E6 - how does it change the feel of the game

[Gilladian]

In another thread, I asked Hobo, among others, how he thinks playing in an E6 campaign (where PCs never advance beyond 6th level) changes the feel of a campaign.

I have found, as I begin to have PCs reaching 6th level, that my world is changed subtly, from what it was when PCs and NPCs regularly reached 10-12th level, and a few surpassed that.

The lack of easy resurrection, the almost total lack of spells of 4th level and higher, and the resultant lack of "easy fixes" for death and world-spanning travel and communication is interesting.

For example, I had in the past, had a situation where a Prince was killed, assassinated on the eve of a war. He was subsequently resurrected by a PC cleric. This caused a plot by the villains to go badly astray, because they had hoped to steal the body and raise the Prince themselves, thus putting him in their debt and changing the tide of politics in the kingdom.

This was a historical fact in my campaign world; when I shifted to an E6 campaign structure, I had to rewrite history to account for this resurrection, in a world that no longer has 4th level and higher spells. I ended up deciding that many 4th level spells ARE still available, but only as rituals that take a largish number of clerics in cooperation, and over time. So the Prince was raised after his assassination, but only because all the clergy in the nearest towns banded together to save him.

And no PC is likely to be able to draw on such support, unless he's a lot more important than the average adventurer!

What are your experiences with how E6 (or E8 or whatever variant you play) has affected your game?

 

[Aldeon]

I haven't run or played in an e6 campaign before, but I really want to. However, I've played some games that removed high-power spells like ressurection and such. It really opens up a lot of options that weren't available before. One of your teammates dies? No more ressurection; instead, let's travel through the Hellgate at the edge of the world to bid for his life from the Raven Queen!

 

[Gilladian]

I haven't run or played in an e6 campaign before, but I really want to. However, I've played some games that removed high-power spells like ressurection and such. It really opens up a lot of options that weren't available before. One of your teammates dies? No more ressurection; instead, let's travel through the Hellgate at the edge of the world to bid for his life from the Raven Queen!

Yeah, it does make some fields of play more accessible; it is possible to run a murder mystery again, too. But what about a world where a hellgate to the Raven Queen's domain was so rare that it would take a journey around the world to find one? Where it took twenty clerics a week to open said gate, by conducting a massive 3-day long ritual preceded by 3 days of gathering components, fasting, and such?

 

[Desdichado]

First off, I think that E6 is actually much closer to the feel of fantasy as we know it (as opposed to D&D as we know it) which is, of course, one of it's founding conceits in the first place. So in a way, it doesn't change the world-building aspect too much, because in general collectively, we do a poor job of really thoroughly integrating the higher level elements of D&D into worldbuilding anyway. It makes huge changes to the feel of the game as it's played, but not necessarily to the setting or the worldbuilding side of the screen, which already operate under a paradigm much closer to that of E6 anyway.

Secondly, it dramatically changes the types of challenges that PCs can face. Thugs, bandits, and other human(oid) challengers never really go away as meaningful challenges. Even a "high level" group at 6th level and with some bonus feats is going to find a mob a difficult proposition. Even if any individual combatant is a "mook", the collective effect never becomes trivial. And NPCs with a few levels in a PC class (or even an NPC class for that matter) can always be a significant threat, especially in numbers.

In addition, wild animals never really go away as a threat. Granted, I've adopted a "Pleistocene North America" fauna baseline (instead of Medieval European), so I've made mine purposefully even more dangerous, by using dire wolves, lions, bears, and a few other animals to represent actual fossil animals that would have been found in, say the La Brea area. But even if you don't do that, adventure stories and accounts from the European exploration of Africa and elsewhere during the "Scramble for Africa" will certainly indicate that well equiped and experienced adventurers still need to worry about packs of hyenas (or wolves), prides of lions, crocodiles, elephants, and other dangerous wildlife while in a wilderness environment.

Also, Undead become more threatening. Sure, basic skeletons and zombies can still get turned by low level clerics, as they do in low level D&D today, but more potent undead rarely have much to fear from turn checks.

Given that NPCs and animals can be sufficiently dangerous, I think there's more of a tendency to use them in an E6 environment. Monsters, which sadly become kind of routine in D&D, can become actually monstrous again. And by this, I don't merely mean that they are more rare and more dangerous (although both of those are probably true)--to really work, you also need to showcase your monsters. The use of one can be almost the whole point of an entire adventure, and with foreshadowing, you can build up a real sense of tension and fear about the prospect of facing down a monster--as opposed to the more dangerous day-to-day of dangerous animals and people.

Without easy access to a variety of spells which are assumed to be fairly prevalent in a D&D world, the field is much more open to a variety of different types of games. I remember being keenly disappointed in some early Monte Cook advice during the 3e era that was posted in an interview, or somewhere, that advised against doing the "murder mystery" for example, since speak with dead takes all of the mystery out of the game. Because E6 eliminates a lot of the spells that "force" D&D into being its own genre, you can actually run games that emulate story structures from other genres much more easily. Although, IIRC, speak with dead is a 3rd level cleric spell, so a 6th level cleric could have it, right? Oh, well. It'll still be much more rare than it is in D&D itself. Lack of access to higher level combat spells eliminates the very D&D specific scry/teleport/fireball type of "hit" tactics as well, again, putting the game more firmly in the genre which inspired it in the first place.

Personally, I've limited magic even more than simply going E6 by spellcasting more difficult and changing the spellcasting classes somewhat. Imagine E6 applied to the d20 Modern paradigm where spellcasting classes are Advanced Classes that you can't take without meeting prerequisites first. Actually, it's not just that paradigm; those are actually my preferred houserules--d20 Modern + d20 Past + E6.

Some higher level magic is occasionally required or desired. Luckily for us, we don't even have to houserule that or develop much of anything; WotC already gave us the tools to integrate spells higher level than casters can naturally get via the Incantations rules, which show up in Unearthed Arcana and in even more detail in the d20 Modern book Urban Arcana.

I think the value of E6 is basically two-fold. First, since running the game successfully at high level becomes more difficult (due to the strangeness of the system and its results at higher level, as well as the complexity required to manage the game at that level), E6 allows players and GMs to focus more on other aspects rather than simply "playing the game" successfully--things like developing characters as characters, developing interesting plots and scenarios that can't simply be shortcutted around, etc. This probably doesn't appeal as much to players of a more gamist bent, but as my approach to the game has always been much more narrativist, it suits me ideally. Secondly, it allows the game to feel much closer to its literary roots than it normally would. One complaint I've heard frequently (and made myself many times as well) is that D&D feels like nothing other than itself. Bringing it back to its literary roots makes it both more comfortable, and oddly more flexible, than it is currently.

I'm sure I'll think of more as the thread develops, but those are my immediate thoughts, anyway.

 

[S'mon]

What are your experiences with how E6 (or E8 or whatever variant you play) has affected your game?

As Hobo said in the other thread, it has surprisingly little effect on world-building, because few fantasy worlds seem to take account of high level magic anyway. I could run Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk quite easily in E6 - I can even still have the uber-wizards flying over the battlefield raining fiery death from above!

One thing - NPC level cap and PC level cap are potentially different things. discussion of E6 seems to typically presume that PC and NPC is held to the same metric, but the implications of "PCs are held to 6th" is quite different if NPCs are capped at a different level. I would argue that for world-building it's the NPC cap that matters; for campaign play the PC cap eventually becomes the important thing.

My version of the Yggsburgh setting has a hard cap at E8 for almost all classed NPCs. This means Raise Dead or Teleport are extremely rare, just legends. But with the Pathfinder version of this campaign I have an E10 cap for PCs and a rare few NPCs, basically 9th and 10th become 'Epic Levels' like 21+ in a regular E20 campaign. With the AD&D version of this setting I'm not planning a level cap (except for demi-humans of course) , instead I'm just limiting max spell level to 5th*, which has much the same effect in terms of world-building.

*Higher in a few rare high-magic areas.

As well as the NPC E8 cap, I've changed 'spell demographics' so that some traditionally common spells like Fireball and other mass-destruction stuff is rare - that Lord Darktarn is known to have mastered this spell, and to have destroyed an entire orc tribe with it, is a major source of the terror he invokes. The result is something that to me is both a traditional D&D-style fantasy world, and much more plausible than most - fifty men in armour with halberds are a significant force, not (generally) spell-fodder, so traditional armies exist and mundane populations are a real military resource.

One thing I like about E8 as opposed to E6, by the way, is that I get to have trolls, ettins, hill giants etc as creatures that are scary, but opposable by the best NPC knights and heroes; that fits both the mood I want, and traditional tales. If I want something tougher than any known knight then I can use (eg) a frost giant.

 

[blargney the second]

In E6, the d20 remains relevant in the vast majority of cases. You don't end up with wildly disparate opposed checks where it's impossible for one person to win, for example.

 

[Lwaxy]

I've played it once, and I have to say I didn't like it. It was stagnation, and boredom settled in quickly.

I GMed in a similar style, though, where there was a cap only to the spellpoints and not the spells you could learn. That worked a lot better.

 

[Yora]

Since I very rarely have any games reach 7th or 8th level, the effects on player characters in E6 usually do not become relevant at all. When I started working on my campaign setting, I instead chose to simply not have any NPCs above 10th level anywhere in the world. The effect is basically the same as having an E8 world but without the added work to have special mechanics for the very few cases where 9th and 10th level NPCs show up or PCs are able to reach 9th level.

 

[Desdichado]

Since I very rarely have any games reach 7th or 8th level, the effects on player characters in E6 usually do not become relevant at all. When I started working on my campaign setting, I instead chose to simply not have any NPCs above 10th level anywhere in the world. The effect is basically the same as having an E8 world but without the added work to have special mechanics for the very few cases where 9th and 10th level NPCs show up or PCs are able to reach 9th level.

That's an interesting point. E6 is a ruleset to allow unlimited play without worrying about higher levels; in actual practice (for me, at least) it's a bit of a moot point, because I rarely play or run campaigns that go into high levels even when we're not explicitly using E6.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I haven't run a game that started at first level and went to double digits for a long time. So I'm agreeing with the notion that E6 isn'ty all that different for many people.