Quote:
Originally Posted by S'mon  Always remember that the players have a great deal of choice how deep they wish to delve - they set their own risk/reward ratio. This means you need lots of stairs to lower levels; it is NOT sandbox design to have just 1 way down, only findable after defeating the Level Boss. Don't worry if after going up to say 4th level they still insist on seeking out all the easy 1st level encounters - don't convert these into level-appropriate challenges. Easy victories mean less XP and slow advancement. If the players don't like it, there are those stairs downward... |
I completely agree about the access to lower levels... stairs down need to be early and often (especially for deeper levels, so it's not painful for your high level guys to get to the fun area).
In 1E, a 3rd level fighter would need 8,000 XP to go from 3rd to 4th - double - and that's 4x what it took to get level 2. Beating up kobolds for coppers in AD&D really wasn't much fun.
It's a tougher argument in
4E, where it takes 1,000xp to get to level 2, and only 3750 to get to level 4, but the difference between a level 1 standard fight is 500xp and level 4 is only 875xp. Players *might* still be leveling at an acceptable (albeit unchallenging) pace if given access to enough encounters below their character level.
I see your point about parceling ahead of time - specifically if you're going to reward players for old school tactics like stealing, tricking monsters out of treasure, etc. Since the paradigm for rewarding XP has shifted from 1gp = 1xp to 'defeating encounters', you need to be willing to redefine what it means to defeat an encounter...
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