D&D 5E Wandering Monsters 01/29/2014:Level Advancement...

[Remathilis]

IIRC, aren't levels 1-2 supposed to be an introduction/apprentice level, rather than serve as real adventurer material? Fine if you want to play there, but most groups aren't going to want to stay, even if that's where they start.

Short answer: No.

Slightly longer answer: The first two levels are going to require less XP (so you level out of them quickly) and have fewer moving parts (no subclasses, no feats). They said that players who want to "jump in" can start with 3rd level (where they get a feat, choose a sub class, and have more hp) to recreate that "3e/4e feeling"

 

[am181d]

Short answer: No.

Slightly longer answer: The first two levels are going to require less XP (so you level out of them quickly) and have fewer moving parts (no subclasses, no feats). They said that players who want to "jump in" can start with 3rd level (where they get a feat, choose a sub class, and have more hp) to recreate that "3e/4e feeling"

At the moment, the first feat comes at 4th level. Although moving it to 3rd would make A TON of sense.

 

[GMMichael]

How Many Sessions . . .

If I were designing an RPG, , I'd use three different types of character features. The D&D equivalents might be abilities, skills, and feats. Then, I'd instruct the GM to award one of these each session, depending on what that PC did during the session. Especially unproductive sessions would be an exception. Highly productive (or long) sessions would justify two of these. When a character got one of each, after give or take three sessions, he'd get another "level," and get more "hit points" to make that level official.

 

[DMZ2112]

Any chart that says "you need this much XP to level up" is a baseline.

I do believe you're mistaken. If only for the sake of new DMs, the game will have to have some method of generating encounters, some means of rewarding PCs for defeating those encounters, and some number of XP required to level up. It's really hard to see how they can manage without any of those things, and between them they do amount to a baseline.

levels/XP * XP/encounter * encounters/hour * hours/session * sessions/month

I was referring to the bolded portion of the equation. Which you'd know, if you'd been reading my posts. Pet. Peeve.

Yep. Although the DMG also included a dire warning that if you used this option, it would surely break your game! Sometimes, it seemed that 2nd Ed really didn't like PCs getting even a hint of power.

The wisdom of the ancients.

In my case it's "level when the players say". I've abdicated even more power . . .

Storminator, for eff's sake. If there were only a license to revoke.

 

[Warbringer]

For the last few years I've used the following.

All levels require 10 plot points.

1 plot point overcoming a minor challenge
2-3 plot points for a major challenge
+1 for being the star of the night

table decides if the challenge for minor/major or even no challenge... Each session an extra point or 2 is up for awesome moments

 

[mxyzplk]

I have no horse in this race, as I'me moving more and more to the "level whenever" camp.

Agreed. XP are so 1970s. In our group, in various campaigns, the GMs control the pace by giving levels when appropriate - fast if they want, slow if they want, a mix if needed (hmm, let's skip a couple levels so I can run this...). Startlingly, none of the players have cried "I miss my extra half hour of accounting practice per session!"

 

[Lokiare]

I suspect that the survey question was probably designed to feel out how frequently people use random encounters in general. One sort of tricky survey design thing is that you have to be careful with "It depends..." options, because they tend to suck away a bunch of your respondents, not necessarily symmetrically from the other options, and without necessarily giving you much real information. If the role of the survey question was just to get a literal answer to the question, then they could put "It depends..." as an option in there and they'd learn that for most groups, the answer is "It depends", but they likely already know that. There's definitely room to quibble about how the question is written, but most likely they didn't include an It Depends answer because it'd just pull all the votes.

They should have put that answer in there, and when it came back that 99% of respondents chose 'it depends' then they would have known they didn't ask the right question..

 

[howandwhy99]

I'm not sure I've seen a tendency for modern D&D games (3rd and 4th) to increase in difficulty with level - the challenges are tethered to the party's abilities at the same rate. A 15th level module is just as difficult for the players to overcome as the 3rd level module was. Have you noticed differently? I've wondered whether this should be baked into the rules in some way - 4 level 1 monsters are a "fair" challenge for a 1st level party, but the equivalent fight for 10th level characters would be 5 or 6 level 10 monsters. Or that "level 10" monsters are really more like level 12 compared to the party's combat output.

I would warn that moving from 50% chance to hit to 40% chance to hit is not increasing monster difficulty. Stats like AC are the "walls", the constants of the maze design. Simply asking players to "be luckier" on their die rolls isn't increasing the challenge for them.

But... Okay, yes. Making that AC harder to hit is part of making monsters harder. But I would suggest a 1st level PC should not be afforded the same game as at 10th level, but with lower monster penalty and treasure bonus modifiers. At 10th level there is a "10th level suite" of abilities the monsters have, combat tactics the "average" uses, class-related actions like raising an army or protecting a land of faithful adherents, of whose design complexity places them as starting at 10th level. Demonstrating you can handle the easier stuff leads to (more and easier) opportunities to do the harder stuff.

 

[pemerton]

Better rules for gaining xp for exploration and role playing encounters would be nice

Better than . . . ? 4e has rules for both of these (quest XP for exploration, skill challenge and DMG 2 "free roleplaying" XP for non-combat encounters), but I'm not sure if you're saying you want better ones than 4e's.

I just feel that XP have to be tied to the character's actions somehow. Whether it's killing monsters and getting treasures (for sandboxy games) or achieving quest goals (for story-er games) - if the characters level just because they've been playing for three weeks, there's no longer a reward factor.

does the rise of "Level when the DM says" correspond to the prevalence of MMORPGs?

<snip>

in an adventure path/Story/DM-controlled campaign, XP are a marker for what kind of adventure the characters can handle?

I personally think you got it right in your first post: the key to level when the GM (or players, as per [MENTION=305]Storminator[/MENTION]) feel like it is not particularly connected to GM control: it's connected to levels and XP not being a reward in the classic D&D sense. This is personally how I view 4e: the XP system is set up so that, basically, every hour of genuine play yields a level-appropriate encounter's worth of XP.

This doesn't make the players' choices irrelevant (there's no levelling in Classic Traveller either, but that doesn't make the players' choices irrelevant). It does mean that the game progresses "automatically" through "the story of D&D" - ie from dealing with kobolds threatening a village to dealing with demon princes threatening the world.

 

[XunValdorl_of_Kilsek]

Short answer: No.

Slightly longer answer: The first two levels are going to require less XP (so you level out of them quickly) and have fewer moving parts (no subclasses, no feats). They said that players who want to "jump in" can start with 3rd level (where they get a feat, choose a sub class, and have more hp) to recreate that "3e/4e feeling"

Why are you lumping 3rd and 4th together? In 3rd, you could die from one hit just like the editions before. You only jad slightly more HP by taking Toughness and adding your Con bonus. You stilled rolled for HP in 3rd. This is no where near the level of 4th.