D&D 5E D&DN going down the wrong path for everyone.

[pming]

Hiya

I know of many groups who went all the way to 20 and beyond but I have no authority or data to say exactly what portion of the gaming community we were in and neither do you, that is why we turn to the book.

For me, we (me and my original group) got characters to level 16 - 21 only once. In my multiple-decades of playing AD&D 1e, we typically got to around levels 7 to 10, but a handful of times (less than 5, easy) have had characters hit 12 to 14.

IME, talking to other DM's and groups of 1e/2e, I'd estimate the average "high level" character being somewhere around levels 12 to 15. The "Monty Haul" (that's what we called them back in the day...) campaigns and characters were so obvious it was laughable (re: 39th level wizards, 41st level fighters, 26/24/28 level F/MU/T...all with multiple artifacts, etc...). That's one thing I miss about 1e/2e...when you asked a player about his favorite, highest level character and he says "Thangaar, 14th level Fighter Lord", you can be pretty sure he's not a Monty Hauler; if he says "Thangaar, 33rd level Samurai Emperor of the Mortal Planes", you can be pretty sure he IS a Monty Hauler.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[pemerton]

Why don't you go and actually look in a copy of the Player's Handbook for 2nd edition D&D? You will see that a Wizard's level goes all the way to 20. Fighter needs 3,000,000 to reach 20th while the Wizard needs 3,750,000. He gets 1 6th level at 12 and at 18 he get's 1 9th level.

These rules and numbers are virtually identical to 1st ed AD&D. But the game was not designed to be played at those levels, in any meaningful sense of "design": there was no playtesting; the monster manuals contained no foes; the published campaign worlds and cosmologies had no real home for characters of that level. I would argue that the real function of an AD&D archmage is to serve as something like a solo in 4e - a powerful NPC opponent who can hold his/her own against mutiple PCs via the use of spells that were never tested for long-term use by PCs (as became clearer in 3E, when those spells actually did start to see widespread PC use).

As for 2e... There's no more significance to 20th level than in 1e really. I don't have a 2e PHB in front of me and spent a lot less time with it, so I don't specifically remember the details of the layout of the tables, but the 'big 4' progression was identical, I do remember that, in effect your 1e wizard, rogue, fighter, cleric was fully legal with no changes in 2e. It is quite possible tables broke off a 20, but they had to break off somewhere.

The point stands, there was no SPECIFIC cut-off. Unlike 3e where it was clearly stated right up front that the game had 20 levels, or 4e where it clearly has exactly 30 levels. Thus it is VERY hard to say that there was an intent for pre-3e games to extend to a specific level.

I think this is obviously true. The game wasn't designed for levels above name or so - those tables were just cobbled together. I mean, look at the rationale for the progression from Grand Druid to Heirophant costing 3,000,000 XP - words to the effect of "The role of Grand Druid is generally unexciting to anyone but bureaucrats and politicians, and 3,000,000 XP of such activity will be enough for anyone." That's not game design in any meaningful sense, it's just slapping down an arbitrary number!

I never had a character that exceeded 14th level. It just got silly. My 14th level wizard AS IT WAS in 1e defeated some pretty silly challenges, like a whole CITY full of beholders (don't ask, we didn't FIGHT them all, but we pretty well got the better of them, there were a few tight spots in that one though). The finale was destroying Demogorgon. There really isn't a whole lot further to go after that.

Agreed. I GMed a 1st ed AD&D game where the highest level PC was a 15th level fighter. There's just not a lot of scope for meaningful adventuring at that level using the material the game offers.

They claim that an elf is a better wizard than a human and yet the human can gain 9th level spells while the elf could not but then their argument was that "most people in their universe" don't actually play games that high so it must be adopted as a universal concept.

When building a 1st level MU I have to choose between half-elf or human. (I'm putting elves to one side because so as to circumvent the argument about the disutility of not being able to be Raised.) The benefit of being a human is being able to play a wizard above 8th level in 1st ed AD&D (we're talking a half-elf rather than an elf) and above I imaginein 2nd ed AD&D the level cap is higher - I don't have the tables to hand. The benefit of being a half-elf is bonus languages, sleep and charm resistance, and secret-door spotting, all at first level.

The argument is that if I can be close to certain that my character will never actually pass 8th level or so, then this choice involves weighing a purely hypothetical benefit for an actual benefit, and that's not a very hard tradeoff to judge. Half elf wins.

Suppose you can be confident that your campaign will pass 8th level or so, there are still serious issues about the balancing mechanic here. But most AD&D players can't have any such confidence.

Who doesn't go past a certain point? Who are all these people that you are speaking of? Do you have any statistical data to back up your claim? Before you ask me the same I don't need to produce any because I have the rules of the game to back me up.

Yes. I quoted it upthread. It comes from Ryan Dancey's survey data, now more than 10 years old but I think (in part because of that) a fairly reliable guide to AD&D play practices.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

These rules and numbers are virtually identical to 1st ed AD&D. But the game was not designed to be played at those levels, in any meaningful sense of "design": there was no playtesting; the monster manuals contained no foes; the published campaign worlds and cosmologies had no real home for characters of that level. I would argue that the real function of an AD&D archmage is to serve as something like a solo in 4e - a powerful NPC opponent who can hold his/her own against mutiple PCs via the use of spells that were never tested for long-term use by PCs (as became clearer in 3E, when those spells actually did start to see widespread PC use).

I think this is obviously true. The game wasn't designed for levels above name or so - those tables were just cobbled together. I mean, look at the rationale for the progression from Grand Druid to Heirophant costing 3,000,000 XP - words to the effect of "The role of Grand Druid is generally unexciting to anyone but bureaucrats and politicians, and 3,000,000 XP of such activity will be enough for anyone." That's not game design in any meaningful sense, it's just slapping down an arbitrary number!

Agreed. I GMed a 1st ed AD&D game where the highest level PC was a 15th level fighter. There's just not a lot of scope for meaningful adventuring at that level using the material the game offers.

When building a 1st level MU I have to choose between half-elf or human. (I'm putting elves to one side because so as to circumvent the argument about the disutility of not being able to be Raised.) The benefit of being a human is being able to play a wizard above 8th level in 1st ed AD&D (we're talking a half-elf rather than an elf) and above I imaginein 2nd ed AD&D the level cap is higher - I don't have the tables to hand. The benefit of being a half-elf is bonus languages, sleep and charm resistance, and secret-door spotting, all at first level.

The argument is that if I can be close to certain that my character will never actually pass 8th level or so, then this choice involves weighing a purely hypothetical benefit for an actual benefit, and that's not a very hard tradeoff to judge. Half elf wins.

Suppose you can be confident that your campaign will pass 8th level or so, there are still serious issues about the balancing mechanic here. But most AD&D players can't have any such confidence.

Yes. I quoted it upthread. It comes from Ryan Dancey's survey data, now more than 10 years old but I think (in part because of that) a fairly reliable guide to AD&D play practices.

Seriously! You actually sit there and try to justify your claim with a Ryan Dancey survey?

I'm sorry but you are going to have to do better than that for validation.

His survey in no way represents the majority of gamers.

 

[pemerton]

Seriously! You actually sit there and try to justify your claim with a Ryan Dancey survey?

Yes. This was the market research that WotC did that underpinned the design and launch of 3E. As far as I know it is still the only publicly-released market research data into RPG playing and purchasing. Assuming the methodology was sound, then in fact it does represent the majority of gamers. That's the nature and purpose of market research data collection.

What makes you think it is flawed?

 

[billd91]

Yes. This was the market research that WotC did that underpinned the design and launch of 3E. As far as I know it is still the only publicly-released market research data into RPG playing and purchasing. Assuming the methodology was sound, then in fact it does represent the majority of gamers. That's the nature and purpose of market research data collection.

What makes you think it is flawed?

It arbitrarily decided to cut off gamers over 35 which biases the results. The posted summary also doesn't really get to the information we really want, limiting the inferences we can make from it. That's less a function of the survey, I suspect, than it is a limitation of the excerpt we have been given.

 

[pemerton]

It arbitrarily decided to cut off gamers over 35 which biases the results.

In what way, though. I don't know of any particular reason to think that such players have higher level characters, and are such a big part of the community as to outweight what was published.

The posted summary also doesn't really get to the information we really want

Seriously? With average sessions between restarts at 20 even for those playing more than 5 years, you are contending that we can't be fairly confident that most AD&D play didn't happen above name level?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

*must spread XP radda radda*

Thank you very much for actually pointing that out.

One other thing anyway. What's the level 20 cap have to do with anything anyway? If you want to go that route then it helps my case even more because it could mean that a human will just keep on going while an elf will not.

Well you stated there was a designed-in assumption in D&D, and I don't recall you stating that originally was even 2e specific, though you probably meant that. My reaction to that was that in fact the game had no level limit. The significance of this would if you had such a limit in the old days then it would imply that the designers of the game envisaged a fully playable game that would normally progress to that level, such as the way 4e works, where at least ideally you play 1-30 and presumably some amount of consideration went into making all levels playable. In fact, I believe, AD&D was simply open-ended and thus effectively higher and higher levels were simply less and less considered something that PCs would use. Certainly it was thought likely characters would often reach level 12, but the character of the game DOES start to change at that point. Only the Assassin and Monk have irregular progression beyond 14th, the Druid ends there entirely. Clerics and magic-users gain spells, but most of those spells were originally in OD&D and its supplements marked 'beyond level 6 NPC-only magic'. As I said before Arneson and Gygax both are known to have only had literally a tiny number of PCs ever reach those levels in long years of play.

My personal feeling is that AD&D was designed to center around the levels 6-12 where character options are wide but limited, the combat system produces fairly interesting results most of the time, the vast majority of monsters are interesting challenges, etc. Levels 1-5 are a sort of survival gauntlet and 13+ are basically semi-retirement beyond name level zone where your main character only gets trotted out when everyone gets bored and wants a change of pace. It sounds like Greyhawk had a sort of high level world-spanning political meta-plot at one point that involved the various super high level PCs going against each other.

All this just means that it wasn't entirely unheard-of to play high level, we all did it once or twice, but frankly AD&D did a horrible job of it. BECMI at least had a more interesting built-in set of goals and things that made high level a sort of mini-game of its own, but it was still pretty silly from the standpoint of adventuring. Did level limits mean anything? Sure they did, but several of them were high enough that in a practical sense they weren't a huge concern.

I'll just say this too, having talked to some of the guys that played with Gary, he hated demi-humans. In fact if you examine the names of famous Greyhawk PCs/NPCs ZERO of them are demi-human. Old Geezer said something like there was exactly ONE elf and ONE dwarf that were ever played in Gary's game. IMHO he just set the level limits to stop players from pestering him about playing something he didn't really want them to play. Clearly in later years he must have felt less strongly about it, since UA clearly shows that he was generally more interested in higher powered and more diverse characters by that point.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Hiya



For me, we (me and my original group) got characters to level 16 - 21 only once. In my multiple-decades of playing AD&D 1e, we typically got to around levels 7 to 10, but a handful of times (less than 5, easy) have had characters hit 12 to 14.

IME, talking to other DM's and groups of 1e/2e, I'd estimate the average "high level" character being somewhere around levels 12 to 15. The "Monty Haul" (that's what we called them back in the day...) campaigns and characters were so obvious it was laughable (re: 39th level wizards, 41st level fighters, 26/24/28 level F/MU/T...all with multiple artifacts, etc...). That's one thing I miss about 1e/2e...when you asked a player about his favorite, highest level character and he says "Thangaar, 14th level Fighter Lord", you can be pretty sure he's not a Monty Hauler; if he says "Thangaar, 33rd level Samurai Emperor of the Mortal Planes", you can be pretty sure he IS a Monty Hauler.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

YUP! That was totally my experience. I've run the same campaign world since those days and no PC in that setting has ever cracked 16th level. ONE hit 16th and maybe half a dozen total ever cracked 12th (not including 4e PCs where I consider the level scaling a bit differently and we actually have gone all the way up). The 4-5 other DMs I played with extensively enough to have mature campaigns likewise, and I personally had IIRC 3 or maybe 4 PCs that ever broke name level. One of my friends DID run a super crazy 'anything goes' game where he and all his college buddies got up to level 25+ and had every artifact, etc. He used those characters as the gods for his later campaign we all played in and it was all a big funny joke where we'd way "Well, we'll just get FM and Triborb to come with us!" and everyone would laugh. Once in a while they'd show up and provide a plot hook or something.

 

[billd91]

Seriously? With average sessions between restarts at 20 even for those playing more than 5 years, you are contending that we can't be fairly confident that most AD&D play didn't happen above name level?

Yes. What level did they start at? People have been starting campaigns above 1st level since the 1e days. There isn't enough information to infer the levels they end at with any reliability.

 

[SkidAce]

We had maybe one campaign out of five or so as I traveled around with the military where we started at name level so we could be rulers and demi-gods.

Not saying that is a representative statistic of any kind...just that there are many viewpoints and uses for the game rules far wider than our particular viewpoints would lead us to believe.

Re: my signature block. (well not my quote...hehe...but the other two.)