High Level PCs Are an Affront to God

Why are there angels in the D&D monster manual? 

In modern D&D – 5E and its third-party cousins – Great Wheel Cosmology necessitates a mirror to fiends, so angels appear for taxonomic thoroughness. Mechanically, I presume the game's designers view the angels in the 5E.14 Monster Manual as summoning spell targets and NPC allies for the (presumably good) PCs.

Fashioning a combat encounter between these holy dudes and those putatively good PCs requires some contortions. D&D 5E makes its angels fluent in all languages, and telepathic as well, edging out the possibility of even a misunderstanding when these creatures descend from the heavens. A footnote in the manual indicates that fallen angels exist, but they don’t get any interesting mechanical implementation (for that, try the Chained Angel from Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts).

D&D in its earliest forms didn’t have them, and many throwback systems still eschew them. The Old School Essentials bestiary, for example, lacks an entry for angels. 

When angels do appear in like-minded products, like Skerples’ beautiful new book The Monster Overhaul, they are decidedly old testament, plausibly dangerous, or decidedly unknowable. In keeping with the book’s focus on table-readiness and applicability to adventures, Skerples’ angels are loaded with danger, friction, and implicit conflict.

This Far You May Come and No Farther 

So imagine an angel confronting the PCs. Clearly it can happen because of something they have done in the game. Some action that made sense to them or solved a material plane-concern, but angered those on high. I’ve done that one myself.

But what else? What if the angels confront high-level PCs because they are high level?

It may not feel like an obvious conflict, but it’s firmly rooted in myth. From Prometheus to Babel, gods have punished mortals for attempting to rival them in power and glory. And PCs get harder and harder to distinguish from gods as they reach high levels.

Applying this mechanically can be quite simple. In a leveling system that goes from level 1 to 20, adventurers might begin to attract the attention of gods around 10th level (5E clerics gain the divine intervention ability around this time; a convenient demarcation point).

The gods might be merely watchful when PCs hit 10th level. I assume tier 3 adventurers are quite rare, unless a setting specifically says otherwise; and many adventurers who do reach that level retire or die before getting much further. But for every additional level the PCs attain, the gods become more wary, suspicious, jealous, and eventually angry.

By the time characters reach level 20, some sort of confrontation – violent or otherwise – is inevitable.

O Come At Me Bro, All Ye Faithful

All well and good for the wizards, thieves, and fighters out there. But what about clerics, paladins, and warlocks? Their adventuring life has been defined by the divine.

Warlock is easiest. Unlike most of 5E’s classes, Warlock has tension built in it at the ground level. A 20th level warlock is strong enough to directly confront the compromising nature of the pact with their patron. Even if they simply want their freedom, the patron may see them as too powerful and dangerous to just let loose. And the PC may even decide to take the patron’s place and begin issuing their own pacts.

For paladins and clerics, there’s always the option to say that at the end of the day, their arrangements with their gods were just warlock pacts with better optics. Maybe the conflict plays out in a similar fashion to warlocks. But it can go other ways.

A good-aligned god might stand aside for a worthy paladin or cleric to replace them – that actually happened in the 5E game I ran past level 20. But even if the god in question is fine with ceding the stage to their protégé, there’s no guarantee other gods will be OK with it. Most mythological gods in the real world do not tend to their portfolios in cool isolation, but instead are highly social creatures, fostering alliance and rivalries within a contentious pantheon. And there could be many reasons for those rivals to see the PC’s ascension as an affront to the gods.

Loose Canons

Canon. What was and was not canon in fiction was once the domain of a humble few, limited to the letters sections of comic books, the back pages of fanzines, and late-night arguments in the earliest fan conventions. The internet changed that, turning ordinary fans of movies, comics, television, and games into lore experts willing to argue as passionately (or vehemently) as the most hard-nosed academic. Nerd culture then fused with pop culture, and a thousand fandom wikis later, we live in a world obsessed with canon.

But before canon, there was... loose canon? Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft created stories in which shared gods lurked in the background, manifesting in different ways. An unfulfilled backdoor pilot in the original Star Trek show became a weird element of lore 60 years later. Elminster visited modern day earth! The loose mythologies of the worlds of Stephen King and Michael Moorcock are also fine examples.

A player in one game I ran created a character that was, in part, a callback to the nickname of an adventuring party from a previous game. The two games were completely unrelated; they were run in different systems. It would not be possible to “travel” from one world to the other. They are certainly not part of some kind of “multiverse” (a term I find progressively less and less interesting as more and more intellectual properties adopt it).

But I liked this idea that there was some tenuous, unspecified, non-actionable connection between these different fictional realities. Those characters will never see each other’s worlds or interact directly. But there are common themes, ideas, and aesthetics that the PCs (in their capacity as both participants and audience) can enjoy, and that’s what loose canon is all about.

Snagging Adventurers With Better Hooks

Bad hooks are a common complaint in Ten Foot Pole's reviews of published adventures. Adventure writers obviously struggle with transitioning users into the adventure, with efforts ranging from the flimsy (“um, the mayor will pay 50 gold for you to, uh, look into his orc problem?”) to the nakedly non-diegetic (“get in loser, we’re going adventuring”).

But I get it. Hooks are hard to write well in a published product, because PCs might enter a given scenario from any number of directions; and unless the product is written for a very specific setting, the writer may not even know the fundamental, baseline assumptions of the game world. 

But even when they are hard, hooks are still important, because the transition into a new scenario or location is an area where the DM could most use help from the writer. By comparison, it’s much easier for the DM to adjudicate uncertainty when the PCs are in the middle of a scenario already in motion. Getting started is the hardest part.

Hooks are usually presented as a best-guess at what the party is doing and what the PCs want, with the assumption that the DM will choose the closest one and tailor as needed. Can we make them any better? Get them any closer to what the DM needs? Perhaps by categorizing common ways adventuring PCs might enter an adventure scenario? 

What would these categories look like? 

• If the PCs are returning to civilization after visiting the dungeon…
• If the PCs are in transit as part of a longer journey…
• If the PCs are lost in the wilderness…
• If the PCs are looking for something that might be found in a town or city…
• If the PCs are searching for something that might be found in a dungeon…
• If the PCs are in search of a particular person or a type of NPC… 
• If the PCs are fleeing or retreating from someone or something…
• If the PCs are recruiting henchmen, hirelings, or replacement adventurers…

Some of these could be combined or better defined… but it might be worth a try to think of the hooks in terms of where the PCs are coming from, rather than where we hope those hooks will take them in the ensuing scenario. 

Adverb-Forward Skill Resolution in RPGs

Ability plus skill (henceforth, “A+S”) has been one of the most common TTRPG resolution methods for over 20 years. Roll the dice, add the ability modifier, add the skill modifier (if any). It allows some complexity and interplay between natural aptitude and trained proficiency, without ever getting too complicated. Nice little system.

But in some RPG systems, A+S gets a little too predictable. In my experience, in D&D 5E, most A+S pairing are almost hard-paired with each other. The Athletics skill is coupled with the Strength ability 99% of the time. Perhaps the DM occasionally calls for an unusual roll that breaks up the pairing, like Wisdom (Athletics), but in practice, the system has a lot less flexibility and depth than its structure implies. Digital tools and platforms for online play exacerbate this problem – the standard A+S rolls are usually tied to convenient buttons on character sheets, while non-standard rolls must be executed manually. 

Someone on the Alexandrian Discord recently pointed out a different X+Y system that caught my attention. Modiphius Entertainment’s Dishonored RPG combines six skills with six "styles." The skills are character actions you might see in a lot of RPGs: Fight, Move, Study, Survive, Talk, and Tinker. But the styles are something different, and what really caught my eye: Boldly, Carefully, Cleverly, Forcefully, Quietly, Swiftly.

I haven’t played the Dishonored video games, and prior to reading this, had no particular interest in the RPG either. But this skills and styles approach caught my interest, because those styles are, of course, adverbs.

Evaluating the A+S problem from a grammatical light provides an interesting perspective. If someone is described as a “strong, athletic fighter,” those two adjectives are perhaps reinforcing each other, but also in danger of blurring together. A parsimonious editor might say, “can’t we just write ‘athletic fighter’ and convey basically the same idea?” That helps explain why A+S sometimes feels one-dimensional instead of two-dimensional.

By contrast, an adverb can stake a stronger claim to its role in the sentence than an additional adjective can. Forcefully tinkering is quite different from quietly tinkering. Swiftly moving says something different than boldly moving. And so on. As I said, I haven’t tried this system; I would love to hear from those who have). I suspect it would feel more dynamic than some of the A+S systems I'm more familiar with.

Who knows, maybe I’ll get a chance to check out the Dishonored system. Or try hacking that resolution mechanic into a one-shot in another game. Frankly, you could say I am extremely interested, and that I eagerly look forward to a very exciting gaming experience.