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ph@t loot and epic levels

Sheriff05

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Volourn said:
So, it's okay for bugbears to be bumped up in power; but goblins shoul be stuck with a measily 4hp? LMAO You obviously hjave a bug bear fetish and hate the poor goblins. :lol:

YES, I do have god damn bugbear fetish, so what of it?
You are missing the point as usual, so I give up.....
You think that CR 1/3 Goblins bumped up CR 10+ (whatver the hell they are in HotU)
is the SAME thing as CR 2 bugbears being bumped up CR 5.
OK, your opinion..but it's fucking lame either way
(although a few ECL's for leaders and what not is fine)


You commend Troika on everything. Not in this theead perhaps; but you most certainly do.[

You are obviously confusing me with some of your other internet boyfriends,
Yeah I think troika is a good company, and I like ToEE
but I don't get all lathered up about like you do with your totally blind defense of Bioware...in the face of HotU, ToEE is like reinventing the wheel
despite its long list of problems..
of course I know you disagree, so don't bother reminding me.
 

Volourn

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I disagree,a nd I'm reminding you of it. What are you gonan do about it? Whine some more? Thought so. :lol:

P.S. I seriosuly doubt those gobs are CR10+ cosndieirng any meleer can kill them individually in less than 1 round. Once again, it's not the goblins themselves that are uber; but the tatics they use.
 

Sheriff05

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Volourn said:
I disagree,a nd I'm reminding you of it. What are you gonan do about it? Whine some more? Thought so. :lol:

remember I don't whine, I rant....get it right.

P.S. I seriosuly doubt those gobs are CR10+ cosndieirng any meleer can kill them individually in less than 1 round. Once again, it's not the goblins themselves that are uber; but the tatics they use.

they are probably listed in the toolset, if not create an encounter...choose hardest level
pick "goblin" and see what it bumps it's stats up to... 30-50 hit points for CR 1/3 creature
has got to have bumped it up close to 10, or higher...
 
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I think the biggest problem with epic battles is that they're pretty much doomed not to last long. Some people here mention long battles between two equally matched titans, but that's not how it works out because the numbers just get so obnoxious. At best it comes down to who gets lucky or else the developers cheat and negate your supah-powahs. There's not a whole hell of a lot you can do against a maximized Isaac's Greater Missile Storm except completely negate it with a cheezy immunity to evocation spells or complete immunity to magic item (yes, they do exist). Likewise, against a weaponmaster with devastating critical, you're just borrowing time until he scores a crit and you fail your save. Either knock him out with insta-death first or he will. Battles between lower level characters have much better chance of lasting longer simply because there's not the "oops, you're dead". It's kind of like the difference between a boxing match and two guys with bazookas facing off. In the first, they usually have to wear each other down unless one gets really lucky. In the second, it's just a matter of who scores the first hit.

And the goblins really weren't bad. Mostly they were using cunning tactics like the dye to paint you for their archers and ballistae, and it was Undermountain so it's not completely out of the question that Halaster just happened to pluck a few of the finest specimens of goblin society out of all of Faerun to play in his little dungeon or else subjected a few normal goblins to a few special... enhancements. 10th level goblin heroes aren't impossible.
 

Volourn

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Sherriff, I'll check. :) Be right back. :wink: And, I love your whines.. err.. rants..

Snails, to Sherriff, they are.
 

Sheriff05

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Walks with the Snails said:
10th level goblin heroes aren't impossible.

you sound like a smart guy, why give plausibilty to this nonsense?
yeah sure they are not "impossible",
improbable and rare-yes
are they taken out of the context of their "improbabilty" in order to add cannon fodder
for HotU's powergaming bullshit?, you tell me-
 

Volourn

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The goblins' CRs range from CR3 for the runts; and CR8 for the shamans. Once again, as Snails pointed out, it's not the buffed upness of the goblins in question that make the enocunter hard; but the tatics they use. Geez..
 

Sheriff05

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Volourn said:
The goblins' CRs range from CR3 for the runts; and CR8 for the shamans. Once again, as Snails pointed out, it's not the buffed upness of the goblins in question that make the enocunter hard; but the tatics they use. Geez..

That sounds way to low for what you describe, unless something else is going on
your 15 level+ Character should wipe the floor with 50 of them if that's the case
the toughest goblin leaders have an ECL of 6-8, (that's why they are goblins after all)
You're not convincing me it's not a stupid, unrealistic encounter, which is what the premise of HotU appears to be. (stupid, unrealistic)
Tactics aside, what SP says about Vrocks and Balors in 2 rounds only encourages my assumptions.
 

Volourn

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The reason why the goblins in questiona re so tough are the following:

1. They're acrossed a bridge.

2. There's a gate that impedes your prgress. You ahve to either break it down, or open locks it during combat (I guess).

3. They use paint to make you an easier target for their archers no matter the distance.

4. They have balista.

Need I go on?

This battle would probably be much eaiser for a fireballing mage who has at leats one pin cushion to take the hits. Unfortunately, I didn't have one as it was me (F/C), a F/B, and a barbarian.

Capiche?
 
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Yeah, they were actually pathetically easy for my mage. Didn't even need a pincushion, just a few well-placed firebrands (didn't even need metamagic on them). And like I said, since Halaster makes a habit of spiriting away tough critters, it's not so crazy he'd have a few of the finer specimens of goblinhood in his playground. I've got some problems with HotU, but not the gobins.
 

Jed

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Volourn said:
Perhaps; but nobody here reviewed SOU so why the change for HOTU? From his early musings; he and I pretty much agree on ch1 to lesser or greater degree.
I would guess that it's due to the fact that so many NWN-istas have defended both the OC and SoU's campaign by saying that many of each's shortcomings are due to the fact that they we're designed with multiplayer in mind. Bioware has stated publicly and implicitly (by locking out MP from the HotU campaign) that this game will address the complaints of those who want a quality single-player experience.

I would speculate Saint is taking them to task on that point.
 

Zetor

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A bit OT, but has anyone here played the AD&D 2nd ed module Dragon Mountain? It was a high-level [12+] adventure and featured a huge multi-level dungeon filled with [literally] hundreds of... *drumroll* kobolds. :P They weren't buffed-up kobolds either [save for a weird 14th level kobold witch doctor / psionicist, but eh], but they had a lot of nifty magic items from the dragon [great wyrm, red] who gave 'em limited access to her hoard in exchange for protecting her. [there's more to their relationship, of course] The dungeon had elaborate relationships between the different kobold clans, rivalries etc. as well... too bad it was so frickin' hard my players decided to call it quits after the third session or so... :twisted:

Anyway, what I was trying to get at [point? we don't need no friggin' point! :P] is that low-level enemies can be deadly adversaries if used well. Those li'l 20 THAC0 1/2 HD buggers become a lot more deadly when they start using arrows laced with Type E poison or explosive arrows that hurt you even if they miss [and when you have 80 kobold archers firing at you, someone's gonna throw a 20]. And don't get me started on the insanely nasty traps they've set up... sure, magic helps, but good luck trying to rest in there and not having a party member kidnapped [tiny kobold-sized twisty tunnels]. Oh yeah, and did I mention the red dragon waiting at the end of it all?! :D


-- Z.
perpetually discobomb-- disocomb-- ah smeg it.
 

Saint_Proverbius

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Volourn said:
The reason why the goblins in questiona re so tough are the following:

1. They're acrossed a bridge.

Actually, I didn't get my ass kicked by them. I got my ass kicked by the huge "L" shaped room dwelling ones with the three to four shaman flinging spells like no tomorrow and all the grunts.
 

Sharpei_Diem

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My thoughts:

Personally, i think the problem is that magic becomes too prevalent. It starts out small, +1 items and such, but then the DM has to give more(or give the creatures more in order to stand a chance) and it has a kind of cascading effect. It eventually reaches absurd levels where everyone and everything has magic weapons and the player is bypassing anything below +4 or unique, or else throwing it into their bag of holding.

I prefer campaigns where magic is relatively rare: a 5th level character might have +1 chain and a magic dagger...

A couple of simple things could be done to keep things in balance:

1) Magic items break: Almost every game/campaign treats magic items like some kind of indestructible substance. Make them break. Haha, make them break catastrophically: staff of power, no more....

2) Magic like foreplay: tease the players. Don't give them plate +1, give them studded leather +1. Make them make a conscious decision about whether they want the advantages of magic, or go for better conventional items (a good example is giving chain +1...the player must decide whether chain +1 has more attractive advantages than ordinary plate).

3) get rid of magic shops and smiths. Talk about overused: how many small little CRPG villages have the world's best magic item forging smith in them? Not to mention the merchant with 6 hp and a veritable fortune of magic items who never seems to be relieved of them...
 

Snuffles

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Isn't high magic a problem with the setting of Faerun?

Personally I prefer the idea of magic items clashing with each other, so you have to choose between items, rather than every item you wear being magical, although magic breaking, being stolen or dissapearing "magically" is also a nice idea, so you don't get too reliant on any one item. It just seems to me that in all the good (;)) epic novels you usually get one powerful magic item per person and that feels about right.
 

Sharpei_Diem

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Faerun and Forgotten realms, both. Though I think it's really dependent on the dm.

From what i know of dragonlance, magic was pretty scarce...they also had a nifty switch with steel being the coin of choice...
 

Volourn

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Umm.. Faerun, and Forgoten Realms are basically the same thing. And, like you mentioned, it's only a problem if the DM allows it to be a problem which it never was in my campaigns.

Saint, they were tricky for me too; but nowhere as bad as the other group.
 

Voss

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Faerun and Forgotten Realms are the same setting.
Just different names.

And the magic issue is pretty much built into the D&D system. 3e has really codified though- characters should essentially have a given gp value of magic items at a given level.

The real problem is that magic items overshadow character abilities to a large degree- a fighter can work his way up to +2 to hit and +4 damage, but anyone can pick up a +4 sword and have an advantage over the trained specialist. Start hanging special powers off the more powerful weapons and armor and it just gets worse.
Eh. The problem is inherent to the system.

Oh, and the dragonlance steel pieces? One of the stupidest ideas in the entire system. In an unstable world with lots of unrest, bandits, and military problems, someone is drawing off weapon and armor smithing material to make coinage? What the fuck? Someone could melt down a couple dozen suits of plate mail, set himself up for life, and then completely destroy the economy.
 

lawfoster

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In terms of magic items being too common, I know from playing Exile and Avernum, and other games like it, that a steel sword can be as great to see as any treasure. Its all about balance, and what type of world you make. Problem is Forgotten Realms(Misbegotten Realms) dosen't really reflect a world that has tons of magic around. Its more or less one big dungeon for PCs, from what it seems. If you make other items just as important it can mean a lot more to find just a more useful item rather than having piles of +4 swords. Just cause you only have 1 +5 sword in the game dosen't make the tons of +4 ones any less silly. And this is not a refrence to HOTU or NWN, but to most games that do it. Actually, the old Gold Box Dragon Lance games, while they had a ton of magic, the Dragon Lances themselves(only 3 of them) were amazing to find. They did a good job with limiting those, but there was tons of magic anyway, I think.
 

Sharpei_Diem

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Sorry, my mistake on Faerun. For some reason i was thinking it was Oerth, or whatever it was Gygax called his...

Voss: um, no. Suits of armor would be worth much more as suits of armor than melted down: same thing goes for weaponry. But there really wasn't that much of it around, sure the knights of solamnia had plate armor, and that was mostly because they were wealthy anyways. I'll admit that it has some holes in it (more along the lines that if steel were that rare, people would be taking it out of circulation to use, particularly given it's qualities), and you'd expect other metals to fill out the void (think bronze age) so that actually finding steel 'on the field' would be pretty rare. Maybe i'm just more interested in it because someone dared jump from the 'gold standard'.

As it is, very few designers actually sit out and think through a reasonable economy. I think you'd really have to start off with what 'common' people earn (how much does a farmer make? And remember most people in the world would be farmers: all those wonderfull city people need to eat, and have a regular supply of food without refridgeration). After that, you'd start pricing out those things farmers would need to afford (draft animals, equipment). Say a farmer earns 10 gp/yr. It might be reasonable to assume that a cheap horse would cost 20, a cow would cost 25 gp, a good meal would cost 1 sp etc, etc. By doing this you start to draw a framework within the world works, and what the PCs can expect to find. A goblin village has been subsisting by raiding farmers, they've been successful of late and the king wants someone to stop them. After raiding over a dozen outlying farms, the village now holds the princely sum of 48 gp, 6 cows, 4 horses and a sheep distributed between it's citizens. Now our party of adventures wins, and divies it up, getting 8 gp each. Sounds pitiful, but then again, in the course of a week's work, they've made about as much as a farmer does in a year! And if the party is smart enough to take the livestock and horses back...but of course, the crown doesn't want to allow the pc's to profiteer off the farmers plight, and so...

hmmm....didn't really mean to get into that. What was my point again? :)
 
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Magic items are so easy to churn out since 3E that really it does make sense for them to be pretty plentiful IMO. Not really a good thing, but that's how it is. It's not like the old days where you had to collect 3 uncommon, 2 rare, and one impossible compenent and then sit in the lab for the better part of a year and sacrifice a point of constitution permanently to create that +3 sword, now you just plunk down your GP and XP and presto, a new item is born in a couple of weeks.

I've thought about creating a gameworld where economics really applies, too, but magic greatly complicates things. Magic has so many practical uses that it seems many people would want to learn it IMO. There's always been that kind of disconnect that it's supposedly rare, but any 4th level fighter can pick it up on a whim soon as he kills enough orcs. Because PC's are "special". You mention food concerns, but when a 5th level cleric can feed himself and 2 others indefinitely and can support many more at higher levels, it makes sense that it would take a little strain off the food supply. Starvation would probably be fairly rare as long as there were enough good churches around. Likewise, coming up with an efficient form of refrigeration would be child's play for a mid-level wizard. And once you've got teleportation, Katie bar the door. Trading rare commodities from the other side of the world would be such easy profits at first that one would imagine the law of supply and demand would create more budding entrepreneurs who hit the books long enough to learn the spell and then rake in the bucks. Eventually teleportation would become so commonplace that prices would tend to even out more. Likewise, scrying and teleportation combined could be used to create a very efficient communications network that would greatly speed the spread of ideas and also would make a good deal of old-fashioned military tactics quite obsolete. Warfare would probably resemble modern times more than medieval times simply because magic can substitute for technology in providing all those nice things generals love like mobility, firepower, supply, and intelligence. Fantasy always seems to prefer nice limited world though, where magic is just a nice toy for adventurers to play with and mysteriously no one else wants to use it for anything other than killing relatively small groups of monsters more efficiently.
 

Sharpei_Diem

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Good points.

If the goal is to create a plausible alternate reality, there's a lot about magic that needs to be fleshed out too.

Clerics: really should only do services for the faithful, or those that they know are sincere. Just because they're clerics doesn't mean they give away these things either. There's all sorts of alignments that don't believe in the society above the individual. On other things, maybe create food just creates enough food for one, not food for 20, or perhaps the food is only an illusion to remove the pains of hunger, but does nothing to sustain the body (until high level that is). Maybe the minimum wisdow to cast spells should be 13?

Wizards: I think the thing to create reasonable limits to magic is to reduce its reliability, or its longevity. Ok, a wizard can create cold, but maybe that only lasts 30 minutes; are they really going to do that en masse and organize on a scale to benefit society? Again alignment comes into play. Reasonable limits on teleportation are supposed to be easy: the wizard was supposed to know the area he was teleporting to very well. Anything less and we'd have a dead wizard soon. We're also talking about 9th level wizards here and there really shouldn't be milions of them hanging around. Then there's also spells to counter beneficial magic.

You're also assuming a very stable world. Stable worlds allow these kinds of beneficial societies to develop. Most of the fantasy worlds written are not so stable, with humanity clinging to survive against the monstrous hordes (not that this doesn't need improvement either)
 
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Sharpei_Diem said:
Clerics: really should only do services for the faithful, or those that they know are sincere. Just because they're clerics doesn't mean they give away these things either.

Hmm, starve or join the church? Join the church or starve? Seems like it would be an effective conversion tool to me, much more important to many religions than filthy lucre. Some would be absolutely dying to feed the hungry if all it took was a few spells they'll get back tomorrow anyway, and those would also tend to be the ones that drew the most converts and expanded the quickest, overwhelming the more transparently self-serving ones by sheer numbers.

There's all sorts of alignments that don't believe in the society above the individual. On other things, maybe create food just creates enough food for one, not food for 20, or perhaps the food is only an illusion to remove the pains of hunger, but does nothing to sustain the body (until high level that is). Maybe the minimum wisdow to cast spells should be 13?

Things might need adjusting, true. I remember Dark Sun limited this to some extent, but really even there being a water cleric or druid meant that if you were remotely clever, the basics of life were pretty well taken care of for you and your 50 closest friends. Just by the basic D&D rules, anyone who's buddies with the buddies of a cleric never has to worry about the basics of life no matter how hard it gets.

Wizards: I think the thing to create reasonable limits to magic is to reduce its reliability, or its longevity. Ok, a wizard can create cold, but maybe that only lasts 30 minutes; are they really going to do that en masse and organize on a scale to benefit society? Again alignment comes into play.

You can always research new spells. Ones of a utilitarian bent tend to be easier to master anyway. Also, the thing about alignment is it isn't in a vacuum. People who cooperate tend to belong to something that is more than the sum of its parts. Good wizards will tend to be looked on more favorably by the general populace and they will also come from and develop more robust societies than ones where everyone is just out for themselves. Likewise, societies that value the free exchange of knowledge and promote the magical arts will wind up far ahead and be in more of a position to expand even further. These things build on one another.

Reasonable limits on teleportation are supposed to be easy: the wizard was supposed to know the area he was teleporting to very well. Anything less and we'd have a dead wizard soon. We're also talking about 9th level wizards here and there really shouldn't be milions of them hanging around. Then there's also spells to counter beneficial magic.

All you need to know an area is have a buddy who can teleport you there. You don't really need that many wizards to really shake things up, either. In a good day, a wizard could literally transport tons of stuff. For long distances, a single powerful wizard could easily outcarry an armada of merchant ships and be safer, more reliable, and faster to boot. And if even one bothered to craft a few permanent teleportation circles in strategic locations, forget about it.

You're also assuming a very stable world. Stable worlds allow these kinds of beneficial societies to develop. Most of the fantasy worlds written are not so stable, with humanity clinging to survive against the monstrous hordes (not that this doesn't need improvement either)

Most settings do seem to be fairly stable to me. It's not like Waterdeep is going anywhere. The monsters usually just go nuts every few hundred years and wipe out an empire or two, which kinda doesn't make too much sense since a highly advanced civilization should be able to wipe out marauding orcs by the bucketful as long as it cares remotely about martial readiness. Some are going to be stupid in that regard but others will learn from their mistakes.
 

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