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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5787807" data-attributes="member: 4937">In general I sympathize with the sentiment.  I don't like the model of 1st level = Hero.My tiers tend to look something like:1st-3rd: Gritty4th-6th: Heroic7th-9th: Paragon10th-12th: Epic13th-15th: The levels my game never seems to reach because by this point we've been playing for like 5 years and either we are burned out, or else people have moved away (especially me).One of the problems I have with having large numbers at 1st level is that by 10th level they are 10 times as big, which means 5 times as many modifiers from buffs, and 10 times as many dice being rolled.  There is a certain point were the simple number of dice being rolled slows down the game.But there are two areas that bug me coming at the rules as I do from a simulationist stance.The first one is the 'housecast problem'.  It's probably familiar to anyone in D&D, and the basic problem is this: there just aren't many useful numbers smaller than '1'.  If a 1st level human is a 1HD monster, then there isn't much room for things smaller and weaker than a 1st level human.  Therefore, mechanically speaking, wasps, mice, rats, cats, dogs, and humans are all roughly comparable in attack power, and indeed their is a good chance that a wasp defeats a cat in combat or a house cat defeats a farmer.  My own house rules have solved the house cat problem.  A house cat now needs suitably fear his owners wrath, and neither house cat nor owner is going to die from the sting of a single rather large or lucky wasp.But the solution here has made another related problem even more severe, and that's the "white tailed deer" problem.  The 'white tailed deer' problem says,  "If bows only do 1d6 damage, how do low level hunters kill deer with a bow?"  Keeping in mind that I know a bit about hunting and the answer is, "They let the deer bleed out.", I'm not sure that having every wound bleed is a great answer.  In fact, it was more my assumption that, "They let the deer bleed out = the deer has negative hit points".   In order to give 1st level characters a margin of utility, the system has always had weapons do comparitively little damage which means that high HD creature (where high means anything above 1) can generally scoff at weapon damage.  Anything you do to increase the hit points at low level magnifies the problem.  While my house cat problem is solved, the poor hunters of my land are in a situation where they need a critical hit to have a 50/50 chance of killing a deer.  Still working on that problem.I'm thinking now that if I started a game system from scratch with D&D like goals, I might make the starting point for a character like '5th level', increase base weapon damage somewhat, and solve the big numbers problem by decreasing the rate at which things got bigger.  That way there is plenty of room for things at a smaller scale than the PC's but starting PC's have a reasonable chance of killing other things about their size.</blockquote>

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