a whole room with flame", but rather how long you're doing it. (Even a one-round invsibility spell might be difficult, for a different reason -- it's only one round, but you are forcing people to interact with it, when you attack, try to hide, etc.)

It's not a perfect in-game solution, of course, but it's another way of looking at it.

 

[Henry]

If 4E's version of an "archmage" is more like Gandalf I'll be happy.

Well, we know he'll be more like Gandalf with the utility magic, but I don't remember Gandalf tossing off fire and lightning round after round like a 4e mage, either. (Though you could use the "magic makes ripples" explanation to cover for this somewhat.)

 

[Harshax]

jaer, robertliguori: brilliant, brilliant posts.

 

[Iron Sky]

Now, that being said, I like high power curves. I like the fact that D&D isn't Iron Heroes. I like the fact that you need to read the rules, and think about them, and that if you go into a situation with the wrong mental metaphors, you are SoL, and that the players can gain a great advantage by subverting the paradigm of a given challenge. To me, the ability of flying creatures and long-range attack spells to kick battles into the modern paradigm of close air support and artillery, and especially to do so when you have a castle, 50 mages, one wyrmling dragon, and 10,000 orcs beating down your doors, is unquestionably a design feature, not a bug. I like scry-and-die as the logical evolution of power-to-a-point tactics; it, in conjunction with abjurations like Forbiddance, give perfect reasons for high-level characters to limit their activities outside of warded areas; this could be the day those enemies you didn't know you had teleport in and gank you horribly. I really like that instead of building a fortress with a built-in weakness that the party must find, I can build a fortress, design it as best I can, and watch the party probe its defenses, found a weakness I actually overlooked, and organically and honestly go forth and kick ass.

I guess for me the issue is what intelligent opponent will actually use castles when you're in a world where the possibility of 50 mages showing up exists? The simulationist in my sees spells like teleport and dimension door and speak with dead and says "these would utterly re-shape society - why is everyone still living in a medieval paradigm?" It also trembles at the thought of looking at 500 spells and figuring out how each would undermine/reshape any rational world in which they exist.

If you look in the DMG at their default city-generation toolset, every major city will usually have at least one person capable of utterly destroying that city or another like it every day, in addition to several dozen casters with access to mid-to-high-level spells.

My simulationist brain, especially when seeing PC casters wield such powers says "why in the past 300 years this city was supposed to be here, didn't some chaotic mage with a grudge flatten the place?"

My default response is to kinda wave my hand and ignore the issue as long as possible, until players start to get to higher levels and they start asking, "if the big bad guy is a level 17 wizard, why didn't he just divine where we were, teleport without error to us and OMGWTFBBQ us when we reached a high enough level to be a threat? That's what I'd do if I was him..."

At the most, it's going to take a day out of his agenda and probably not even that. How many 17th level wizards use up even a significant fraction of their spells every day?

Ok, this isn't going off on a rant, so I'll just sum up: if I have to someone rationalize full-healing after a good night's sleep, it's worth it if it can stabalize the radical caster-power issues I always have with my DnD worlds.

 

[D_E]

The Gray Wanderer disagrees with you

Actually, given the abilities described by Tolken for the Balrog fight, Gandalf could probably just jump to the bottem of a small chasm and climb up the other side. Remember that he survived what was at least a several-hundred foot fall after breaking the bridge, and was able to get up and chase the Balrog all the way back up the mountain by way of the endless stair. A real human would almost certainly die after hitting the water, even if they didn't have to contend with a demon trying to kill them.

 

[robertliguori]

I guess for me the issue is what intelligent opponent will actually use castles when you're in a world where the possibility of 50 mages showing up exists? The simulationist in my sees spells like teleport and dimension door and speak with dead and says "these would utterly re-shape society - why is everyone still living in a medieval paradigm?" It also trembles at the thought of looking at 500 spells and figuring out how each would undermine/reshape any rational world in which they exist.

If you look in the DMG at their default city-generation toolset, every major city will usually have at least one person capable of utterly destroying that city or another like it every day, in addition to several dozen casters with access to mid-to-high-level spells.

My simulationist brain, especially when seeing PC casters wield such powers says "why in the past 300 years this city was supposed to be here, didn't some chaotic mage with a grudge flatten the place?"

My default response is to kinda wave my hand and ignore the issue as long as possible, until players start to get to higher levels and they start asking, "if the big bad guy is a level 17 wizard, why didn't he just divine where we were, teleport without error to us and OMGWTFBBQ us when we reached a high enough level to be a threat? That's what I'd do if I was him..."

At the most, it's going to take a day out of his agenda and probably not even that. How many 17th level wizards use up even a significant fraction of their spells every day?

Ok, this isn't going off on a rant, so I'll just sum up: if I have to someone rationalize full-healing after a good night's sleep, it's worth it if it can stabalize the radical caster-power issues I always have with my DnD worlds.

The first step, of course, is to toss the DMG demographic and weath-by-level tables into the same pile of rules that bag-o-rats and conscious-but-dead characters. Then, you pick your named character point, your heroic ratio, and your power curve. For me, it's usually about level 6 for the named character, 1/100 for the heroic ratio, and 1/10 power curve. What that means for my worlds is that for every hero, there are about 99 nonheroic characters in the population, and for every hero of level n (up to n=6), there are ten times as many heroes of level n-1. So, a population of ten thousand should, all things being equal, support 1 3rd-level character, 10 second-level heroes, and 100 1st-level heroes. Soceities that are willing (or forced) to put large segments of their populations through potentially-fatal upbringings can up the heroic percentage, as can heroes working specifically to train others on an individual level. What all this means is that I now know what kind of population I should need to get a strike force of 4 level 5 rangers, should I need one. In addition, it tells me that effects of characters up to 6th level are theoretically purchasable; Continual Flame is for sale, Raise Dead is not. This gives you a nice level of additional crunch, with built-in guidelines for how often its encountered (Sleep often, Acid Arrow sometimes, Fireball rarely).

Past the named level (and its accordant CR), nothing is generic. If I choose to drop a Wizard9 into the campaign world, it is as a distinct individual, with a name, personality, bits of backstory, and plan for how that character would affect the surrounding world (or lampshades firmly hung explaining why he hasn't.) I also tend to make outsiders unique and named; IMC, the Dark Eight are the only eight pit fiends in existence, and there is only one solar. (I also hack Planar Binding / Ally into something slightly less horrible, as well. They now always cost XP; bringing Outsiders to the Prime is always a big deal.)

Plus, there are a lot of dead things in my campaign worlds; it got to the point where one player complained that he was afraid to start liking any of the small towns and farming communities the party encountered on their travels, because there was a good chance that one of them would have been raided by something nasty before their return trip. And, to your other point, after the PCs see what a high-level named character can make of a large, industrious, well-defended population center, they endeavor really, really hard to remain off of his radar.

 

[Harshax]

I want to sit at your table!