[D&D Design Discussion] Preserving the "Sweet Spot"

we used to play with a system of giving everyone 3 rolls for hd. you pick the highest. all monsters and enimies get 3=d4 4=d6 6=d8 8=d10 10=d12. It made combat last longer and high level play wasent too bad. at high level thier were never one bbeg. he alwayse had backup.

Wulf Ratbane said:

I was never really a player in 1e. DM only.

Not that that stopped me from playing "solo" and just rolling up random dungeons, combats, and treasure.

Although, even with players, that was often all there was to it.

In those days I don't think I/we measured success by character advancement, per se, but on how many of the old modules were completed.

So, essentially, the campaign was over when the characters advanced beyond the highest level of any of the dungeons I owned (with the top end being either Queen or Tomb).

I don't really think it's all that useful to benchmark my desires as a player now to what engaged me when I was 10, 12, 16...

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Fair enough - I know I didn't really have a style that "gelled" until well into the 2e days. So, let's skip forward to there: how did you measure a successful campaign in 2e? Was it the same as today? Different? How?

GlassJaw said:

If you take a look at the essence of the "challenge" in D&D, it basically boils down to bigger numbers. The players get bigger mods so the "challenges" have to as well and vice versa.

But if the increase in challenge is a linear progression throughout the lifetime of the characters and/or campaign, i.e., the "challenge" is the same regardless of the level of the characters, why is there a need to make the numbers so cumbersomely high?

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I'm not sure that higher numbers are the problem. Many people have noted how quickly Mutants & Masterminds plays, for instance, and there the characters are all superheroes. In D&D, high-level characters don't simply have higher numbers; they have more numbers.

GlassJaw said:

In high-level play, the numbers are much larger overall so the game plays slower. Also, with spells that Wulf mentioned, it becomes more difficult to preserve story elements or even maintain certain plots. For example, just read the outlines of the three Adventure Paths. They all invariably end up with the characters plane-hopping and teleporting as story arcs.

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Yes, certain spells fundamentally change the flavor of the game and render "normal" plots meaningless. Eliminate them from your next campaign.

Redefine -10 hp to be gravely wounded rather than dead, and rename raise dead to cure grave wounds, and you get around the "easy resurrection" problem.

Enkhidu said:

Fair enough - I know I didn't really have a style that "gelled" until well into the 2e days. So, let's skip forward to there: how did you measure a successful campaign in 2e? Was it the same as today? Different? How?

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Hmm. It's been a while.

I was running a game for college buddies. And I know I wasn't really using the 1e adventures all that much.

I don't remember much but two things occur to me:

1) Nobody ever really got "bored" with the campaign...

2) ... despite the fact that I think 2e provided fewer regular cookies.

But then I don't really remember much about the campaign(s).

The only truly memorable experience was running Tomb of Horrors concurrently with another DM at another table on the other side of the room. When you died at one table, you moved over to the other table to keep playing... And we were competing with each other to kill off the one annoying player that nobody wanted at their table.

I don't know if I could seperate out style from circumstance. In 1e, we played largely at lunch with a bunch of schoolmates who didn't really associate outside of school. That really lent itself to the 'run a module' style of play. Sometimes players kept characters from module to module, sometimes they dropped one to play something different. Outside of school, we tended to system hop *a lot*. A game would stay on the radar for a few months, then we'd get bored or someone would get really psyched about some new system, and we'd start over anew.

In college, we gravitated to something more recognizeable as a 'campaign', but that was because we all lived in the same dorm and could get togther to play more often and for much longer at a sitting. The environment promoted continuity. We still system-hopped, but it became easier to run multiple campaigns at once, so that became less disruptive, too.

*sniff* Now I'm getting all weepy and nostalgic for the good old days, when we waited with baited breath for the next module release. *sniff*

I wonder how much real-time pacing plays into the cookie situation. If its 13 encounters between 'cookies', the cookies seem more 'fresh' (to stretch a metaphor) if you're gaining them every 2 weeks realtime instead of every 2 months.

The system we stuck with longest in junior high/high school was SPI''s old DragonQuest, where XP was awarded per every four hours of play-time. The game's advancement system left a lot to be desired in retrospect, but it kept the cookies coming at a regular pace without being overly reliant on combat encounters.

Wulf Ratbane said:

Well, no. To be honest with myself, the reason I want it to stop is because-- under the current rules-- by 20th level I have long since passed the point of actually enjoying the game.

Prolong the sweet spot and I am certainly willing to play indefinitely.

I'm not satisfied with that answer. I am, at heart, a Gamist, I would like to find a Gamist solution that extends infinitely. I am realizing it doesn't exist.

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I guess that's where I was trying to indicate our divergence. All I meant was as long as the sweet spot is there - you're in. I'm willing to play on....

I am willing to sacrifice some of the playability of the game to keep it going - even when the basic gameplay changes significantly.

One of the reasons I came into 3E from WFRP was the ceiling characters always seemed to hit in WFRP. You spend about 3,000 XP in WFRP and that's about all you could do. My players never seemed ready to let go of their characters, but even they could see the writing on the wall and we had numerous retirements. I have some grand schemes about huge campaign arcs taking years to play, but I too am finding a new kind of ceiling in D&D. Really its the sweet spot you are discussing here.

Honestly, I'm starting to believe hitpoints is one of the big culprits.

But, you could be right - it may not be solvable.

I think HP is the biggest problem, easily. Magic can be "capped", so to speak. Limit raise dead to suitably epic moments, limit teleport, whatever, but HP are much more ingrained in thr system. And there comes a point where the only adventure that will make the 250 HP fighter (i've seen it. Dr 17/- as well) actually try is one that involves fighting dragons and pit fiends. And that gets old.
Unfortunatly, I have no idea how to solve the problem other then cutting severly down on HP progression after level one.

As some will remember, in early editions of the game HD were capped.

Wulf Ratbane said:

...I don't remember much but two things occur to me:

1) Nobody ever really got "bored" with the campaign...

2) ... despite the fact that I think 2e provided fewer regular cookies.

But then I don't really remember much about the campaign(s).

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OK - based on this, I can see a few conclusions (you'd have to ask yourself a few more questions to narrow it down further):

1) Your 2e campaign(s) never left the sweet spot for the game.
2) The criteria you use to identify a rewarding RPG experince is different today than it was then.
3) 2e was a better game than 3e for your playing style.

There are, of course, others, but that's a start. To get more specific, I think you'd need to ask yourself questions like "when exactly was the first time I felt dissatisfied with my 3e experience (what level, adventure, etc - I imagine it was during your namesake's adventures through the first adventure path, but when?)," and "what levels did we rise to in 2e?"

Personally, my hunch is that you (like me) yearn for the days of name level, where teleporting, raising the dead, and killing with a word were truly pillar shaking events and PC advancement ground to a slow crawl, but you just don't know it yet.

pogre said:

Honestly, I'm starting to believe hitpoints is one of the big culprits.

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I've felt that way for years, and its one area in which I think 3e went the wrong way. More HPs with stagnant damage leads to longer and eventually interminable fights. Static HP with increased character capabilities leads to TPKs or pushover fights. Increasing HP drastically and increasing character capabilities keeps fights manageable but increases the complexity and the variability.

There is an inverse curve between level and character vulnerability iI think, and there is another line that represents character capabilities. The sweet spot lies around the intersection of the two, at the point where characters are neither liable to die in one swing, nor able to laugh while they jump off the 200' cliff.