People talk a lot about how D&D characters have become 'more powerful' in more recent editions, but power in D&D is relative: if you have twice as many hit points, but all the monsters do twice as much damage, then nothing has really changed except the size of a number on your character sheet. (See also: the entire history of World of Warcraft.) So the real question is: 'more powerful when compared to what?'
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| 'When I was level 1, I could kill the orcs and wolves in the level 1 area in two or three hits. Now I'm level 100, I can kill the super-orcs and mega-wolves in the level 100 area in... two or three hits. So it was totally worth the wait!' |
If one compares the abilities of PCs with a range of monsters across the various D&D editions, it swiftly becomes apparent that, as usual, it's been the poor old humanoids who have been the biggest losers. In both Basic and 1st edition AD&D, a single lowly goblin was very nearly the equal of a 1st level fighter in combat; but more modern PCs are expected to be able to scatter goblins, kobolds, skeletons, and similar low-level foes like chaff, even at level 1. The mid-level monsters have remained roughly stable: some, like the various save-or-die monsters or the level-draining undead, have lost their scariest abilities, but the general assumption that a troll or an ogre should be a pretty tough fight for a low-level party has held pretty constant across editions. PCs have been big winners, going from fragile dungeon explorers to badass, tough-as-nails fantasy superheroes, but they haven't been the biggest winners. The biggest winners have been the high-level monsters.
Remember Lolth, spider-goddess of the drow? When Sutherland and Gygax wrote Queen of the Demonweb Pits in 1980, their assumption was that she would be a tough but not impossible boss-fight for a party of level 10-14 characters. How about Tiamat, mother-goddess of all evil dragons? According to the AD&D 1st edition monster manual, she has AC 0 and 128 HP, although 80 of those are 'in' her various heads: doing 48 damage directly to her body will kill her outright. (You don't even need magical weapons to hit her!) Orcus? 120 hit points. Asmodeus and Demogorgon? 199 and 200 HP respectively. Yes, they're crazily powerful, and, yes, they're quite capable of killing your PCs: but they still clearly exist on the same scale as trolls and giants and dinosaurs and high-level player characters. Tellingly, Asmodeus, the overlord of hell, capo di tutti capi of all the other arch-devils and all-around second-baddest dude in the multiverse, is described as being 'physically stronger than any other devil', but we're then immediately told what that actually means: he is 'as strong as a storm giant', i.e. Strength 25. The single strongest devil in existence is stronger than your fighter, but he's not that much stronger. If a party of, say, 18th level PCs really went gunning for Demogorgon, and managed to solve the obvious problems involved in getting to his hell-realm and breaking into his throne room and so on, then they'd probably have a pretty good chance of taking him down.
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| He's only got 120 HP! Just kill him and take his wand already! |
Now, as much as D&D PCs have been boosted over the years, their top-end foes - dragons, demons, demon lords - have been boosted even more. High age-category dragons, for example, have gone from 'a bit tougher than a giant' to gigantic mega-monsters with completely surreal numbers of hit points. In AD&D 1st edition, the maximum number of hit points for a regular goblin was 7, whereas in D&D 3.5 it had risen to 9: but over the same time, the maximum HP for a red dragon of the largest size had risen from 88 to 880, meaning that the toughness of the dragon had increased roughly eight times as fast as that of the goblin. (It's not a completely fair comparison, because the 1st edition rules for dragons meant that their maximum HP were also their average HP - but even an 'average' maximum-age red dragon has 660 HP in D&D3.5.) The demon lords are now meant to be capable of taking on whole parties of level 25+ PCs, even though those PCs are vastly more powerful than their same-level equivalents would have been 'back in the day'. I think Asmodeus and Demogorgon may have transcended stats entirely. Early D&D presents a universe with a relatively 'flat' power distribution, in which something like a night hag or a fire giant or a 9th level PC is already about halfway up the scale. Modern D&D puts them all way down in the foothills, staring wistfully up at the mountain above, while Orcus sips cold drinks with a great wyrm dragon somewhere near the summit.
The thing that got me thinking about all this was reading a list of Pathfinder's demon lords and thinking how much more useful they'd be if only they were a bit, well, smaller. A demonic sadist with the head of a dove, who eats the eyes of his victims, makes minions made from their flayed corpses, and lives in a house in which every room contains some new tableau of the macabre? That's great! Stick him and his horrible skinless minions and his horrible creepy house in a hex somewhere right away! But wait: he's 'challenge rating' 26, meaning that only a party of level 25+ characters would have a decent chance of beating him, and his 'house' is an entire dimension. Boring. How am I supposed to use that? (Yes, you could send the PCs in to rescue someone or something and then get out before he catches them, but once you've done one 'escape from hell' scenario you've done them all.) A demonic princess who looks like an angel who has been dismembered and then stitched back together with copper wire, her eyes and mouth sewn shut, presides over a ruinous city of profaned churches and drives its fallen priests to suicide: awesome. Except she's a god-level enemy and her 'city' is a layer of hell. Boring. A city you can save, or at least save parts of, haunted by a demon you can fight, or at least evade: that's something you can get a decent game out of. An urban hell-realm ruled by a demon goddess is just another abstract bit of spiritual real estate floating around in the Abyss somewhere. Why should your PCs care about something which is so manifestly beyond their power to meaningfully affect?
In the original Conan stories, the hero can't seem to manage a half-hour's walk without tripping over some benighted valley full of crazy demon-worshippers revering a monster-god from before time. These stories almost always end with Conan stabbing the beastie to death and wandering off. That's not because Conan is a super-duper-high-level-mega-ultra-badass fantasy superhero: it's because the demonic god-monsters in his world just aren't all that tough. Early D&D reflected that sensibility, and I think it was the stronger for it, because it makes the resulting monsters - dragons, demons, archdevils, and the rest - so much easier to use in actual play. There is a place in games for enormously, unbeatably powerful monsters, but it's quite a small place, and you're unlikely to need very many of them in any one campaign. The further removed they are from human-scale action, the less likely they are to be useful in stories which are, ultimately, always going to be about human beings. Or almost-human beings, at any rate.
So before you give the super-awesome demon you just came up with a thousand hit points and nine different kinds of get-out-of-death-free cards and seven layers of the abyss as his personal fiefdom, just pause for a moment to reflect whether he wouldn't actually be more useful to you as the seriously scary but far-from-invincible demonic patron of a single horrible city someplace, instead...
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| 'I increased my hit points by 900% by following this one weird tip...' |
The thing that got me thinking about all this was reading a list of Pathfinder's demon lords and thinking how much more useful they'd be if only they were a bit, well, smaller. A demonic sadist with the head of a dove, who eats the eyes of his victims, makes minions made from their flayed corpses, and lives in a house in which every room contains some new tableau of the macabre? That's great! Stick him and his horrible skinless minions and his horrible creepy house in a hex somewhere right away! But wait: he's 'challenge rating' 26, meaning that only a party of level 25+ characters would have a decent chance of beating him, and his 'house' is an entire dimension. Boring. How am I supposed to use that? (Yes, you could send the PCs in to rescue someone or something and then get out before he catches them, but once you've done one 'escape from hell' scenario you've done them all.) A demonic princess who looks like an angel who has been dismembered and then stitched back together with copper wire, her eyes and mouth sewn shut, presides over a ruinous city of profaned churches and drives its fallen priests to suicide: awesome. Except she's a god-level enemy and her 'city' is a layer of hell. Boring. A city you can save, or at least save parts of, haunted by a demon you can fight, or at least evade: that's something you can get a decent game out of. An urban hell-realm ruled by a demon goddess is just another abstract bit of spiritual real estate floating around in the Abyss somewhere. Why should your PCs care about something which is so manifestly beyond their power to meaningfully affect?
In the original Conan stories, the hero can't seem to manage a half-hour's walk without tripping over some benighted valley full of crazy demon-worshippers revering a monster-god from before time. These stories almost always end with Conan stabbing the beastie to death and wandering off. That's not because Conan is a super-duper-high-level-mega-ultra-badass fantasy superhero: it's because the demonic god-monsters in his world just aren't all that tough. Early D&D reflected that sensibility, and I think it was the stronger for it, because it makes the resulting monsters - dragons, demons, archdevils, and the rest - so much easier to use in actual play. There is a place in games for enormously, unbeatably powerful monsters, but it's quite a small place, and you're unlikely to need very many of them in any one campaign. The further removed they are from human-scale action, the less likely they are to be useful in stories which are, ultimately, always going to be about human beings. Or almost-human beings, at any rate.
So before you give the super-awesome demon you just came up with a thousand hit points and nine different kinds of get-out-of-death-free cards and seven layers of the abyss as his personal fiefdom, just pause for a moment to reflect whether he wouldn't actually be more useful to you as the seriously scary but far-from-invincible demonic patron of a single horrible city someplace, instead...
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