Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Silveras" data-source="post: 1601411" data-attributes="member: 6271">In a rationally designed, internally coherent setting ? Sure. But, in addition to the "balance all things" mantra, another was "back to the dungeon". The idea that the vast majority of campaigns consist of little more than dungeon-visits-with-occasional-trips-to-town colored a lot of the design. Settlements are primarily "supply dumps" for dungeon crawls, and their functions in normal society are secondary. Likewise, the pricing structures are, like in 1st/2nd Edition, based on the presumption that adventurers spend a good deal more than residents for the same goods. In 1st/2nd Edition, it was plainly stated that the costs were designed around the gold rush idea; the prices in 3rd Edition lack that explicit statement, but they seem to be holding true to it. In 1st Edition, you did not advance a monster, you just made a new one. There were no "extra tough" Goblins; instead, there were Hobgoblins. That made sense in terms of grading the challenges on a dungeon level, but it was not terribly satisfying. Players graduated from fighting Kobolds to Goblins to Orcs to Hobgoblins. Often, once you moved on, you never moved back. 2nd Edition started the same way, with tougher monster races pushing around weaker ones. Late in 2nd Edition, the idea of Monsters as characters appeared. It was, in some ways, a welcome change. In 3rd Edition, the monster advancement rules make that unnecessary. However, I expect most campaigns play the monsters straight from the MM. Advancement is seen as a tool for creating "Bosses" only. Certainly, the time required to select Feats and spell skills for a "stock 5th level Orc Fighter" is prohibitive. However, exactly that is what makes a "believable" world work; just as there are 5th level adventurers, there are 5th level Orcs to challenge them.   Well, the third thing that the design team had in mind was that most campaigns ran to about 20th level and then stopped. A significant subset went on, but the majority were played over the course of a year and capped at 20th level. Thus, the Core rules established a 1-20 curve and cap, pretty much. You *could* advance beyond 20th level, using the then-forthcoming Epic rules, but the design team set 20th level as the "end" of normal play. I don't know if the consequences were as much "unanticipated" as considered irrelevant. The people who would be bothered enough by such oddities are the same ones, generally, as will feel comfortable taking steps to fix them. For the "casual" player (who fits the 1-year, level 1-20, dungeon-delving campaign model), there are probably few questions that come up. That's certainly a reasonable rate of progression. Really, any way of doing it so that the players are having fun is fine. Personally, I would like to climb fairly quickly from levels 1-7 (say), then spend a nice long time advancing after that.  That was why I liked the Birthright rules. They did a *fantastic* job of making rulership independent of character level. A 0-level merchant could be just about as effective a ruler as a 10th level Fighter. The ability to work realm-based magic was still tied to character level, but just about all other functions were level-independent.</blockquote>

Verification