How Many 1st Level Fighters Should a 10th Level Fighter Beat?

[Balsamic Dragon]

Inigo "That's enough! That's enough! Where is this Rugen now, so I might kill him?"

Fezzik "He's with the prince in the castle. But the castle gate is guarded by thirty men."

Inigo "How many could you handle?"

Fezzik "I don't think more than ten."

Inigo "Leaving twenty for me. At my best I could never defeat that many. I need Vizzini to plan. I have no gift for strategy."

My answer: Ten with brute force, twenty with a cunning plan

 

[the Jester]

Does not apply.

PC's aren't meant to fight PC's so the answer is irrelevant for me.

...for some playstyles. In others, pc vs. pc happens quite a bit.

A campaign is a story. DM needs to be able to create appropriate encounters to tell the story.

...for some playstyles. In others, a campaign is a milieu that reacts organically to the pcs, and the "storytelling" is what happens over beers later, when the group is talking about last night's awesome game.

The system must accommodate the DM's needs regardless of level. One set of players might like "Assault on the Keep" type scenarios at level 6, another group might like it at level 16. You might be doing a dungeon exploration at level 1 or level 20. It all needs to be scalable.

Now THIS I can agree with!

 

[Mengu]

...for some playstyles.

You're absolutely right. That's why I said, "for me". I guess I could have been clearer. But I believe the majority of D&D players don't play PVP. As far as game system design goes, I wouldn't worry too much about PVP, it's a side product, not the main event. Those who want to turn it into PVP can add their own rule hacks to accomplish that goal as needed.

 

[Upper_Krust]

The difference should be the square of the XP difference.

Level 10 is 5 times the XP difference of Level 1, so a Level 10 Fighter should defeat 25 Level 1 opponents.

Level 19 is 24 times the XP difference of Level 1, so a Level 19 Fighter should defeat 576 Level 1 opponents...getting into Driz'zt's "Thousand Orcs" territory.

Level 28 is 130 times the XP difference of Level 1, so a Level 28 Fighter should be able to defeat 16,900 Level 1 opponents.

The Tarrasque should be able to gobble up 902,500 Level 1 opponents.

Orcus should be able to turn 2,528,100 Level 1 opponents into undead servants.

 

[The Human Target]

Ok, imagine a monster or NPC a 1st level fighter has a 50% chance of beating alone. How many of those should make a 50-50 encounter against a 10th level fighter?

Edit: These are only ways to concretely ask about how quickly you would like PC abilities to increase.

I've come to prefer level gains increasing options but not so much increasing raw power.

And I've also come around to the idea that D&D should probably only have ten levels.

So with that in mind...

5 to 10 sounds about right.

But then, D&D also isn't designed around the idea of single PC combat.

 

[Stormonu]

One point to consider is that at 10th level, a wizard's single fireball could incinerate 20 first level fighters, even if they made their save. This is only one spell in the wizards arsenal, and not even his most powerful.

The big cavaet is the edition you are playing in. In 1E or 2E, who gets the initiative would determine the wizard's survivabilty, whose only got about 20 hp average and maybe an AC 6 (or 16 in 3E/4E terms).

In 3E, the same wizard probably has at least 30 hp and an AC 18 or better (AC 2 in 1E/2E terms), probably better.

I'm not familiar enough wih 4E to postulate what a 10th level wiz would look like.

I should note, however, that I chose 10 for my answer. In meaning that the fighter should be able to take on 10 opponents at a time, for the course of 4-5 rounds (so, aabout 40-50). This would put the wizard at decimating about 80-100 in th same amount of time.

However, I don't believe the fighter should be brought up to the destructive level of the wizard, but that the wizard should be brought down.

 

[Tony Vargas]

'10' is winning, I guess people have been reading Book of Five Rings.

I had to vote N/A. There shouldn't be a point at which a given number of 1st level characters are a meaningful threat to a 10th, rather, a much lower-level creature should present a different kind of challenge than a straight-up combat one. That was one of the wierdnesses of old-school D&D, the 4,892 orcs in a 10x10 room.

If a 10th level fighter is facing an army, he might get killed, he might fail to hold the pass he's defending, he might fail at some other objective that requires fighting the army, but he shouldn't just be whittled to death by inevitable 20s or AD&D-style 'overbearing' attacks.