'mundane-flavored superpowers'

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Thu Dec 06, 2012 8:45 pm

I don't really care about whether the enchanter is about as good as the social engineering guy if they use their abilities to do the same thing. I am perfectly fine playing magical types, and I don't care what bonus abilities a character has so long as they can actually do their primary schtick.

If I get a magical crafty dude, they should be able to give magic swords to their generals and build battle golems.

If I get a stormpriest, they should be able to summon storms.

If these characters can do that and remain viable in the game, it's all good.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Thu Dec 06, 2012 9:27 pm

Foxwarrior wrote:You know, I've forgotten what type of audience I was trying to pander to with this. Do people who only want to play nonmagical characters really exist, or are they just an illusion?

Yes. I do, personally. But it has to fit the setting. In terms of D&D, it can work for certain settings, but it strictly doesn't for others. For something like Dark Sun or Forgotten Realms, forget it. The setting literally laughs at you, smacks you around and shits on your rancid corpse. Then animates you as a shit zombie.

For a setting like Eberron (especially at launch), it isn't nearly as much of a problem as 95% of the 'high level' NPCs were approximately level 9, and literally everyone can just go and buy an airship or whatever when they get enough cash, and gates to other planar realms were just places you could stumble into, so whatever. You can go on flying adventures by stopping in at House Airship, and get the appropriate crap for underwater adventures at House Magic Item Shop. But regardless of the baubles, you can still wander around and sword people to death if you want to. And as the campaign approaches level 8 (if it ever does) you shift over to political theatre or simply retire.

codeGlaze · Post by **codeGlaze** » Thu Dec 06, 2012 9:42 pm

Pedantic wrote:
Foxwarrior wrote:You know, I've forgotten what type of audience I was trying to pander to with this. Do people who only want to play nonmagical characters really exist, or are they just an illusion?
I spent three threads on RPG.net trying to make this point. It is apparently maniacally important that you don't call these abilities magic and that they aren't "supernatural" but rather "supernormal."

You've got an audience who desperately wants their superheroes to be strictly "mundane" and still hang with wizards.

Then they need a rules-system that enforces magical Iron Man.
That's the only other, logical, option.

"Supernormal" is fucking retarded. Do these people seriously fucking think that living in a world that TEEMING with arcane energy wouldn't somehow affect "mundane" people too? It's absolutely maddening trying to wrap my brain around how these people think. Either you have a world where a mage is powerful enough to rip open space/time and a warrior can be Superman. Or you stop mages at fireball and balance around that.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Thu Dec 06, 2012 9:58 pm

Voss, representative of the audience: How excessive are you willing to let nonmagical characters be* before it's just too much?

*Before magic items or other advanced equipment.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Thu Dec 06, 2012 10:16 pm

Voss wrote:
Foxwarrior wrote:You know, I've forgotten what type of audience I was trying to pander to with this. Do people who only want to play nonmagical characters really exist, or are they just an illusion?
Yes. I do, personally. But it has to fit the setting. In terms of D&D, it can work for certain settings, but it strictly doesn't for others. For something like Dark Sun or Forgotten Realms, forget it. The setting literally laughs at you, smacks you around and shits on your rancid corpse. Then animates you as a shit zombie.

This is a pretty important point. But I'd go a bit further to say that the definition of "Mundane" varies by setting. In some settings, normal people really do have access to what would be blatantly supernatural effects if they were transported to another game.

If you are in something like Dark Sun, and everybody has psychic powers, I might call a person who learned emotion reading, inertial force armor, and the ability to make small objects explode mundane. After all, everybody has powers, and these don't really distinguish you from a random person on the street.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Thu Dec 06, 2012 10:49 pm

Foxwarrior wrote:Voss, representative of the audience: How excessive are you willing to let nonmagical characters be* before it's just too much?

*Before magic items or other advanced equipment.

Actually, that exception is actually more interesting: I'd rather not see a lot of magic items either, though in D&D it is pretty necessary to make the system function at all.

In my 'perfect setting' (which I've never actually seen and really doubt at this point I ever will, since the fantasy genre is pretty different from what I grew up with), I'd prefer mundane abilities capped at exactly what it says on the tin.

Naturally you've got to open up mundane abilities and have functional disarms, crippling attacks (hamstringing and breaking arms), 1 round stuns and all sorts of things, but they need to be 'I ram the edge of my shield into his crotch' not 'I blast his mind with a ki stare' or whatever, regardless of whether or not the effects might actually be analogous. [1d4 rounds of nauseated, for example].

Fitting magic into that kind of setting can be quirky, and it certainly can't be D&D style magic, but low-level effects and damaging effects can be largely fine. Entangle is ok when the swashbuckler can pull an Errol Flynn style clothing staple with knives or arrows.

Basically the metric for the setting needs to be personal skill, not gear or _especially_ not 'over 9000' bullshit (or really just a spell bullshit, which is what a lot of the proposals here seem to be). Probably something along the lines of the Excalibur movie, without the anachronistic armour, where changing a man's face is a seriously powerful act of magic, and summoning fog over a battlefield is a big deal, that can shift the outcome of battle. Or Conan the Destroyer, where opening doors is seriously a thing. But mostly everything comes down to personal skill and grit (even the magical contests), not 'and the wizard snaps his fingers.'

Iron Heroes and the Conan RPG were things I was initially excited about, but well, the former turned out be absolute shit (and some of the classes got very silly indeed, even beyond the non-functionality), and the latter had a lot of quirks, plus the difficulty in selling people on it (and for good reason, as the setting is excessively sexist and racist)

Avoraciopoctules wrote: If you are in something like Dark Sun, and everybody has psychic powers, I might call a person who learned emotion reading, inertial force armor, and the ability to make small objects explode mundane. After all, everybody has powers, and these don't really distinguish you from a random person on the street.

Yeah, but in dark sun, those powers are mostly bullshit, and no one cares. If you happen to roll up dominate or disintegrate, you've got a couple shots at contributing each day, but whatever. Even with that crap a fighter or gladiator or rogue is still a pissant compared to a full on wizard/psionicist or cleric/psionicist. And as Frank recently pointed out, the setting books are quite willing to grind that fact into your face.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Thu Dec 06, 2012 11:08 pm

The only Dark Sun I've ever played was the Shattered Lands and Wake of the Ravager computer games, but I'll readily concede that the baseline psychic powers generally got pretty underwhelming by midlevels, when fighty types could kill 4 people a turn.

But my main point is somewhat generic. In some settings, the definition of "Normal" is significantly skewed from real life. If everyone in Redarkhan has magic rock powers, and everyone else has magic based on what culture raised them, then the definition of mundane shifts to what an average person can achieve with the magic powers they have simply by surviving to adulthood.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Thu Dec 06, 2012 11:31 pm

Personal (player) skill is the thing I like most about spells and magic items, actually. MacGuyvering solutions to problems is quite satisfying, and having a new set of gadgets for that purpose makes it much more doable than directly competing with centuries of innovation.

Limited access to the technology (unlike in a futuristic setting) means that it's not always odd that you discover some of these uses before any of the NPCs do.

So, sorry Voss. No can do.

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Thu Dec 06, 2012 11:41 pm

Foxwarrior wrote:You know, I've forgotten what type of audience I was trying to pander to with this. Do people who only want to play nonmagical characters really exist, or are they just an illusion?

sure wasnt me, because i want my nonmagical fighters to be as mundane as a human is...ergo nonmagical, so no DBZ, no wuxia fakery, or any of that.

i am sure there are people that want to play Superman on D&D and be considered nonmagical...but are they really?

the physics making superman fly and such is equivalent to the affects of magic from the random onlooker, just like any "science" to a medieval person would appear to be magic. (see any version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 12:44 am

So everyone here falls under one of two camps:

A: Really high power levels are ridiculous anyways.

or

B: At really high power levels, players should have the option of playing superheroes who are less flashy and obvious than a D&D wizard.

And the compromise of exaggerating normal powers while continuing to call them mundane is just some nonsense I picked up from Lago or someone like that? Edit: Oh yeah, the RPGnet people.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 1:57 am

Foxwarrior wrote:So everyone here falls under one of two camps:

A: Really high power levels are ridiculous anyways.

Eeeh, I guess. I want my pretender gods at least as susceptible to getting mauled by a bunch of normal soldiers as in Dom3, so maybe I'm not the person to ask about this.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 1:59 am

I thought you were pretty firmly in camp B.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 2:04 am

Voss basically said he only likes playing E6. So really, who gives a fuck. Why bother trying to make a level 20 fighter fit into his idea of what a mundane person should do, when literally, he doesn't want to go about level 7 or 8.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 2:05 am

Foxwarrior wrote:I thought you were pretty firmly in camp B.

I guess I'm both.

I like people being on the same RNG as each other, and I also like people with nonvancian power schedules and distinct themes to their powersets.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 2:13 am

sabs: So you're in camp B, with a heaping handful of scorn for camp A? Or am I missing something?

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 2:16 am

Yes. I'm in camp B with a heaping handful of scorn for people who want to play fake High Fantasy. If they want to play Low Fantasy.. that's fine. Low Fantasy can be a lot of fun. But it's not High Fantasy.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 2:17 am

I don't think those 2 camps are exclusive. High-power games can be ridiculous, and high-power characters can be subtle.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 2:26 am

Good thing I didn't use an exclusive or, huh.

Edit: Oops, I said "one of two camps". Darn.

Sabs: Didn't Voss describe quite a Low Fantasy indeed? And what is it about a setting where some people can teleport through castles but there are no people who can teleport through planets that makes it fake High Fantasy?

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 2:44 am

Avoraciopoctules wrote:I like people being on the same RNG as each other

Does "people" include all people everywhere, or just all people at any given level? And doesn't that mean you have to do special case exceptions for things like "split an arrow with another arrow", even though such an action should reasonably just depend on your accuracy?

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 2:58 am

My favorite D&D campaign settings generally have peasants as level 4 commoners with a little multiclassing and sorcerer-kings at level 10-15, with suboptimal multiclassing at the high end. Demon lords generally occupy a similar threat level, and armies of low-end fiends are more significant.

I like games where individual human lives can be meaningful enough that someone pulling a gun on you is generally something you care about even if you are a badass.

I think Dominions is close to an ideal stock fantasy setting, but needs more cool things for nonwizards to do.

I like SR4-style dice pools.

codeGlaze · Post by **codeGlaze** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 3:36 am

On the other side of the coin from Avo, I don't like levels on baseline humans. Levels, to me, denote power... not necessarily how experienced you are at tilling the fields and killing wolves. A basic, non-exceptional peasant is barely level 1. Levels are for people who are rising above 'normal'. They are better, they are ( or will be) more powerful. Heroes have levels... shit Kings might not even be above level 1 if it was inherited rule.

Could someone explain the love for dice pools? I saw Frank use them in one of his settings, what makes them better than just rolling a 20 or even percentile?

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 3:37 am

Presumably, dicepools are great because you can always get a 0.

I can't use them in my game though, because dicepools and squads of characters combine in the most awkward of fashions.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 4:27 am

Foxwarrior wrote: Sabs: Didn't Voss describe quite a Low Fantasy indeed? And what is it about a setting where some people can teleport through castles but there are no people who can teleport through planets that makes it fake High Fantasy?

Not exactly. I've a specific dislike for D&D high fantasy or dragonball/superman type stuff, but that isn't the only range of high fantasy.
Riding around on airships and visiting underwater cities can be a great deal of fun, and definitely don't fit into 'low fantasy.' (Though I like that too).

To make a parallel in a genre I don't really give a shit about, the Justice League with Batman and Green Arrow fighting Batman villains is interesting. The Justice League with Batman and Superman fighting Batman and Superman villains if fucking dumb. And that is what D&D does, almost from day one.

sab wrote:Voss basically said he only likes playing E6. So really, who gives a fuck. Why bother trying to make a level 20 fighter fit into his idea of what a mundane person should do, when literally, he doesn't want to go about level 7 or 8.

I could see how you could take it that way, but that wasn't really what I meant. Partly because e6 is fundamentally stupid, but it also puts a hard cap on personal skill, but not on the sheer quantity of magical shit you can have dripping off your person (just each individual bonus is capped lower than normal). Thats pretty much the opposite of what I want. The problem is D&D has 12+ levels of theoretical advancement for non-casters that honestly means nothing at all. They get shit. But people pretend they still 'advance.' Meanwhile the spellcasters get increasing piles of crazy that aren't meaningless +1 bonuses.

Partly what I'm objecting to is probably simply D&D. Even if the Crossbow Marksman can't put a bolt through the eye of the High Ritualist and kill him outright (because insta-kills generally make for bad games) before he summons the World Eater, he should still be able to disrupt the ritual, not get a response of 'Ok, you do <rolls>... 8 damage and he <rolls> ... easily makes his concentration check with a +15. Next'. That doesn't make for a good game, story or anything else. It is just tedious.

It wouldn't be so absurd if everything scaled in a rational manner, but the doubling effect every two levels is both intentional and highly stupid. But they seem intent on proving that the can't scale anything sanely with 5e even if they try, so, oh well, I guess.

codeGlaze · Post by **codeGlaze** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 5:10 am

So where would you cap magic, Voss? And/or scale things?

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Fri Dec 07, 2012 5:55 am

Voss wrote:The Justice League with Batman and Superman fighting Batman and Superman villains if fucking dumb. And that is what D&D does, almost from day one.

Hey, Batman can totally fight Lex Luthor.

He'd probably even win a straight-up fistfight pretty handily too.