D&D 5E L&L 3/11/2013 This Week in D&D

[pemerton]

The perceived value of a level where just your numbers go up is related to how closely the DM is keeping the monsters' numbers to yours. If the monsters level up whenever you do, then "vertical advancement" isn't so exciting; you need some new "horizontal advancement" toy to make it interesting.

I would say this is right for 4e, which has the sort of scaling you describe built in as a ground-floor assumption.

in a more quick, lightweight game with a broader focus (which is how I want to play D&DN), getting new abilities isn't really the point. For that kind of game, I'd rather just get +1 to one of my basic numbers, write it down, and forget about it.

In D&Dnext at the moment, there seem to be some levels that are dead but for hit points - eg cleric 15/16, 19/20 - unless I've missed something buried in the text.

 

[pemerton]

Getting a new toy every level belies an almost impatient attitude and has lead to the "kewl powerz" mentality that clutters up both Pathfinder and 4e.

My response to this is - if levels aren't giving "kewl powerz" in that sort of game, redesign the game to get rid of those unnecessary levels!

 

[Sunseeker]

Not buying this.

First off, improving numerically means that no level is dead. In 3e, you get bonuses to attack, saves every 1 or 2 levels. You get hp and skill points every level. You also get feats every 3 levels and ability score improvements every 4. Fighters get a feat every other level. Casters get more spell slots (and spells known). Other classes get a feature improvement most levels. Getting a new toy every level belies an almost impatient attitude and has lead to the "kewl powerz" mentality that clutters up both Pathfinder and 4e.

That's assuming you improve numerically, part of the "flat math" goals of DDN was to reduce the numeric progression. There are numerous levels at which your BAB and defenses do NOT increase. What is the benefit in gaining nothing more than a few HP? It doesn't improve your combat abilities, save that you live longer. It means nothing for the social and exploration types.

It's not impatient to suggest that improvement should mean something. For casters who have X/level spells, sure there's an improvement every level for them. For people who lack that, there's only improvement when they're allowed to choose new skills/powers/feats/whatever.

Sure, a level isn't "dead" if it provides some form of improvement, but there should be something beyond simple HP gain. HP gain can be bundled much easier with other advancments without needing to add more stuff at each level.

This is quite an overstatement... If you don't like dead levels, fine, and you're definitely not alone! In a game where classes grant a large number of abilities or boosts, dead levels feels wrong especially if in other levels you get two or more boosts at the same time (this happens in 3e), because they give the feeling of some sort of jerk-like advancement: in one level you get no special ability, in the next you get two, why not arranging them one per level? In such a game, you are clearly right (and I think 5e is probably going to be this kind of game with plenty of special abilities), but in the more general sense, there is nothing wrong with a game where classes (hopefully all of them being similar, otherwise there is potentially a different problem) get sparse special abilities like one every 3 levels, and only get hit points in the other levels. It all depends on what basic design decisions were made for such game, e.g. how hit points should scale, or how attack bonuses should scale, and of course how flexible/complex should characters be in that game.

My general point being, in a game where classes already have most their levels with a special treat, then yes dead levels should be avoided and would feel better if filled with something; but there are also games where in fact dead levels do serve a purpose, and that purpose is to advance special abilities (and complexity) at a lower rate compared to other features/numbers.

Heres the thing though, in a system where only HP is gained, all it does is slow the game down. Lets say you only get a cookie every 5th level. At 4th level you have 40 HP, but all your other stats are the same as a level 1. You hit as hard as level 1. Your defenses are as high as level 1. While this means lower-level foes can still be challenging, it also means killing your PC now takes 4 times as long. What have we gained really other than bogging down the game? This was one of the major complaints of 4e was monsters being big bags of HP. We should endevor to make sure that players are not bit bags of HP either.

I seem to remember an early TTRPG, where half the classes were entirely composed of what you call "dead levels." There were no feats or skill ranks either. As I recall, it was a pretty successful game. It came out in the 70s; you've probably never heard of it.

And I do not find it surprising in the slightest that games have evolved away from that.

 

[Visanideth]

The core issue with dead levels, for me, is that leveling is ultimately a necessary evil more than a boon. It's a mechanic meant to allow for character development and variety in gameplay, but it comes at the cost of many negative side effects - rationalizations aside, it leads to old material being obsolete, new material being required, weird abstractions, more complicated maths and so on.

If the level is "dead" (ie, it doesn't develop the character giving him new abilities or quicks) it may as well not be there, because you get all the bad and none of the good. Look at E6 for example: you stop leveling up but you keep getting new "toys". The toys are the important part, not the level.

 

[Raith5]

Have you played the Elder Scrolls videogames? The level-scaling in Skyrim is more complex, but in Oblivion levels were REALLY dead--the strength of the enemies was tightly coupled with your character level, so levelling was almost entirely an illusion. It's possible to beat the main quest of the game at level 1. Doing random dungeons between parts of the main quest does not make it easier. Sandboxing is not much fun unless the monsters and treasure are placed objectively.

I liked both Elder scrolls games, both enabled the creation of interesting characters (for a computer game). But there are two issues: enabling interesting choices and enabling game meaningful choices. The later refers to choices that by some calculation increase the power of the character. If you choose a feat or power that doesnt increase the power of your PC then it is not really meaningful within the game even though it is interesting to you the player. I think in the game Skyrim they did a really good job of making perks (basically feats) in the game which you got each level, really game meaningful because even though everything scaled, perks in certain strengths of the character increased in power faster than that. So you felt that you were doing your archetype was being expressed really well!

But in reference to D&D feats have to be powerful/useful and interesting. They really need to express the archetype you are trying to create and have some fiction which relates the power you have achieved to what the character does in practice. I have a (4th ed) Ranger/Cleric of the Raven Queen who is essentially a badass demon and undead hunter. He obtained the feat Pervasive Light in light which meant that any opponent he hit who is vulnerable to radiant takes that damage: really appropriate for undead and some demons. Powerful in the right context but really appropriate for the archetype. Not all feats in 4th or 3rd ed had a fiction which related to archetype enabling powers - a lot of the feats regarded as feat taxes spring to mind.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think it comes down to people's perception of progression. In a game where everyone has cool abilities, you start to think of "progression" as "getting more cool abilities." I'm certainly a little disappointed whenever I level in 4e and don't get any new powers.

But in a more quick, lightweight game with a broader focus (which is how I want to play D&DN), getting new abilities isn't really the point. For that kind of game, I'd rather just get +1 to one of my basic numbers, write it down, and forget about it.

Basically, I think dead levels should be a player option. Mearls's solution sounds good to me.

The point of leveling has ALWAYS been to get more 'juice' for your character, always. This structure is the primary reason D&D has been so popular through the years and what has distinguished it from games based on BRP (RQ), Traveler, and many other early RPGs which either entirely lacked that feature or where it was much less explicit. It is just that back in the day when ALL a fighter's class was about was hitting harder and being tough getting a +1 to-hit and another 1d8 hit points WAS a class feature.

I don't know what you mean by a 'broader focus' in other words. Cool abilities might have been a little less granular for some classes, but there was no focus on anything else. D&D's entire focus has always been on leveling and IMHO I don't see it having any really different feel now than in 1975. In fact the 'focus' of 4e is vastly broader than OD&D, B/X, or 1e, which were all entirely about a party of adventurers delving down into a dungeon and gaining treasure and bennies.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The place I found it has since gone away, probably C&D'd. I saved the file with the webserver app (nothing shady about that) and the file with the compendium-skimmed data (the shadier part), but the latter would need to be updated. Since you already wrote a script that could handle this, we can nicely avoid talking about the semi-illegal part. I can probably send you the local server app and you can see how it works. If you PM me your email, I can hook you up.

Yeah, we wouldn't want to talk about anything shady... Anyway, as far as the Compendium data I'm perfectly happy to go by the rules of the road, you can allow people to access the actual compendium's data and re-present it/use it for whatever purposes as long as you're accessing it via the user's valid DDI account. For my own purposes I figure I can make a program that caches some of the data as long as I don't give it away, or use it when I don't have an account. Obviously if we were talking about being able to run a sort of alternate compendium of our own at some undefined future point where the WotC one went away, then we'd have to generate our own data (IE enter everything into our own database). I'd cross that bridge at the time, but either way the front-end parts are the first thing.

Power2ool is flash-based as far as I know, so no ipad (boo apple), and linux implementation will depend on your patience level for dealing with it, which is probably greater than mine, lol. I haven't run linux since mucking around with Debian and Knoppix about 10 years ago, and when my patience ran out that was that, lol.

Flash-based, yeah. Quite polished too, though I have only spent 2 minutes just now playing with it. My only beef is I really am not going to want to put tons of data out on some site somewhere that is someone's hobby and is likely to vanish in a week. If I could set up a power2ool as part of my XWiki and keep my own data, that would be awesome (I could think of some integration things that could be done with this at that point, but anyway).

As for Linux, well, 10 years makes a huge difference. Really, unless you do windows development, the tools on like FC17 that I'm using now are just way way better. Honestly, even for doing windows apps you're not loosing much, if anything. VS is not bad, but we've got equally good tools. Every time I have to do something on some Windows machine it drives me crazy, the UI is retarded and the command line is a joke! lol.

It's cool in that it's a very visual interface and great for use as a storyboarding tool. It also has seamless integration with the Compendium. It allows for full customizing of powers, monsters, and items, and even writing your own from scratch and auto-formatting them to look just like the books. It has printer support as well. For those reasons I love it, but it doesn't have any kind of character sheet, unfortunately; you can only use it to organize your powers.

Yeah, it is an interesting sort of mix of features. I'll have to play around with it some more. Thx!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The core issue with dead levels, for me, is that leveling is ultimately a necessary evil more than a boon. It's a mechanic meant to allow for character development and variety in gameplay, but it comes at the cost of many negative side effects - rationalizations aside, it leads to old material being obsolete, new material being required, weird abstractions, more complicated maths and so on.

If the level is "dead" (ie, it doesn't develop the character giving him new abilities or quicks) it may as well not be there, because you get all the bad and none of the good. Look at E6 for example: you stop leveling up but you keep getting new "toys". The toys are the important part, not the level.

Right, if you have the same character and the same sorts of challenges then there's no point in just having bigger numbers. It might be OK if you are literally playing Gygax-era pure dungeon-crawl where "Ohhhh, now we can dare to go to the 5th dungeon level!" is the goal, but nowadays? People want to have characters where the mechanics of the game can give them some support for character growth. If that includes 'kewl powerz' so be it!

Honestly, this whole sort of debate is why I suggested in various places a "boon based progression" system where instead of XP and level driving advancement you are "level 10" if you have "10 boons", and the "boons" are just things you pick up for story reasons (IE items, training, etc). Any adventurer macho enough to have accumulated 10 of them now has hit points and bonuses worthy of such a figure. It puts character growth and how the character progresses in whatever story there is at the front and center. You can still play a dungeon crawl with that kind of system too. You could even have a boring old "I just get attack bonuses" type fighter class potentially (you just get "+1 to-hit" for your boon endlessly).

 

[I'm A Banana]

Man, I don't think anyone is forcing you to go up in level.

Don't want to level up? Don't do it. Rest at the sweet spot. E6 the thing. This ain't rocket surgery, just stop doing the thing that you don't want to do anymore.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

Flash-based, yeah. Quite polished too, though I have only spent 2 minutes just now playing with it. My only beef is I really am not going to want to put tons of data out on some site somewhere that is someone's hobby and is likely to vanish in a week. If I could set up a power2ool as part of my XWiki and keep my own data, that would be awesome (I could think of some integration things that could be done with this at that point, but anyway).

Apparently the guy used to run it out of his house when he was unemployed, but he now has a job and has it "professionally hosted" somewhere, so there's that. You're correct though, he could just pull the plug anytime, and that part sucks; nobody has heard from him in about a year, so who knows. I'd love to be able to get a local version of this running. I particularly love the way it auto-formats powers and such. I've found it such a boon to creativity, it would be a shame to have it go down.

Yeah, it is an interesting sort of mix of features. I'll have to play around with it some more. Thx!

No problem. I've been plugging that site every chance I get because I've found it so helpful.