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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hawken" data-source="post: 3109993" data-attributes="member: 23619">You're putting the cart before the ox. Strahd didn't take levels of Fighter to be a scarier vampire. He was a Fighter before he even considered going down the path that made him a vampire. He was responsible for ridding his homeland of invaders. He wasn't a "sit back and watch" kind of guy either. He was out there with his troops in the middle of all those battles. He walked away from it a 20th level Fighter that rid his country of invading barbarian hordes after 26 years of warfare (roughly the equivalent of a country the size of Germany telling Ghengis Khan to go to Hell). Anyone fighting barbarian hordes for 26 years and surviving sure as heck would come out of it at least with 20 levels in a fighting class. That's not quite true either. The Ravenloft setting expanded upon the adventure, it didn't disregard it. Following the timeline of the setting, the original adventure occured some 230 years before the current setting. And the time of the original adventure was some 180 years after he became a vampire anyway. If Strahd could get 20 Fighter levels after 26 years of warfare, it's not too far fetched to believe he could gain 10 levels of Necromancer in 180 years and then 6 more levels a few centuries down the line! If the game is scarier for you at lower levels than higher, that's fine for you. But reprints that allowed it to be played by higher level characters weren't any less scary. Strahd hitting for 2 levels at a time still only meant that higher level  players had a few more hit points, they could survive maybe one or two more hits, otherwise, not really much difference from the low level game. And even if you let all 12th level characters in the game, a 10th level Strahd could still wipe the walls with them without being bumped to 16th level.</blockquote>

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