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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 9228481" data-attributes="member: 6670763">The very first thing I would do to greatly improve the game and (mostly) everyone's experience with it immediately conflicts with the whole initial premise of taking the game as it actually is and working with that. Which is to lower the level cap from 20th level to 12th level.For the (anecdotally) normal campaign that goes from 1st level to 8th or 10th, that doesn't actually impact what happens in the game very much. But I think it immediately turns the entire game into a considerably smaller mountain to tackle. Throw out all the 5th and 6th level bard spells, the 7th to 9th level cleric, druid, and wizard spells, and the 4th level paladin and ranger spells and forget about them. A few people will miss them, but I think for the vast majority of people that is all material that never will come up anyway. And it's been that way (anecdotally) all the way since AD&D first came out and to this day. Make your super famous archmages and high priests 11th and 12th level. Those are mightily impressive enough and if the campaign runs for so long that the PCs actually reach such levels it will be really cool for everyone involved. And by that time, you can use pretty much any monster in the Monster Manual as a big scary boss monster. Even most of the popular big scary boss monsters will already be left in the dust by a party of four 10th level PCs anyway.One thing that this does is that it communicates to the players that their characters probably will only have three or maybe four feats on their character by the end of the campaign. Creative feat stacking is one of the main things that gets you lost in the Chat Ops weeds.If the campaign does use Prestige Classes, and I think it's really important for every GM to reclaim authority over that aspect of the campaign, then there will really only be room for 1 Prestige Class per character. That means PrCs regain the aspect of being membership in a small and very exclusively group rather than something that you dip into to qualify for another PrC of feat.Speaking of which, I realized literally only yesterday what the purpose of the Multiclass XP penalty and Favored Classes was. What it does is to discourage players from dipping one or two levels in a class to collect their front loaded main abilities. Like 2 feats for 2 fighter levels, or 8+Int skill points for 1 rogue level, which you can all put into a single skill if you do it at a later point.Elves are free to dip wizard, dwarves are free to dip fighter, and halflings are free to dip rogue. Which all seems appropriate to give each race as a whole more character and evoke their niche.But I have to say, in the good 7 or 8 years that I had been casually hanging around Char Op subforums, I am pretty sure I have never seen anyone even mention that Multiclass XP penalties could be a factor. This was something that was in the rule, everyone saw once and thought it was stupid (because they didn't understood what it was supposed to do?), and immediately became common consensus to completely ignore for the entirety of the game's run.But maybe do enforce it (and remind the players of it in advance, because everyone think it's ignored by default) to put a bit of breaks on the whole Char Ops train that easily runs away from you. In theory, spending time between games on theoretical optimization of your character shouldn't have any negative impact of what actually happens when you play. But in my experience it often does. It's a big part of what I usually call "Searching for the solution to obstacles on your character sheet". And that's what RPGs really should not be about. In combat situations maybe, but overall playing an RPG should not be approached as a math puzzle. You have both a player for every party member and a GM for all the NPCs present who can play all the characters as people. Through complex interactions. It's not a 1980s computer game or choose your own adventure book with dice. I think that for a really enjoyable roleplaying game, players should think of their character sheet as little as possible and imagine the game world as a real place instead. Letting the Char Ops train run away with you is something that I encountered and experienced as one of the big obstacles towards that goal.</blockquote>

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