Forked - Level-Based Systems and Non-Heroic PCs

[Rechan]

BTW I find the quote in the OP that saving a village from skeletons is 'not heroic' and unworthy of starting PCs to be pretty weird! I didn't watch Jason & the Argonauts fighting living skeletons to gain the Golden Fleece and think "Newbie Fetch-Quest, how dull!" I didn't watch "The Magnificent Seven" and think "They're fighting to protect a mere village?! Pathetic!"

No, again I said that the difference is tone, risk and scale. Are the skeletons attacking a village? That's fine by me. Is it a few skeletons hanging around a dungeon? Meh. Are the rats overrunning a farmhouse and there's a little girl in the 2nd story window unable to escape as hundreds of rats swarm up the stairs? That's great. Are they just in a dungeon chewing on food and attacking when disturbed? Meh.

I've never, ever seen this happen outside of video games, so maybe that's why it seems so foreign to me. The "go kill those three random skeletons and dire rats in the cellar" has never been something I've seen.

Let me give you a few examples from the few 1st level adventures I just looked through.

The Sunless Citadel's first encounter is with 3 dire rats who are just hanging around the dungeon's opening. Later there are dire rats hiding in refuse piles and cave rats, and more rats later on. As well as a hidden room that has skeletons just hanging around inside.

Pathfinder's "Crown of the Kobold King", the adventure is all good and heroic - but here we have dire rats just sitting in dungeon room minding their own business, the PCs barge in, the rats attack.

However, even if it was, I know that the heroic characters at any level would help any way they could if they were dangerous. I'm assuming the party can fight dire rats or skeletons at low levels with the same intention that level 15 characters would: helping people. I think you're talking more about context than creatures, but I might be wrong (there's a big difference between dire rats randomly attacking from a pantry, and dire rats harassing town members by eating their food and diseasing them).

That's a good comparison 1st level pcs and 15th level PCs. You're right, 15th level PCs would kill rats and skeletons trying to hurt people. But, you wouldn't actually run the numbers. You wouldn't roll to-hit for a 15th level PC to kill rats and skeletons - you just assume they do because they're not a challenge and you don't want to waste time rolling it. Like saving a kitten from a tree, it's something a good person would do, but you wouldn't dwell on the success of it because hey it's a freaking kitten in a tree, we don't need to roll multiple climb checks, just handwave it and move along.

Set aside the "Hey they're attacking innocent people" angle (because I've rarely if ever seen that's the case with rats and skeletons), and just put them in a room in a dungeon. Now tell me how awesome it is to fight them. And yet rats and skeletons are a "challenge" to 1st level PCs. They are Legitimate threats and posed as such to kids poking through a crypt. I just find that insulting. I use rats and skeletons as a bit of a hyperbolic example, but it invokes the feeling of fighting bugs because you're not good enough to face any real threat, go grind until you're a higher level.

In one of Paizo's Rise of the Runelords adventures (I think 5?) the PCs are about 14th level, and they are infiltrating a library where an army of giants are camped outside. Inside, they come across a room with some CR 5 ogres. The fight is played for laughs - the ogres try to push the PCs into mud because they think it's funny, and pose no real threat to the PCs because they simply can't touch them. It's not dangerous, it's just the PCs squishing some bugs that potentially could harm someone much, much lower level than them, but who aren't. That to me is killing rats and skeletons.

 

[mmadsen]

Basically, it's the idea that starting out at the bottom of the barrel level-wise and being forced into a story that is "non-heroic" is not his preference (he used the word "condescending").

A big part of the problem is simply having such a steep power curve built into the game and the players knowing about it, because it turns legitimately scary monsters into "condescending non-heroic" encounters.

The skeletons in the catacombs come to life and attack you? Scary as all hell, right? Nah, they're single-hit-die minions. Dog-sized plague-carrying rats? Again, scary as all hell, right? Nah. When do we get to the demi-lich?

The problem with zero to hero, IMO, is that it's been done to death. Bilbo gets pushed out the door, has adventures and comes back a hero. The children go into a closet and eventually become kings and queens. So on and so forth. It's been beaten into the ground.

Well, always being a hero has been done to death, too, right?

What D&D does poorly, by the way, is allow you to play a zero fated to do great deeds along for the ride with heroes, like Frodo and the other hobbits in the Fellowship of the Ring. (The Buffy the Vampire Slayer game handled this nicely with weak characters getting more drama points.)

I guess the basic problem is, how do you incorporate both visions into the same game? Particularly in a level based one. Sure, I suppose, you could simply start the "heroic" game at higher level, but, now I'm missing out on a chunk of the game. Conversely, if you make level 1 "heroic" then the Joe Average archetype gets chucked out the window.

I don't see how starting the game at a heroic level hurts anything, if your goal is to play at a heroic level, but designing the game so that the lowest level is already heroic clearly cuts out the option of playing as non-heroes.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Just a thought Re: mixing zeroes & heroes.

It occurs to me that many- if not most- heroes start off their adventuring group careers falling in with those wyou could be considered zeroes. In fact, it seems much rarer for heroes to group together at the dawn of their careers as opposed to hanging out with zeroes in some kind of mixed group.

And even in heroic groups, there may be those who eclipse the capabilities of those other heroes, so much so that those other heroes SEEM lie zeroes in their presence.

 

[howandwhy99]

I don't consider D&D to be zero to hero. Fighting-Men start off as "veterans". For me the game is about class. The game starts off after considerable training for a highly skilled or "expert" class, but 0 XP is the cusp. The campaign then begins with the start of each PC's adventuring career.

They can be heroes when players decide they are. NPCs will hold a higher reputation of PCs depending upon their deeds, but this can go up and down regardless of PC class levels.

Other games do this differently, but D&D is historically about class progression.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I sometimes like zero to hero, and I also like something almost static advancement. Not completely static, but a game with competent GURPS or Fantasy Hero characters with very little XP awarded is close, and can be quite fun. I also like hero to even bigger hero. Or young hero to older hero. There are also games like RuneQuest and Burning Wheel, where the systems tend to advance inexperienced characters very rapidly, and then gradually put on the brakes.

Generally, if the game has levels as a mechanic (whether class levels or something more subtle), I want some definite, noticable, and consistent power increase, at least over several levels. I don't see any point in having levels otherwise. If it wants to tail off at some point (e.g. 1st ed. AD&D) for thematic reasons, that's fine. Where that power increase starts and ends is really up to the larger purpose the game is trying to achieve.

So I like my 1E the way it is, and my 3E the way it is, and my 4E the way it is. That may be a cop out, but it is the truth.

 

[Hussar]

Well, always being a hero has been done to death, too, right?

No, not really. At least, not in most of the fantasy genre fiction I've read and not particularly in D&D either. 1st level PC's in pre-4e D&D are really bloody fragile. You've got your 1 HD, and the baddies can typically easily squash you in one or two hits.

It's not particularly heroic when you aren't really a whole lot stronger than the average kobold. At least, not IMO.

And, the "hero's journey" style quest fantasy seems to dominate genre fiction up until the last ten years or so. The hero starts out minding his own business, living on a farm maybe, and then the bad guys show up and the story starts out. Doesn't matter if it's The Hobbit or Eragon. There's a bajillion examples of the story.

The "We're already competent and established" trope appears a lot more in Urban fantasy which has gotten a lot more popular recently. But, I'd say it's a trope that has been done a whole lot less.

 

[mmadsen]

And, the "hero's journey" style quest fantasy seems to dominate genre fiction up until the last ten years or so. The hero starts out minding his own business, living on a farm maybe, and then the bad guys show up and the story starts out. Doesn't matter if it's The Hobbit or Eragon. There's a bajillion examples of the story.

The "We're already competent and established" trope appears a lot more in Urban fantasy which has gotten a lot more popular recently. But, I'd say it's a trope that has been done a whole lot less.

It sounds like you haven't read much classic sword & sorcery fiction -- Robert E. Howard's Conan, Kull, etc., Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & Gray Mouser -- where we meet the characters well into their adventuring careers. Even when we flash back to their early years, they tend to be incompetent only by comparison to their later selves.

Also, almost all of the members of the Fellowship of the Ring are competent from the start of the Lord of the Rings, with the obvious exceptions of Frodo and the other hobbits.

Anyone playing Conan or Aragorn would expect to be competent from the get-go, and letting them start at, say, 8th level seems perfectly reasonable, if that's the kind of game you intend to play.

 

[Celebrim]

Also, almost all of the members of the Fellowship of the Ring are competent from the start of the Lord of the Rings, with the obvious exceptions of Frodo and the other hobbits.

Just to be nit-picky, but Frodo and to a lesser extent Sam are compotent from the get go as well. Frodo never seems to fail a saving throw (and when he does, he gets a reroll almost immediately), seems to have ranks in just about every skill, and seems to have basically maximum stats for a hobbit. Every NPC he encounters comments on how OP he is, and he seems quite capable of daunting and aweing with his presence everyone in the story but Gandalf. Though he seems to have invested most of his points elsewhere he's capable of holding his own in a fight (driving off the Wraith, challenging the full Nine to combat, fighting orcs, driving off trolls, etc.). Don't judge him by the movie, which steals his heroism from him continually.

The two younger hobbits are basically incompotent up until about the time that they escape from the orcs and meet Treebeard, after which they too are treated as high level characters brimming with competancy.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Just to be nit-picky, but Frodo and to a lesser extent Sam are compotent from the get go as well.

Just to be nit-picky, the others in the Fellowship were, in D&D terms, all experienced Rangers, Fighters, Wizards or such. Sam & Frodo were not. They may have been charismatic and so forth, but in D&D terms, they were NOT anything more than something like Commoners- not exactly "Heroes" in the context of this thread.

 

[Hussar]

It sounds like you haven't read much classic sword & sorcery fiction -- Robert E. Howard's Conan, Kull, etc., Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & Gray Mouser -- where we meet the characters well into their adventuring careers. Even when we flash back to their early years, they tend to be incompetent only by comparison to their later selves.

Also, almost all of the members of the Fellowship of the Ring are competent from the start of the Lord of the Rings, with the obvious exceptions of Frodo and the other hobbits.

Anyone playing Conan or Aragorn would expect to be competent from the get-go, and letting them start at, say, 8th level seems perfectly reasonable, if that's the kind of game you intend to play.

I'm not saying that it doesn't happen. What I'm saying is that the Joe Average Done Good trope dominates so much of fantasy. See, while it's true that the other members of the LOTR are competent, it's the Hobbits that are the focus of much of the story.

Even the dwarves in The Hobbit are all competent, but most of the book is about Bilbo, not the dwarves.

Or, we could point to Narnia, Lloyd Alexander's Taran Prydain series, David Eddings Belgariad, Tad William's Dragonbone chair, or any number of other very similar stories where you have the Joe Average character undergo the quest for the macguffin.

Sure, the pulps were different. But, it hasn't been until the past decade that pulps and pulp heroes have come back into vogue. There's an awful lot of fantasy genre that's taken up by the Joe Average trope. Not all of it, sure, but an awful lot.