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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 2830672" data-attributes="member: 63">[hq]Taking a step back for a moment. . .[/hq][hq][/hq]I've got a head ache, so I had to skip the middle 30 posts or so, but I want to weigh in, since I'd never really pinned down my own leveling philosophy until recently.Previously, I'd just level the group whenever I felt they had faced about 13 challenges, or when the plot had hit a nice "We came, we saw, we kicked it's ASS" point. It's always good to tell the players, "Okay, you beat the big bad of this story arc. You level." Let's take a step back and consider what we're trying to accomplish with leveling, shall we? Is the point of gaining levels to:a) make the game more dynamic, so that characters can be changing and the types of challenges can evolve, and so that the players feel like they've 'won' something by playing; orb) reflect how exposure to dangerous circumstances when combined with the proper training causes people to become better at surviving; orc) increase the level of drama by giving the characters more impressive challenges as the story progresses; ord) something else?Basically this comes down to a really rough riff on the old Gamist-Simulationist-Narrativist ideology. Are you trying to make the game fun, trying to create a believable world, or trying to make the story interesting? Obviously all those aspects are involved, but you need to decide which you value most, and craft your leveling system accordingly.I've written up some ideas along those lines, and I'll present them in my next post. The other element of this ruleset equation is the Experience Point issue. In 3e, XP represents training, plus some sort of mystical battery power that you can funnel into magic items to turn them on and spells to cast them. While it would be very daunting to rewrite swaths of the rules in order to alter this paradigm (and indeed, you might have tied that paradigm into the fabric of your game world's magic system), you should at least consider it.You want some way to make magic item creation cost, as well as making powerful spells cost. The simplest way to fix this is to replace it all with a GP cost. According to the PHB (pg. 132, right column), 1 XP is worth 5gp. Maybe all you need to do is offer up items worth X gp in order to create a magic item, or maybe casting wish causes 25,000gp worth of stuff you own to turn to ash.Understandably, the old 'age 5 years' balancing factor for wish in 2e is undesirable. What sort of other balances are there? Rewrite the spells so they don't need to be balanced? Ability burn? Hit point damage? A lot of times when I'm looking for ways to balance D&D rules material, I look to how powerful spells are balanced in Magic: the Gathering, because it has an excellent resource management ruleset.Of course, all of these options might be unsavory because they represent too big of a departure. But I'm interested to hear what you think about them. I'll post more in a minute.</blockquote>

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