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Pros and Cons of Epic Level Play?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6284816" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I basically agree. I've seen some attempts lately in OSR to go fully 'epic' from level 1 on. It's not fully convincing to me because I think you need to build some relationships to the setting before doing that can be meaningful, but certainly the ideas driving the adventure were not that epic meant bigger numbers. And rules sets like E6 were built on the premise that they wanted 'epic' play in D&D, without the need to deal with the fiddly complexity and lack of balance typically seen in high level D&D play. Fourth edition with its skill check DC's set by party level, and its 'fixed math' was built explicitly to keep the gameplay and character relationship to the world the same from level 1 to level 30. There are positive sides to that; like E6 it is trying to avoid the fiddliness, slow play and lack of imbalance of high level play seen in earlier editions. But the negative side of that for me is that it seemed to have lost sight of this notion of character perspective on and relationship with the world changing as the character advanced in level that was implicit or even explicit in earlier editions like BECMI or AD&D. That notion was somewhat lost in 3e (note the rise of the heroic Adventure Path where the monsters CR rising is the main differentiation between the modules), and I think fully lost in 4e. If you compare a 3e or 4e adventure path, to one from the mid-1st edition era or even 2e, you'll see real shifts in how things play. Chronicles of the Dragon Lance modules for instance involve lots of Battlesystem play, and lots of politics and character growth (in a non-numeric way) as a major component of play. A 3e or 4e adventure path on the other hand, is much closer in structure to early hack and slash along the lines of GDQ. For me, it feels like you level up, but nothing really changes.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>That's WoW mentality. IF that sort of thing happened, then it suggests that the numbers changing is entirely metagame and has no meaning in the game world at all. And yes, to a certain extent 4e seems to me to actually embrace that, although Pemerton will likely (rightly) point out that in 4e the DM is supposed to handle that by changing the flavor of the two scenarios.</p><p></p><p>But my problems with the diminishment of evolving gameplay goes deeper than that.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6284816, member: 4937"] I basically agree. I've seen some attempts lately in OSR to go fully 'epic' from level 1 on. It's not fully convincing to me because I think you need to build some relationships to the setting before doing that can be meaningful, but certainly the ideas driving the adventure were not that epic meant bigger numbers. And rules sets like E6 were built on the premise that they wanted 'epic' play in D&D, without the need to deal with the fiddly complexity and lack of balance typically seen in high level D&D play. Fourth edition with its skill check DC's set by party level, and its 'fixed math' was built explicitly to keep the gameplay and character relationship to the world the same from level 1 to level 30. There are positive sides to that; like E6 it is trying to avoid the fiddliness, slow play and lack of imbalance of high level play seen in earlier editions. But the negative side of that for me is that it seemed to have lost sight of this notion of character perspective on and relationship with the world changing as the character advanced in level that was implicit or even explicit in earlier editions like BECMI or AD&D. That notion was somewhat lost in 3e (note the rise of the heroic Adventure Path where the monsters CR rising is the main differentiation between the modules), and I think fully lost in 4e. If you compare a 3e or 4e adventure path, to one from the mid-1st edition era or even 2e, you'll see real shifts in how things play. Chronicles of the Dragon Lance modules for instance involve lots of Battlesystem play, and lots of politics and character growth (in a non-numeric way) as a major component of play. A 3e or 4e adventure path on the other hand, is much closer in structure to early hack and slash along the lines of GDQ. For me, it feels like you level up, but nothing really changes. That's WoW mentality. IF that sort of thing happened, then it suggests that the numbers changing is entirely metagame and has no meaning in the game world at all. And yes, to a certain extent 4e seems to me to actually embrace that, although Pemerton will likely (rightly) point out that in 4e the DM is supposed to handle that by changing the flavor of the two scenarios. But my problems with the diminishment of evolving gameplay goes deeper than that. [/QUOTE]
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Pros and Cons of Epic Level Play?
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