Lunar wrote:I try to apply some things that make sense in my games. Even though the rules technically say you can easily overcome the fifty level one or 1/2 guards, I'm still not letting you do it. There are fifty people, you are overwhelmed. GG.
Except that doesn't make sense at all.
First off, if I have, say, a high-level Psion, I could kill fifty people easy with one Energy Wave
, and nearly take out a city block while I'm at it. It doesn't make sense for raw numbers to overwhelm.
If you're willing to accept magic as a response but nothing else, then setting aside balance concerns, the Fighter in the group is defined as being equal in power to that Psion, and yet, he's somehow automatically overwhelmed just because he doesn't have a sign that says "magic?" We're talking about a guy whose job description pretty much reads, "Kill monsters that kill armies," and he's not given his fighting chance? We're not talking technicalities, here; it is self-evident within the world and the genre that this guy is tremendously powerful, to an extent that's orders of magnitude beyond those putzes surrounding him. That's not rules lawyering. That's just the basic logic of, "Hey, the entire army got wiped out by that dragon this warrior slew in a duel. He's clearly obscenely powerful." Basic logic: Dragon > Army, Fighter > Dragon, thus it's not that hard to conclude that Fighter > Army.
This is heroic fantasy. What's more, it's D&D, with a rocket ship power scale built in as you go from, "Goblins are dangerous," to, "I can threaten demon lords." That's not rules lawyering; that's a fundamental genre/system assumption.
When you're getting to level 7, 10, 13 characters, you're not talking about Bob the Militiaman anymore. You're talking Beowulf, Cid, Roland. When you hit level 20, you're talking Cuchulain. It does not make sense for Beowulf to go down without a fight against fifty mooks when we're talking about the guy who ripped Grendel's arm off and whose might is enough to scare off entire countries even when he's in his eighties. Cuchulain's established as being able to stop armies in their tracks.
That 13th-level Fighter is an overtly superhuman being, defined as the equal to a Glabrezu or an adult green dragon or three T-Rexes. That's not a technicality. That's a basic genre assumption. We're talking Greek heroes, and unless those fifty men could take on a fully-grown dragon, it's a vastly greater suspension of disbelief to accept that they could
take that Fighter down. After all, how in the Hell does a band of putzes hope to take down Hercules?
And if you don't want warriors defined as being on par with a Glabrezu, why are you playing a game whose defining feature is that rocket ship power scale designed to get you up there over the course of two thirds of a summer, then beyond?
Lunar wrote:The whole point would be that trying to get a phylactery would be a challenge, just swimming down there and taking a pew d6 of damage is incredibly lame and anticlimactic. I would want my party to come up with some other way to get it that doesn't involve a wizard stealing the spotlight with: "Taadaa! Magic!" Even though two of my players are rules lawyers I know that they would simply look at that situation and find it stupid, they'd want to figure out some other way that would be more fulfilling to them.
Swordsmen solve problems by swording.
Thieves solve problems by thiefing.
Mages solve problems by magicking.
Getting angry at players or calling them rules lawyers just for doing what they're fundamentally expected to do. Mages are designed to solve their problems with magic, and if there is a character who has the abilities to locate any object in the multiverse, teleport anywhere in the world, ward themselves against environmental hazards, breathe water, generate light, and return safely, it doesn't make one lick of sense for them to just ignore the abilities they've spent a lifetime studying. It's not spotlight stealing; it's taking the obvious and sensible solution.
You're expecting the characters to go out of character to act like idiots and buffoons whenever competence is inconvenient. That's bad policy.
There are a lot of things I'm not saying. Those things I'm not saying? I'm not saying them.