I think you're misunderstanding me. I don't want anyone to "impose their own arbitrary limit" on their character's advancement, I just want them to respect the benchmarks that are provided by the game even if those benchmarks aren't enforced by hard caps. That is, to "play the game the way that the game tells you to play it." If the game doesn't provide any such guidelines, all bets are off.ACOS wrote: [A]s long as there is incentive to increase his ability, and the game continues to allow those increases, then the player is still going to continue to try to increase his ability. This is just the nature of human motivation. This isn't some failure of moral character on the part of the player; this is just the player playing the game the way that the game tells him to play it.
And then we have you sitting there saying that the player has some sort of ethical responsibility to impose his own arbitrary limit on his character's advancement based on your personal aesthetic tastes.
I have to wonder if there's something about this point that makes it invisible to you guys, because I repeat it in every post and nobody seems to notice it:If a stat of "16" is what you want to be "good enough", that's fine; but you need to play games wherein that is actually viable (in which case, post-6th-level D&D is certainly not the game for you).
In other words, I know this issue isn't relevant in D&D and I'm not trying to apply it to D&D. I'm talking about games like M&M, GURPS, Champions and After Sundown.me wrote:me wrote:
If a game doesn't have sufficient benchmarks to give you context for the stats and what particular numbers mean, then none of the above applies. Notably this describes all editions of D&D.
(Emphasis in the original, but re-emphasised to be more legible in a quote tag.)
I also said I think that's a bit annoying, but ultimately not a big deal and something you just deal with by adopting a relativist and accumulatory mindset -just like you're saying. In a more consistent game, the owlbears and hyena men would be statted with reference to the exact same benchmarks and everything would fit together neatly, but if we're talking D&D spesifically they're not and they don't and that is, ultimately, okay.
Dogbert:
See above, but also, since your point applies to other games than just D&D: Challenges don't scale with level, that's precisely backward. That's what leads to 4e-style unclimbable trees and 25th level orcs. Rather, your level increasing allows you to take on a greater span of challenges (and eventually drops some challenges below your radar.) Challenges other than mirror-image contests in your field of specialization exist and lower-level challenges don't cease to exist just because you've nominally outgrown them, so depending on the ability in question, precisely because you have limited resources to design your character with there are many degrees of investment worth considering between"none" and "all-in".Dogbert wrote: Alas, this is d&d we're talking about. Challenges scale with level, so unless you keep devoting resources on a skill in order to keep it "level relevant," it becomes obsolete and your investment is wasted. You only get so many chargen resources, so if you're going to keep investing, you might as well aim for being the best you can be at that.
On that note:
All of these, however, are phoney VAH solutions that depend on the GMing arbitrarily nerfing the Bard so you don't feel small in the pants, and so irrelevant for an actual discussion of a system.
What does any of that have to do with the GM nerfing the Bard?? Seriously, that's complete moon logic to me. Those are all just examples of situations where the specialist might not be willing or able to act on your behalf (or you might not be willing to include them in the loop) and you have to do the job yourself. They're all initiated by the players. You don't mean to tell me that characters in your games never learn anything that they don't immediately share with the rest of the group, pursue personal projects independently or disagree about what to do?
Yes. I don't disagree with that, I don't see why you think I would? That's precisely what I've been talking about. Flash is the Fastest Man Alive. Superman and Wonder Woman are also fast, sometimes even fast enough to make Flash work for his title belt, and they get a lot of mileage (hur hur) out of their speed, but they don't have his connection to the Speed Force so they shouldn't be as fast as him or able to pull the tricks he does. If their players build them so they can, or Superman suddenly starts vibrating through walls solely because his player had spare xp, the collaborative fiction is undermined and rules and story no longer support each other. Then everyone gets annoyed at Superman's player.I think what Souran is talking about is niches. Your Justice League can have two guys who run fast, but only one gets to be The Flash, and only one gets the bragging rights and title as "fastest man alive" that brings.
Well, this is really two separate discussions. Probably, in a supers game, background skills like that should come from their own earmarked pool -Flash's forensics skills certainly shouldn't come at the expense of running slower or being easier to hit, that's just poor game design. But whether they do or not, if his player wants to play a police scientist, Barry Allen should have those skills to support his concept. And I think if the player decided to make a police mechanic instead purely because that cost less skill points to put on his character sheet, that would be putting the cart before the horse. (As much as I like Wally...)Flash is a cop and can do some basic detective work (and decent forensics), but such little bit of trivia was only relevant in one out of 20 issues of the New 52 Justice League. If that was a game, I don't need my GMing skills or my HR skills to tell you Flash' player would feel cheated by now about having wasted resources in something that would turn out to be completely irrelevant. Most non-basket weaving players would in that situation.
I'm not against optimization, I encourage it and engage in it, but you fit the build to the concept, not the concept to the build.[/i]
