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.