D&D General A History of Violence: Killing in D&D

[Lanefan]

This is why I still like 2e and OSR for the magic loot, but I think that makes sense. 5e really doesn’t need magic items - your character gets its uniqueness and power from the class abilities. In earlier games, you got that from the magic items. By the same token, I hear much more often from players about whether taking on a side quest or an encounter is worth the effort in 5e (again with milestone leveling). In 2e, if you don’t adventure, you don’t level and more importantly, you miss out on magic items. IME, that’s less of a thing with 5e.

Which, if true (and I think it is), is IMO a major negative of 5e.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Given there are games that get by without either of those first two, want to rephrase that?

For D&D style games they are necessary abstractions. It's a level-based system.

 

[Guest 85555]

This exploration of the nuances of the word 'necessary' has been an intriguing detour

 

[Lanefan]

Notably, many game systems do advancement on a strict per session basis.

Which, while making the DM's bookkeeping easy, doesn't incentivize anything other than showing up; and doesn't even incentivize that if it's character-in-play sessions being counted rather than player-at-table sessions. It doesn't incentivize adventuring, it doesn't incentivize risk-taking*, and it doesn't incentivize advancing the story.

Taken to a silly (but very plausible) extreme: the characters could advance in level by spending several sessions just sitting around at the farm telling war stories as freeform roleplay.

* - in fact, it actively and strongly disincentivizes risk-taking: if you're going to gain levels at the same rate anyway, why stick your neck out?

 

[KYRON45]

Which, while making the DM's bookkeeping easy, doesn't incentivize anything other than showing up; and doesn't even incentivize that if it's character-in-play sessions being counted rather than player-at-table sessions. It doesn't incentivize adventuring, it doesn't incentivize risk-taking*, and it doesn't incentivize advancing the story.

Taken to a silly (but very plausible) extreme: the characters could advance in level by spending several sessions just sitting around at the farm telling war stories as freeform roleplay.

* - in fact, it actively and strongly disincentivizes risk-taking: if you're going to gain levels at the same rate anyway, why stick your neck out?

Some people just play games because the playing of the game is fun.

 

[Micah Sweet]

not really.

what level is your character in World of Darkness?

Read the above post. This is in a D&D thread.

 

[Lanefan]

I mean, the best uses of milestone leveling (ie, not just "we finished this chapter of AP, guess it's time to level). Curse of Strahd gives (admittedly limited) advice to this effect. Leveling is tied to major accomplishments, which certainly feels (imo) more tangible and less arbitrary than killing enough orcs to roll the counter up.

Which works for Curse of Strahd or any other hard-coded adventure path as those major accomplishments are easy to define within the path's storyline and can, as noted, even be written right into the module.

What it doesn't work for is a more open-ended or sandbox-y type of campaign where those accomplishment points aren't so easy to define and-or may never be achieved if the party decide to side-trek into doing something else; or where the adventures are more stand-alone and not necessarily always connected/related to each other.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Most RPGs out there don't use levels, so, no they are not necessary.

Some games out there don't even have an analog for XP.

Heck, some games don't even have power advancement as a major element of play.

None of those are D&D (the subject of this thread) see above.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which, while making the DM's bookkeeping easy, doesn't incentivize anything other than showing up; and doesn't even incentivize that if it's character-in-play sessions being counted rather than player-at-table sessions. It doesn't incentivize adventuring, it doesn't incentivize risk-taking*, and it doesn't incentivize advancing the story.

Taken to a silly (but very plausible) extreme: the characters could advance in level by spending several sessions just sitting around at the farm telling war stories as freeform roleplay.

* - in fact, it actively and strongly disincentivizes risk-taking: if you're going to gain levels at the same rate anyway, why stick your neck out?

Exactly what I was saying.

 

[Mannahnin]

Which, while making the DM's bookkeeping easy, doesn't incentivize anything other than showing up; and doesn't even incentivize that if it's character-in-play sessions being counted rather than player-at-table sessions. It doesn't incentivize adventuring, it doesn't incentivize risk-taking*, and it doesn't incentivize advancing the story.

Taken to a silly (but very plausible) extreme: the characters could advance in level by spending several sessions just sitting around at the farm telling war stories as freeform roleplay.

* - in fact, it actively and strongly disincentivizes risk-taking: if you're going to gain levels at the same rate anyway, why stick your neck out?

I've seen you do this a bunch of times and people explain it to you many times. Most players we know have zero interest in sitting around town doing nothing. They want to play the game and go on adventures.

Assuming that players want to play the game and actively do heroic stuff (whether given XP or milestone leveling) is a near-universal expectation to the extent that your assumptions on this particular area of player motivation are clearly more the exception than the rule.

I personally like XP, but I didn't change my behavior in a friend's Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign just because he was running milestone leveling, and as far as I could observe, neither did anyone else. To some extent milestone leveling could be argued to better support verisimilitude, because the group focused on our objectives and character interests, and weren't incentivized to try to take on extraneous encounters or clear out rooms just because they'd be worth more xp.