Forked thread: Treasure & Advancement Rates

[pemerton]

In terms of expected speeds to gain levels, though, I don't believe that 2e was actually slower than 1e. With the extra XP awards listed in the DMG, it was, if anything, faster than 1e.

This really depends on the consequences of removing treasure XP. Played by the book in AD&D (ie XP for treasure plus using the treasure tables), I believe that treasure makes the most significant contribution to level gain, by a considerable margin.

Dropping XP for treausre seems to me to be one of the obvious signs of the increasing trend towards simulationism rather than gamism ("Why does looting things make me better at spellcasting?!") and towards a heroic rather than a mercenary genre.

AFAICT, 1e took steps to slow down advancement rates

But only at name level - if you compare the XP charts in Basic/Expert to AD&D, for example, levels above name are twice as expensive in AD&D as in Basic.

(I guess I should really be making this comparison to the OD&D rather than the Basic charts, but I don't know them off the top of my head!)

WotC and their marketing survey - did it not occur to them that the reason slower advancement was the norm was because play groups wanted it that way?

I don’t know if they were trying to fix the problem you’re assuming they think they found. Is that the same survey that showed most campaigns only lasted at most 18-24 months before dying off. (Players moved on in Real Life – school, jobs, family, etc.) I remember a designer “complaint” that with slow level advancement the players only experienced half to three-quarters of the presented game (levels 1-10 to 1-15) in the expected lifespan of a campaign.

IIRC, the designers did indeed say that this was an issue that they were trying to address.

My recollection is the same.

it can just as easily be argued that because the game design reaches that high doesn't mean it's intended to be played that high. I always looked at the info. for very high level types merely as the framework for building BBEGs.

I think this is an interesting amibiguity in any system in which adversaries and PCs are built according to the same rules.

4e is the first version of D&D to drop this approach - epic levels are for PCs, whereas powerful adversaries are to be built using the elite/solo monster design guidelines. And interestingly, the upshot of this has been that WotC has significantly reduced support for epic tier, on the basis that it is not being played very much. Which suggests that Lanefan may be right in his hypothesis, both about player preferences and about the function of high-level build rules in classic D&D!

(And for the record - I've GMed AD&D PCs up to 15th level, Rolemaster PCs up to 27th level - which I would say corresponds to AD&D or 3E levels somewhere around 18th - and am looking forward to taking my current 4e campaign into the epic tier in due course.)

 

[Lanefan]

Um, not entirely accurate.

I was 32/33 in 1999. I started in 1980 at the age of 13 -- I had been playing nearly 2 decades by the time of the poll.

13 puts you in, what, Grade 8 at the time? High school is Grades 11-12, or 10-12 depending where you were.

So I fall within their demographic, and yours.

Yep, there's a very narrow window there, depending how you define what constitutes high school. But my point remains...

The 18-24 month campaign length was/is about my experience even now, with another decade added to my time.

However, it is not mine and never has been; nor has it been that of pretty much any pre-3e player I know.

And, there's a difference between taking a poll within a certain demographic, and "throwing out responses."

Merely one of semantics. There was nothing in the survey that indicated not to bother answering it if you were over 35, so in good faith I (and many others) filled it out and sent it in. Those responses were, by any definition, thrown out.

You can't please *everyone*, so you have to pick an audience and try to please the hell out of them specifically.

If you're in WotC's position in the late 90's taking over a 2e system that's surviving only because it doesn't know it's dead, don't you want to survey the ENTIRE market just to see what's out there and how they're playing the game, before deciding what to fix in the game and-or who your target market is?

The impression I got, once I saw 3e, was that the survey parameters had been set in order to give them the answers they already knew they wanted - thus defeating the entire point.

Lan-"and yes, you can please everyone if that's what you set out to do"-efan

 

[Umbran]

13 puts you in, what, Grade 8 at the time? High school is Grades 11-12, or 10-12 depending where you were.

Where I grew up, it was 9-12.

If you're in WotC's position in the late 90's taking over a 2e system that's surviving only because it doesn't know it's dead, don't you want to survey the ENTIRE market just to see what's out there and how they're playing the game, before deciding what to fix in the game and-or who your target market is?

Whether or not you want to do that depends on what return you expect to get from the effort.

I don't know it for a fact, but I think it is likely that they had indication by other means that the potential customer base under 35 was much larger than the over-35 bunch. They probably also had strong indication that no matter what game they finally produced, the over-35 market was going to be difficult/expensive to maintain, much less grow, for reasons completely unrelated to the game.

If they're a smallish bunch, and you're going to lose them anyway, might as well focus on the folks you can keep. If some of those old folks like what you produce, that's excellent, but their needs are probably not a good choice for high priority in your design criteria.

The impression I got, once I saw 3e, was that the survey parameters had been set in order to give them the answers they already knew they wanted - thus defeating the entire point.

How did you determine what they knew they wanted? Did you survey them, or something?

Lan-"and yes, you can please everyone if that's what you set out to do"-efan

I'm sorry, but as a practical matter no, you really can't. And trying is a good way to throw your business down the drain. If you are lucky, you can satisfy a great many people, but "everyone" includes people with mutually exclusive desires and needs.

If you want to consider it artistically - even the best artist on Earth cannot produce a work that everyone likes.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't know it for a fact, but I think it is likely that they had indication by other means that the potential customer base under 35 was much larger than the over-35 bunch. They probably also had strong indication that no matter what game they finally produced, the over-35 market was going to be difficult/expensive to maintain, much less grow, for reasons completely unrelated to the game.

If they're a smallish bunch, and you're going to lose them anyway, might as well focus on the folks you can keep. If some of those old folks like what you produce, that's excellent, but their needs are probably not a good choice for high priority in your design criteria.

These are what we'll never* know:
- how many surveys came in from over-35's in relation to the total; if it's only 5% or 10% then who cares, but if it's 50% or more there's a problem
- how (if at all) the final data and results would have changed had all the surveys been included
- how 3e would have differed, if at all, from what was actually released.

* - never, unless Ryan Dancey is still hangin' round here and remembers any of this stuff, as he wrote the report; surely the NDA would have worn off by now!

Lan-"and the worst thing is it's way too late to re-do the survey now"-efan