One lesson I probably should have learned by now after over 15 years of writing this blog is that, since I treat it as informal, casual brain-splurge, I don't always take the time to properly guide the reader through my thought processes, and this results in misunderstandings (that are sometimes - no pun intended -entirely understandable) .
An example of this is my recent post about imagining high-level combat, which some people took to be a declaration that I cannot visualise what it would look like if a person was fighting a giant or dragon. That isn't what I meant; we have all of us seen cartoons and read comics when we were children. What I meant was that I find it hard to realistically visualise what a D&D PC would look like fighting a giant or dragon, given that D&D PCs* are not supposed to be quasi-superheroic Peter Jackson-LOTR-style Legolas elves who can manipulate physics and are possessed of extraordinary strength and agility, but are basically supposed to be humans as we know and understand them today.
More simply put: D&D PCs are supposed to be able to do supernatural things, but only on the basis that they derive from magic - spells, magical items, or inherent magical abilities. They are not supposed to be able to do supernatural things merely by virtue of advancing in level or being more experienced. A 1st level PC with a STR of 12 is as strong as a 20th level PC with a STR of 12. And being 20th level shouldn't in itself therefore entitle you to be able to leap 12' in the air, swing about on your arms like a gibbon, penetrate inches of steel with the force of your blows, and so on and so forth.
The problem in other words is not, properly stated, one of visualisation, but coherence. D&D asks us to imagine a world in which PCs are ordinary humans (or dwarves, elves, whatever) and derive what special abilities they have chiefly from external magical sources. But in combat, at high level, it asks us to imagine they are capable of superhuman things - whether this means physically taking down a vastly bigger opponent or surviving attacks that can only be realistically imagined to cause at best grievous wounds (such as a dragon's breath attack, a boulder thrown by a cyclops, etc.).
No, this does not make the game unplayable and yes, abstract combat has many virtues. I simply mean to point out that this basic disconnection between what a D&D world is supposed to look like and what happens within the sphere of combat leads to a lack of immediacy or verisimilitude and that this tends to make higher-level gaming less satisfactory or 'vital' in tone and more cartoonish or video-gamey in feel. And that is all.
*Here I should clarify, on the off chance that a random bystander is reading this blog, that I mean D&D in the TSR-era, or OSR, sense.
I agree with your points about coherence, but I think D&D started from a place (Chainmail) in which heroes - and superheroes - were supposed to be extraordinarily powerful - in a way that's almost impossible to visualise in any 'realistic' way.
ReplyDeleteSo, in Chainmail, a hero fights as four figures. Not "men" but "figures" - and a figure represents 20 men in the game. That means that a Chainmail hero fights as well as 80 men and a superhero ("these fellows are one-man armies") fights as well as 160 men. It looks plausible enough on the tabletop - "this guy's a great fighter" - but it kind of falls apart when you start imagining what's going on within the game's assumptions. It's actually the same trick that Rick Priestley, in an interview, pointed out in Warhammer: the game has a tacit 1:20 figure scale (10 or 20 men wouldn't manoeuvre in blocks), but the heroes, standard-bearers and musicians all function as 1:1 individuals.
Old-school D&D began, at least in part, as a route to heroism and superheroism. But the journey is more interesting than the destination (as your post today and the one on high-level combat set out). And that's why low-level play is inherently more rewarding.
The dissonance between the low-level adventure simulator and the high-level tabletop wargame comes through in stat blocks for things like Keep on the Borderlands and many city adventures, where *anyone important* has mandatorily heroic stats. RuneQuest copes with that sort of thing a bit better, as most of its civic leaders, etc., are powerful by dint of divine favour (and the spells and spirits that that brings), and (super)heroism is a bit more baked in to the background. The solution for D&D, I think, would be to maintain that level advancement is only something for PCs and very occasional NPCs - with almost everyone else permanently at 0 or 1st level.
Good points - and, yes, I entirely agree about the journey being more interesting than the destination.
DeleteYou make a good point about the incoherence of D&D's power scaling. As I see it, the major discrepancy between the game's workings and the fantasy fiction it claims to emulate lies in hit points per level. In D&D, a tenth-level fighter with average strength and constitution can conceivably fall eighty feet onto hard stone and walk away without the slightest change in his immediate capabilities. He can be immersed completely in acid or dragonfire without evident ill effects except that he needs to rest. These are superheroic abilities. Yet the same fighter can never perform the superheroic feats you described. Hit points, the original luck points, represent unkillability due to accumulated story significance. This makes them surreptitiously the basis of super power in D&D (besides spells). The perennial argument over hit points (is it woefully unrealistic? or simply an adequate abstraction for luck, stamina, etc.?) overlooks what you are discussing. High hit points do not simulate our normal way of thinking about heroic deeds. A D&D hero can do a jig without wincing after being struck by five arrows, but he probably can't lift a particularly heavy rock. The early alternatives to D&D got rid of ballooning hit points but allowed core ability scores to improve. The designers of such games thought they were emulating heroic fiction better. Anyway, I think the issue you're addressing is related to this.
ReplyDeleteYes, you've put it well. Abstract combat makes sense - no pun intended - in the abstract, but D&D does not actually do abstract combat. It does an awkward melange of abstract and concrete, in which hit points sometimes mean 'luck/morale/stamina/sixth sense for danger', etc., and sometimes they actually mean physical damage (as in your falling example).
DeleteThis is not fatal to the enjoyment of the game, far from it, but sometimes people can lead themselves down blind alleys trying to pretend it makes sense.
You refer to ability scores for comparison but high level, with its attendant higher hit chance, hit points and saving throws DOES indicate that these characters are vastly more capable and potent then their low level counterparts. Call it skill, divine favor, the mandate of heaven, or some supernatural potency, but they can stand against the most lethal perils, even a dragon's breath, and emerge intact. I have little problem imagining such a thing.
ReplyDeleteThis focus on realism is...not exactly wrong but misguided and ill-informed. Damage does not translate directly to physical harm. In addition, high level characters will tend to have items or indeed ability scores, gained through play, that endow them with supernatural abilities to match their legendary status. We can imagine some sort of hypothetical level 15 fighter with 9 strength and no gauntlets of ogre power but this is not very likely.
The problem that is outlined would seem to be easily resolved by playing the game.
What STR do gauntlets of ogre power give a PC, oh mister 'I play the game a lot'? It's 18 - meaning the same STR as a very very strong ordinary man (i.e., not somebody who can pole vault into the air and do five somersaults before thrusting his sword through three-inch-thick giant armour and then land on his feet in a pirouette).
DeleteI tease a little bit, but the problem is not 'realism' (realism is a fool's errand) - the problem is, I repeat, coherence, and a feeling of cartoonishness at high levels that seems divorced from what low-level play is all about,
Ogre gauntlets give strength equal to an ogre. It's right there in the name. Play the game or quit the hobby.
DeleteGet a copy of the Rules Cyclopedia and have a good read. Then get back to me.
DeleteYou try to opine on an issue you are inexperienced with, because you have not played high level dnd often or at all and the result is embarassment, confusion, nonproblems to drive traffic. It is divorced from actually playing high level DnD, which you have not done, often or at all.
DeleteYour problem of 'coherence' is solved as easily as simply imagining a situation where a stronger fighting man is defeated by a more capable weaker one.
Your counter-argument is simply evasion. The point is, and you would know this if you had played it, that even if the problem you outlined exists (it does not), it would be extremely rare because high level characters also have with them an array of items that endow them with superhuman abilities. Kvetching that Ogre power is still technically human strength is very weak, as if being at the peak of physical ability somehow still rattles the suspension of disbelief.
I encourage you to fix the deficiency in your knowledge with experience.
" It's 18 - meaning the same STR as a very very strong ordinary man"
DeleteActually, it's not even that - Gygax somewhere defines 18 STR as the ability to do an 82.5kg military press. That's decent but by no means extraordinary - a strong ordinary man, perhaps.
I once pointed out to a gaming friend that *I* had 18 STR by the Gygaxian rule. "I was expecting someone more like Conan," he replied.
Prince: It's clear I've touched a nerve with the gauntlets of ogre power gaff. Calm down - nobody is going to die. All I am saying ultimately is that high-level D&D feels cartoonish and rather ephemeral as a result of how combat works. No need to take this as a personal insult.
DeleteJC: This raises the question of what an ogre's strength *should* be. Discuss.
Well ... a point perhaps overlooked is that gauntlets of ogre strength (per Rules Cyclopedia but also per MM and DMG) actually make you *stronger* than the average ogre.
DeleteIn both the MM and the RC, a typical ogre does weapon + 2 points of damage `(or d10 if unarmed in the MM). A human fighter with 18 strength (or a punier specimen with gauntlets of ogre strength) does weapon +3! That's in line with an ogre *leader* as set out in the MM.
So ogres just don't seem to be that strong: effectively STR 17. I'd slightly misremembered the Gygaxian overhead-press formula: it's 10bs. per STR point, so a mere 180lbs (81.6 kg) for regular 18 STR. We can assume that the average ogre has an 170lb military press - good for the average-sized man (bodyweight overhead is decent) but not great for a 9' hulk.
On the other hand, if we consider Grendel an ogre, old-school D&D does set up a nice opportunity for Beowulf (STR 18, surely!) to outwrestle him grievously.
Oddly, in Chainmail, ogres ("trolls" rather than the Poul Anderson -style "true trolls" that D&D would later immortalise) have much more offensive output, being the equivalent of six heavy infantrymen in melee (which would be something like 6d6 damage in D&D terms - or at least six d6 attacks).
Of course, D&D has downgraded ogres to get more of a level-matching continuum in its "giant-class" creatures. But in any case, being as strong as even an ogre leader makes you no more remarkable than the most remarkable raw PCs, strenghth-wise.
Remind me again, what's the title of a level 8 fighter? People go too hard on "heroic, not superheroic," power creeping monsters especially dragons out of control, trying to justify that fighters of any level are still just men (even in a system where they are well past being explicitly superheroes!), coping with HP as something abstract (thanks, Gary).
ReplyDeleteD&D has rotted into a dragonslaying game where dragonslayers aren't thematically up to slaying dragons, even in the rare cases where they are mechanically up to it. That's a huge problem, and the first thing you should change if you aren't going to be a hardcore purist. D&D is full of magic, and starting with 3e its full of superpowers, yet the most basic of heroic feats that Beowulf or an Arthurian knight a goddamn generic movie elf wouldn't think twice about have been written off for no real reason. It's not that any fantasy element justifies whatever I want, it's that SUPERHEROES are not SUPER HEROIC! Maybe to make high-level D&D work it's necessary to change some suppositions. Maybe a level 5 fighter can kick Legolas's ass, maybe strength scores are not the only factor to what a guy can or can't lift, and maybe a level 15 fighter can survive a dunk in lava. Even though that's scary. I don't care that it's scary.
I think another problem here may be that dragons and giants are too big and scary in modern imagination (influenced both by modern reality and by modern media) compared to medieval/pre-modern one.
ReplyDeleteWhile in medieval legends (and even in Tolkien's writings) dragons were quite big (maybe even bigger than a warhorse - the largest animal an average medieval person had seen), they were still killable by a single strike of sword or lance or a single arrow that penetrated their scales. And while in medieval legends giants were stronger and bigger than humans, humans were able to wrestle with them or cut their arms off with a sword.
So while strong and dangerous, they weren't invincible (as a tank or a fighter-plane is invincible to a human with medieval weaponry). They had a power-level more or less equal to elephants and lions - and humans were able to kill elephants and lions since prehistoric times.
This is an interesting observation - there is a great picture by John Howe of Lancelot along these lines: https://www.john-howe.com/portfolio/gallery/details.php?image_id=166
DeleteHere is the description of a knight killing a dragon from "The Romance of Tristan & Iseult" (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14244/14244-h/14244-h.htm), for example:
Delete"Tristan charged his horse at him so strongly that, though the beast’s mane stood with fright yet he drove at the dragon: his lance struck its scales and shivered. Then Tristan drew his sword and struck at the dragon’s head, but he did not so much as cut the hide. The beast felt the blow: with its claws he dragged at the shield and broke it from the arm; then, his breast unshielded, Tristan used the sword again and struck so strongly that the air rang all round about: but in vain, for he could not wound and meanwhile the dragon vomited from his nostrils two streams of loath-some flames, and Tristan’s helm blackened like a cinder and his horse stumbled and fell down and died; but Tristan standing on his feet thrust his sword right into the beast’s jaws, and split its heart in two."
Surely medieval dragon, while a dangerous opponent to a fully-armed knight on horseback (the most powerful warrior on a medieval battlefield) is killable by lance and sword, guided by true hand and brave heart.
Now Sigurd and Regin ride up the heath along that same way wherein Fafnir was wont to creep when he fared to the water; and folk say that thirty fathoms was the height of that cliff along which he lay when he drank of the water below.
DeleteThe cliff may be was 30 Icelandic ells (so about 15 yards, not 60) in the original, and Fafnir was exceptionally big even compared to "other lingworms". And anyways Fafnir was killed by a sword-strike, so that's kind of proves my point that dragons weren't imagined invincible to human weapons.
DeleteCompare Dragon statblocks from the monster manual 1e and 2e. And 3e and then look up how Eberron dragons work. I think dragons should be above the level of flying lions but not so much that you cant even use them in a campaign!
DeleteI love the commenters on this blog. Debating how big Fafnir was. This is what you call specialist knowledge!
DeleteAngon makes a strong point: people seem to have a mind's eye image of dragons/giants of "Godzilla size", rather than the dimensions listed in (for example) the 1st edition AD+D Monster Manual (where frost giants are 15 feet tall, red dragons 48 feet long). Adventurers are not necessarily hacking away at their toes.
Delete> They are not supposed to be able to do supernatural things merely by virtue of advancing in level or being more experienced.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid 5th Edition has significantly deviated from that rule.
Well yes, but let's not speak of that.
DeleteI dispute that. Funnily 5e has issues where "fighters" as a class seem ineffective compared to all the other guys, Monks and Paladins and Barbarians are thematically fighter+ but the game still tries to balance them. And the guys struggle to accomlish feats of strength and mobility that Ive seen regional level athletes accomplish even though spellcasters are about as strong as ever. Aside from stuff like tripping people or hitting them with the shaft of a polearm, the modern class feqtures of a fighter are all abstracted mechanics that cant be visualized, sitting in the same space as HP. That doesnt apply to the other "martial" types of course.
DeleteInteresting - I don't deny that I don't have a great deal of knowledge about how 5th edition works.
DeleteCharacters exist within an imagined world of certain genre conventions. In Game of Thrones even the most seasoned veteran still moves and fights in a recognisably realistic way, whereas through Lord of the Rings up to Wuxia and Marvel superhero films, we see escalating physics-defiance paired with greater 'narrative protection' or 'plot armour.' Each genre can be emulated by the concept of protagonists levelling up, but what that looks like 'in the fiction' is completely different.
ReplyDeleteLow-level D&D characters fighting rats in a basement sets a grounded expectation, but then by the time characters are high-level fighting dragons and giants the emulated genre has firmly moved towards super-heroic, both in what they must physically achieve to move about or inflict harm at that scale, but also their resilience and ability to be beaten up but keep fighting.
I think most of the issue stems from these superimposed, yet discordant, expectations that the mechanisms of levelling up in D&D provides. I can only really think of the 'origin stories' from superhero fiction in popular culture as representing the sort of 'zero to Hero' transitions we experience in D&D, yet those occur overnight as a step-transition and arguably move the world-as-experienced by the protagonist from the grounded to the super heroic.
Yet as Tom highlights, the two elements of 'Heroic Action' and 'Heroic Resilience' always go hand-in-hand in these stories. It puts D&D in a fairly unique place if we interpret the mechanics as affording ONLY the 'Heroic Resilience' portion. I'm reminded of The Boys' Translucent, who has skin impervious to blades and bullets, but otherwise has normal human strength and dexterity, and when attacked from inside explodes into viscera. It's a deliberately comical subversion of expectation, based on that same discordance of being 'super-heroic' in only some dimensions of existence.
For those happy to interpret the fiction as implied by the mechanics, it is generally less discordant to interpret higher level characters as moving to Action Movie Hero (level ~4) then Superhero (level ~8) in both their ability to Act and Resist. You need to then interpret ability scores in light of character level, as showing relative potency in that domain compared to an 'average' character of your current level, but that's fairly easy to do and requires no 'hard rules changes.'
For those otherwise wanting to keep play grounded throughout a campaign, there are fortunately several solutions including: just ignore the discordance (people have done so successfully for 50 years now!); lower the level cap of play to whatever feels right (popular options include Basic's 1-3, or D&D 3.5's E6 1-6, or GLOG's 1-4); or switch to any number of other systems designed for a much flatter progression, from Into the Odd-likes back to Traveller (or its fantasy versions).
The most important thing, as always, is that all participants at the table have agreed to a shared genre of play. Unless you really WANT to explore a deconstruction like The Boys, you don't want some players being level 8 Superheroes while others are level 8 'skilled but realistic swordsman.'
Hmm. I don't find anything wrong with the coherence of D&D combat.
ReplyDeleteYou write: "D&D PCs are supposed to be able to do supernatural things, but only on the basis that they derive from magic - spells, magical items, or inherent magical abilities. They are not supposed to be able to do supernatural things merely by virtue of advancing in level or being more experienced."
And so they don't...if you take away the spells and magical items of an AD&D fighter, their chances of surviving combat with powerful monsters drop substantially.
Let's say you have a 20th level fighter of "average" ability...keeping in mind that such a character is one of the most experienced combatants on the planet. On average she'll have 83 hit points. Let's say she's fighting an "old" red dragon (6 hps/die)...one that's been around the block a bit and is no dummy...a measly 60 hit points, right? We'll give the fighter nomal plate and shield and a long sword, and put them in open terrain, so that the fight is on an even footing (i.e. where the fighter can gain no tactical advantages)...just two "super powered" individuals fighting each other. The fighter is dead meat...because the dragon can fly and breathe on the fighter three times and kill her.
But let's say the dragon decides to melee with the fighter for some reason. The fighter has an average damage output of 10.4 damage per round (2x attacks, 1d12 vs size large, 80% chance to hit). It'll take 5.7 rounds to finish the dragon. The dragon has a damage output of 16.575 versus the AC 2 fighter...it'll finish her in 5 rounds flat. "Softening her up" with a single breath (saved or not) to start the combat will only speed her demise.
Giants don't (of course) have breath weapons, but they still have plenty of beef. An average fire giant would take 6.8 rounds to take down the same 20th level fighter, while the fighter would finish the giant in 4.3. However, we ARE talking one of the greatest warriors of all time...a character whose reputation would probably send a lone giant running for the hills. Against TWO fire giants, the fighter would be dead in 3.4 rounds.
It probably need not be said, but lesser fighters bereft of their magical items fall fairly easily to large monsters, especially those below 13th level (who don't receive two attacks per round). An 8th level "superhero" should be able to handle a single hill giant (definitely not two!), but anything stone giant size or larger will DESTROY her...quickly. And that's even without forcing saving throws for 'crushing blows' or worrying about the ease with which such a creature can grapple the pipsqueak adventurer.
The magical gear accessible by high level PCs in a normal campaign is what allows the tackling of these superhuman threats. The scaling seems fine and (for me) the visualizing of these combats seems fairly obvious...though, as I commented in your prior post, I feel "visualizing" is a non-issue.
I'm late to the conversation as usual – that's what I get for not living on the internet – but at a quick Cmd-F it looks like nobody pointed this out already: it seems to me that it's your basic assumptions that are wrong. Others have pointed out that Chainmail's superhero certainly is actually super-heroic; at 1:20 scale, a positive threshing machine, almost Vedic in scope. And if we look at what D&D proper actually asks us to envision for high levels, I think it's clear that what is really the closest analogy is wuxia: you are correct, for example, that a 10th level Lord with STR 12 is clearly not capable of superhuman *feats of strength*, but then, lightfoot kung fu isn't exactly a feat of superhuman strength of dexterity. No, it's the directed application of qi, which is not really magic but vital energy, and actually a strong analogue of XP. Much wuxia (and naturally all xianxia) is preoccupied with the accumulation of qi; obviously, the manner of gaining it is different than D&D's focus on loot, but then that's already an acknowledged gamism on the part of D&D so overlooking it shouldn't cause any fresh problems. The amount of vital energy thus accumulated is directly proportional to the individual's abilities; so when a high-level Fighter uses his +10 to-hit bonus, gained from raising his XP reserves, to hit the dragon, his projection of qi force reinforces his blade and breaks through the dragon's ordinarily impervious scales, wounding it – a feat impossible to a person with weak internal energy. This is not a feat of strength; it is a manifestation of an orthogonal personal power. In fact, a common feature of wuxia novels is that the lower-tier practitioners will have a "brute style", "speed style", &c. which is predicated on personal physical properties, but that these distinctions gradually fall away in favor of cultivation level, with contests essentially being of raw qi among the higher echelons.
ReplyDeleteEven level drain supports this interpretation: the creature canonically sucks out part of your vital energy; the consequence is that your XP/qi reserve is numerically reduced, depleting your abilities proportionally. Likewise, ancient manuals and potent decoctions may allow the person who obtains them to raise his XP/qi/level without corresponding effort or experience. This shows that the XP is not merely a record of past experiences but a living reserve contained within the body (or potentially soul, considering ethereal/astral travel and the like) of the character. I could go on like this, but I think I've sufficiently conveyed my point already.
My belief is, if I'm honest, that you just *don't like* this æsthetic; you push it away, creating a gap in the visualization of events, and this is what gives you the impression of a disjunction or incoherence. But in reality, all the tools are there.
You may be right in the final pararaph but I have a quibble: bringing in Chainmail is a bit of a cheat because the game that we are discussing is not Chainmail, but D&D.
DeleteMy apologies; I evidently phrased myself badly. I intended to contrast Chainmail with D&D, not apply it directly; all the specific arguments I made are drawn from D&D proper as I hope is clear. (That said, I do think the logic of Chainmail applies to OD&D; but I agree that that's a narrow and niche case which doesn't reflect on D&D as a whole.)
DeleteAlso, it occurred to me as I thought about it that the "classical" Arthurian knights manifest these same characteristics, which is probably a much closer reference point for Gygax (as for Arneson, his fondness for the chop-socky film of the Shawscope era is evident in the Monk inter alia, so who knows). That is, the knights of Malory are always cleaving through plate with their swords, which Malory himself must have known was impossible, and one or two giants get slain into the bargain; but they don't seem to do this by main strength. Off the top of my head, the only knight ascribed unusual physical strength by Malory is Gawain, whose strength is evidently supernatural in origin inasmuch as it waxes and wanes with the sun (and in spite of it, he fights Morholt to a standstill, so that evidently the latter has some other and at least equally important resource to set against him). The amusing episode in Trystram of Lyonesse featuring the quite normal Sir Dynadan also displays clear evidence of some sort of "level" disparity, when the two of them encounter a score or two of enemies; Trystram tells Dynadan to deal with two of them, and he'll handle the rest. Dynadan thinks this is plain madness but is able to manage his two, and Trystram indeed kills all the rest, whereupon Dynadan expresses a desire to no longer share a party with a high-level Fighter. But again, this deed of arms is not accomplished by overwhelming brute force, nor by miraculous or supernatural aid. Evidently, Trystram has *some* internal source of power which is not strength but which allows his blows to tell where his enemies' do not; I daresay it's natural to prefer to call this e.g. skill rather than qi in an Arthurian context, but it works out to the same thing, which is that he can kill monsters and surmount obstacles apparently with pure vital force.
DeleteOf course, D&D's profusion of magic items isn't very Maloryesque; you'd have to go to the Welsh tales for an analogue to that sort of thing. Malory's magic items are rare but powerful.
For myself, misunderstanding seems to persist, because to extract from this post what seems to me a one-line summary: "what a D&D PC would look like fighting a giant or dragon, given that D&D PCs* are not supposed to be quasi-superheroic Peter Jackson-LOTR-style Legolas elves who can manipulate physics and are possessed of extraordinary strength and agility, but are basically supposed to be humans as we know and understand them today".
ReplyDeleteThis seems to me the exact same conceit as what I was talking about when I said "I thought you meant things like a guy, made of meat instead of something like liquid metal, holding a sword instead of something like a raw thunderbolt, moving about as a person might (albeit a powerfully athletic one) instead of jumping from treetop to treetop wuxia-style."
The are visual examples from current pop culture, available on YouTube, of characters that fit those two descriptions, fighting and killing building sized giants and dragons and such.
Those visuals are far from guaranteed to work aesthetically for everyone either. But it is a bit strange to bring up the difficulty of visualising a normal-ish man fighting a giant, and then dismiss a visual example of a normal-ish man fighting a giant saying "they should be normal-ish".
I don't understand what's strange about saying that since we know what ordinary human beings are capable of, it's hard to imagine a normal human being doing things that human beings might be portrayed as doing in video games or wuxia films. You seem to be getting caught up in the first half of a sentence ('what a D&D PC would look like fighting a giant or dragon') and ignoring the second half ('given that D&D PCs* are not supposed to be quasi-superheroic Peter Jackson-LOTR-style Legolas elves who can manipulate physics and are possessed of extraordinary strength and agility, but are basically supposed to be humans as we know and understand them today'). I'm sorry, but the example of Dark Souls (or any other video game, cartoon or film) is not a good one because that doesn't portray 'humans as we know and understand them today'.
DeleteThis sounds like you have never seen Dark Souls. Is that a mistaken assumption?
DeleteTo my eyes, visually, the protagonist of Dark Souls looks like and moves like humans as we know and understand them today. They absolutely do not look like Peter Jackson Legolas who can manipulate physics.
They are obviously absolutely not actually a normal human. High level D&D PCs are not actually normal human. And the portrayal might not necessarily work for you.
But to dismiss it out of hand, along with any other video game, cartoon, or film (seen or unseen?) reads like you don't actually have a difficulty with visualisation that might be looking to resolve, more like you have an aesthetic preference against the subject matter of high level D&D, or of Dark Souls.
We seem to be speaking in different languages here!
DeleteWhether or not I have played Dark Souls doesn't matter because I am familiar with what human beings are actually capable of. It doesn't matter that there might be some convincing representation of human beings leaping 30' into the air in a video game - I'm happy to take your word for that. The point is that I know human beings can't do that. The problem, to repeat, is not that I can't visualise a certain thing happening. It is that I can't visualise it on the basis that it is being done by an actual normal human person as opposed to somebody superheroic.
I'd forget about "Battle of the Five Armies" Legolas manoeuvres (which get a deserved raspberry). If we are going to consider films which might depict high level fighting, how about Troy (2004)? Achilles (Brad Pitt) isn't ten times mightier, but has superb timing and placement of blows. And when he finally meets a warrior of similar quality in Hector (Eric Bana), you could imagine this as a
Deletecombat lasting a few rounds where hit points are whittled down. And the Achilles leap and strike at a vulnerable point against Boagrius might be starting point for visualising combat against giants.
We do seem to be speaking in different languages.
DeleteI have written, verbatim, that Dark Souls has "the protagonist [who] moves like humans as we know and understand them today", "a guy, made of meat instead of something like liquid metal, holding a sword instead of something like a raw thunderbolt, moving about as a person might (albeit a powerfully athletic one) instead of jumping from treetop to treetop wuxia-style".
I can't really see how that can be read, in good faith, as human being leaping 30' into the air.
If you think I did mean that, and if you that's what Dark Souls show, then it very much does matter if you have actually seen it or not, because seeing would resolve those misconceptions instantly.
If you have a difficulty you might like to resolve, seeing a clip might help. If you have a conviction you want to maintain, fair enough.
Hello! Love the blog and this discussion. Wanted to add my voice to those recommending checking out Dark Souls PCs. Dark Souls PCs pointedly do not jump 30 feet in the air or have physical abilities ala anime or wuxia films or the like. They may have access to magic spells of a fireball or magic missile nature or sometimes wield swords of a size and weight that seem outside of human ability. But generally they are if a fairly convincing human speed and agility. I guess in hand with the giant swords some of the rolling in heavy armor is also a bit superhuman (though I’d say similar to what I imagine magic items and high stats might provide). I think a lot of people are pointing you towards these games in particular because they portray something like what you are talking about with high level D&D combat. Worth a look is my point, take a few minutes to check out a gameplay video or two of a boss fight against a dragon or giant.
ReplyDelete