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OK, we've all seen many a discussion about the rate of level advancement in 3rd edition. Many feel it is too fast to be realistic. I would like to provide a counter example (one in particular, though it opens a wealth of sources).
Audie Murphy. In case you haven't heard of him, he was the most decorated soldier in the history of the U.S. Army. He received EVERY decoration for valor given out by the U.S. and 5 more from France and Belgium. He fought in the European theatre of W.W. II.
He started as a buck private, and advanced to staff seargent. He then received a battlefield commision, and was promoted to 2nd lieutenant.
He is credited with 240 kills of enemy soldiers, and with wounding and capturing a large number in addition to this.
OK, this is pretty damned impressive isn't it? Sounds almost like an epic sort of fellow (well not quite, but certainly high level). Well Audie Murphy was in the war for only three years.
I wish I could remember who it was, but I read once that (whoever) had a litmus test for any modern-day RPG: could you build Arnold Schwarzenegger in it? Physically impressive and rich and married into one of the richest and politically connected families in America and famous and has extensive business contacts and etc etc.
The problem is mostly with the fact that audie never was helpless. He basically was kick ass from the beginning. This is certainly not true for 1st level characters.
Also, we have a certain expectation from fiction that magical powers amass slowly. Salvatore had to work around the normal levelling advancement in The Cleric Quintet for instance, because it wouldn't have worked if every four weeks Cadderly would have said: "Hey, I know even more powerful spells than I did four weeks ago. Soon, I will be a very powerful cleric. In two years, I'll be the most powerful cleric of my order! Strange, I am not doing anything all the other clerics in my order aren't doing..."
Funny the way he handled it though - he sped it up even more, so he basically wouldn't have to handle it, and simply gave it a miraculous explanation.
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Originally posted by Ravellion The problem is mostly with the fact that audie never was helpless. He basically was kick ass from the beginning. This is certainly not true for 1st level characters.
Where did you get the idea that Audie kicked ass from the beginning? He was brought up dirt poor. He might have had some hunting experience (which probably served him well), but her certainly didn't have combat experience. I certainly doubt Audie was slaughtering Germans from day one. He had to learn. He may have learned more quickly, but he did have to learn.
Also don't assume his background was all that different from many others in the Army at the time. A lot of the population was rural, and a huge portion of Americans hunted.
Truth be told, there is always a large difference between veterans of a few battles and those who are green.
PCs only level fast because, in general, the world is catering to them.
Think about it.
You are a 1st level party of four, traveling through a swamp. The DM sees that you are 1st level, and pits you against a handful of giant leeches or something.
If a D&D world was "realistic" (beat on that term all you want, but you'll see what I mean) that same first level party could have stumbled into a troll encampment - and their leader is a 10th level barbarian. BOOM! no more 1st level party.
Do you realize how INCREDIBLY LUCKY a party of adventurers would have to be to ONLY run into threats that they HAPPEN to be able to overcome? Even as they increase in power? It's the old, "Where were the wandering dragons back when we were first level" question.
(By the same token, 15th level parties never seem to run into those small bands of kobolds that plague 1st level characters.)
Most low-level NPCs in a D&D world will be scared shootless at the prospect of actually going Adventuring. Why, they could get killed the very first day by a Gray Render or something. Consequentally, level advancement would be VERY SLOW for them since they don't want to risk getting xp.
So WHY don't PC parties get wiped out before they become 2nd level? Because it's NO FUN that's why. They are controlled by humans, in this world, playing a GAME. They want to be able to know that whatever their characters face, they will be able to overcome (even if it's difficult) and gain experience and power. NPCs have no such assurances. PCs, therefore, do not model behavior that is common in a D&D world. They are the one-in-a-million, just because they happen to run into a neat series of adventures especially sculpted to their level, allowing them to get incredibly powerful in a short amount of time.
Example: take a handful of D&D modules, designed for very-low-level, low-level, mid-level, high-level, and very-high-level parties. As a DM, you would throw these at your players and their PCs in order, because that's the way to have fun. For anybody else in our "real" D&D world, the stack would be shuffled. They would have no idea of the difficulty of an adventure until they got themselves (most likely) roasted alive - because "real life" is generally no fun at all, with dragons and necromancers afoot.
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Low level adventures usually take place in or very near civilized areas. If you can remember back to 1ed, they had random monster tables for civilized areas, and uncivilized areas. Guess which had the power creatures?
So, no running into grey renders or anything because they all got wiped out. Gotta go travelling to far-off, mysterious places to encounter the hard-hitting stuff.
Unless you're in FR, in which case you can find a beholder in every city's mafia
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I seem to remember the 1st edition random encounter charts listing "Night Hag" under city encounters.
But say you have a standard opener for a 1st level quest: "The local mines have been mysteriously abandoned. The mayor is looking for somebody to investigate."
I can think of all kinds of ways the mine could be abandoned in the middle of a civilized region that would be certain death for a first level party... Or even a 5th level party. Or higher.
"For millenia, the crypt of the Lich King lay undisturbed, when suddenly, local miners broke through the undergroud wall..."
etc...
I will not be convinced!
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Remember the line, "...and none who have attempted this have lived to tell the tale."
That's the kind of stuff your PC adventurers would go for, right?
What makes them think they are so special and different, that THEY can succeed where all others have failed? Yet time and time again, they do...
(disclaimer: arguing for the fun of it. Don't think I WANT my campaign worlds like this)(though my most recent one is kinda deadly if you're not careful)
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Last edited by MerakSpielman; 3rd March 2003 at 06:29 PM..
I dunno... just started in a level 1 TT game, and our first encounter of 5 kobolds was almost a TPK (3 our of 5 and negatives, and 1 person at 3hp with 2 subdual)... being just 5 kobolds, we attacked. Had it been an ogre or something, I'm not dumb enough to stick around.
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I don't think I am any Audie Murphy but at 26 I consider myself a 6th Expert/1st Bard. That's 7th level. As a human I would get three feats. I figure mine are SKill Focus (Profession: waiter) Skill FOcus (Profession: teacher) and Skill Focus (Perform: Karaoke).
Seeing that I started working in restaraunts at 14, I think 7 levels in 12 years is about right. I imagine my xp will slow down now that I am less adventurous.
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Originally posted by buzzard He is credited with 240 kills of enemy soldiers, and with wounding and capturing a large number in addition to this.
OK, this is pretty damned impressive isn't it? Sounds almost like an epic sort of fellow (well not quite, but certainly high level). Well Audie Murphy was in the war for only three years.
And at the end of these three years, could he take on, say, 512 enemy soldiers in a fairly even fight? Or equivalently, 128 soldiers in an "easy" encounter? (512 CR 1 soldiers is a CR 19 encounter, a 50-50 fight for a 19th level character). Sure, the CR system breaks down at high levels of low-CR opponents, but the fact remains that at every 2 level increases you are supposed to be able to handle twice as many opponents. More realistically, maybe he could routinely take on 4 enemies simultaneously without breaking much of a sweat. That would be a CR 5 encounter, one that would be appropriate for a 9th level PC, using up about 20% of his resources.
Sure, this guy may have killed 240 enemy soldiers over 3 years, or on average 1 or two a week, 6-7 a month. I don't have the XP tables in front of me, but my back-of-the-envelope calculations say that would make this guy no higher than lvl 8 or so. And how long do you think such a campign spanning three years of war would take anyway? I've rarely been in any campaign where game time went faster than real time (e.g. you cover on average more than a week of game time in each weekly session).
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I see your point... however, if a 1st level party is careful they can avoid some of the tougher creatures.
--stick to the well-traveled routes. They're well-traveled for a reason.
--if you must travel out of common areas, use as much stealth as possible.
--don't just go around attacking every bad guy you meet. some players can't help it. those players usually die.
As far as Audie Murphy is concerned... there is a big difference between a gunfight and swordfight. I doubt Audie would have survived 241 swordfights. That's not to say that his distinguished career isn't impressive... it just doesn't necessarily translate to a fantasy campaign.
"Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit." -- Wm. Shakespeare (iconic bard)
I've rarely been in any campaign where game time went faster than real time (e.g. you cover on average more than a week of game time in each weekly session).
Ahh, so you actually take 1 week to go through a week of game time, interesting. What happens when you get jumped in the middle of the night? Does the DM come running to your house knocking on your door and say you hear something off in the distance. What happens then if you say you go and wake up another party member. Do you then go and run over to their place and wake them up?
As far as Audie Murphy is concerned... there is a big difference between a gunfight and swordfight. I doubt Audie would have survived 241 swordfights. That's not to say that his distinguished career isn't impressive... it just doesn't necessarily translate to a fantasy campaign.
--sam
Personally I would assume it's a hell of a lot harder to live through 240 gunfights than swordfights. Now granted, with a thompson machine gun (Audie's favorite), you can kill a whole bunch of people in a hurry, but still, so can the opposition. Also there's that pesky issue of tanks and artillery (the last being the thing which kills most people in modern wars).
If it weren't for modern medicine, a whole lot more people would die in modern conflicts. The weapons are simply a lot more lethal.
I imagine if we look at the great eras of dueling, some pretty high kill numbers were amassed in sword fights. Anyone know what Musashi is reputed to have as his total?
Originally posted by buzzard Anyone know what Musashi is reputed to have as his total?
buzzard
A number of sites list 78 as his lifetime total, though it's mentioned that he would have killed more in battles. 78 seems to be the 'confirmed' number, but I haven't run across anything that breaks it down. Now, if Duel at Ichijoji Temple is to be beleived, he kills about 40 in one fight though he's hardly facing them one on one.
I really dont' think that the level system is realistic at all, but even applying it I personally have a hard time imagining any real world person as more than 5th level or so.
There might be a handful of people out there whose training, education, and experience was sufficiently broad or deep to qualify as sixth or seventh level but these would be the most capable people on the planet.
As for Audie Murphy, I think you are looking at a convergence of talent with luck. Afterall, in a war with ten's of millions soldiers, someone is bound to perform well above the statistical mean. I'm not taking anything away from Babyface Murphy, because he was clearly a brave and capable man, but by far and away clearly the most important aspect of his surivival was analogous to his ability to string together lots of 20's at a time when his foe was not rolling well. It doesn't mean that he was more than 5th or 6th level.
A better system for resolving a real person into game attributes is figure out how much time you have spent training in various fields, then use those numbers as guidelines to convert to GURPS skill points. Add on appropriate ads and disads, add or subtract a point or two for every standard deviation you are from the norm in intelligence, agility and what not, and you have a character sheet.
Last I added up the totals, I was a 60+ GURPS character, and my knowledge and skills are not generally regarded as insignificant. I'm going to be very suspicious of anyone claiming to be a 200 point GURPS character who has time to spend on these boards.
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Originally posted by MerakSpielman PCs only level fast because, in general, the world is catering to them.
Think about it.
You are a 1st level party of four, traveling through a swamp. The DM sees that you are 1st level, and pits you against a handful of giant leeches or something.
If a D&D world was "realistic" (beat on that term all you want, but you'll see what I mean) that same first level party could have stumbled into a troll encampment - and their leader is a 10th level barbarian. BOOM! no more 1st level party.
Do you realize how INCREDIBLY LUCKY a party of adventurers would have to be to ONLY run into threats that they HAPPEN to be able to overcome?
Actually, IMC the Players are warned before the start of a campaign that my world has a very fluid threat level, so if they stumble into, for example, Troll country, they'd better have their running shoes on, because look out boys, you are toast if you stay! At any rate, my point is that your above statement doesnt hold true for all campaigns.
Re Audie vs the 512 Germans: I remember reading about a (real) Jewish American soldier in WW2 who was controversially not awarded the Medal of Honor after killing an entire Japanese battalion (ca 500 men) single-handed; first with an LMG, after it ran out of bullets or jammed he finished them off with his bayonet! In this case the Japanese were assaulting his machine-gun nest so he certainly had a positional advantage; still it is possible - the rest of his fire team had understandably run off when they saw several hundred Japanese soldiers coming at them.
Actually he didn't kill all of them: the Japanese commander apparently killed himself after running out of troops...
The article though was about racism in the US military at the time causing the soldier not to get a Medal of Honor for the feat.
I agree with the point that if anything WW1/WW2 combat was a lot riskier than, say, sword combat between plate-armoured medieval knights; about the only way to actually kill a knight was to get him off his warhorse then stick something sharp up his unarmoured posterior... *ouch*
Originally posted by S'mon Re Audie vs the 512 Germans: I remember reading about a (real) Jewish American soldier in WW2 who was controversially not awarded the Medal of Honor after killing an entire Japanese battalion (ca 500 men) single-handed; first with an LMG, after it ran out of bullets or jammed he finished them off with his bayonet!
I've heard a similar story but the American was using a box of hand grenades.
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Last edited by LostSoul; 4th March 2003 at 02:50 AM..
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