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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 5806319" data-attributes="member: 8461">One of my favorite gaming blogs is <a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net" target="_blank">The Alexandrian</a>, and one of my favorite articles over there is <a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/d&d-calibrating.html" target="_blank">D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations</a>. The article talks about a lot of things, but one of the more salient points is that a lot of people head(ed) into 3.X with the expectation of the entire game playing like a low-power/magic, LotR-like fantasy adventure RPG, and then become disillusioned as the game becomes less and less conducive to this style of play as you level up more and more.The article argues that this is a feature, rather than a bug, of the game, and says that rather than trying to "fix" this, it's better to calibrate your expectations to the fact that the game is really only about gritty heroism for the first five levels or so, and that after that you start getting wuxia heroes, superheroes, etc. (Incidentally, it was this that inspired the idea of E6 and capping level advancement before it fully left the "gritty" realm of play).So how does this relate to 5E?Well, the bit about the game transforming from gritty low-level heroes who become wuxia masters and then superheroes isn't how the game played before 3.X (and 4E) - or so I've been told (I haven't heard about many high-level and epic-level 1E and 2E characters).What WotC seems to want to do with 5E is recalibrate D&D's own expectations for itself in order to return to that lower power-level across all of the levels. That is, it wants the gritty feeling to last more than five levels...quite possibly a lot more.From what I've heard here and elsewhere on the internet, a lot of people want that. Or at least, they want some version of that.The thing is, I'm somewhat concerned about what gets lost in the transition. Is there no room for the game having some point where your character has justifiably graduated to being measurably better than ordinary people? Or even so powerful that he's practically a demigod in the campaign world? I'm surprised by how many people seem to think that, to whatever degree, playing a truly powerful character is anathema to what D&D is.5E is framing itself in very positive terms, but I can't help but wonder if a large portion of what it's trying to do is better define what D&D is not.</blockquote>

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