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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DM_Blake" data-source="post: 3928872" data-attributes="member: 57267">This is a little off-topic (OK, a lot) but why so few high level characters.When I first picked up 3.0 around the turn of the century, one of the first things I noticed was that level progression was a lot faster than it was in 2e. According to the DMG, an adventuring party should level after 13-14 encounters of the appropriate EL - and this holds true across all levels, so a level 1 group becomes level 2 after 13 encounters with orcs and a level 15 group becomes level 16 after 13 encounters with dragons.Doing the math, and allowing for non-combat encounters (like a cleric converting someone from a different faith, or the party talking their way past a guardian, etc.), it dawned on me that EVERYONE in 3e should be higher level quickly.Consider a fresh-faced farm kid runs off to the city and joins the city watch patrols. 13 tavern brawls and arrested burglars later, he's 2nd level - that should be doable in a week with 2 incidents per shift. Another couple weeks he's 3rd level, and a few weeks later he's 4th level. Been on the job just over a month and he's 4th level.Allright, so all the 1-year city watch veterans are 7th level or higher, and their 10-year commanders are well into double digits.As for PCs, killing 13 pairs of orcs sounds much, much better than the hundreds that were needed to level a 2e adventuring group from 1st to 2nd level.So, if everyone in a rough-and-tumble lifestyle is leveling so quickly, then it stands to reason that people not so rough-and-tumble also level much more quickly, unless we assume that the only way for the village blacksmith (expert) or prince(noble) or farmer (commoner) to gain any levels is to go out and kill orcs or break up tavern brawls. Or worse, we assume that their daily activities leave their leveling progress in the dust compared to the town watchmen.Which means that EVERYBODY is leveling much more quickly than old 2nd edition or previous.  Which led me to my next conclusion, that while it was OK for high-level NPCs to be very rare in precious editions, they must be much more common in 3e. This theory is backed up by the preponderance of high CL monsters in the Monster Manual. Compare with previous editions, and 3e is comparatively bursting at the seams with stuff that would absolutely destroy a typical 2nd edition village community.Given all that, 3e just seems a place where NPCs aren't even noteworthy until they break into the upper single-digit levels, and nobody is really heroic until they get to double-digit levels.None of that was on-topic for this thread, but at the risk of hijacking my own thread, I just wanted to share that with you.</blockquote>

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