Nobody talks about lack of vertical progression?

[Viktyr Gehrig]

Why should it take more than 20 Int? Other than spellcasters, no other class has any silly restrictions "you must be this tall to play".

I'm not saying it should be a hard mechanical restriction, like a prerequisite. I'm just saying that I have a hard time with the idea that an epic world-shattering archmage isn't superhumanly intelligent. He should be smarter than he was as an apprentice.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Funny, it's the feature I think is most revolutionary.

I'm a little surprised by the lack of furor over it, myself. Level advancement is something all editions of D&D have in common. Every last one. This is perhaps the one truely new thing 5e is doing, and it's mostly just slipped under the radar. If 4e had gone that route rather than the "treadmill" (which is so functionally so similar in actual play), it would certainly be one of the most hated and "not-D&D" abominations of that benighted system. But, in 5e it hardly raises comment.

weird

 

[77IM]

Tony: I think it's because people already tried the "treadmill" in 4e and didn't like it. In particular, the need for ever-increasing DCs ("You slipped on the cave slime because it's astral warpblood cave slime!") rubbed people the wrong way. Yet it's easy to see why the game needs that math for challenges to remain relevant -- which shows a major downside of 3e's ever-increasing mega-bonuses. So I think people are willing to give the bounded accuracy a chance.

-- 77IM, not having to level monsters up/down is probably a big selling point too

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

I'm a little surprised by the lack of furor over it, myself. Level advancement is something all editions of D&D have in common. Every last one. This is perhaps the one truely new thing 5e is doing, and it's mostly just slipped under the radar. If 4e had gone that route rather than the "treadmill" (which is so functionally so similar in actual play), it would certainly be one of the most hated and "not-D&D" abominations of that benighted system. But, in 5e it hardly raises comment.

weird

You might be right. But the concept of flattening the math has been being tossed about for a long time now. So much so, I think, that when we saw it, it was practically expected.

The big numbers are fun the first time, but somewhere along the line they lost their charm. Maybe we saw the futility. Maybe we got tired of watching our friends trying to add 17 and 28 every round. Maybe Diablo and Final Fantasy burned out our enthusiasm. Whatever the cause, deep in the back of our mind we wanted this.

 

[Blackbrrd]

You might be right. But the concept of flattening the math has been being tossed about for a long time now. So much so, I think, that when we saw it, it was practically expected.

The big numbers are fun the first time, but somewhere along the line they lost their charm. Maybe we saw the futility. Maybe we got tired of watching our friends trying to add 17 and 28 every round. Maybe Diablo and Final Fantasy burned out our enthusiasm. Whatever the cause, deep in the back of our mind we wanted this.

I started thinking about it because of a computer game, The Secret World, which is a cross-over between an MMORPG and an Adventure game. It's a game with 500 abilities (A cross between spells and feats) with all of them supposed to be at the same power level. Each player can select 7 active and 7 passive abilities. A bit like a 3e sorcerer who could select 7 spells and 7 feats.

Then they presented 5e and it looks like they nearly removed all vertical scaling, I went aha! That's the way to do it.

There are so many better way to improve a character than just adding higher numbers. More options is really good. I really liked all the different things a Fighter could do in 4e compared to the earlier editions.

Making the characters in 5e so dissimilar is also something that makes it important for the DM to add a variety of challenges, not just combat, which was the easy way out in 4e.

Anyway, having ideas for alternate advancement is a great idea. Growing the character horizontally (more options) is something I am all for.