Dragonlance "You walk down the road, party is now level 2."

[DarkCrisis]

I never considered this, but actually like this idea a lot and am probably going to steal it to use someday.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

That's just it: the PCs should, before their first adventure, be farmers and blacksmiths and (rarely!) reigning monarchs; and be defined more by that than by their nascent class which they're only just starting in.

They were ordinary. But now they’re not. Now they’re adventurers, and thus important enough for the D&D camera to focus on them. If they were farmers or nobles, the Farming Simulator or Crusader Kings camera would be focusing on them instead.

Metagame dynamics, mostly. Not the characters' fault.

A character that refuses to adventure in an adventuring game would be just as out of place in D&D as a murderhobo adventurer would be in Animal Crossing. Characters should be designed with the game in mind.

They certainly can be just anyone, and the "reason for adventuring" can be as simple as the adventure comes to them whether they like it or not; and there's a hundred different ways (some of which aren't even railroads!) to set this paradigm up as the start of a campaign if so desired.

PCs at some point were anyone. My point is that they’re not anymore. An adventurer with the Farmer background isn’t a farmer. You’re not playing a farming game, you’re playing an adventuring game. The former farmer at some point stopped being an NPC farmer and becomes a character with narrative and mechanical power in the game. If the PC retires and goes back to being a farmer, or priest, or noble, the game stops focusing on them and they’re no longer an active part of the game.

The way I see it, the character you just rolled up was and still is a random person in that world, though perhaps a bit more skilled than most in some way, that for some reason we're going to pay attention to for a while.

IMO, “random people in the world” can’t do what the players do. Random people don’t gain XP and levels. Random people don’t follow the same rules or get the same mechanics. They have the potential to, if they were to become important characters. And narratively important NPCs will have features comparable to the PCs’, but a butcher won’t get more HP and damage if he kills enough chickens and a Priest/Mage NPC can get more powerful spells without killing anything.

 

[el-remmen]

This is a tangent. But I really don’t like the “camera” analogy or thinking of D&D as a movie or TV show with those kind of beats. In fact, what I like about playing D&D (and many, but not all RPGs) is how it can subvert the expectations of narrative and character through randomness and player agency.

 

[aco175]

Most backgrounds mention that your character has some sort of experience. You're a soldier. You saved your village. You've had schooling.

You aren't a fresh daisy.

The PC's are special.

 

[Lanefan]

I am not a character in a game focused around adventuring. D&D characters aren’t born, they’re created to fill a very specific role. If the adventuring party isn’t inherently “special” in some way and the camera could focus on anyone in the setting, why doesn’t it focus on employed workers, nobles, priests, or beggars?

Because you players just happened to roll up these particular workers, nobles, priests, and beggars; which means that's who we're going to focus on for now as they either a) make their way from those origins to becoming fighters, mages, clerics, and rogues or b) die trying.

A PC could have formerly been a laborer, or an acolyte/priest, or an urchin, or the scion of a noble house, but they’re not anymore. Somewhere in their background they must cross the threshold and stop being a “standard background NPC” and become an “interesting main character.”

To the bolded: I categorically reject this separation of PC from setting.

That threshold is crossed when they go out on their first adventure. Also, some of those background NPCs are adventurers in their own right.

 

[Lanefan]

I would assume your DM would have you just be THE Paladin of Thor. The Current Slayer.

Leading to a career of endlessly having to fight off those who would seek to take my place as Thor's chosen?

Fine - in fact, potentially quite cool - if I'm the only player. Boring as hell for anyone else, though.

 

[Lanefan]

IMO, “random people in the world” can’t do what the players do. Random people don’t gain XP and levels.

Yes they do, or can if they want to.

Random people don’t follow the same rules or get the same mechanics.

Yes they do, or most certainly should. Otherwise the actual PCs become far too divorced from their setting for my liking.

They have the potential to, if they were to become important characters. And narratively important NPCs will have features comparable to the PCs’,

The relative narrative importance of one NPC over another doesn't change their underlying "mechanics", nor should it.

but a butcher won’t get more HP and damage if he kills enough chickens and a Priest/Mage NPC can get more powerful spells without killing anything.

A butcher will, over time, become better at killing chickens and may be able to translate those skills into killing other things, i.e. he very very slowly self-trains his way into becomeing a 0th-level warrior of some sort. Or not, if said butcher only ever gets so proficient at killing chickens and for whatever reason stalls there i.e. has risen to highest-possible personal level of competence in that arena and might be better off doing something else.

Assuming the bolded "can" was supposed to be "can't", I again disagree. There's no logical reason why stay-at-home mages and clerics can't gain abilities (expressed as levels) as they go along; with the big difference being the rate of gain: adventurers level up every time they sneeze while a stay-at-home might only gain a level every several years.

 

[AnotherGuy]

To be frank D&D hasn't matured in some areas, and this thread highlights a very old problem. which is the stark difference of power between levels.

The solution should be that Levels should expand versatility while the increase in real power should be represented by Tiers.

Then it wouldn't matter that a 20 year old was level 5 or level 8, because they'd still be Tier 1.
Then you could also do some interesting things with age and skills, you could use Tiers to define Low or High Magic campaigns...etc I mean the ideas just write themselves.

One day WotC will catch-up, I'm sure of it!

 

[MerricB]

I recently posted on Bluesky that in 5E you could call Level 1 "Level 0" and Level 2 "Level 1/2", and then level 3 becomes level 1 - because there was an expectation that experienced players would start at level 3.

And then apparently Mike Mearls had already had the same idea for his new RPG (something similar at least!)

Levels 1 & 2 are there to teach new players the mechanics of their class slowly. (This is somewhat ruined by 2024 and weapon masteries).

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It has long been an annoyance of mine the 5E published adventures that really speed through level 1. This is not universally true.

The level 1 sections in Lost Mine of Phandelver and Waterdeep: Dragon Heist are lengthy and significant. You can do them in a 4-hour session, but it's a session packed with incident. The new players get a lot of things to do and get to experience their characters before they gain a level.

Meanwhile, in adventures like Descent into Avernus the level 1 portion becomes One Giant Fight and then the characters gain a level. It feels really wrong.

I don't mind level one only being one session. I do mind it when it isn't even that!

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You'll find a lot of the published campaign adventures (especially in the early days) start at level 3 or 5. And then they have a very speedy "get people to that level" section. These sections tend to annoy me (e.g. Death House) not because they're bad adventures, but because they tend to throw the storytelling of the main adventure off.

Storm King's Thunder begins at level 5. Why was level 5 a good level to start? Because it's where Lost Mine of Phandelver ends! (I much prefer running Lost Mine before SKT - the included introduction to SKT, A Great Upheaval, mucks up the storytelling too much, despite having a really good level 1 & 2 section).

Curse of Strahd and Princes of the Apocalypse begin at level 3. And that's for those experienced players who just start at those levels, since they don't need to go through the learning experience of the "apprentice" levels again.

(Once again, neither have a great level 1-2 intro section - at least, it doesn't integrate well with the later experience. I rather enjoy running Death House, but find it tonally very wrong with Curse of Strahd as a whole. Give me the Burgomeister's letter introduction any day!)

Anyway, that's a lot of the historical design & adventure context around level 1-2 in 5E!

 

[tetrasodium]

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IMO, “random people in the world” can’t do what the players do. Random people don’t gain XP and levels. Random people don’t follow the same rules or get the same mechanics. They have the potential to, if they were to become important characters. And narratively important NPCs will have features comparable to the PCs’, but a butcher won’t get more HP and damage if he kills enough chickens and a Priest/Mage NPC can get more powerful spells without killing anything.

That doesn't result in any of the d&d setting have where the split is as extreme as it is I'm 5e. PCs in 5e are practically vitrumites§ but more extreme because they are the same species. That's important because there is a genre of fiction that has such an extreme split (wuxia/cultivation) and that split tends to shape society to the point where you have cultivators and "mortals" or similar with mortal lives being cheat to the point where it's practically the norm for cultivators to casually kill mortals lik be insects over the smallest of slights.

§ alien race from Amazon prime show called "invincible". Kinda like krypton Liam's (is superman) but more interested in galactic conquest and far less morals.