D&D General How important is leveling to the play experience (lvls 2-8)?

[Baron Opal II]

Because leveling in D&D is the current method for improvement, it is essential unless you replace it with a different method. There are games as you mention were improvement is based on purchasing better abilities via XP or karma or whatever, others have you roll for improvement if you accomplish something significant, etc.

I've developed an L12 variant, based on the E6 idea, but stopping at level 12 and 6th level spells. It is, for many, the peak of heroic before you are really getting into super heroic.

Although my game runs off of an AD&D foundation, I've adopted a 12 level scheme myself. While I used to run, and enjoy, high level D&D I find that I don't play enough to get to those levels anymore. Having a scheme of 12 levels plus bennies has become more useful for me.

As to leveling in general, I feel that it is necessary for a D&D game, particularly in a class based system. If there wasn't any leveling, or one or two levels at most, I would be surprised if it wasn't a planned short campaign. Maybe 5-6 sessions. Otherwise I would expect there to be relatively quick levelling at first, slowing down at 5th, crawling at 9th.

 

[overgeeked]

If you're doing a "Journeyman to Hero" campaign (as opposed to "Zero to Superhero"), how important is the actual leveling to the feel of playing D&D?

As others have said, it's not the levels per se that are important, rather it's the feeling of progress. I like E6 even in 5E. (I cannot wait for 6E so we can have 6EE6 or E66E.)

I don't need levels, but I need to be able to have progress be explicit. I prefer diegetic over non-diegetic everything but especially rewards and advancement. So gaining a reputation in the fantasy world or finding an ancient artifact or finding a scroll with a new spell on it rather than collecting enough meta-currency (XP) to reach a certain meta-threshold (XP to level) then suddenly being handed a pile of non-diegetic rewards. Which is why I do XP for gold spent on in-world stuff that doesn't go on your character sheet. I also require training time and other in-fiction levers to be pulled before characters advance. Going out and grinding XP to level and dinging whilst in the wilds and automatically gaining abilities, spells, etc is the antithesis of what I want from a game.

Would it still feel like DnD to you if you started at 2nd or 3rd level (whatever it takes to have the archetype and not be totally squishy) and made everything after that buying new improvements? Say, gradually moving you up to say 6th level plateauing, where what's available to buy with xp depends on your initial class and what you've bought before (like feat chains).

Yes, it would. Because despite what some other people's preferences are, my preferences aren't centered on using the RAW, the whole RAW, and nothing but the RAW. It's still D&D if you start at zero level and never advance. It's still D&D if you start at 2nd and advance to 6th and stop there. Though I would feel increasingly ill-at-ease if there's literally no progress made in any in-fiction fashion after that. Building castles and keeps, finding new magic items and spells, etc. I'd still want that stuff because that's part of the fun. But levels as written? Nah.

 

[Lanefan]

In my campaigns, there are often months, if not years between levels after level 2 or so.

Months/years in-game or months/years at-table?

I explain it as downtime training, random minor adventures that don't impact the overall story line and so on.

On the other hand even though I plan on going all the way to 20th in my current campaign, I generally prefer lower levels both as a DM and a player. I like, for lack of a better term, smaller worlds and smaller influence. The stories I spin, the connections I build at lower levels always feel far more personal. At a certain point you almost need something earth shaking to justify what you have to throw at PCs. This generally involves travel to other planes, invasions, some kind of catastrophe.

The more I get away from that friendly neighborhood adventurer theme, the less connected I feel to the world I built. Heck, some of my favorite campaigns (played and DMed) had the PCs starting out as kids with little or no offensive capability where the big bad monster was a single giant rat and most big fights involved snowballs.

But I also get enjoyment out of seeing growth and drool over all the cool things I'll get to do someday.

I second all this.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I second all this.

I didn't think there was much I'd agree with Lanefan and Oofta about - but that more intimate surroundings are more interesting are definitely somewhere we do all agree.

 

[Maxperson]

If I'm working on a detailed campaign world, one of the things I struggle with is how it all fits together reasonably in a world that goes from the 1st level zeros to the 20th level super heroes. So I really like the e6 idea (in 3.5, say, you advance to 6th level as usual and then only get feats after that - gradually moving up the equivalent of a couple of levels in power as you plateau). This gives a world where the standard "medieval" feel still makes vague sense and fits with some of the inspirational fiction that starts after the main character has some experience and where the main point isn't them advancing in prowess.

And so, I spend an inordinate amount of time wondering about how to craft the ideal e6 (and then the project is put on pause, and then 5e comes out and...)

Anyway, I reread Gamma World 1e the other night for the first time in several decades and had forgotten its advancent doesn't really have levels. You just rolled a die to get randomly accrued bonuses one at a time as you got the xp that would level you in DnD. [Edit: the big idea for me here is the one at a time,.and not the random]. And then I remember how the advancement in WoD 2e went, where you can use the xp to improve individual attributes, abilities, and powers that you chose.

And so finally I get to the question:

If you're doing a "Journeyman to Hero" campaign (as opposed to "Zero to Superhero"), how important is the actual leveling to the feel of playing D&D?

Would it still feel like DnD to you if you started at 2nd or 3rd level (whatever it takes to have the archetype and not be totally squishy) and made everything after that buying new improvements? Say, gradually moving you up to say 6th level plateauing, where what's available to buy with xp depends on your initial class and what you've bought before (like feat chains).

If you really like the starting at 0, imagine the rules for that have slightly slower advancement than now to get you to the 2/3 journeyman stage and then what I sketch above kicks in.

For me the important part is the feel of advancement. Whether it's incrementally increasing attributes, powers, etc. or levelling and getting them in clumps doesn't matter to me. No advancement or slow advancement doesn't cut it for me.

 

[Oofta]

Months/years in-game or months/years at-table?

Yes. My longest single campaign was somewhere around 5 years. I have a peristant world (with occasional crossover or PC as NPC) so you could say decades.

 

[Lanefan]

I think the question to ask yourself before asking the question in the thread title is "How important is levelling to your players?".

By this I mean there's a large cohort of players out there who see levelling-up as the main motivator to keep playing the game, and they want those levels to come fast and often and mean something when they do. If you've got some of these then a system that reduces both the impact and frequency of levelling probably isn't going to go over very well.

There's also a large cohort of players who, like me, largely see levelling-up as merely a pleasant side-effect of continued play; and though we'd miss it if it wasn't there it's not all that important in the grand scheme of things. Level-bumping once or twice a year is enough. If your players are of this mindset then your ideas might have found fertile ground.

Most players probably fall somewhere between the two groups noted above.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes. My longest single campaign was somewhere around 5 years. I have a peristant world (with occasional crossover or PC as NPC) so you could say decades.

You answered 'yes' to a question with an 'or' in it - does that mean both are true?

 

[Cadence]

I think the question to ask yourself before asking the question in the thread title is "How important is levelling to your players?".

By this I mean there's a large cohort of players out there who see levelling-up as the main motivator to keep playing the game, and they want those levels to come fast and often and mean something when they do. If you've got some of these then a system that reduces both the impact and frequency of levelling probably isn't going to go over very well.

There's also a large cohort of players who, like me, largely see levelling-up as merely a pleasant side-effect of continued play; and though we'd miss it if it wasn't there it's not all that important in the grand scheme of things. Level-bumping once or twice a year is enough. If your players are of this mindset then your ideas might have found fertile ground.

Most players probably fall somewhere between the two groups noted above.

This feels like a bit like a different side of the session 0/game selling thing from the available choice of races thing. In that one they'll know right away if the racial resyrictions weren't their cup of tea, with this they won't know if slower and fine grained (as opposed to faster and in chunks) annoys them til they've been at it awhile.

 

[DND_Reborn]

You answered 'yes' to a question with an 'or' in it - does that mean both are true?

A close friend of mine (non-native English speaker) does this ALL the time... I ask her an "or" question, and she replies, "Aha".