Maldor said:
Do you cap off BAB at +5 and saves at +4 what about HD
Man i don't know about anyone else but i'm tried of low level games it's like all the DM's are afraid to run anything above 10th level.
Yup. BaB gets capped, saves get capped, HD gets capped, everything stops at 6th level. The idea is that the entire world stops leveling at 6th level and you just have a series of feats after that.
Now, by the time the characters have earned enough XP that they'd have normally advanced to 20th level, they'll function much more like 10th level characters, owing to the number of additional feats they have. What you wind up with is characters that have a greater width/breadth in terms of capability, with a relatively slow and minor increase in terms of power.
Maldor said:
Man i don't know about anyone else but i'm tried of low level games it's like all the DM's are afraid to run anything above 10th level.
Weeeeeeell... that's a little bit tricky.
See, there's a large portion of people that absolutely detest when characters move out of the "zero" side of things. It's nothing new. I've seen it for the past 20 years. Their general outlook is that a character is no big deal and should constantly struggle to survive and get anything.
The problem is that with the way that D&D is set up, once you finally manage to get out of that "zero" range of things and move more into the "hero" range, the game becomes a lot more complicated in terms of trying to keep track of things.
You also have additional factors like people wanting things to be "realistic" and trying to reconcile life in a low-tech magic using world with low-tech real earth history. I personally am unsurprised at the difficulties people have making the two match up.
Something that _doesn't_ really get talked about I think is also this myth about how a campaign "should" play out. There's all these hoary old stories floating around about people playing a campaign for 5 years or more, and how they slowly leveled their characters and alllll the greaaaaat times they had. Blah Blah Blah. An important part to this is the thinking that you (as a player) have to earn the right to have a cool character.
Don't believe me?
Try talking about having a group that's had 3 players consistently show up for a game and have played their characters from 1st level up to 8th. There's a 4th player that's much more inconsistent about showing up. Should that 4th player's character still have the same amount of XP and therefore a character of the same level as the 3 that have been there every week? You'll find a vast number of people's response will be "hell no".
In other words, that 4th player hasn't earned the right to have a character as high a level as everyone else.
The reality is that _many_ (I hesitate to say "most" but I think it's a majority) people don't have the kind of time for the kind of campaign that popular gamer lore declares everyone should be experiencing. Additionally, a fair number of people really aren't interested in slogging their way through the low levels of having to run away from rats, before they can run away from orcs, and then run away from trolls, and so forth. By the time they're 8 months or a year into the game, they're still playing characters that suck and they're starting to get bored.
So they start losing interest in the game. They can't be competent without min-maxing, which will bring about all sorts of cries and condemnation from "real roleplayers", so they don't bother investing too much in their characters and treat them more as tactical bits.
Which leads to GMs complaining about how their group doesn't really invest in the game that the GM has worked so hard to make, only want the next shiny powerup, and focus on killing anything and everything they can. Missing the obvious point that generally said GM gives most of the XP for things that are killed. And so GMs think that the solution is to run lower leveled games to try and counter-balance problems stemming from playstyle differences and lack of communication about the expectations the players and GM have about what the game is going to be like and what it's going to be about.
Of course, all that is just _my_ opinion and I also don't think it applies to _everyone_. Not even all the people that like the idea of E6.
Afterall, I really like the idea of E6 _and_ I'm tired of chump characters.
Asurya said:
maybe you're fine with all this but it's quite understandable why some (many) other aren't.
I don't know that "many" people don't like running higher level D&D games for the reasons you state. I think "many" people don't like to because they want to see characters struggle. I think the annoyance with keeping track of the complexity of the game is an additional factor.
Myself for instance. I really don't like additional unnecessary work. I personally like the cap more like E8, but that's a minor detail. From my perspective though, after about 6th/8th level all you've really got is "bigger" and "more". The hit points are bigger, the items are bigger, the stakes are bigger.
But the thing is, it doesn't have to be. People have this mental block that says, "low level means chumps". Low level doesn't have to mean that.
And no, I'm not really talking about that article about how the great heroes of Lord of the Rings were all 4th and 5th level. I couldn't care less, as anything like that is typically used to try and bolster support for low-level-chump-play.
No, I mean that it'd make life a lot more enjoyable for players (and easier for GMs) if instead of people being locked into the zero-to-hero, level-1-to-level-20 style of play that people seem obssesed with, they looked at levels as a "power gauge" and set the gauge and range to what they want.
This makes life easier for the GM too, because they're going to have an idea of the amount of work that goes into making an NPC/creature, and they're going to be able to say "No, I don't want to do more than [x] amount of work."
There's nothing that says a character has to start at 1st level.
Pick a level to start, say that characters can level from that point to some other point, and then cap the game.
_That's_ the brilliance_ behind E6. Ryan's telling people to simply cap the game at a particular level. He found the range that _he_ liked (which happens to be in tune with a bunch of other folks) and then came up with a resonable mechanic that allowed him as a GM to keep things at a managable level while still giving the players something to play around with and look forward to with their characters.
People could just as easily start at level 6, play through to level 10 and cap the game at that point. It's going to produce a rather different feel of game.
There's nothing stopping people from changing the point at which spells cap either. For example, think about what a game might play like if the ability to use magic is only allowed starting at level 5. And the game caps at level 10. It means you wind up with 10th level characters in a world of 3rd level spells and durations. Most casters are going to be some sort of multiclass with a non-caster class. Casters that multiclass with other casting classes are going to be much weaker in terms of power, which has been exchanged for the ability to do a larger variety.
Sorry for the threadjack, but it sometimes annoys me how people grab hold of E6 and try to make it strictly about low powered play. The idea that Ryan put out there _does_ lower powered play like _he_ wanted, but it's capable of a lot more.
I'm running an E8 game. The group started at 3rd level. 2 of them had the ability to teleport in different fashions, and could pull off the trick several times before needing to rest. One of the teleporters is also a golem/warforged. All the party is equipped with magitech devices of different sorts, including guns. They've been kicking ass from the time their sheets came out and the dice hit the table.
If you're one of those folks like Ryan that really likes low level play, hey that's great. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I really don't. It might seem like it from everything else I've written, but that's not the case. It bugs me that every GM I've had for the last 20 years liked that style of play and wanted me to like it. But I've got no problem with other folks like it.
I'm just saying, "Don't miss the potential". Yes, you can run a "low powered" game. But you can also run a much "higher powered" game and still keep things under control. I'm doing it. My monsters/NPCs don't look like the MM ones. I see a stat block and I yawn. Chop those things down to about a quarter and that's the most complicated one I've got. The characters are out there kicking ass, using swords created entirely out of magic energy and gunning down evil sorcerers that plan on taking over the world. But I'm still able to challenge them, and I've come close to killing them a number of times.
E6 changes things from "the leveling game" and gives a very short range of power for _everything_ in the world to operate from. Dragons? Yeah, they're going to look a lot different under E6, since _everything_ in the world is supposed to be following the same guidelines. This means that the GM and the players can shift their focus from what level some adventure/monster/magic item/whatever should be, and allows them to start thinking about what kinds of cool things they can do in the world.
