Antagonists who simply cannot be disposed of by damaging their physical body, because either they would easily recover or their spirit would still persist with even more dangerous effects, are one of the biggest staples of fantasy, though (even before touching the realm of anime and manga, where a fighting series just isn't complete without at least one immortal and unkillable guy). As people still read fantasy, I think such antagonists are epic and cool enough. The problems you're describing arises from the fact that 3.X (or Exalted) simply never were conceived with the thought that high-level characters might be able to effectively disregard all damage, yet unwittingly provided the ways for them to do so. So when such characters were unexpectedly created by minmaxing, they could only be defeated in equally unexpected ways, not covered by their array of immunities.
>Btw I'm not even sure that making system that tries to cover from ratcatcher to epic demigod is a good idea. By my experience most system that tries to simulate several tiers are only good in one.
This is a valid point, of course. However, as you might notice, I'm rather past the stage where explaining why writing a better DnD is a hopeless task was relevant for me. In fact, I did enough of that myself. As a better DnD is certainly not going to materialize on its own in the next 10 years at the very least, I think it is better to try even if I'm going to fail than to never try and admit failure before even starting. And if I'm going to try, striving for actual improvement presumes at least attempting to succeed where DnD previously failed, rather than trying to convince the audience that issues don't exist (Paizo is doing that better than I ever could anyway).
Keyword here is "antagonists". It is perfectly fine to have antagonists who cannot be dealt with by simple hitting in the face. But, first of all, this antagonist have to be beaten by some quest way then, not via throwing some kind of irresistible sneezing + hurricane diarrhea combo that will disable him enough to activate tarrasquesque condition, if you intend combat then direct damage would look more spectacular. Second of all, this power is barely fit for PC in longterm play, 99% of challenges will either will be void or turned in "directed kryptonite to weak point" / "your valuable NPC is in danger.. again" type of challenge.. which kinda sucks.
While powers of that type indeed are far more common for antagonists I can name three protagonists with combat-relevant regenerative immortality off the top of my head - Manji, Alucard, Ban (more if we count games where cutscenes don't work on the same assumptions as gameplay - half of Kratos' schtick is his ability to drag himself out of Hades again and again, Dante has rapid regeneration with unclear limits, etc). Also, teleportation, for example, is a stereotypically villainous power as well, doesn't mean it is not traditional for DnD.
"Second of all, this power is barely fit for PC in longterm play,"
And yet that's how it worked in actual DnD at high levels since AD&D. Certainly in 3.X where the biggest penalty of death, even assuming your party got wiped out, was losing your items. Even assuming it was not your Astral Projection that perished, you needed a poorly-written non-core spell (Barghest's Feast) for anyone to stay dead for an appreciable amount of time, assuming you GM allowed that spell to work, even though by its description it shouldn't have been doing what its mechanics did. As death meant little, hit point damage meant even less. Turning your enemies to stone, Sequestering them and then casting Imprisonment in a random area was a rather more reliable way to get rid of them than making them explode.
Now you may observe that DnD at top levels doesn't work. You will be largely correct. The fact that only full casters were able to participate in shenanigans above was one of the reasons, the fact that adventures and whatever presumed PCs actually could die as easily as on low levels was another. What can be done with that? I can go the way of 4E and just throw out all the crazy powers. But had that solution been satifsying for me, I'd already be running 4E or 5E. Or I can attempt to make the craziness work at least somewhat, and to do that the assumption and the expectation that characters may just be impossible to dispose of by simply reducing their HPs is necessary. And if I don't want casters to again be mandatory for a party, their immortality should not come from a specific spell, too.
Finally, as you no doubt know, one of the reasons DnD has Raise Dead/Resurrection is HP math just not working terribly well at high levels. Given that I don't have a team of testers, the latter problem is likely beyond my ability to solve. Therefore - and if a cleric is not supposed to be mandatory in the party - characters need more ways to prevent death by hit point damage, and at the top level tier outright immunity doesn't seem to be out of place.
I don't know who first and third ones, but I know Alucard, and this example is quite good.. because, honestly, Alucard is very boring as character. Of course he tries to showoff and such, which may work on some public, but in TRPG you don't have nice visuals so it would be "do I really have to roll this combat?". Of course I heard that some people in the internets plays Exalted with gm polishing players rear with his tongue via describing awesomeness of their characters.. but it is closer to psychological treatment than to a game.
As for 3.x 1. Loosing your items was penalty big enough. You know, Christmas Tree, all other talks, etc etc. 2. Resurrection costs 1 Lv unless you backed your PCs with Lv 17+ Cleric, and required a body, which actually could also be destroyed by some are spell or like. 3. Also there were things trapping soul like one Core spell and one Weapon Material from CW.
Over than that I' to lazy to discuss how f-d DnD resurrection system is. To be short, it is designed for PC's (and GMPCs) and is not figuring anywhere else in the world.
And again, why overstacking some silly debuffs is better? Why opponent don't have immunity to these irresistible itchings or terrible pains of whateverak? You will just go Exalted way where lp doesn't matter, and essence is real health, except in your case combat values to be debuffed will be a new lp.. and these new lp will follow quite non-heroical spiral of death pattern as it actually lowers combat effectiveness of character with every bit and chunk lost.
Trap the Soul was not something you cast after reducing HPs of an opponent to -10. In fact, you needed serious semantical hymnastics to justify such possibility. It was something you cast instead of reducing hit points. Which again bring us back to my statement that normal death already was one of the less severe conditions in high-level DnD. True Resurrection did not cost levels, and by the book getting some 9th-level scrolls was not hard at all. Particularly given that a party could plane-hop to a multiversal marketplace at level 9.
And similarly your buffs and resistance to dispels already were your real hit points at high-level, moderate-to-high optimization games. In my last campaing major opponents almost pushed themselves off RNG with only the basic level 1-3 spells their had in their default writeups plus resistance to the form of energy the party's sorceress was generally using. Had I actually written their buff suite for maximum efficiency it would have been "Disjunction or GTFO" because Dispel is shit in Pathfinder. And Pathfinder has a good deal less effective buffs than 3.5 had by the end. But in both your hit points would be gone (or bypassed with a SoD spell, or you will eat 20 negative levels, etc) in 1-2 enemy actions, after your major buffs are removed. The last non-casting monster the party encountered in the same campaing was CR 20 against level 15-16 common sense-optimized characters and he didn't get a turn.
The main reason why Dispels and Dragons that already de-facto exists is unacceptable to me is "Full casters only, martials need not apply" nature of high-level games to which it contributes. Sure, DnD/PF is flexible enough that you may work around that with a social contract at your table (unlike, say, Exalted, where no social contract can establish a middle ground between so deadly I have to cheat in PCs favor nearly every fight, instead of only when I go overboard with optimizing encounters as is the case of DnD, or boring as fuck to run), but ideally a system should not place such burden on players.
If I don't want to preserve the current state of things then what I want? As in fantasy, where the baddest of bad guys can only be sealed, or banished, or imprisoned until their sole weakness if found, I do want "death" to remain not nearly the hardest condition to recover from in the endgame. It should be accepted the moment you go into the cosmic tier than you need ways to imprison your enemies or make them deader than dead if you want them gone for more than a couple of days. And I do want simple removal of hit points to lose its position as the single universally reliable way to inflict death at cosmic tier.
Consider that 3.X already has four ways to make characters die - hit points damage, Con damage, negative levels, SoD spells, besides a half-dozen more ways to remove them from battle that are even better than death. Why hit points damage should have the privilege of being the one path to death creatures are never outright immune to or even immune to until you get past their defenses (barring unexpected optimizing combos, of course)? And if "death" is just an intermediary condition, tenderizing the enemy so you could apply your real finisher easier, why penalties which do the same thing, if perhaps to a lesser extent, do not automatically become more valuable in the cosmic metagame? As to why enemies are immune to them, do you not think that immunities to something almost anyone in the world can do (damage) ought to be more common than immunities to a specific power?
>Btw I'm not even sure that making system that tries to cover from ratcatcher to epic demigod is a good idea. By my experience most system that tries to simulate several tiers are only good in one.
This is a valid point, of course. However, as you might notice, I'm rather past the stage where explaining why writing a better DnD is a hopeless task was relevant for me. In fact, I did enough of that myself. As a better DnD is certainly not going to materialize on its own in the next 10 years at the very least, I think it is better to try even if I'm going to fail than to never try and admit failure before even starting. And if I'm going to try, striving for actual improvement presumes at least attempting to succeed where DnD previously failed, rather than trying to convince the audience that issues don't exist (Paizo is doing that better than I ever could anyway).
Reply
Reply
While powers of that type indeed are far more common for antagonists I can name three protagonists with combat-relevant regenerative immortality off the top of my head - Manji, Alucard, Ban (more if we count games where cutscenes don't work on the same assumptions as gameplay - half of Kratos' schtick is his ability to drag himself out of Hades again and again, Dante has rapid regeneration with unclear limits, etc). Also, teleportation, for example, is a stereotypically villainous power as well, doesn't mean it is not traditional for DnD.
"Second of all, this power is barely fit for PC in longterm play,"
And yet that's how it worked in actual DnD at high levels since AD&D. Certainly in 3.X where the biggest penalty of death, even assuming your party got wiped out, was losing your items. Even assuming it was not your Astral Projection that perished, you needed a poorly-written non-core spell (Barghest's Feast) for anyone to stay dead for an appreciable amount of time, assuming you GM allowed that spell to work, even though by its description it shouldn't have been doing what its mechanics did. As death meant little, hit point damage meant even less. Turning your enemies to stone, Sequestering them and then casting Imprisonment in a random area was a rather more reliable way to get rid of them than making them explode.
Now you may observe that DnD at top levels doesn't work. You will be largely correct. The fact that only full casters were able to participate in shenanigans above was one of the reasons, the fact that adventures and whatever presumed PCs actually could die as easily as on low levels was another. What can be done with that? I can go the way of 4E and just throw out all the crazy powers. But had that solution been satifsying for me, I'd already be running 4E or 5E. Or I can attempt to make the craziness work at least somewhat, and to do that the assumption and the expectation that characters may just be impossible to dispose of by simply reducing their HPs is necessary. And if I don't want casters to again be mandatory for a party, their immortality should not come from a specific spell, too.
Finally, as you no doubt know, one of the reasons DnD has Raise Dead/Resurrection is HP math just not working terribly well at high levels. Given that I don't have a team of testers, the latter problem is likely beyond my ability to solve. Therefore - and if a cleric is not supposed to be mandatory in the party - characters need more ways to prevent death by hit point damage, and at the top level tier outright immunity doesn't seem to be out of place.
Reply
As for 3.x
1. Loosing your items was penalty big enough. You know, Christmas Tree, all other talks, etc etc.
2. Resurrection costs 1 Lv unless you backed your PCs with Lv 17+ Cleric, and required a body, which actually could also be destroyed by some are spell or like.
3. Also there were things trapping soul like one Core spell and one Weapon Material from CW.
Over than that I' to lazy to discuss how f-d DnD resurrection system is. To be short, it is designed for PC's (and GMPCs) and is not figuring anywhere else in the world.
And again, why overstacking some silly debuffs is better? Why opponent don't have immunity to these irresistible itchings or terrible pains of whateverak? You will just go Exalted way where lp doesn't matter, and essence is real health, except in your case combat values to be debuffed will be a new lp.. and these new lp will follow quite non-heroical spiral of death pattern as it actually lowers combat effectiveness of character with every bit and chunk lost.
Reply
And similarly your buffs and resistance to dispels already were your real hit points at high-level, moderate-to-high optimization games. In my last campaing major opponents almost pushed themselves off RNG with only the basic level 1-3 spells their had in their default writeups plus resistance to the form of energy the party's sorceress was generally using. Had I actually written their buff suite for maximum efficiency it would have been "Disjunction or GTFO" because Dispel is shit in Pathfinder. And Pathfinder has a good deal less effective buffs than 3.5 had by the end. But in both your hit points would be gone (or bypassed with a SoD spell, or you will eat 20 negative levels, etc) in 1-2 enemy actions, after your major buffs are removed. The last non-casting monster the party encountered in the same campaing was CR 20 against level 15-16 common sense-optimized characters and he didn't get a turn.
The main reason why Dispels and Dragons that already de-facto exists is unacceptable to me is "Full casters only, martials need not apply" nature of high-level games to which it contributes. Sure, DnD/PF is flexible enough that you may work around that with a social contract at your table (unlike, say, Exalted, where no social contract can establish a middle ground between so deadly I have to cheat in PCs favor nearly every fight, instead of only when I go overboard with optimizing encounters as is the case of DnD, or boring as fuck to run), but ideally a system should not place such burden on players.
If I don't want to preserve the current state of things then what I want? As in fantasy, where the baddest of bad guys can only be sealed, or banished, or imprisoned until their sole weakness if found, I do want "death" to remain not nearly the hardest condition to recover from in the endgame. It should be accepted the moment you go into the cosmic tier than you need ways to imprison your enemies or make them deader than dead if you want them gone for more than a couple of days. And I do want simple removal of hit points to lose its position as the single universally reliable way to inflict death at cosmic tier.
Consider that 3.X already has four ways to make characters die - hit points damage, Con damage, negative levels, SoD spells, besides a half-dozen more ways to remove them from battle that are even better than death. Why hit points damage should have the privilege of being the one path to death creatures are never outright immune to or even immune to until you get past their defenses (barring unexpected optimizing combos, of course)? And if "death" is just an intermediary condition, tenderizing the enemy so you could apply your real finisher easier, why penalties which do the same thing, if perhaps to a lesser extent, do not automatically become more valuable in the cosmic metagame? As to why enemies are immune to them, do you not think that immunities to something almost anyone in the world can do (damage) ought to be more common than immunities to a specific power?
Reply
Leave a comment