Quote from: Ratman_tf;1076559Now I'm starting to wonder what meaningful treasure a group of low level orcs are going to have anyway.

There was a 10% of any 2 magic items, a 40% chance of 2 to 8 potions and a pretty good chance of gems.  Plus as much money as you could get by dragging all the Orc equipment back to town to sell.

Ah, good times.

D&D makes great stories!

You and your friends play the game, eat the pizza, then sometime later, you all talk about the game. Viola! Story!

And sometimes, you write down what players did in your D&D campaign and it becomes an HBO series.

Quote from: Shasarak;1076540I just wanted to address this quickly.  You are assuming that having low level monsters always being a threat to PCs helps with game world verisimilitude. ...

I said no such thing.

Read my post!

I said: "...Some players feel that ..."

I'm not making a value judgement between players that may like more verisimilitude and those who like the more gonzo kitchen sink fantasy direction D&D has been edging towards.

Just highlighting that making "progress" with D&D as a system is a two-edged sword.

How do you gauge which way to jump without alienating half your player base when 6e comes out?

WOTC/D&D has to walk a fine line.

Quote from: Shasarak;1076555Sure Conan may be "worried" about 100 serfs with sticks and on the other hand he never ever is defeated by them.  

If Conan was actually invulnerable to the 100 serfs in-world/in-game, then he would behave differently. More like General Zod in Superman than the character we actually see. Same goes for Grendel, and dragons who ravage the land and extort maidens from the city, but don't land in the palace courtyard and eat everyone (so not Smaug, he did that, but a lot of other dragons).

When high level PCs are immune to armies, they act like Anime characters or Zod & his buddies in Superman. Not like Conan.

Quote from: S'mon;1076594If Conan was actually invulnerable to the 100 serfs in-world/in-game, then he would behave differently. More like General Zod in Superman than the character we actually see. Same goes for Grendel, and dragons who ravage the land and extort maidens from the city, but don't land in the palace courtyard and eat everyone (so not Smaug, he did that, but a lot of other dragons).

When high level PCs are immune to armies, they act like Anime characters or Zod & his buddies in Superman. Not like Conan.

Why would high level PCs even be fighting Armies when they have Zod to fight?  That is why we have Zods in the Monster Manual and not just Orcs all the way down.

Quote from: sureshot;1073900Not to mention they did absolutely  nothing.for the better part of ahead when it came to 4E edition  warring.  Gamers are hypocrites one minute they HATE 4E, the next the love the same thing in 5E. They bitched and complained about The linear Fighter Quadaratic Wizard issue. Then took a huge dump on the edition that actually tried to fix the flaws of 3,5. Why because they never wanted to actually see any of the issues fixed because then they would nothing to bitch and moan about.

Was it just me who thought that it was ironic to balance the so called "linear Fighter Quadaratic Wizard issue" by making a Fighter into a spell martial caster?

Quote from: Shasarak;1076601Why would high level PCs even be fighting Armies when they have Zod to fight?  That is why we have Zods in the Monster Manual and not just Orcs all the way down.

My reply is in picture form

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How could you not want that?

Quote from: Shasarak;1076601Why would high level PCs even be fighting Armies when they have Zod to fight?  That is why we have Zods in the Monster Manual and not just Orcs all the way down.

You really have a bee in your bonnet about this!

Fighting armies is fun - IME players love wading through hordes of mooks in a mass battle just as much as they love dungeon delving after the BBEG, or facing him on the battlefield atop a corpse pile after wading through the mooks.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1076528Wargames at that time didn't really have storytelling aspects. The majority of them were historical re-enactment. It wasn't until the rise of Chainmail that fantasy elements were introduced as an option.

So no. Wargames of that era largely didn't generate any kinds of stories of note.

And playing a historical wargame scenario doesn't create a story?  Have you never heard a wargamer talk about the time that he managed to come up with a masterful strategy and, against all odds, reverse the actual historical result?  Have you never seen a published After-Action Report on a wargame?

I'm a little young (only 48!) to have any pre-1974 wargaming experience, but I assume we can agree that there were no "storytelling aspects" in Risk or Axis & Allies, yet my friends and I would tell stories about our games for days or weeks afterwards.  I can still very clearly, decades later, recall stories about battles I fought 30 years ago in the original edition of Warhammer 40k, although I suppose you might consider that to have "storytelling aspects", depending on what exactly you mean by that.  (And, yes, I realize that none of those are "serious" wargames.  Unfortunately, in my youth, I was never able to find anyone else interested in Blitzkrieg, Panzer Leader, Squad Leader, or any of the other Avalon Hill titles in my collection.)

A game's rules may need "storytelling aspects" to support intentional story creation, but wargames have been producing emergent stories for as long as wargames have existed.

Quote from: nDervish;1076635A game's rules may need "storytelling aspects" to support intentional story creation, but wargames have been producing emergent stories for as long as wargames have existed.

Including modern computer based wargames. There are extensive AAR (After Action Reports) for Crusader Kings 2 and Hearts of Iron 4.

Quote from: Azraele;1076605My reply is in picture form

How could you not want that?

Eh. It can be fun once in a while, but like anything, too much of a fun thing gets boring. Fighting a battle with no real chance of failure isn't very interesting to me.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1076677Eh. It can be fun once in a while, but like anything, too much of a fun thing gets boring. Fighting a battle with no real chance of failure isn't very interesting to me.

The solution of course, is self-evident:
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Make the mooks capable of killing your living tank. Pretty no-brainer solution.

Quote from: S'mon;1076615You really have a bee in your bonnet about this!

Fighting armies is fun - IME players love wading through hordes of mooks in a mass battle just as much as they love dungeon delving after the BBEG, or facing him on the battlefield atop a corpse pile after wading through the mooks.

I am glad that I could convince you. Fighting hordes of mooks is supposed to be fun not instant death when they drag you down into the mud.  Achilles does not get punked by the Trojan army, Grendal does not get defeated by the Viking villagers all jumping on him at once, Conan does not get beaten by 100 serfs with sticks.

Quote from: Shasarak;1076699I am glad that I could convince you. Fighting hordes of mooks is supposed to be fun not instant death when they drag you down into the mud.  Achilles does not get punked by the Trojan army, Grendal does not get defeated by the Viking villagers all jumping on him at once, Conan does not get beaten by 100 serfs with sticks.

"Does not" and "Cannot" are worlds apart, mate.

Does Not refers to the outcome of the fiction: Conan didn't die that way (or at all, really)
Can Not refers to the mechanics of a game (a thing with a failure state) preventing an outcome from being possible ("You can't die to 100 serfs with sticks")

It's important to realize you're talking about something different here.

The answer is "at what cost?" The fact you can't die to a horde of mooks doesn't mean there isn't a cost in the form of time, damage, or lost opportunities.