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="schnee" data-source="post: 7088960" data-attributes="member: 16728">You know, after playing games that do that, and D&D, I've come to like a system that adds discrete abilities over time rather than marching along a smooth gradient. That way you can see how a character works within a smaller context, given a certain set of parameters, then you get a 'new toy' to play around with from time to time. It keeps it fresh.It also means you get 'bumps' in power that level out as enemies get tougher, which adds a bit of swinginess to the way the game plays that probably makes balance change over time - fire is really effective at low levels, but later on you get other ways of dealing damage about the time fire-resistant creatures become more common. So, it creates distinct 'phases' in the life-cycle of a character that leads them to try and do new things. You can get that in a way by having one mechanic that scales, but what does that mean, for, a Druid's Land Stride? Do you have phases where you only move 5' faster through rough territory, then 10', then full movement speed? When monsters have subtle differences in their movement speeds, that makes it fiddly, not work out the way characters hoped for, and sometimes going unused. It's like Thief skills in AD&D - people just ended up not using things that were too risky, because the high chance of failure was such a bummer. Putting things in all at once makes them reliable and more fun. Games with smooth power gradients play completely differently. I like them, but if I want that sort of thing I'll fire up a Basic retro-clone, or Shadowrun, or (gulp) see if I can convince a group to try a Chaosium system.</blockquote>

Verification