Here's a link to a description of Epic-6:

https://www.myth-weavers.com/wiki/index.php/Epic_6

What do people think of it?
This message was last updated by a moderator, as it was the wrong forum, at 20:00, Thu 13 July 2017.

I *really* like Epic 6, especially the philosophy behind it.

Conceptually, it's interesting, but I'm not as sure that D&D is the best system to use to achieve those ends.  You could just as easily run a game in a different system that's a little more geared toward the level cap and get the same theme.

I've liked the idea since I read the article a year or so ago.  That's the type of fantasy game I usually run and enjoy.  It fits the worlds I enjoy cooking up as well.

This message was deleted by the user at 20:31, Thu 13 July 2017.

Personally, I prefer splitting advancement into power and options instead.

E6 has the disadvantage of limiting versatility and class options, not to mention denying prestige classes.

Advancing hp, hd, bab, dmg progressions, etc separately from class levels is far more flexible than e6, and can actually allow a lot more advancement while keeping things gritty, alternatively, it allows starting out as untrained superheroes with great power but not much experience or skill.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 6):

That sounds very interesting. Can you elaborate or provide a link?

That's not really true - it takes no effort at all to break classes (both prestige and not) into their class features, and then make those among said class feature that the GM feels like allowing available as extra feats (or even feat chains) with special requirements.

Personally, I think that E6 is a great idea, because it allows the player far more and more flexible customization, while allowing the GM far greater control and, more importantly, allowing for vastly more coherent worldbuilding.

But it's a matter of opinions in the end - for certain types of stories, E6 just isn't a good fit, but 3.P high-level play isn't for everybody either, and if one doesn't like it, then going with E6 or some derivate adaptation of the system is usually a good idea.

My personal opinion (and I'll emphasize that it's ONLY my opinion) is that E6 is a limited attempt to fix the faults of the deeply flawed 3.5/Pathfinder system.

It takes some good steps in the right direction...it helps balance classes a lot (but perhaps not enough,) it makes it easier to have a more well rounded character concept using a broader range of feats than are normally available, and it helps reduce the effect of the massive number of splat-books that bloat that system.

But, it doesn't really do enough to limit the power-creep that exists in the later releases of both 3.5 and Pathfinder.  And, since those issues exist as much at 1st through 6th level as at 20th, it wouldn't be able to.  In addition, it doesn't at all address the issues with unnecessary complexity, which leaves the issue of needing to slow the game to look up how to do anything that isn't essentially a normal attack action.

All-in-all, I'd say that if you really like 3.5/Pathfinder, you should just play it with whatever house rules your group is comfortable with to make the game playable for you.  If you don't like 3.5/Pathfinder and want to find a way to drastically change the game to make yourself like it, maybe you should look for another system altogether.  Perhaps a system like 4th or 5th edition D&D, FATE, Dungeon World, Burning Wheel, or others that might just fit your needs better.

I don't know where to find any already existing on the internet. I am building my own version of the concept, but it is not complete (and is sidelined at the moment, but I could be convinced to make it an active project again).

It'd take a while, but I could digitize what I have so far and share it.




Essentially you are proposing to houserule the e6 rules.

The ability to houserule an issue into a non-issue does not negate the fact that the issue exists in the rules.

In any case, there are two things here, first, class features are often balanced by when they are obtained and what else is obtained at the same time. Both of these factors are bypassed by simply allowing class features to be cherry picked. Further, in some cases, achieving certain combos of abilities requires significant investment (by needing to gain several levels in different classes and suffering multiclass penalties [implicit rather than explicit in PF, but multiclass still usually falls behind straight classes in raw power]).

I'm sure this is the case, but I'm also fairly confident that its thesis has legs.  A lot of the problems that d20/Pathfinde have are related to scaling and stacking bonuses and effects that tend to pile up once you have access to certain spells or abilities.  Epic 6 contains a lot of that by simply removing the tools necessary from circulation.  Sure, you still have some moderate power creep (especially in Pathfinder's base classes), but Epic 6 deliberately focuses on the narrow slice of d20 gameplay that actually works, specifically the lower-mid levels.

Epic 6 also makes world building much, much easier.  If adventurers have 20 levels of potential, you really have to assume that there are 20 levels of "content" out there.  Epic 6 pulls the rug out from under that assumption, capping the capabilities of "normal" people into merely blowing up houses or wading nigh-unimpeded through hordes of orcs.

Honestly, a lot of my experience with 5e convinces me that Epic 6, or at least some convergence of evolved thought process behind it, played a major role in 5e's math.

Epic 6 does limit the possibilities of the PCs, that is true.  But by definition, the rules are trying to scale back the power of PCs.  RAW, Craft Ring is right out.  But given that it's a mod whose rules can be explained in about 3 paragraphs, I think there's plenty of room to build back up a desired player archetype.

It is less of a flaw, and more of being diffierent from popular desire.

The core d20 design is centered on naturalistic balance rather than gamist balance. Primarily because it was dssigned to be played similarly to how Gygax and Arneson played, which is quite different from the popular use of the rules.

A major part of that touches on your worries about complexity. It is a sad fact that many, if not most, players see rules as constraints, and while houserules are generally accepted (if minor. Major houserules are avoided like a plague.), having more rules generally makes players less accepting of twisting those rules during play, even when the rules are spevifically designed to be twisted, such as with d20.

D20 was not designed for rules to be seen as constraints, nor was it designed for rules to be what players can do, instead, it was designed for rules to be a supporting framework, for the rules to be how players can do something. Following the intended use, you could have a table of players who never see character sheets, rules, or dice, and have them play almost freeform style telling the gm what they do, and the gm could any action (that makes sense within the world milieu. I.E. no turning off gravity in a contemporary setting.), run it through the system and get reasonable and sensible results.

Strangely, even though the rules were designed that way, few players want to play that way.


That is one reason splats tend to get power creep. The designers of splats are usually not those who designed d20, and so they design for what players want, which is options and to feel powerful.

Additionally, is the issue of advancement, which is d20's real flaw in this case. D20 has set up a case where advancement grows in both power and versatility combined (and not much versatility gain, unless a caster). That is an issue mostly because players like advancement.

To use an example, Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings, is basically a lvl 5 from start to finish. Trying to get players to play through an epic saga of that scale and scope without any advancement would likely result in a new gm and a new game.

You can't just blame the system. The player's expectations and how they use the system is as much a factor as the system's design.

I'm not sure I agree with much of this.

Worldbuilding is largely an issue of player expectations. Players seem to think that low level characters can only deal with small localized problems, and saving the world from utter destruction, for some reason must be a high level task.

As for stacking up lots of things, mostly this is because the core design was for something different from how it is commonly played. The core concept was that the rules would be for how things can be done, instead of what can be done, thus problems arise from that, and frankly, I don't see how resolve that particular issue, cause you either deny the ability to do certain things for purely arbitrary reasons that will not make sense within the world milieu, or you have exploitable cases that require either a certain playstyle or gm intervention to keep in check.

 In truth, power itself is a problem only in two cases, competing characters of vastly different power levels mechanically that are supposed to be of similar power in the story, or when the numbers are tied to certain meaning in the story but there is a mismatch between achievable numbers and what makes sense in the world.

Otherwise, power is meaningless. Dealing 100 dmg per attack is nothing to an enemy with 100 million hp. Thus if atk and def grow at the same rate for opponents who grow at the same rate, then power actually remains the same, with merely an illusion of growing power (due to larger numbers).

What really makes higher levels an issue, is that options exist that allow players to bypass barriers that are intended to act as both balancing factors for power, and to allow gm control of the pacing of the campaign.

For example, magic is limited by how often it can be used. So, the gm is expected to make how long players must fight before regaining spells a constant issue. When players can get away with blowing all their spells on each encounter though, it is gaining extra power with no consequence. Normally, this is due to a poorly experienced gm, but at higher levels it becomes a system flaw because players gain the ability to bypass that timing limitation regardless of how the gm tries to enforce those limits.

Another factor, which is often blamed on the system but is really gm or module design, is that higher levels can bypass encounters, such as by using flight magic. Flight magic shouldn't be allowed to bypass having encounters, rather it should simply change the type of encounters. Many gms and module designers don't do this, and instead blame the system.

If you are dismissing the impact of power on world-building and adventure design, I think you're missing the point of Epic 6.

The core thesis of Epic 6 is that a 6th level character's abilities are epic.  A wizard can explode an entire house with a single spell.  A fighter can stand at the head of an army and dissect a small tribe of orcs with martial prowess alone.

However, Epic 6 characters never transcend those baseline challenges entirely.  The math simply doesn't let them.  A level 6 party can rout a tribe of orcs, but they never cease to be a factor entirely.  Getting into the mechanical grit, orcs will still have an impact on the party's resources.  Getting into the narrative grit, orcs will never cease to be at least a minor threat.

By extension, creatures like manticores, ogres, and giants retain some teeth.  As an adventurer, you can never simply dismiss these creatures by sheer virtue of your character's very high numbers.  This also makes dragons and their ilk genuine existential threats, the objects of adventures, requiring cunning, wit, planning, and perhaps allies an ancient magic macguffin to overcome, no matter how buff your character is or what age category it is.

This lack of continual transcendence contributes to a consistent tone.  Your characters overcome their initial weakness, and rise above the common.  They become epic at 6.  However, at that point, their climb slows down tremendously.  They have time to linger in that place, to use their new power in interesting ways, with a real sense of accomplishment and impact, since, as the DM, you don't constantly have to change adversaries' rosters to meet an ever increasing CR, robbing players of a sense of accomplishment, since the opposition just scales to them.

No matter where you are in the game, you can always dip back into the pool of orc tribes your PCs pissed off in their climb to 6, and have them come up with a credible threat, even if it is just more of them.  Plus, they get to feel badass, because they can whup way more of them than they could at level 3.  Maybe this time they summoned a demon!  They might have a demon, but they also don't have to inexplicably have all of their warriors be 4 more levels higher to be a credible threat, just because the PCs haven't faced them in a year and the algebra results in boring encounters.

In short, the flattened math allows you to use more of the Monster Manual at every point in the PCs' careers, giving the DM more flexibility.  It lets kings threaten the PCs with arrest and execution.  It lets goblin sieges become and remain real problems that don't have Elminster-esque solutions.  And it allows the setting's "boss monsters" to retain their status as dangerous and frightening, without having to rely on a sliding scale of "boss monsters" that eventually get demoted to annoyance.

(Age categories for dragons are actually one of the most interesting and most telling issues that I think Epic 6 addresses.  The fact that you need to continually scale up your dragons for them to continue to remain relevant is symptomatic of a power curve that makes a narrative difficult to sustain. It is not terribly elegant game design, but I digress.)

This was an explicit goal of the flattened math in 5e, and I can attest (having played 5e from 1-7, and a handful of one-shots at higher levels) that it does have this effect to a degree.  (High level 5e is a bit trippy.)

Limiting the power of spell magic also keeps the PCs from ruining world economies because of weird spell interactions.  (Or worse, from having to cast spells with incredibly wonky language explicitly to prevent wizards from breaking world economies that makes them less fun, impactful, and useful.)

Epic 6 also prevents the Shonen feedback loop of beloved and fun abilities, tactics, and spells being gradually ground into obsolescence by sheer weight of math.

Epic 6 specifically targets continuous flight (overland), Combat invisibility (Greater), long-distance teleportation, long-distance scrying, and the worst of the save-or-die effects (Hold Monster, etc).  It argues that those abilities fundamentally alter the game in ways that make it less fun.  If the core of your opinion is that Epic 6 doesn't allow those abilities, and you want to have them?  Then that's an irreconcilable difference of opinion.

Also, as I said, some high-level abilities can be made available, if the GM and player agree that it makes sense/would be cool to have that ability around.

For example, a very useful spell when fighting outsiders is dimensional anchor, which is normally unavailable to lv 6th characters; but it takes no effort at all to reduce the spell's range from ray to touch, give it a save, and maybe shorten the duration to round/levels. Now the spell is vastly weakened, so it might be accettable to give it to players at a lower level - and you have a cool ability around.

Or one can do insert a ritual system that allows players and to access high-level spells to be accessible, but requiring vast amounts of interaction with the setting and NPC in it: if your ritual rules require that the spell's caster level is equal to the number of casters, and you need to meet the necessary caster level for the ritual to work, suddenly a powerful spell like Teleport is gonna require over ten magicians working together to be cast, which means the players have to look for allies and engage the world to use these effects in one-of-a-kind situations.

And the mere existence of the high-level material saves work on prep for campaign-shaping situations, too - a GM can easily use CR 20+ creatures as gods and 9th level spells like Gate as world-endangering threats, so that wealth of high-level material can still be in the game, just in a different context which makes it both more impressive when it shows up and less disruptive for the game experience as a whole.

Basically, the key advantage of E6 is that it allows for a much greater balance in the running of a setting, without invalidating anything of what people like from 3.p (merely repurposing it), while still allowing players to progress as they play, which is a core part of the experience. It also makes it easier to actually fulfill a character concept, by achieving it at 6th level and then spending the rest of play fine-tuning it, instead of requiring twelve levels of play to see a build properly take form.

In reply to Egleris (msg # 15):

What I'm getting from the discussion here is the old MMO notion that "the game begins at max level." Some people are interpreting E6 as having a max character level in the same sense as an MMO does, and the bulk of the material that the game designers put real effort into creating being available only to max-level players. I suppose that's to be expected in 2017, after more than a decade of entrenched gamer culture that sees max level as the only "true" game. Yet I think the developer of E6 (who says they playtested extensively before releasing their model to the public) has a subtly different vision. E6 is not about turning 3.5e/Pathfinder into a tabletop MMO, but about reinvigorating interest in the core rules, which D&D players rarely stick to these days. E6 makes the core rules motivating, and I think that is its strength.

In reply to mickey65 (msg # 16):

I wouldn't know about MMO - haven't played one in my life, and I most certainly don't plan to start anytime soon.

However, it is a fact in 3.p that a number of character builds "come online", for whatever definition of the term, around level 12 or thereabouts. Also, many players, when creating their character, plan for the whole 20 levels, and this creates assumptions where the players harmstring themselves for a number of levels in order to achieve whatever concept they're shooting for at later levels. Later levels which, in many play-by-post, they might well never see.

What E6 does is remove the motivation behind this mentality; now, the players will just plan for the six levels, which they will reach faster, and have much less reason to compromise for.

Also, when discussing E6, discussing the gameplay after characters reach level 6th is sort of the most important part, becasue the gameplay before that isn't something interesting or new - it's the first 6 levels of 3.P, which haven't really changed much since 1998, and thus mostly everybody interested in the concept of E6 knows how they work. Which is well. What more is there to say about that? :)

In reply to Egleris (msg # 17):

I think you answered your own question. If players are focused on that future level 12 character they really want their character to be, and they, in your words, "hamstring" their character at character creation and lower levels for the sake of that Level 12 future, that prevents the familiar first six levels from working as well as they should. That could be part of why E6 should reinvigorate interest in those first six levels, which also means interest in core-rules play. From what I've seen, you don't need to compromise your fresh Level 1 or Level 3 roll for the sake of the max-level, Level 6 hero. I hope that makes my meaning more clear.

Reply to message #14

On the contrary, I am saying the worldbuilding issue is impacted far more by the gm than the rules. Your example draws a world from the rules, rather than drawing a world and using the rules to represent it.

For example, goblins and kobalds can be a problem for higher level characters, if used right, straight out of the book, but the other thing to remember is, that if the pcs can get high level, then so can everything else, which means not just that pcs can encounter higher level goblins and kobalds but it also means that everyone in the world knows about level 20 and prepares ti handle them. Vaults will be built to prevent teleportation, castles will be designed to protect against those who can fly, the guardsmen of towns will have ways of handling higher level troublemakers, etc.

So while E6 allows lazy world design in terms of monsters and challanges (the good or bad of that is mere opinion), it isn't really that big of an advantage compared to the disadvantages.

Besides, my main point against worldbuilding was the scale. Common player expectations see low level pcs as being suitable only for small scale threats, such as threating a small frontier town. The idea that level 1 characters shouldn't go on an adventure to save the universe from collapse has nothing to do with system.

Now, to address overland flight, invisibility, etc, these are not about raw power, and their value can't be measured from them alone. There plenty of ways that these can be handled to integrate them into the story without fuss, though some lateral shifts in thinking and expectations may be required. For example, if the players can fly, then it is a high point of stupidity to rely on encounters that don't account for flight. That is a gm/module designer mistake and not a system flaw.

At the same time, e6 is not the only way to deny these options if you don't want to deal with them.

I am not claiming that these spells should be allowed. What I'm saying is that the trouble with these spells is not in raw power, but in the gm's ability to creatively handle them without it seeming like a cheat, and therefore, whether they be allowed or not has nothing to do with whether you play e6 or normal.

As for ruining world economies, that problem exists at all levels, again because of player/gm expectations rather than system. Most don't think the consequences of an ability all the way through to how it affects society and the world, so they make assumptions based on real world or stereotypes, then when someone comes along that does think further on the consequences of an ability, it seems breaking, but the truth is, some abilities just would not exist without world-changing effects, and therefore, a world with those abilities should be designed with those world changing effects in place.

For example, teleportation. This has a drastic effect on moving people and goods from one place to another. Do you honestly think that a world with teleportation would not make use of that? Of course teleportation would be used. In fact, it would likely be in high demand with many wizards providing that service alone. Communication and trade would use it extensively. It wouldn't break the economy because the economy would be built around it. The economy breaks when the gm tries to have an economy without teleportation in a world with teleportation. That is then a flaw in the design of the world, not the rules.

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In any case, I was not really trying to say e6 was bad or shouldn't be used. I merely pointed out a few weak points and an alternative concept that addressed those weak points.

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Another alternative is to cap class levels at 6, but allow character level to be unlimited (or some higher limit at least), but with the caveat that bab, base saves, etc do not stack between classes, thus a ftr6/wiz6 would be capped at +6 bab, 5+con fort save, etc.

This keeps the power level low, yet characters can keep growing in versatility much simpler than using xp currency like e6.

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Anyone who would like a copy of what I've got for splitting levels into power vs versatility, send me a pm and I'll digitize and post it, and send you a link.
This message was last edited by the user at 01:08, Sat 15 July 2017.

One of the reasons I started the modification of splitting power from versatility was that I liked tge first few levels in terms of gritty plausible/"realism," but wanted to still have a great many levels of advancement.

Because of how advancement works in d20, you either leave the low level play quickly, or advancement goes so slow that you might as well not have advancement. Additionally, it is hard to build certain concepts in only a few levels, such as a spellcasting soldier, or a combat medic (not a fighting priest with heals, but a doctor that is also a soldier).

In the real world, there are practical limits to mastery if an occupation, and certainly limits to a person's power, but yet, a motivated person can attain mastery of multiple occupations and be decent at many hobbies. But it just isn't feasible to attempt in 5-6 levels of d20. D20 basically forces a polymath character to be superhuman.

The whole point of E6 is to limit things to the lower levels while still letting players have progress.

As for worldbuilding lazyness, if one's answer to "the players can teleport" is "but any place worth teleporting to is guarded against it", then you might as well just say "the players cannot teleport", since that's basically the same.

Also, you keep distinguishin flexibility from power... but, flexibility is power, particularly in 3.P. The ability to tackle a same challenge in multiple different ways (so that neither the setting nor the GM can stop it) is vastly superior to the ability of being able to tackle a challenge overwhelmingly well, but only if you're allowed to tackle it in a single, specific way.

But really, the best thing about E6 as a concept is that the world makes sense from a numerical standpoint - you don't need to keep scaling skill DC and AC and other numbers to the point where what's easy for a character is impossible for everyone else. Instead, you can have hard things be hard, easy things be easy, and that is what makes for more logical worldbuiling: because, instead of the ridicolous idea that the world scales up to the player, the world can just be itself, and thus be far more consistent.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 19):

The argument that kobolds can be higher level, and that level 1 characters can still affect world events are intrinsically contradictory.

If there are world-affecting events, those events are important enough to be dealt with by the higher-level infrastructure that must exist, as you state, to deal with higher-level threats.  If there are level 20 town guards, what do you even need with a level 1 adventurer?  How is the level 1 kobold tribe that a level 1 adventurer is equipped to cope with going to affect a town or society that can effectively bear the impact of high- or epic-level threats?  They will, at best, be a nuisance that you pay a bunch of rookies a few hundred gold to deal with because you can't be arsed.

And if the level 1 kobolds are nothing but a nuisance, then the acts of the PCs are, in effect, only dealing with a minor nuisance.  Their actions have no narrative impact on the setting other than saving Level 20 Guard some time and the hassle of adding mileage to his level 20 paycheck.

Epic 6, by constraining the powers of its most heroic characters to sub-deific levels, makes overcoming that level 1 tribe of kobolds a heroic feat, in the overall context of world events.  By removing the truly mathematical titans from narrative circulation, you elevate everyone's deeds' relative heroism.

You argue that most character concepts don't "come online" until about level 12.  And, unfortunately, in core D&D, that's not just true for mechanics.  You aren't really doing anything until you're out of the womb of lower levels.  Your actions have local impact at best, and the challenges you face in the future of your career can literally steamroll the towns, villages, kingdoms, princes, and princesses that you once struggled to save.  Your previous conflicts lose their meaning as you struggle to chase the system's ever-escalating mathematics to face the next challenges.

Meanwhile, as a GM, you are forced to ask yourself why those more epic challenges didn't rear their ugly heads earlier.  If there's a level 8 or a level 12 or a level 20 tribe of kobolds, why didn't they steamroll the PCs early on?  Where were they while the PCs were building up their strength?

General Tianji's race horse problem applies here.  Unless you sequester out a "newbie zone" and don't carefully avoid high-level "infrastructure" bumping into the PCs until high level, the PCs are going to get themselves nuked.  And PCs, who naturally desire their characters to have a narrative impact, will find themselves frustrated by a world that gradually reveals itself as more than capable of dealing with challenges they have been struggling to overcome.

And that's not even addressing the issue that monster scaling raises with signalling and story symbolism.  In D&D, kobolds mean something.  Dragons mean something.  Beholders mean something.  A kobold is a low level monster that travels in packs and tries to get the upper hand through traps and cunning.  A low- to mid-level party encountering a single level 10 kobold is facing something more akin to a giant in terms of difficulty, which jars the theme and mood created by using a monster like a kobold.  Scaling it up makes it lose its identity, which confuses the players and can draw them out of their precious state of immersion.

The same can happen if a high-level PC or group of PCs just maths an insufficiently geriatric dragon to death.  The dragon becomes an anticlimax, a disappointing obstacle rather than an iconic encounter.  It loses its meaning and impact, and its potential is squandered.

Epic 6, and games that draw the same lines as Epic 6 lays out, address those issues directly. Acknowledging that player empowerment isn't necessarily a direct path to more fun, more enjoyable gameplay is a mature decision. It's not for every D&D game or every D&D group, but it's a smart, elegant, simple solution for making your traditional fantasy D&D setting work better.

It is rather clunky and the shift in "progression" style is awkward at best. Additionally, not everything above level 6 is worthy of being demmed as only suitable for high level play. For example, why must a wizard with 20 spell slots be a demigod? Certainly a wish spell or the like would be godly, but 20 slots of 1st - 3rd? Not so godly.



Trying to not be insulting in a reply to this is difficult, but I am trying not to be,

The idea that teleporting requires that players be able to teleport anywhere they want whenever they want in order for it to be fun is false. Look at Dishonored. It has a basic teleport ability. The range is limited, but still, there is a requirement to find a way into places, and figure out how one can best use the ability. Teleport (called blink in the game) is one of my favorite abilities in that game and it doesn't need to be a "go straight to bbeg" ability in order to be fun and useful.

If a player actually complains that they can't just teleport past all encounters, then they are not really going to enjoy the game long term anyway.

Teleport is not, and should not be, a way to skip to the end of the story.

Besides, the actual teleport spell has requirements. Simply enforcing those requirements can make the story. For example, you need to know the place you are teleporting to. You can't simply state "take me to the bbeg." So if the players want to teleport to the bbeg instead of walking or flying, then instead of fighting minions to get to the bbeg, they must find descriptions of the bbeg's throne room or whatever so they can picture the place in their mind in order to teleport there. Even divination attempts can be thwarted reasonably, thus even that route will need some research, hunting, and luck.

But truthfully, "I win" buttons are not what those abilities should be, and a gm that allows them to be "i win" buttons is in serious need of improvement.

Oh, and anyplace worth teleporting to might prevent you from teleporting inside it, but teleporting outside the front gate is still going to work just fine, and there will still be plenty of places and situations where teleport will be quite useful.

Preventing abilities from being "I win" buttons does not make them worthless.




The power that comes from versatility is vastly different in it's effects from numerical power. For example, bypassing a tiefling's fire resistance by switching to sonic has different side effects and a different impact on gameplay than dealing so much fire damage that the tiefling takes just as much damage as switching to sonic.

Of particular note is that the sonic and fire damage can still be lower damage and thus not overwhelming to other things that are not resistant. The versatility can still be grounded in whatever tier you decide to play at. It is progress without gaining overwhelming or god-like power.

It also makes the choices more tactical in feel since simply gaining larger numbers isn't an option, using the right options for the job becomes important, yet with enemies being run by an intelligent person, and with defenses, it becomes a matter of outsmarting the enemy rather than blindly swinging your +999 sword at anything that moves. But that tactical feel can only be gained by gaining versatility. Without versatility nor power, what is the point of advancing at all?



And lots of versatility plays very nice with this concept.

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Although, I think people often get the wrong idea about high level things in the world.

Take Lord of the Rings. The velar, such as Melkor/morgoth are easily level 20 characters. Sauron is at least a level 15 or so, and probably higher. Sauron plowed through armies on his own yet still lost, and his death still came at the hands of a level 2-3 hobbit. Aragorn and other great men were at best level 5s, Gandalf would be hard for me stat up as 7 or so. And yet things exist in that world that are certainly high level. It still works as a world and a story, low level characters in a high level world, because high level things are rare.

High level people have better things to do than fight every problem, even every problem they alone can deal with. Low level people will be left to fend for themselves all over the place.

Also, high level people can only be in one place, or a few places with the right abilities, but still a high level individual simply can't be everywhere they are needed and sometimes low level people have to step up simply because no one else is willing or available to deal with it. Truth is, that is what really makes someone a hero, the willingness to step up because someone has to and no one else will, regardless of the difficulty they face.

Limiting numerical power to lower limits is fine, and in fact I like it, but it certainly doesn't solve any problems, it simply avoids problems that some people don't want to, or don't know how, to deal with.

Gming is only somewhat easy. Great GMing is hard enough that I would say it requires a professional level of ability. Most of the problems I see people complain about in a system comes from either playing in a way that is contrary to what the system was designed for, just plain false expectations, or most often from a lack of GM ability.

GMs/players who think that preventing teleport from working inside castles and lairs makes it worthless, think that because they lack the experience/ability to see how useful it can be despite even severe limitations.

Give yourself 60 seconds to think of as many uses for newspaper as you can think of. If you come up with less than 10, then you aren't ready to be a gm, and being a player is likely to be challenging unless everything is laid out and fairly straightforward.

Read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo and Frodo were never high level characters, but Sauron, balrogs, and dragons most certainly are high level.

Also, look up Tucker's Kobalds.



Again, look tucker's kobalds, far more than a mere nuisance. Also, the existence of high level characters does not mean they can be everywhere they are needed, nor does it mean that they care about others who might need their help.

Basically, simply having high level characters does not mean that there will always be high level folks in place to deal with all the high level problems. Truthfully, high level folks will usually be kings or leaders of some sort and thus have lots of things to deal with just on the leadership front. This means that those high level folks are almost always busy (or just don't care) and so the little folks have to solve the big problems, especially when the little folks have nothing the high level character see as worth their time.

Sometimes you won't have time, or an enticement, to get a high level person to come handle your problem.



Then you lack vision. There are tons of stories where the characters deal with things that won't even make a footnote in history books, but are still worthy tales, and thus similar scale games can be satisfying. You don't need to save the entire universe in order to have an awesome and fun game.



And I gave some alternatives that I believe to be better at achieving this than E6. Besides, I never said E6 was bad, nor a bad idea, I simply pointed out a few things I think are weaknesses with how E6 achieves this goal.


Incorrect. I never stated nor implied this, and I never will. In fact the only time a plan character levels ahead of time is when I make a 1st level character but my concept can only be represented via multiclassing, in which case I rp that the character has the second class but just narratively avoid using anything from the second class until I actually gain it. (Such as a spellcasting soldier.)



There is a saying, it isn't the destination, it is the journey. Do we read Harry Potter for the final chapter? Of course not. We read it for everything that happens between then start and finish. Harry's defeat of Voldemort does not in any way lessen the enjoyment or importance of his struggles in his first year.



For a good gm, this is easy, though tied in very much with worldbuilding, which isn't always done very well in supplements and modules.



Cause they were busy elsewhere and/or the PCs didn't have anything the upper level kobalds wanted. What? Do you think the high level kobalds are going to do nothing but try to kill every Tom, Dick, and Harry that picks up a sword?



Worrying about the threats they actually knew about at the time. Making sure the other high level characters of the world stayed busy elsewhere and leaving them alone to do what they are going to do.

Besides, I wasn't trying to say that every kobald in a tribe would be high level, but I would rather expect a tribe to have fewer and fewer as the levels go up, so very much like PC races, the tribe would mostly be low level kobalds with only a handful of higher level kobald heroes who fight against the high level PCs. Of course, given kobald society, those heroes likely would each lead squads of slightly lower level kobalds and set traps and ambushes and try to overwhelm the PCs.




This is a completely hilarious concept. Having high level content in a world doesn't mean it will be omnipresent. The castles will likely have mid to high level defenses, but frankly, if you can't handle those defenses, then you shouldn't be trying a frontal assault, regardless of how powerful or weak those defenses are. Players shouldn't expect to get by with being idiots unless that is an explicit point of the campaign, in which, if that is a desired point of the campaign, then worldbuilding has taken a back seat and having things make sense is obviously not important enough to worry about such questions as "why haven't they steamrolled the PCs earlier?"




I'd call this a matter of opinion. Frankly, I'd find it hard to believe that you can have tribes of kobalds with none of them being able to challenge the better warriors of civilization. Sounds far too much like racist idiocy to me for it to allow immersion.



If this happens, the GM isn't playing the dragon very well. This is one of those cases I'd say is a good example of how GMing requires significant skill, ability, and insight. Putting a dragon in a situation where simple numbers can bring it down is a noob move. If a GM tried this on me, I'd pull them aside and try to give some advice and pointers on actually running the encounter.



I agree, but I think it is a failure to recognize the true source of the issues.



Mature? Perhaps not in my opinion, but certainly an enlightened decision that I wholehearted agree with. Achieving this is where the debate lies.



Simple certainly applies. I wouldn't call it elegant though.

A solution like this seems to me like making things easier for GMs that have not yet gained sufficient ability and experience to handle those issues in a more elegant and satisfying way.

I don't think you were at all; the only thing that could come across as such is that your writing seems to presume I'm an awful GM, and presumption does is indeed insulting in most circumstances, but I'm not easily offended. So it's fine, although if you're worried about coming off as offensive, I would suggest not making suppositions in your posts over what your interlocutor's capabilities are, since you don't actually know. But that's just my suggestion, nothing more. :)

Anyway, I agree with most of your posts; there are only a couple of points I want to nitpick, but nothing mayor.

For example, I agree that short-range teleportation is not really problematic at all, and that it's not impossible to limit the Teleport spell in particular; and generally finding the right balance to allow players the ability to use their high level abilities without them turning into "I win" buttons is one of the interesting challenges of high-level 3.P GMing.

However, "I Win" buttons do exists in the game, and needing to ban them all individually is a pain. So that alone makes E6 preferable, because you can just blanket ban everything above a certain level of power, and then let select abilities be accessible through feats (possibly at reduced potency) so that the fine-tuning is much faster. This includes things like letting casters have extra spell slots (so those who want it can get to 20 slots of spells of lv 3 or less), or letting prepared casters learn more spells known, etc. - anything that exists in the game can be made available to the players upon request, the main difference is that the GM control over it is both more accurate and easier to exert.

But really, the worldbuilding consequences of having high-level characters around are the real reason to go with E6: because indeed, if certain spells are available in the world completely changes the setting. For example, there can't be any real scarcity in a world where priests above lv 8 are a thing (particularly organized priesthoods with multiple such priests), and you won't see caravans of goods when anybody would rather pay for a teleport than incur the risks of a long journey through land and sea... which would leave pirates and highwaymen without any reason to arise. Cities would probably still exist - a bomber on our days is more or less the same level of threat to them that a dragon or flying wizard would be in a fantasy setting - but anybody actually important would live into dungeons, not castles, since castles were born in real life to defend from a type of warfare that would be obsolete in a 3.P world. And that's just an example - a society which took full advantage of what high-level magic has to offer would look more like a sci-fi setting than anything we're used to call fantasy.

Which can be cool if that's what your game calls for, of course, but if one wants a more traditional story, then high-level character shouldn't be around, except as god-equivalent, such as your LotR comparison places them.

Although, on a unrelated digression, having read both LotR and the Silmarillion, and ignoring the films, I can't think of anyting that'd require Sauron to be incredibly high-level; he's a lich of sort, can turn into a wolf, for a period had a seductive voice and the ability to pass himself off as a human, can craft magical rings, create undead servants, scry things at great distances, has some limited mind-control (compulsions only, and Aragon could resist them), and his most noticeable feat is rising Barad-Dur from the ground at incredible (but not specified) speed. When he's shown fighting on the page, he's not presented as capable of soloing armies at all, although he does defeats some heroes (but is himself defeated twice, once by a team of four powerful warriors, and once by a magical dog). That's probably just par for the course for what a lv 11th caster in 3.P would be capable of, with some finangling.

And of course, you yourself argued that, if one is going to use feats for progression, one might as well go all the way and remove levels entirely, letting the character creation be more modular. I agree that going such a route is good, and would work well; indeed, it'd take no effort at all to create feats that allows for +1 to HD, BAB and Saves (what you get normally from advancement), break into feat chain the sub-lv6 class features, plug in Spheres of Powers so that magic can be acquired by progressive feat gains, and simply let players go fully modular on their character building. Indeed, assuming the same limits as E6 are enforced (BAB caps at no more than 8, spells don't go above lv 3 equivalent in power), this would make for pretty much the same experience, except that the initial phase of levelling is slower, but on the other hand the level of progression is static throughout.

Having said that I agree with that, I think you're overlooking that one of the main reasons people go with 3.P over more modular rules systems like GURPS is because they have classes, which help players focus their character concepts and fule creativity by limiting the available options to a thematic idea. That's the one advantage E6 retains over going full modular, and I think it's a meaningful enough one to warrant the existence of the concept.

So, to conclude: I agree with you that high-level play does can be handled by challenging the players properly, but I think that thematically, keeping said challenges organics can create problems with setting expectation and feelings; I also agree that going fully modular is a more smooth process than E6, but argue that doing so loses some of the appeal that D&D has to the players who gravitate toward it.

As such, while obviously there are plenty of alternatives, I still think that E6 is a perfectly valid way to run a 3.P game, and is neither a lazy solution nor too complex of one - it has limit, but so does anything, and it can be the best option if somebody is going for a certain type of game.

To each their own, right? :)

Interestingly enough, I have reasons for selecting d20 over other systems, and classes is not one of those reasons. In fact, classes is one of the biggest things I'd like to see discarded. Mostly this is because I find classes far more limiting than helpful.

My biggest reasons for liking d20 over other systems is that it strikes a good balance between simulation and ease of use, and most importantly, it is built as a set of tools rather than as hard-coded rules, and yet includes plenty of research pre-done so a player could state just about any course of action and it could be run through the system and a result obtained that would make sense and be reasonable.

In any case, my original suggested alternative keeps the classes and level based progression and thus leveling looks like standard advancement throughout.

For simplicity though, I still think leveling as normal but capping individual classes to 6 levels and making bab and similar numbers non-stackable between classes achieves the desired effect easier, simpler, and still allows greater versatility than e6.

I find the argument "LotR did it" quite spurious.  Lord of the Rings would be a miserable game of D&D. Maybe Ryuutama, or something more story-driven like FATE, but as D&D?

Imagine, for a moment, sitting at the table as Frodo.  Read the books, and imagine sitting down at that table, rolling dice and listening to the DM.  Frodo's story is just a tale of suffering, luck, and eventual tragedy.

In terms of D&D, he's probably an escort quest NPC that the actual D&D party lost somewhere around Lothlorien after one of the PCs decided the Ring would probably be better guarded if one of them carried it instead of the level 1 halfling commoner.  And even as a Fighter, Boromir's logic about how Will saving throws work in D&D bears him out.

As illustrated above by this simple example, system influences behavior.  If you are looking at a world from a simulationist bent, all of these creatures are, on some level, at least vaguely aware of the math, in some grounded way.  A level 20 fighter knows that he is immortal to kobolds.  A level 20 kobold knows that he is immortal to level 1 fighters.

Why would the Level 20 kobold, who just wants to exterminate the surface-dwellers, or even just take slaves for the mines, try to fight the level 20 stronghold with the level 20 fighters?  If the population of the world isn't dense enough to have level 20 adventurers tromping around routinely, there are plenty of soft spots for those level 20 monsters and level 20 evil overlords to rip apart wholesale and build entire kingdoms of evil.  (And what with Create Greater Undead being a thing, you can turn all those peasants directly into something strategically useful in a world with full level scaling!)

But I think you missed the point of the racehorse problem.  If you're a kobold that has a pyramid-shaped distribution of warriors, in terms of level, you never, ever send the level 3 warriors after the level 3 party  You send the level 6 or the level 8 warriors.  And then the PCs, high off their victory over the local kobold tribe, are suddenly accosted by kobold assassins that can melt them to death.

If your goal is simulation, and the kobolds have these assets available, why wouldn't the kobold tribe call in superior force to deal with plucky adventurers?  (Or, if you prefer, what happens if the Ring Wraith makes its spot check on the road from the Shire to Bree?)

I also find Tucker's Kobolds to be a spurious argument when arguing against the setting-breaking implications of full-sweep level scaling.  It's an apocryphal war story that just doesn't hold up to how D&D 3.x works as a system, unless you arm thousands of kobolds with greek fire, in which case they can be overcome by a simple Protection spell.

3.x Tucker's Kobolds are battling against hundreds of HP, and in some cases, a full die face of saving throw bonuses.  Unless you get to genuinely ludicrous circumstances (Assuming auto 20's because so many attacks are being launched, for instance, or gross abuse of the grenade rules), it doesn't hold up.

In fact, Tucker's Kobolds would work better in Epic 6, or 5e, both systems without the vast mathematical gulfs between floor and ceiling, because they can just do their thing.
This message was last edited by the user at 01:58, Tue 18 July 2017.

First, I honestly do not see why lotr would be unfun. There seems to be this notion out there that the players need to be of similar level and face only equal level challanges, both concepts are false in my experience (and yes I am speaking from personal experience). Frankly, an rp does not require players to be mighty heroes by any metric. Trying to maintain that limits rp options to a sliver of a fraction of all the possibilities. Rpgs have combat, but they are not combat games (there is a difference). Anything that makes a good story can be a good rpg campaign, even tragedies or stories about kids lost jn the woods trying to find civilization again while surviving the environments, animals, and murderers hunting them down. And yes, dnd can work for such a game just fine.

There is nothing wrong or contrary (to rpgs) about a campaign of suffering and tragedy.

Dnd was also majorly inspired by lotr and my general impression is that Gygax's idea of a campaign would look very much like lotr.

Further, I consider the gm as taking in the role of destiny and fate. As the saying goes, you meet your destiny on the road to avoid it. Railroading isn't a case of predetermining the end, it is a case of controlling how players get there. Thus, a great gm can let the players do whatever they want and yet still continue the story to it's conclusion.

Second, my point in lotr was about what a world might look like if it included high levels, namely that simply having high level characters doesn't make them common, powerful individuals have limits on where all they can be at any one time, and that being that powerful doesn't grant automatic world domination.

Furthermore, kobalds are people. Portraying them as mindless monsters whose only goal is to destroy is the key mistake that causes issues with having high level kobalds.

Also, if the kobalds want the pcs for some reason, they wouldn't know very well how tough the pcs are at first, and thus sending a squad of lowly warriors first would make sense, then upon their failure, it would be realized that tougher warriors with a better plan would be needed, and possibly even consider alternatives rather than simply attacking, such as getting hostages, or even simply attempting diplomacy depending on what they want from the pcs.

Third, Tucker's Kobalds is more a point about being intelligent rather than acting as pathetically stupid as mmo mobs. Bandits are not going to fight to the death, and most definitely not animals nor beasts (few exceptions do exist). Such opponents have a reason for attacking, and a limit for how much risk and what cost they will except.

In any case, attackers have motivations, generally the same or similar to real world motivations. They don't exist for the sake of being fodder. There is the exception of a game where randomly fighting things in a straightforward and idiotic, yet fun way, but in such a game, worldbuilding and sensibility are meaningless and don't need to be pursued as the attempt at it would actually work against such a game.

My understanding is that this statement would have resulted in a very irate Gygax.  He claimed that LOTR wasn't a major influence on D&D.  I'm sure the battles with the relevant lawyers had nothing to do with that.

While there might be issues admitting such officially and legally, I hold to my general impression.

Regardless though, a campaign like lotr, including both hobbits and gandalf as pcs, still seems a viable campaign to me, though it may not be to everyone's tastes, I do think denying that such a campaign is a core viability of rpgs only hurts, both an individual's potential experiences and gameplay options, but it also hurts newbies who hear and follow suit and thus are denied an experience they might enjoy greatly simply because everyone they know claims it is "not what a good rpg is."

Personally, I think people need to start looking for and accepting divisions in the idea of "role-playing games" so that they can not only more easily focus on their desired style of gameplay, but also to work against players running into issues of "this is what an rpg is and how it is played" and thus not even realizing how many alternative experiences theg deny themselves simply from never havinb experienced an alternative and never hearing about them because everyone is usjng the same terms for vastly different things (no matter how similar they may be superficially).


Personally, I've played campaigns that were like lotr, and those are my favorite type of campaigns, but as of late, it is harder and harder to find folks that can accept that such campaigns exist, much less being open to trying them or at least accepting them as an alternative way of playing.

The exception is free-form players, but I find that a system can be immensly useful and actually makes it easier to play, even when you are playing free-form with a system (as opposed to playing the rules). In fact, I don't really like true free-form games, but I rather am very tired of playing squad-based-combat-games-with-tacked-on-story.

I think you're missing the point.

Epic 6 allows and even encourages asymmetrical encounters.  Powerful dragons are threatening, and remain threatening throughout your career.  No matter how mighty a Dwarf King you are, a dragon can still defeat you in single combat.  That very same dragon retains its meaning within the narrative, without having to worry if you spike up in power.  As a DM, you aren't forced to introduce a new, stronger dragon that's 2 age categories more powerful, just to keep that dragon at the forefront of the PCs' minds.

In a system where so much is dependent on the statistics you can put into play, there is only so much that "playing smart" can do for you.  Eventually, you encounter diminishing returns, and your opposition becomes effectively invulnerable.  Tucker's kobolds hold up as a desirable archetype, sure.  But As an actual, designed-and-rolled gameplay encounter, 3.x as a game system just doesn't support it past around level... probably 8, to spitball it.

It's important to separate the expectations we have of literature and gameplay.  You're playing D&D.  Dice will hit the table eventually.  You'll tally hit points and make saving throws.  Lord of the Rings might have been a formative influence, but so was Conan, and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and Kull the Conquerer.  For every player who wants to play Frodo or Samwise, you'll get at least one more who wants to play Red Sonja or Aragorn, or even archetypes informed by the post D&D fantasyscape, like Drizzt or Flint Fireforge.

It's a rare player outside of a horror game that wants to be profoundly disempowered the way that the hobbits are in Lord of the Rings, and D&D is not a horror game.  Aside from the sense of powerlessness (effectively putting themselves in a purely reactive role to the GM's narrative), there's the matter of balance and fair play.  The hobbits have to contrast their contribution to the story and the gameplay next to Aragorn, Gimli, and Gandalf. While you can definitely gain some satisfaction from playing a plucky underdog character, the experience at the table can very easily turn sour, when the opposition has the ability to crush you, but simply doesn't for railroad-narrative reasons.

... this is rapidly becoming a much more philosophical discussion than a critique of a particular 3.x mod, but bringing it back...

In this vein... epic 6 allows you as a player to constrain your concept.  Your character concept doesn't have to scale to level 20.  You might be the most dangerous thief in The City, or you might be a fearsome night watchman, but you can be a plucky hobbit or a gritty warrior, without worrying about how your relatively grounded character concept will translate into the crazy anime action levels of 13+...

Aye, e6 does this, but it isn't the only way to get this, and I think it is overly complicated and limiting (in a bad way).

Also, I think it is a great disservice to assume that playing a hobbit will give a feeling powerlessness. The feeling of powerlessness is dependant on the player's goals. A player who wants to jump in and kick strawberries feels powerless from having less, or even equal, combat ability to the monsters they face, but their inability to seriously affect the story won't, while a player who wants to explore character and world won't feel powerless from simple lack of numbers (and these are usually the folks that can get greater mileage from weaker numbers), but they do feel powerless when their choices don't matter. (For example, I walk up to a group camping in the wilds. I expect that they might try to attack, so I'm ready for it, but I also want to avoid it if possible. But since I am ready for combat if it turns to that, being told I get the exact same penalties as an idiot that walked up deaf, dumb, and blind with open arms, makes me feel powerless.)

Personally, I do not consider the hobbits to be diempowered. Combat is not their forte, but it is not the only thing that matters. The Hobbit is a story all about a hobbit, a hobbit with very little combat ability, yet the hobbit is still a major player in progressing events and had a massive impact on the outcome of events. Bilbo should not be looked down upon as being a lesser character to play simply from lack of combat ability. This applies to games just as much as stories.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 32):

Putting aside that D&D's rules are largely combat rules...

If LotR were D&D, the hobbits would absolutely be disempowered.  Their status as low-level, low tier characters directly influences their ability to affect the plot.  Frodo becomes the main character essentially because he has a decent Will save.  While a novel writer can get away with embiggening such a character, a game has mechanics.  And 3.x operates under some pretty simulationist assumptions.

If your numbers aren't high enough to matter, your decisions don't matter.  If you decide to sit up and keep watch against someone creeping into your camp, that decision doesn't matter if your Spot is +3 and your assailant's Hide/Move Silently is +20.

Or, alternatively, if your hide/move silently is +20, and your opposition's Spot check is +3, you don't have to carefully cling to cover on your way to his camp, carefully mapping out your approach and only ducking in where you are sure you'll remain unseen.  You could probably pants him without him noticing for an hour.  Being unfailingly stealthy can be just as dry an experience as being unfailingly spotted, although it's probably less frustrating.

"Bounded" math (as it's been termed, as it relates to 5e, and is salient to this argument) constrains those cases and allows those decisions to matter in the first place, since you are rarely up against an unsurmountably high wall of numbers.  And, in the case of Epic 6, when you are, it's clearly signposted by the fact that you're being harassed by someone genuinely invisible, or throwing a spear at a dragon.

So I have to ask, from the other perspective... what are the advantages of a full 20 level progression over a system like Epic 6, especially when trying to craft a story that relies on fairly grounded characters interacting, like Lord of the Rings?  What makes Epic 6 overcomplicated and limiting over the full gamut of 3.x mechanics?

Slight tilt to the subject, since the topic seems to have drifted a bit from just E6...

Is there something inherently wrong with a high probability of failure or less-than-heroic characters?  From a strictly-RP perspective, I mean.

What I mean is, there are game systems/settings where the entire point is to have underpowered players opposing an overpowered authority/situation.  The entire horror genre is based on it, really.  Paranoia and Outbreak:Undead do an amazing job at taking characters that will certainly die and making it fun to instead see how long and well they can survive the situation before their inevitable demise.

In Outbreak: Undead especially, you're playing normal people (yourself, in fact) in a zombie apocalypse.  At best, you tend to have only a 50% chance of success for any action you take.  Is that inherently bad?  Is it a bad system for having such a low chance of success?  Or is it just a different playstyle that may not be your cup of tea but is still effective for fans of that genre?

It's not inherently bad, but 3.x's mechanics don't support it.  The mechanics don't support losing conflicts, failing checks, or scraping by against a superior foe who withdraws because he is wounded.  It doesn't support mechanics like long-term attrition, mental trauma, or even the idea of playing "normal" people.  A 1st level commoner in 3.x is mechanically insignificant, liable to lose a fight with a cat.  Its mechanics aren't granular enough to etch out meaningful differences between one common person and another, what with them being balanced around the levels of 4-10.

There are plenty of games that do support those playstyles.  Engine Heart.  Apocalypse World.  Call of Cthulhu.  World of Darkness Core.  They are designed around those narrative assumptions, and use mechanics that support those themes.

3.x just isn't.  It assumes you're going to at the very least be playing a Fighter or Rogue, and that you want to stand a decent chance of winning a fight.  All of your tools as a player character, all of your feats and spells and abilities are pointed firmly towards overcoming obstacles and being victorious.  There aren't a bevy of grimoires that summon beasties that just eat you, or scads of miscellaneous "scrap" gear that is designed for you to improvise with.

The way tactical combat works brutally punishes retreating (which is assumed to work in the favor of the PCs, who will rout the enemy), and there are no mechanisms to resolve anything like a chase, and even a basic stalking scenario falls apart because of skill imbalances.  There are no consequences for combat other than HP loss and potential death.  The grappling rules as a text are more nightmarish than the consequences of the grappling rules.  All of these narrative verbs and adjectives are really important in a gritty horror game, but not so much in a game of hearty adventure and monster slaying, which is what 3.x is.

  Would you assert then that 3.x is less capable or incapable of playing in scenarios where the players are at significant disadvantages?  Fighting in a war on a side that is truly overwhelmed?  Attempting a rebellion against an entrenched militaristic Empire using limited resources?  Or finding a way for a low-level party to prevent an elder dragon from ravaging their homeland?

  Is 3.x only capable of high adventure with characters that overcome every obstacle and foes that flee before them?

I would say that it's less of a system incapability, and more an issue of the player mentality that the system inspires in the players. If you pit a powerful enough enemy against them, the PC cannot win; there are optional extra rules that allows for making diplomatic encounters more complex than a mere die roll, alternative rules to make chases interesting, and over twenty years of materials (from 1998 until today when considering only 3.P, which is still going and has three different baseline core rules to pick from) which can be used to support nearly anything you want to do.

However, the game is structured so that players are expected to win and succeed; the mechanics bear this out, and as a results, players tend to act as if their winning is a predetermined conclusion, often without paying attention to the contextual cues of why this might not be so in their specific circumstances. Which, naturally enough, prompts people to go for the straightforward approach (which is whatever their character happens to best at), and also what leads to TPK if they get in over their head... or more likely, a GM taking pity on the players and saving them with something unlikely.

These are both factors which E6 helps with; the removing of the level scaling makes it so that if you see a creature, you more or less know what kind of threat it is, and the capped level makes it so that the players are aware that they're limited, and thus allow for more cautious gameplay. I think that encouraging this shift in mentality in the players is one of the biggest features of the E6 paradigm - it allows more freedom and creativity in handling situation by cconstraining the players. Because, as it really should be obvious, you can only think outside the box when there is a box for you to be constrained by.

I definitely agree that it's partly derived from mentality, and that system influences behavior, but I disagree, I think that much of that reason is rooted in the rules.  3.x lacks any sort of failsafes or fail-forward mechanics, which means that success is often the only way to progress the story or scenario.  On top of that, the combat system lacks meaningful progress or failure signposts.  This is partly because of the inherent fuzziness endowed by level scaling, but is also because a lot of combat lose conditions are effectively decided by a single saving throw.  You go from full fighting trim to drooling and facedown after 1 failed save.

I do agree, though, that one of Epic 6's strengths is stabilizing the mechanics enough to allow for proper signposting of encounters.  As I discussed in world-building above, it allows you, as a GM, to use your setting's symbolism and even just evocative descriptions in a way that is much, much more useful to the players.

D20 was designed in a way that failsafes and fail-forward mechanics are not needed, mainly because whether these things are needed is combination of how the the rules are needed and who is gming.

There is a piece of advice out there "always fail forward" and this advice does not require mechanical support. It is about how you use the rules, how you structure the cases where a die roll might be needed into the overall narrative.

More importantly though, the rules are so commonly misused and misunderstood (in their design goals) that many supplements and especially third-party designers design their material with contrary design parameters.

In particular, d20 is not a game at all, it is a toolbox to aid in playing the game of role-playing. Just look through the dmg for all the ways the book basically screams for the gm to bend or even break rules to fit the campaign and better fit player's character concepts.

Yet despite how much the rules scrwam for this, it is very rare to find anyone who does it. The core rules assume the gm makes rulings about every encounter, but the only changing people do is blanket houserules that apply to everyone in every applicable situation.

From what I see, d20 is flawed but it's number one biggest flaw is that it can't communicate itself effectively enough to convince players to use the rules as they were designed.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 39):

The blend of success and complication is a relatively recent development in mainstream RPG design.  Although it has been kicking around in the wings, it didn't really emerge as a core part of systems until Burning Wheel and FATE.  D&D, even unto this day (much as I love and enjoy 5e), doesn't offer any fail-forward or succeed-at-cost mechanics (or even advice), while FFG's new Star Wars game has it literally baked into the dice.



Every game has an editorial intent.  Even the loosest and most universal games strive towards something, even if that something is mechanical independence or a generalized sense of consistency.  3.x's editorial intent was to bring D&D's style of gaming forward with new technology that was coming into the market at the time.  Classless systems, universal task resolution, and point-generated characters all laid their stamp on 3.x.

3.x then stormed the marked with the SRD and OGL.  This generous license is the reason that the majority of the third party and supplemental material sported the d20 logo.  Mutants and Masterminds 2e was considered "bold" at the time for changing their core mechanics enough to disqualify them as a d20 branded game.  The material exists not because 3.x is the best vehicle to carry it (something realized in the twilight years of 3.5 and especially after 4e hit shelves.

3.x's rules mean something.  They do something.  They lend a certain theme and tone to games which use them.  A lot of supplemental material exists that tries to turn them into something they're not, and some does a better job (Mutants and Masterminds) than others (d20 Modern).

I recall a particular D&D module I played that required a Turning check, or a Strength or Open Locks check at something like DC 30 to open a door.  Our Cleric/Rogue (yes, that was one character) had just been murdered by the adventure, and our combined Strength and Aid Another checks were insufficient to pass the obstacle, just because the numbers were too high.  The DM was left hanging in the breeze by the system as we started contemplating the cost of hirelings to start some kind of mining operation for what was supposed to be a minor not-even encounter.

In order to keep the adventure going, the DM had to effectively fiat the door open.  The system did him no favors.  It told him to keep the door shut.  It didn't recommend "succeed, but."  In fact, the DMG (p. 33) advises "Succeed, and..." and "Fail, And," to punish failed rolls with increasing degrees of failure.  Fail Forward or Success But are not in the DMG's lexicon.

3.x makes for a fun time crawling through dungeons and bopping monsters, because that's the core of its design.  Mouse Guard?  Less so.  Much less so.  And the number of house rules necessary to change those core identities, competencies, and incompetencies built into a system's architecture could arguably make it completely unrecognizable as the game you started with in the first place.  (See, again, Mutants and Masterminds.)

What I'm trying to say, in summary, is that, yes, a DM can totally fudge it to fail forward.  A DM can make it up on the fly, a DM can totally wrap a system around his finger to make it fit his modus operandi.  That does not mean the system is helping him.  What a DM does to break a system over his knee is often done in spite of the system rather than because of it.  Saying a DM can change the rules does not mean that the rules are good or appropriate for a situation or theme.
This message was last edited by the user at 00:25, Fri 21 July 2017.

This is really just a nitpick, but if your example, GreyGriffin, is the one I'm thinking of (Sunless Citadel), the door in question is not required to be opened to complete the adventure. Instead, what's behind it is a reward for figuring out the particular puzzle associated with the door. It's not a "fail forward" because failing means little at that junction, instead just giving you a reward for succeeding.

The example I'm thinking of was a Dragonlance 3.5 module, behind which the Plot MacGuffin that was supposed to begin the meat of the adventure was hidden.

It's not unreasonable to put these kinds of things behind locked doors, but the assumptions the system has to make about your available resources can completely hamstring you if your math just doesn't add up.

And if the game or module locks "optional" content up behind a door? That's saying something too.

Nitpick comment retracted, then. :)

What are you suggesting that locking "optional" content behind a door is saying?

I have nothing to really add about E6 in specific, since I have zero interest in it.

Most often?  The game is making judgement calls about what resources you "should" have available to you, if you were "good" at it.  If you are "good" at lockpicking, you should have someone who can pick a DC 30 lock.  If you are "good" at group composition, you should have a cleric.

Or, alternately, it's making assumptions about the skills and abilities that go unappreciated in a group (such as, say, social skill checks, or Turning Undead), and giving those abilities a chance to shine.  It may also be making judgements about what it expects you not to have, either tantalizing you with future prospects of power and ability further down the advancement track, or giving you a nugget of props for bringing an appropriate (or even uncommon) character type.

Having not read the scenario you're describing, I honestly can't read the intent there.

In reply to GreyGriffin (msg # 44):

In the case of the Sunless Citadel, it was to reward bringing along a cleric or paladin who had the capability to Turn Undead, which was useful since the Big Bad of the module was a vampiric tree.

Modules overall have the issue of making assumptions about your group. It's the nature of the beast, since modules have no way of knowing what your particular group composition is like. You either have to go in knowing those assumptions have been made, or you have to tinker with the module from the get-go to make it work for your group. This is regardless of game system or setting.

A mistake being made with some of these exanpkes is confusing module design with system design. A module designer might have different expectations from the system designer which colors their designs. For example, their rogue player might be a big time munchkin/powergamer breaking the system without breaking the rules to get insane numbers (something the gm shoukd keep in check) like +50 open lock, for which the module designer might not appropriately adjust for in their module designs.

Furthermore, what does failure mean? It could be that the door doesn't open, but there is no reason to think that it can't be that door opens at a cost, but let us say the door remains shut, well in that case, the key must be obtained, either by having an encounter with those that keep the door locked, or solving a puzzle, or finding it hidden somewhere, etc. Basically, failing to open the door just adds an extra encounter to deal with (which is another reason I agree with gold/quest-completion=xp).

If a module doesn't provide multiple ways to get past every potential chokepoint, then it is a flaw in the module design and the gm needs to fill in as required.

It is my opinion that the gm is basically playing destiny for the players, and therefore, just like characters in a book, there will always be a way forward, but it won't always be the way that is expected.

There is a reason to think that the door doesn't open at cost - that's what failing a check means in d20.  Having a failed roll succeed at a task is a GM fiat, an audible call, not a function of the rules.

We've gotten pretty well off-topic here, digging into the guts of "What is a system?  What does it mean?"

Dragging it back on-point, systems with flattened math (like Epic 6) make designing adventured with lateral solutions much easier.

Obstacles faced by players have more predictable, and most of all, more readable difficulty.  An Epic 6 character with certain competencies falls within a pretty predictable range of numbers.  If your party has a rogue, you can count on a DC 35 lock being almost impossible, but a DC 20-25 lock being quite achievable.  You can continue to use those numerical benchmarks because the character's ranks don't continually crawl up.  That means that certain types of locks (adamantine dwarf vault locks?) continue to have a consistent, contextual, narrative meaning that reflects in the mechanics faced by the player.  He knows he has to roll high or spend some kind of resources to get through those locks.

In the face of a level 15 Rogue, those adamantine dwarf vault locks are still adamantine dwarf vault locks, but he can bypass them on a roll of about 5.  The DM is forced to recontextualize the lock in order to retain the challenge (or at least the chance of failure).  To mitigate the constantly growing power of the PCs, the DM must arbitrarily put the difficulty on an arbitrary sliding scale, which effectively removes advancement; diminish the evocative nature of the earlier challenge in order to retain the evocative nature of the later challenge (only rusty iron goblin vault locks until level 5), which diminishes the stakes of low- to mid-level adventures; or escalate the context, which can rapidly get ridiculous (masterwork godforged superadamantine double-walled vault locks with Symbol of Pain cast on each of the tumblers!)

In a system where you "peak out," like Epic 6 (or Mutants and Masterminds), the DM can clearly present challenges, and the players can read the context of those challenges in relation to other challenges they faced, and gauge the difficulty of the challenge against a character whose capabilities they are more familiar with, since the character's context doesn't rocket upwards in tier.  Advancement isn't stymied, though it is finite (A dedicated lock-picking rogue has plenty of gear to chase and at least a handful of feats to invest in), but since your context isn't constantly shifting that more incremental advancement can actually be more profoundly felt when he is not facing constantly escalating threats and difficulties.

Why does the level 15 rogue need challanging locks to pick? She's been there, done that, got the t-shirt (and the loot).

 At the point of being a demigod, there shouldn't be any locks that give her trouble, and the lack of them helps keep her skill in perspective. She is a demigod, not some level 5 but with higher numbers. How can you feel like a demigod if nothing ever becomes easy?

At the point of being a demigod, she should be looking at becoming skilled in other things now that she has mastered locks.

To me this sounds like expectations are remaining static while the numbers grow. Sounds like you want the experience and difficulty to remain the same and to keep facing the same types of things despite refluffing them as different.

But really, trying to achieve that while leveling up to 20 is basically ignoring what those higher levels mean. Do you think Sauron faces challanging locks? Does he worry about the same things a bunch of level 1s worry about? Of course not!

Being high level doesn't mean facing more difficult versions of the same things, it means facing entirely new types of challanges. As such powerful beings everyone and their grandma looks to the PCs. Some with worship, some with fear, some see them as people to manipulate to achieve their own ends, others want to make them queens and kings, etc.

The challanges faced by high level characters should not be locks or tracking, it should be the need to be in many places at once, being targets of entire kingdoms, assasination attempts, etc. When you are a demigod, you are like Hercules, everyone recognizes your power and wants to either be touched by it or to influence how you use it.

You pass through town, people don't go "Hey look, adventurers!" rather they act much like Bilbo when Gandalf first came by offering adventure, people are amazed, honored, and/or terrified.

If you keep trying to make locks a challange to high level players, then the game has not advanced and thus has been eclipsed by the advancement of the characters.

Why does the level 15 fighter need monsters to hit with his sword?  Why does the level 15 cleric need undead to turn?  Opening a lock is just an illustrative example, but it does represent the character's core competencies.

To go back to the previous point - creating a world in which those transformative challenges exist that both feels consistent and rewards the players' actions in the ongoing narrative is a nightmare.

Combat may still be a regular challange at higher leveks, but even then, why must battles always be with creatures that can individually challange the pcs in direct head on challanges?

Sure having one or two such beasties is fine, but by the time one is level 15, they should be facing mostly large groups of lower level creatures using harrassment tactics and asymetrical warfare strategies.

A level 15 should rarely be facing other level 15s or the creations of such.

And delving dungeons for loot is pointless at that level.

Okay, at this point some people need to back away from this discussion, because we're just seeing the same few names basically repeating the same arguments - "It sucks."  "No, it doesn't.", just phrased differently.

If you've given your opinion, you don't need to keep repeating it until the other guy agrees with you (because, you know, he is never going to).

Accept that some people like games that you think are dumb, and go play the ones that you like.

Thank you.

Hmm, not quite my impression but I don't catch such things very well, so onwards to main topic,

If you are interested in e6, I recommend first playing normally but capping individual classes to 6 levels and make the numbers such as bab and base saves non-stacking. Simple, fast, and if you like it, then you can go through the trouble of sorting out the e6 rules for advancing past level 6.

I may run an E6 game, as a test, to see how it works.

I normally try to keep my thoughts to myself in discussions such as these, but feel compelled to offer my opinion. Notice I say opinion since all opinions are the sole purview of their bearer. Sometimes opinions align, though rarely perfectly and I would like to state that my opinion is no better than anyone else's since this is such an esoteric topic.

First, I will say that I think E6 games are for GM/DMs that either can't or won't adapt to increasing power levels. All games get more complex and some get more mathematically challenging as play progresses from the lower tiers to the upper ones. It takes real investment from both players and GM/DMs to make a higher level game interesting. While some people simply don't have the skill necessary to pull off higher level games, some simply do not have the time.

This is not a condemnation of either. It is simply a fact of life. This holds true for both E6 and regular games. I've played in both where once you reached the upper tiers of play, the game got extremely boring. I consider both a failure on the GM/DMs part to keep the game engaging. I've also played in both where the upper tiers of play where simply amazing. The GM/DMs were invested in making the game great and the actual level didn't matter.

Personally, I prefer non-E6 games. I'll admit I'm a bit of a "crunchy" player and see the mathematics behind all game systems as a challenge to be taken to their ultimate limit. Some would call me a power gamer, but I like to think of myself as a "character perfectionist"...:-D

I don't think it's necessarily the indication of insufficient time or expertise, but a reflection of narrative choice.  I'd be willing to wager that most D&D settings, both published and homebrew, aren't designed with the ascension from plucky farmboy to epic end-of-season-9 shonen anime hero.

Some settings are built for that.  Some narratives can handle it.  Some games thrive on the constant escalation.  But many aren't, and many can't, and systems like E6 allow those settings and narratives to exist without the "threat" of being derailed by the realities of existing alongside creatures that are living titans.

Also, some don't have the interest. It's important to note that some people run E6 games because they like them, not because they're incapable of doing otherwise.

I consider E6 another asset in my DM toolbox. I've run all manner of games, in all manner of modes, moods, atmospheres, themes and styles. Sometimes I have an idea best served by high-level, high-point-buy Gestalt. And sometimes I have an idea for a story that is well-served by existing in an E6 world and played with E6 characters.

Your command of Gamecraft is like your wardrobe, yeah? The wider and more varied your options, the more different kinds of stories you're ready to tell.

There is the aspect of keeping a game in the gritty tier of play, but aside from my own suggestions, no one seems to be discussing how e6 compares to alternative ways of staying gritty, not even commenting on my suggestions of alternatives.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 57):

Possibly because that's not really on-topic. And also possibly because your suggestions have a lot of 'should this' and 'should never that.' And 'should' is not a very useful word when discussing something with as varied experiences as role-playing.

And your alternate E6 suggestion solves some problems, causes others, and overall just establishes another social contract with another set of assumptions and pitfalls.

In other words: https://xkcd.com/927/

In truth this is probably the wrong argument for me. I'm a bit too by the book. I'm of the opinion that if you can't use a system to do what you want, you either use another system that does or design one yourself. A bit harsh perhaps, but it is what it is. I will now bow out of this discussion.

*Pulls out the popcorn to watch the continued debate*

In reply to orynnfireheart (msg # 59):

Which is funny you say that, because that's exactly what Ryan Stoughton did. He had a system (D&D 3.5) and it didn't do what he wanted it to do. So he designed a system himself. He used Open Source d20 as a starting point, and modified it.

How is compare and contrast to alternatives off topic? The main topic is what people think of e6, well in discussing e6 that would include the reasons behind looking at something like e6 and also why pick or not pick e6 in particular of all the options that address what e6 addresses.


Sounds worthy of discussion, and sounds right on topic too.

###
Any of my "should" comments related to the tangent topic of which I believe most problems with full leveling effects on worldbuilding and other issues come from misconceptions where people are trying to take the entirety of the system and shoehorn it into a limited concept based on familiarity (with the concept) rather than taking the system and trying to understand the concepts that naturally derive from the system regardless of how unfamiliar, hence the "should"s. Metaphorically, people are trying to push a square peg into a circle hole because they already have a circle hole when they should notice that things will work out better if they cut out a square hole for the square peg.

I disliked e6. It was like a rusty staple to the heart of an otherwise healthy game. It imposes static "feel" and does it dreadfully wrong. My group played three games in total. One started at 0 XP, the other at 15,000 XP. Both died around 25,000 XP from sheer repetitiveness. We switched to Exalted as heroic mortals and had much more fun in a world far richer to the experience.

When I GMed the third e6, it got to 45,000 XP, and I could tell the players wanted more options. The story and characters were interesting, but the character sheets were largely a hindrance, so I asked "Do you guys just want to level up? As in ACTUALLY level up?" and the response was overwhelmingly "YES! Gods, yes...".

In conclusion, if you like D&D 3.5 stick with it or some house rules. If you want a heroic mortal experience, skip e6. There are better ways to point buy than in d20, especially D&D. If it helps any, I despised M&M when I played it, and I felt e6 was a shadow in that system. I'd suggest systems, but I think that become less germane to e6.

V's e6 rating: 1 out of 5 stars

In reply to V_V (msg # 62):

... would not become Epic at 6th level again.

I'd be curious to hear more about this. How was the game repetitive, exactly? And what kind of extra options became open with normal leveling that the players didn't have access with E6?

I'm genuinely curious here - the only things that E6 completely removes from the game are higher numbers, certain spells, and full-attacks, so I'm confused as to how E6 could be repetitive in a way standard 3.P isn't - because it's not a point I'd ever heard made against the concept before.

For starters, any class ability above lvl 6, not all of which are merely higher powered versions of low lvl stuff, any prestige class, skills stop progressing, just name a few things.

Also, less mechanical but still important is the "feeling" of progressing. At lvl 6, you consider yourself a lvl 6 character of [class x], but with e6, you might get more feats, but you still look your sheet and lvl 6. It doesn't change and thus it feels less like progressing despite the increase in feats.

I think I already commented that one can easily make higher-level class (including prestige class) abilities that aren't overpowered or merely add numbers into extra feats, didn't I? So if that's the problem, then it's easily solved. Same for getting more skill points, even if they'd need to be assigned to skills which aren't already at 6. I can see how not doing these addition might make the game feel more static - that a great many feats in 3.P are worthless isn't news.

Not sure how the numbers staying the same on the sheet makes things repetitive though? The numbers are meant to indicate what your character can do and not do, and how well; if the challenges keep changing (and I can't see a reason why the game being E6 would prevent the challenges from changing, they just won't scale up), the fact that the numbers don't doesn't seem that big a problem to me.

So... am I missing something? If it's just a matter of taste, that's fine, but the idea that capping the levels would somehow make the game feel repetitive was new to me, so I'm trying to make sure I'm not missing something important on how things work in an E6 game.

It isn't about scaling up numbers. Think of it like this, if you play an mmo and you get new armor, you look different, and that difference marks that you have progressed even if the stats didn't improve.

Without visuals, like d20, other things serve the same purpose and level is one of those big things, as well as class or whatever other factors for a system that you use primarily identify what a character can do.

In e6, what do have at lvl 6 of magical study? A lvl 6 wizard. What do you call that character 30 thousand xp later? A lvl 6 wizard, plus stuff. Does that really sound like a 30,000 xp advance to you?

I don't really care much for XP (goal-based progress is more incentivizing for the players in my eyes), nor have I any understanding of MMO (never played one); still, from what I gather it's a matter of psychology. I suppose I can understand that, if nothing else. Thanks for the explanation, at any rate.

This message was deleted by the user at 12:26, Mon 31 July 2017.