Forked - Level-Based Systems and Non-Heroic PCs

[pemerton]

My issue is with systems that leave no room for "zero to hero" style of play.

<snip>

I'd like the game to accommodate both levels of play through the level system. In the game I made (and run), the average settled adult is hit die 4. That means that if I start the PCs at hit die 1, they're well below average, and truly worse than most guards at fighting, most scouts at scouting, etc. However, the advice I would give to avoid this is simple: start them at hit die 4, or even higher. This gives the players and GM the option of starting at "zero" or "average settled adult" or "very experienced" or "heroic" or whatever.

Besides Hussar's point - that this means there are parts of the game that many purchasers won't use - there is also the complexity issue - PCs can begin at level 1, but you are encouraged to begin at level 4 - "Why am I starting halfway down the number line?"

Neither of these may be an issue for a hardcore RPGer like most of those posting here, but I think they are issues for a commercial RPG publishing company like WotC.

I think what I like best is a game where level 1 PCs can be either zeroes or heroes, dependent only on how things are skinned (demographics of NPC/monster stats), so for an heroic game the PCs start relatively stronger compared to the setting baseline, but the PC stats themselves are identical.

I find that 4e D&D is good for this; 1st level PCs can be relatively weak novice adventurers, or distinctly heroic, depending only on how the opposition and friendly NPCs are statted. Eg in an heroic-from-start game the average human or hobgoblin soldier could be a 3rd level minion (eg the hobgoblin grunt in MM), the 1st level PCs fight squads of guardsmen to rescue the princess from the evil baron. In a novice-at-start game the average human or hobgoblin soldier could be a 3rd level standard monster (eg the human guard or hobgoblin soldier in MM), the 1st level PCs fight goblin brigands to rescue the baker's daughter from their boss, a hobgoblin soldier.

IME 3e and earlier didn't work so well for this approach (NPC power determines PC status) because 1st level PCs were so fragile, no matter how weak the opponents, and because the power gradient was so steep.

This approach requires the abandonment of strong simulation in mechanics - "1st level" or "3 HD" no longer has a concrete meaning within the context of the fiction, but is instead a purely mechanical state which has to be correlated with the fiction on a case-by-case basis (per campaign, per encounter, even per creature perhaps what with minions, elites and solos hanging around).

Not everyone is going to like that.

This actually came up in my 4e game recently - the PCs ended up in a fight with a wizard much more powerful than them. Initially I had envisaged the encounter happening in 3 or 4 levels time, and had tenatively statted the wizard up as a 19th level elite. When it became clear that the fight might occur much earlier, I restatted him as a 13th level solo. In the course of the fight, I had to explain to the players that it was clear to the PCs that he was a very powerful wizard, who could obliterate any one or two of them with ease, but was being stretched to his resources trying to hold off all five of them at once. And given his 500-odd hit points, I was also having to narrate even large amounts of damage from the sorcerer and ranger as mighty blows that he nevertheless parried with his staff, though showing some strain from the effort . . . until the final blow, when I described him as worn down and unable to defend himself any longer.

Of course I'm not saying this is a deal-breaker - quite the opposite, given I'm a big 4e fan. But it's a serious issue from the point of view both of design and GM advice. (4e is good on the design, but weaker on the GM advice in my view.)

 

[Rechan]

Another element here is just what levels you manage to play.

The highest level I've ever reached was 8-9th. The longest running campaign I ever was in (this one I ran) went from 5th to 9th level in 3.0, which spanned a year and a half or more. The longest game I played in went from levels 1-8 or 9, and I forget how long that game took real-time. Most of the games I played in ended before level 3.

My entire gaming history has been "Group gets together, game may last 3-6 months, game and group dissolves".

It sort of changes your perspective when you ignore everything system-wise above 10th level. I just do not read those rules because I genuinely believe I will never see them in play.

 

[S'mon]

This approach requires the abandonment of strong simulation in mechanics - "1st level" or "3 HD" no longer has a concrete meaning within the context of the fiction, but is instead a purely mechanical state which has to be correlated with the fiction on a case-by-case basis (per campaign, per encounter, even per creature perhaps what with minions, elites and solos hanging around).

Not everyone is going to like that.

This actually came up in my 4e game recently - the PCs ended up in a fight with a wizard much more powerful than them. Initially I had envisaged the encounter happening in 3 or 4 levels time, and had tenatively statted the wizard up as a 19th level elite. When it became clear that the fight might occur much earlier, I restatted him as a 13th level solo. In the course of the fight, I had to explain to the players that it was clear to the PCs that he was a very powerful wizard, who could obliterate any one or two of them with ease, but was being stretched to his resources trying to hold off all five of them at once. And given his 500-odd hit points, I was also having to narrate even large amounts of damage from the sorcerer and ranger as mighty blows that he nevertheless parried with his staff, though showing some strain from the effort . . . until the final blow, when I described him as worn down and unable to defend himself any longer.

Of course I'm not saying this is a deal-breaker - quite the opposite, given I'm a big 4e fan. But it's a serious issue from the point of view both of design and GM advice. (4e is good on the design, but weaker on the GM advice in my view.)

I agree - 4e is quite anti-simulation and definitely doesn't support "3rd level has a concrete meaning within the context of the fiction" well as written. Re your wizard I'd almost certainly have kept him a 19th level elite though, I've never found a 6 level gap to be a major problem. At worst the PCs realise he's too tough for them; he probably doesn't have the personal power to wipe out low-paragon PCs. Unless he has lots of high-paragon guards he probably can't wipe them out either.

In a couple weeks I'm planning to run an adventure for 5th level PCs which includes a 16th level monster. Like the Roper in Forge of Fury the PCs don't need to fight it to win the adventure, it should be clear to them they can't hurt it ("ok, roll to hit AC 30"), they can avoid it, but they're free to get themselves killed by it if they insist.

 

[pemerton]

Re your wizard I'd almost certainly have kept him a 19th level elite though, I've never found a 6 level gap to be a major problem. At worst the PCs realise he's too tough for them; he probably doesn't have the personal power to wipe out low-paragon PCs.

The PCs are 12th, and (given the ingame context) I wanted to combine the wizard fight with a catoblepas (10th elite) and a bunch of Orcus cultists and undead (9th through 12th).

If I'd run the wizard as a 19th elite I think he would have done less to the party (because of action economy issues) but been more likely to escape (because they wouldn't have been able to hit him enough). I don't have a strong view on whether that would have been better or worse.

As it is, he played very strongly - he had a number of blindness effects (a rechargeable AoE radiant attack, and also the Pluck the Mind's Eye interrupt from Thunderspire Labyrinth, turning him invisible to an attacker) - and to defeat him (as opposed to letting him escape) the PCs ended up using their one wish from a ring of wishes they had found on another plane - the player of the dwarf carrying the ring spent some time thinking up a wording that he was comfortable he would get away with (I hadn't said anything about twising over-ambitious wishes, but this player has many years of D&D training and sound instincts!), and in the end decided to wish that no one in the great hall should have their sight obscured for the next 5 minutes.

With their sight restored, the PCs were able to beat the wizard, then handle the other foes (which was helped by using Twist of Space to teleport the catoblepas into the air and then drop it on some cultists).

To bring this back to the slightly less-OT issue of metagame mechanics, I also adopted a new approach to resolving attacks by one NPC (the catoblepas) against another (the baron the catoblepas was trying to kill) - let the player who is hoping to save the baron roll a saving throw. Some good rolling meant that the baron survived, shaken but unharmed.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

[spam]

[spam]

Reported.

 

[Arkhandus]

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.

OTOH, the more pulp action, which has been gaining a lot in popularity over the past while, has heroes that are not "normal guy". Whether it's Conan or Doc Savage, these are not Joe Average picking up a sword and doing extraordinary things. And, because a lot of these style of heroes are very popular in genre fiction now, RPG's are simply mirroring popular views.

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'm not really sure you can have both archetypes in the same system as a starting point. They really are very different.

When I want PCs to start out heroic, I just start them at 3rd or 6th level or somewhere inbetween. Or 10th-level or so in a few cases. But at least I have the option of starting them at 1st-level instead. And the choice of ability score generation and HP determination also affects the gameplay; PCs with 25 point-buy or lower (or old-school 3d6/stat or similar) tend to play as closer to average guys, as do those with random HP rolls sometimes, whereas those who start with 32 point-buy or a good stat-rolling method or max HP/level or 75% of max HP/level tend to play as much more heroic characters.

And just starting at something like 3rd or 6th level doesn't mean the players have to miss out on some part of the game, especially if the campaign lasts into epic levels. They can still fight goblins etc. at 3rd or 6th level, they're just likely to face a proper goblin-horde or goblin warbands with some leveled-up goblin leaders instead of a few average goblins here and there. My players (in multiple OpenRPG groups, and at least one face-to-face group) could tell a few stories of how I've challenged them at mid- and upper-levels repeatedly with lowly kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, worgs, orcs, skum, troglodytes, and such.

But generally, I try to start campaigns off with something fun or unusual, though I have started them off occasionally with a "wipe out some kobolds/goblins/orcs/gnolls" adventure before moving on to something more heroic. And my campaigns tend to have a major goal/quest that's often evident early on but takes a long time to achieve, like saving the world or the country or something. Or changing the world. Myself, though, I don't mind playing a "zero to hero" style campaign, and I do sometimes run such a game.

 

[Arkhandus]

Another element here is just what levels you manage to play.

The highest level I've ever reached was 8-9th. The longest running campaign I ever was in (this one I ran) went from 5th to 9th level in 3.0, which spanned a year and a half or more. The longest game I played in went from levels 1-8 or 9, and I forget how long that game took real-time. Most of the games I played in ended before level 3.

My entire gaming history has been "Group gets together, game may last 3-6 months, game and group dissolves".

It sort of changes your perspective when you ignore everything system-wise above 10th level. I just do not read those rules because I genuinely believe I will never see them in play.

Yeah, definitely. I've known DMs who always start games at 1st-level (and rarely run the campaign for more than a few levels, if even that), and others who start things off at 3rd or 7th level but quickly drop the game. And other groups who manage to keep the game going for a few months or a year before they start dropping out or we get TPK'd or the DM just stops running. most games I've played in have started at low levels and ended after a few levels or less, so I've rarely even had the chance to briefly try high-level play.

The longest face-to-face campaigns I've DMed only lasted about half a year or so before too many players had to drop out due to schedule changes (as the new school year began and prevented the younger players from staying in the game; also work-schedule changes for some of the older players required some of them to drop out). The longest campaigns I've DMed online, over OpenRPG, have lasted about.....lessee......3 years now? And counting. My T13K: Fall of the 14th Kingdom campaign probably has another 3 years left in it, or maybe 2 if I rush it (the PCs are around 9th-level, but would be higher if not for some slow sessions and some cancelled sessions each year).

The longest campaign I've played in has been The 13 Kingdoms: For More Than Glory, which I played in from 1st-level up to about 13th-level. My first PC died at 2nd-level and was replaced, then that PC died sometime around 12th or 13th. However, that campaign has been running under different DMs (sorta round-robin style) as each one gets DM-burnout or finishes whatever story-arc they had in mind, and I've DMed it a few times and just had my PC around as a barely-active DMPC during those times (and my PC died the last time I was DMing FMTG, as I happened to crit him while he was brawling with a frost giant or two and getting chopped up badly).

The second-longest campaign I've played in, without DMing at all, was DM Dragonwriter's T13K: Perils of Thunder Island campaign, in which I also lost 2 of my characters, and that game ended after about a year or so. Everything else I've played in has lasted less than a year (though DM Reckless did run a few different Pathfinder games in short succession as he kept TPKing us, and that string of games lasted about a year or half a year).

 

[ExploderWizard]

All of these things being discussed feed into each other. It is a product of the level system. If you want to see your character improve and become epic through gameplay then it stands to reason that you can't start out that way.

What constitutes a "real" challenge is and always has been a factor related to current PC power level. Hunting rats in an abandoned basement might seem unheroic to some but saving the world right at the start of a campaign leaves a lot less room for anything that can top that. What do you do after the campaign has been going for 6 months and the PCs have already saved the entire multiverse 3 times, do it again?

 

[pemerton]

All of these things being discussed feed into each other. It is a product of the level system. If you want to see your character improve and become epic through gameplay then it stands to reason that you can't start out that way.

<snip>

What do you do after the campaign has been going for 6 months and the PCs have already saved the entire multiverse 3 times, do it again?

Which also ties back to the "length of campaign" issue some have raised. I'm currently running my third campaign in 20 years - 1991-97, 1998-2008, 2009- . A level and story progression rate that suits my game is going to be pretty different from one that suits Rechan or Arkhandus.

 

[Gilladian]

I much prefer zero to hero games, myself, and even then I prefer that "hero" still fits within the realm of "not godly powerful". That's why I play E6 - even the greatest hero can still have reason to fear a 1st level NPC in the right circumstances (or at least a group of them).