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="mmadsen" data-source="post: 3304422" data-attributes="member: 1645">Ostensibly, experience points represent useful experience, from facing real challenges, the kind of experience real people learn from.  Levels, of course, diverge quite a bit from how real people learn and improve in real life, not so much because they tie many separate skills together, but because they involve all the oddness of hit points and magical powers.I haven't seen anything so extreme, but real-life soldiers become dramatically more effective after a few weeks in combat:<img src="http://www.killology.com/images/Tbl1p1482.JPG" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />Certainly some of it is selection rather than experience, but fighter pilots who survive their first engagement are dramatically more likely to survive their second.In fantasy, we have the canonical example of the hobbits returning to the shire ready and able to take on Sharky's men -- they've gone up a few levels, and without even beating 13 EL-appropriate foes...I guess that might be a practical problem, but I don't see it as a verisimilitude problem.  Lancelot looks like any other knight.  When the knight wearing no coat-of-arms at the tournament keeps knocking everyone around, you start to wonder, Is that Lancelot?Do we need the game system to spell that out?  At any rate, plenty of stories have the retired hero shake of the rust and demonstrate just what a hero he used to be.Sure, but I think something like a level cap or slower advancement at higher levels makes more sense than no advancement at all.  We don't notice Aragorn getting any better at anything, even if the hobbits grow (sometimes literally) throughout the epic.If they started out at a high enough level, I think it would be fine.  If they never reached the point where they could take on a half-dozen hobgoblins, it wouldn't be.I don't think it would be realistic without the disparities in skill.  In real life a master swordsman is much, much better than a novice.Adventuring isn't a union job, and real-life people grow and improve only with challenging experiences.  A young, motivated learner can gain enough skill to surpass an old, unmotivated worker, even though they are at the same job.</blockquote>

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