D&D 5E Legends & Lore 4/1/2013

[Rune]

Pure genius!

This solves no less than five distinct problems:

• The current lack of a 'fresh off the farm" option of gameplay.
  
• The current complexity of introductory play.
  
• The current frailty of otherwise highly competent starting adventurers.
  
• The verisimilitude disconnect between a world full of commoners and powerful 1st level adventurers.
  
• The lack of multi-class rules that offer both flexibility and disincentive for cherry-picking levels.

And, seriously, the biggest objection is that you're expected to start at 3rd level, if you don't want to play the first two?

Okay, well, here's a possible solution (that would still work for multi-classing):

The Apprentice tier has levels 1-3. The Adventurer tier has levels 1-12 (Or go 15, even. It's doable.). The Legacy tier has levels 1-5.

Multi-classing would require that Apprentice levels be picked up before Adventurer levels before Legacy levels. Simple enough. Six problems solved.

 

[Rune]

Personally, I think, in most circumstances, that the leveling rate suggested would be much faster than I like, but easily scalable.

Other than that, I'm very excited to see how such a system would handle E6. I think, very well.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

As far as putting it into the leveling scheme starting at 1st, the only good reason is multi-classing support. Everything else is just labeling. OTOH, that's one of the few ways to solve many of the starting multi-classing issues. So on balance I'm fine with it.

I do think that levels are essentially about power level, not breadth of the characters. Saying that low-level characters are narrow and (well-rounded) broader characters are higher level has all kinds of nasty side effects on limiting play styles. It would be better to make character breadth a dial mostly separate from level entirely. (This would also solve the 1st level commoner problem ... while also solving the experienced but non-adventurer higher level problem--which the stated idea does not.)

P.S. I wish someone would make an intelligent argument for why wizards should have d4 hit die. I've seen it asserted all over the place, but no one has yet bothered to apply any logic to the assertion.

 

[jhunton]

I love the apprentice tier consept . I think it makes it more chalenging for the players and you urn the rewards there not just give.

 

[Obryn]

I don't find an "abbreviated level range" to be an indicator of any lack of options or play time, necessarily. What do you imagine will be the effects on your game from that 12-level band?

On Obryn's subject of "losing two level" in the Adventurer Tier... I don't see it as such. As Kamikaze said, "What are you losing?"

Mostly? The satisfaction of starting a character at 1st level without going through the process. I'll quote here...

Adventurer tier covers most of what we consider to be the standard D&D experience. Most experienced groups will simply jump straight to adventurer tier, and our rules for building such characters will include some simple story options (random tables and other idea generators) for setting down what happened to your character during his or her apprentice tier adventures.

That seems an awful lot of a process to go through to push the "standard D&D experience" back to 3rd level.

If the "standard D&D experience" starts at level 1 - and I'd say it should - the non-standard stuff should be modular rather than built into the progression and skipped by default

In my opinion, this is an inclusive change that satisfies actual problems with the game that were issues until now. Starting character hit points. Multiclassing and front loaded classes. NPCs using the same level system. Gritty 1st-level characters. Super simple character creation for beginners. Super simple gameplay and initial leveling up for beginners (which should be just as important as just character creation).

Man... You see, all that stuff you mention? Not a list of problems I want to have.

First off, I think 3.x style multiclassing is pretty terrible and I'm in no hurry to see it come back. I may be a minority here, but I'm not interested.

Gritty 1st-level characters? To me this does not mix well at all with "this stuff is for beginners." I see the Gritty bit and the Beginner bit in conflict; jamming both a gritty experience for experts and a simple experience for beginners into the same levels is madness, as far as I'm concerned.

Edited to add: And I'm not really convinced the "apprentice" stuff Mearls mentioned should be read as "gritty."

Yeah, this is the only part that I thought might be an April Fools joke. That is insanely fast.

This is one of the only areas I don't have a problem with. Leveling rate is about the easiest thing in the rules to change, unless you do something silly like integrating XP into systems other than leveling again.

I love the apprentice tier consept . I think it makes it more chalenging for the players and you urn the rewards there not just give.

Replying to you, as well. I agree there should be a gritty/challenging sort of module. I disagree that it should be the same thing as the simple newbie on-ramp to the game of D&D.

-O

 

[Manbearcat]

P.S. I wish someone would make an intelligent argument for why wizards should have d4 hit die. I've seen it asserted all over the place, but no one has yet bothered to apply any logic to the assertion.

Murphy and God hate Wizards and 5 % of the time they have 66.7 % less meat per square inch than your average cutthroat, bravo, sneak-thief, acrobat, scout. Its science.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think they make any expectations for what people are going to do. I think they're looking for patterns in the way the game is play, off the rulebook, and trying to implement some of those differences as optional rules.

The rule is to address people who are uncomfortable with being low powered early in the game because they're bored with low-level options (or whatever your reason is).

There's enough, but not an overwhelming, demand to not have those 'low power' levels in the game. Its not an issue with "complexity", really, although that's sort of part of the effect of handling things this way. This is a way of them addressing that.

My feeling is it creates a sort of meat-grinder type of play which I just don't find that interesting. I'm fine with the PCs being 'starting on their first adventure', but I played enough of the old 'Bob 1, Bob 2, Bob 3...' kind of thing back in the day. I remember I actually rolled 100 sets of stats on the back page of my notebook and just crossed them off as I burned through them. I just always yearned to be playing the game where I could have a meaningful story for my character right from the start. Sure, SOMETIMES that story would be abruptly cut off by a nasty end, but when you have 3 hit points survival is mostly luck anyway, and your character is just some shmuck with a death wish. That's OK, but it gets old and you just can't invest anything fun in that character. It also shapes the whole way the game works, you can't have anything good or get any really useful distinguishing choices or features because you've got a disposable character and the 3 minute roll-up is in force.

IMHO by making lower levels low powered you skew the whole game towards simple colorless disposable PCs. "Just start at level 3" isn't really quite the same thing in that game. OTOH if you say "OK, levels -1 and 0 are special things that break the normal expectations", that design works more for me and likely delivers more on what I want, I think. Mechanically there really may not be a LOT of difference, but a lot of it is presentation.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Two arguments:

1. If every edition has it as an afterthought, why not have it in the core and get it right from the start?
2. Apprentice levels are not 0-level. A 0-level character has no class. An apprentice character has a class, but isn't very good at it yet. Which is what 1st level should be, isn't it?

It's a system they're planning for D&D Next, whereby you make your mark on the world--by building a castle, becoming an archmage, etc. This gives characters a "retirement plan" similar to 4e's epic destinies.Except it's not Epic. Epic is more... well, epic. Legacy is more like "name level."Yeah, but not all adventurers are heroes.

So.... The game isn't about anything fantastic at all? I'm supposed to aspire to just 'build a castle'? and the entire terminology of the game is about that? Remember, name level was about level 9 in AD&D. Level 20 is likely about the end of the reasonably usable and achievable levels. And yes, adventurers are heroes. Show me a story where they aren't (once in a while they're bad guys, fine).

I don't agree that making 'Apprentice levels' normal levels is "doing it right" (see my previous post, it skews the game design). I'm find if it is in the core, but it MAY be better to have it be very clearly a separate optional thing you can use if you so choose. As for what '0 level' means, IMHO NPCs never have levels at all, so it is immaterial what they are, PCs and NPCs are just different. If a character is an 'apprentice' once again why is he out running around in the world? Where is his master? How is it that 3 weeks later without any mentor this guy is going to be all studly? It really never makes much logical sense.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, this is the only part that I thought might be an April Fools joke. That is insanely fast.

I don't think they're joking at all. In fact 4e has a very similar pacing, you nominally do '10 encounters per level', but with SCs, quest XP, and several higher level encounters the average is really about 6 full-up encounters per level. You can SURELY resolve 3 of these in a week on average (again, since not all are combat, and some will be pretty trivial). That yielded about 60 weeks for a campaign, which I found to be not far off from what you would achieve playing every week. I think the perception is that many times people can't do that schedule (one of my campaigns ran 2.5 years and didn't reach 30th). People play slowly and not every week. At the same time its hard to keep a game going these days for several years, so it would be NICE to have a quicker pace.

 

[GX.Sigma]

So.... The game isn't about anything fantastic at all? I'm supposed to aspire to just 'build a castle'? and the entire terminology of the game is about that?

From Mike Mearls: "These examples are just that: examples. Other legacies might include becoming a divine saint, striving to the immortality offered by lichdom, or countering the influence an archdevil or demon prince claims over the material world. Your legacy reflects the tales and legends that will be told about your character years after his or her death."

And yes, adventurers are heroes. Show me a story where they aren't

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As for what '0 level' means, IMHO NPCs never have levels at all

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