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="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7029577" data-attributes="member: 996">D&D does mostly fail to emulate heroic tales in book & movie. Even anti-heroes are still heroes, and I question that those two are that far from the traditional heroic mold in what they accomplish and how they go about it.  It's mainly the writing of their stories that was a departure from the classics of fantasy.  Sex, violence, & moral ambiguity, not them being killed by kobolds at 1st level, distinguished Lieber's heroes from the more traditional kind. Right, not the heroes of their own story, but the dire warnings in the actual heroes' stories. Decompose? Niche protection is not the only way to do that - and 'that' BTW, is balance - nor is it a good way to do it.  It's just one of many mechanisms tossed out in the early game when no one really had any idea how to balance RPGs.  It did not work at all well, and 5e has not forgotten all the lessons of those early failures in it's rush to evoke the <s>fad</s> feel of the early game.  As I pointed out, niche protection is already quite dead in 5e.   I suppose that's what Clerics or Druids have asked themselves.  That and "How can we work 'zilla' into this strained but obvious reference to 3.5 Tier-1 caster dominance?"  ;P  Though, with some token attempt at seriousness, the answer was rarely 'nothing,' nor even 'carrying our vast collection of wands/staffs/rods.'  There are always 'warm body' uses to put even the most benighted PC to - especially in 5e where a warm body rolling a natural 20 can do just about anything an Expert rolling a 2 could. 'Synergy' is probably a nicer way of putting it than interdependence, but yes, it's nice if everyone doesn't just take turns contributing some of the time, but actually all participate most of the time.  Not that turn based initiative exactly sets the stage for that... (whole 'nuther kettle of wyrms). Low level could be a bit wobbly, too, in a different way.  D&D has generally had a sweet spot, and it's bounds were always debatable: The classic game (yes, I'm lumping 3+ editions and two 'prongs' together), it started once even the weaker (but not appallingly unluck) PCs became a bit survivable and could contribute a bit more often, maybe as low as 3rd (ish, a single-class Thief for instance might easily be 4th or even 5th by the time the last PC was 3rd in at least one class) and trailed off as magic got out of control (as early as 5th or possibly even 4th level spells becoming available, certainly by 12th level or so).  3e beefed up low-level characters nicely, so was positively playable as early as 2nd or even, arguably 1st - but it also went south the moment Polymorph was on the table (nor only that).  E6 neatly kept 3.5 in that sweet spot.  Though, IMHO, with enough player restraint, 3.x could hold together into the low double-digits.  5e definitely has the old '1st level problem' (though, like all old problems, it's also a classic-feel feature), but it also has a clever expedient in that you're barely 1st level for any time at all, you can easily be 2nd by the end of the first session!  That exp advancement continues through 3rd or 4th, taking you out of 'Apprentice Tier' and into the sweet spot.  Advancement then slows until sometime in the early double-digits, so clearly whoever wrote those exp tables thought the sweet spot started around 4th and continued to at least 10th (and published adventures go as high as 15th, so there's an outer bound of what they might think is still reasonably playable).   I feel like the sweet spot starts at 3rd, myself.  I haven't explored the opposite limit, at all.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />While whole-party viability is the culprit at 1st level, beyond that it's balance - both class balance and as ogre mage alluded to, encounter balance - that makes it increasingly difficult to keep the game from 'wobbling' as your party rises in level. Sounds about right, the two longest (whole run, from 2000 to 2008) made it to 14th (though there was no actually play /at/ 14th in one of them) and we'd been feeling the cracks for a while, in spite of having a very nice non-powergamey group for the most part.  I've run an informal campaign into Epic, and played at all levels - class balance holds up at all levels, encounter balance holds up if you use MM3 style monsters.  But, the tone changes* and the bar for system mastery edges up going into Paragon and Epic (especially pre-Essentials eClasses mostly have more constrained choices, and clear default paths), so even in 4e, there's reason, if mainly of taste, to prefer Heroic Tier play. Just about the time exp advancement has started to speed up again.  Thanks for the supporting data point!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />* actually it doesn't have to:  you can go on playing Paragon and Epic Tier just like you did Heroic Tier, it's just more and more likely to get boring.</blockquote>

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