NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4217636" data-attributes="member: 40961">Suppose I started a 3e campaign where all the characters were juvenile dragons.  As such, they started out with multiple hit dice, multiple attacks, breath weapons, high ability scores, spell like abilities, and the ability to fly.And in context, most NPCs were other, much, much larger dragons, or monsters capable of seriously threatening an adult dragon.Would this mean that my campaign was incapable of modeling a plot arc where the characters start weak and grow to achieve power?  Of course not.There seem to be 3 objections to 4e's ability to model weak characters.  1. Amount of hit points, 2. At will instead of spell slot magic, 3. Everyone has wacky powers.  The above adequately responds to all of those things.In the meantime, there are a few very important ways in which 4e more effectively models low level characters.Take a look at monster stats, and compare them to PCs.  Specifically, look at what level a PC is expected to be when they first fight a particular monster.The below is formatted as Monster/3e CR of basic version/4e Level of basic version.Kobolds/.25/1Goblins/.333/2Hobgoblins/.5/3Orcs/.5/4I would put human guards in here, but I only have the SRD right now, and I forget their CR.  I know you fight them at about level 1 if you like, and in 4e, a generic human guard racks up at Level 3.Notice something?  In the context of their gameworld, level 1 4e pcs are less competent than level 1 3e pcs.This doesn't prove that characters start out as dirt farmers or anything, obviously they start out with enough training to do interesting things.  If you want to play a game where characters start out with literally nothing, then learn the abilities that define them in combat, 4e doesn't give you that out of the box.But 1) neither did 3e, and 2) the fact that it doesn't is COMPLETELY unrelated to things like amount of HP, or the nature of the magic system.</blockquote>

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