D&D: Adventurers, Not Heroes

[ptolemy18]

That isn't the problem, IMHO.

The problem, in my experience, is the 30+ year old veteran D&D player who has invested hours or days to create a character unlike any of the dozens or hundreds she has already played with an involved backstory and distinctive characterization that gets cut down by a lucky crit from an orc in the first combat encounter.

The number of times you are willing to invest much effort in character creation is limited if it's for nought simply because of an unlucky die roll.

Plus, as a veteran player, I typically find the first level pretty boring, since there aren't many options for appropriate challenges for a starting adventurer. About the only way for me to still enjoy starting adventures is to create a truly 'fresh' character concept and roleplay it to the hilt. Which leads me right back to the problem mentioned above.

This must be a difference of opinion between us. I'm a 26-year D&D veteran (started playing when I was 6) and the character generation time in D&D3.x has never bothered me. Sometimes I've played characters who lasted two session; sometimes I've played characters who lasted a year. If a character dies horribly early on, then that's just the luck of the dice. Sometimes it's painful -- I do wish my East Indian sorcerer/alienist demon summoner hadn't gotten killed so quickly, I loved her concept, and the same with my crab-hengeyokai martial artist -- but there's always other character ideas waiting in the wings. In a good RPG, there's always zillions of possibilities... In that old D&D campaign, I never did get to play my Priest of the Death God who used the "Leadership" feat to have his wife, a fellow priest, accompany him on his journeys... or my cross-dressing courtly female swordswoman based on the old manga "The Rose of Versailles"... or this character, or that character. I *LOVE* coming up with characters.

The only times that dying in a RPG bothers me is if the DM "rubs it in" by either turning it into a form of humiliation (i.e. "Your character is murdered and raped by the bugbears. His body is thrown in a ditch"... I've never had this QUITE happen but I've witnessed similar situations) or by dissing my gameplay and character design choices (i.e. "You wouldn't have died if you had spent those 2 skill points on Jump instead of Profession (cook). I know you are aware of this, but allow me to rub it in and remind you that you are stupid. Now, allow me to ignore you while I focus on the more min-maxy players."). But those are both problems with the DM, not with the rules. As long as a DM is "tough but fair" I generally don't mind dying.

 

[ptolemy18]

Ok, you got me. I was being a bit hyperbolic, and I did not play 1st ed. However, I think the premise is still pertinent; playing the moral hero is not something new to 4th or even 3rd edition. The paladin has been an official character class since, what? The 80s? Early 90s? I started playing AD&D 2nd edition around '97 or so. And bane of amoral character groups though it may be, the fact that it is a core class says something to me about the kind of adventurers the game expects, paladins or otherwise.

I actually don't have any issue with moral characters or moral groups. They're all too rare, in my opinion. But that sort of thing is only really "earned" if the PCs and the DM honestly choose to play that way; if the game railroads the PCs into taking heroic roles even if they really just want to kick ass and take names and gain levels, then it's more of a way of avoiding moral issues.

 

[Gentlegamer]

Meh. I do actually have a slight problem with the "always a badass" part too. I like badass games and I like making badass characters -- I am a gamer after all -- but I also like having the option to run, or play in, 1st-level schlub games in D&D. (And then if you can gain levels and work your way up to being a badass, then it's sooo sweet.) It is a Simulation of a game world, and schlubs exist in that game world, after all, and once in a while it can be fun to play one. (This is my experience with games like KULT, Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer speaking, I guess.)

Now, maybe the majority of people don't like this, or maybe there is a terrible problem with 12-year-old newbies playing D&D for the first time and saying "I was knocked unconscious by an orc? This sucks! Back to Warcraft!" And so I can understand the desire for D&D4e characters to start out with 3xhd hit points. But I personally also like the option to play games where the characters are kinda weak, just as I personally like the option (shock! horror! insanity!) to play games where there's quite not so much combat or there's minimal miniatures-use and every class and every character type doesn't have to be combat-capable. If I am outvoted by Wizards, Wizard's focus groups, and the people in the enworld.org 4e forum, then che sera, sera. But I like having the option to do that in D&D.

Of course, I like super high-fantasy badass games too. And actually, I also worry about the "high end" of the game being removed too; the high-level powers and weirdness. Like that "Game Breaking Spells" thread, where everyone is whining and moaning about how Fly or Teleport or Polymorph or Speak with Dead makes their games unplayable. Give me a break! Stop nerfing all the cool stuff! There is NO way to perfectly balance a game. The way to balance a game isn't to eliminate "game breaking" effects, it's to craft the game around your PCs' abilities, or alternately, to make sure that there are *enough* game breaking effects that if someone "breaks" the game one way, another PC or NPC or monster can "break" the game another way. (Evil NPC: "Damn! That wizard flew over my basilisk-filled ravine, negating that entire portion of the encounter! I guess I'll just have to FINGER OF DEATH them!") If the PCs' particular ability or spell or magic item turns out to be the perfect tool for the scenario, then the PCs deserve two things, in order: (1) a reward for their cleverness (2) the DM working harder on the *next* scenario to design something that challenges that particular group of PCs. They don't deserve the DM writing to Wizards saying "Take Teleport out of the game cuz the PCs teleported into the fortress."

D&D should be about flavor and options, and at high levels, in a high fantasy setting, your options should be nearly limitless. D&D is a fantasy game, and fantasy means a certain level of weirdness and unpredictability and chaos. If a wizard or monster is able to do it in a fantasy novel, it should be doable in D&D, even if only at an incredibly high level. D&D shouldn't be a predictable tactical setup where everyone goes against approximately the same challenges with approximately the same power level. Otherwise the only difference between 1st level and 15th level is that the PCs are doing 100~ damage per round instead of 10~ damage per round, and the only difference between a wizard and a fighter is that the wizard says "I blast him" and the fighter says "I hit him."

At another gaming community I frequent, there is an "inside joke" of replacing "QFT" or "I agree" with "X poster is right" to mean the same thing (providing fodder for one's signature, if desired).

ptolemy18 is right.

 

[Gentlegamer]

True enough. It sounds like plenty of the games played "back in the day" by some of the great D&D luminaries were heroic in feel. (Roger E. Moore's editorial about his paladin finishing off a Type IV demon with a dagger is an old fave of mine.)

Ah, yes, the "Devil's Advocate" editorial.

 

[Gentlegamer]

The problem, in my experience, is the 30+ year old veteran D&D player who has invested hours or days to create a character unlike any of the dozens or hundreds she has already played with an involved backstory and distinctive characterization that gets cut down by a lucky crit from an orc in the first combat encounter.

First level characters are peons, nobodies. They don't have a story. It is up to you to forge a story through game-play. Your character's story is when you are tenth level (or some other advanced level) looking back on your adventuring career.

I remember creating a 3e character shortly after the edition premiered in 2000. The DM asked me if I wanted to create a back-story for him. I replied, "If he survives to about 5th level, I'll get back to you."

 

[hong]

schlubs exist in that game world, after all, and once in a while it can be fun to play one.

Exactly. And hence schlub 1st level PCs will be the exception, not the norm.

 

[ptolemy18]

First level characters are peons, nobodies. They don't have a story. It is up to you to forge a story through game-play. Your character's story is when you are tenth level (or some other advanced level) looking back on your adventuring career.

I remember creating a 3e character shortly after the edition premiered in 2000. The DM asked me if I wanted to create a back-story for him. I replied, "If he survives to about 5th level, I'll get back to you."

I agree and disagree. I like playing peons but even with 1st level characters I usually come up with some basics, because I am all into the Character Acting and all. (http://seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html) Unless it's a drop-down con game or something, I always like coming up with stuff for the first 18 years of their life like "he was raised by farmers, this is his mentor's name, he has a psychological trauma caused by being chased by lizard men in his childhood", that kind of thing. The idea being that then the DM can say "The old man sitting at the bar in the tavern turns out to be... your old mentor! He says there is a haunted guard tower outside of town" or "The ogres are invading your home village and gonna burn down the family farm" or stuff like that. Your basic background material to give the DM something to work with other than generic adventure hooks.

In my experience this is a question of personal preference; some people are into this and some aren't. One of my friends in my old campaign always played a half-orc barbarian, and then the half-orc barbarian's brother who was almost identical, and so on. Some people overdo it and add way too much complicated back story. (Obviously I think my *own* back stories aren't too complicated so it's a matter of taste... ) It doesn't take me long to come up with this kind of stuff so even if my peon character dies horribly, as peons do, I don't consider it a great loss; there's always a new character to make up. Of course, if I lose multiple characters in a row (never a good thing) I find that my character backgrounds get simpler and simpler...

Actually, in the one long D&D3.x campaign I played for six years, most of the time I was making higher-than-1st-level characters (high death rate, plus the "build your new character one level lower than the rest of the party so you can catch up" style), so as time went on my backstories got longer and longer... although usually there was always a gray area of "And then he went on adventures for a few years."

Thanks for the props on game balance!

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

I actually don't have any issue with moral characters or moral groups. They're all too rare, in my opinion. But that sort of thing is only really "earned" if the PCs and the DM honestly choose to play that way; if the game railroads the PCs into taking heroic roles even if they really just want to kick ass and take names and gain levels, then it's more of a way of avoiding moral issues.

Well again, I don't think 4e is going to railroad us into playing moral heroes and do-gooders. I think, whatever type of game we decide to play, we're just going to see more evidence that our characters are exceptional earlier.

Some people will not like this. I've had some really bad experiences with 1st level characters, so that's certainly shaped my opinion. In whatever games I run, I've always avoided starting my players at 1st level because it is, IME, awful and boring. If 4e presents me with an opportunity to play at 1st level again and enjoy it, that's something I can really get behind.

I'm currently running a Star Wars Saga game and even after the first game, my 1st-level players feel heroic (i.e., exceptional.) If 4e reproduces that experience, count me in.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Why do we need a new edition to make PCs into "Heroes" at the start of a game? Just start the PCs off at a higher level with the existing rules.

If you begin playing in a game system you have never played before in, do you regularly start at a higher level?
I certainly wouldn't because I still have no real idea how the game is supposed to play and what all these higher level abilities mean.

It doesn't matter if 90% of the gamers on this board are familiar with D&D and possible several other game systems and thus might actually be able to make good guesses about to start a new RPG at a higher level. But there are a lot more potential gamers out there that don't have a clue, will naturally start at level one, and if their first experiences consist of characters dropping down or dying while fighting weak goblins or kobolds, possibly without getting a feel for the game or how it is played, they might not feel that great with the game. Some might stick, but many might not. And that's not something anyone really wants.

One might ask: "Why are these potential gamers more important than us, who sometimes like to play the weak peon" - because we are already playing. If we want weaker beginning characters, we are quite capable of coming up with some house rules to do that. But the potential new gamer has no clue that he might be better off start off at a higher level (and he might have trouble actually creating a higher level character, especially if there are tons of abilities to choose from.)

 

[ptolemy18]

Well, I suppose in the end, my whining on enworld is not going to effect the style of D&D 4th edition. I do like playing high-death games and low-fantasy games where PCs are "just ordinary folks" sometimes. But regardless, I'm looking forward to how the new edition turns out. At the best, it might make it *easier* to run 1st-level games because 1st-level PCs wil be tougher and thus able to last longer and fight more monsters... in fact, I suppose that's the 4e designers' intentions. And if I want to play a mean game in 4e where the PCs are weak relative to other characters in the game world, this thread has suggested a few interesting options.

Now I'm just gonna hope they don't nerf the high-level magic. (*fingers crossed*)