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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6708749" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't understand this at all.  First level has historically been objectively more lethal than other levels.  That's not an assumption.  The reason for this is pretty simple.  Second level characters can always be pitted against first level challenges to control the lethality.  But there is nothing meaningful to pit against first level characters that doesn't threaten immediate death because there aren't any degrees of challenges smaller than first level challenges.  This has led to the trope that first level play involves killing rats in a basement.  But even that risks high lethality, as there is no way to be more granular than a single hit point.  If you don't have maximum hit points at first level, the PC's are threated with death with every blow and lack any ablative protection at first level.  That's not an assumption.  That's just math.This has been a problem since the beginning of the game that people have sought solutions for.  Probably the most complicating one in the history of the game has been death is not automatic at zero hit points, which is a very old modification to the game that I know was widely in use by like 1985.  Some of those other attempts at solutions you mention are also relatively old.  I encountered max hit points at first level as far back as 1989.I'm not sure what to make of this as an assumption.  The reasons combat tends to be a focus of play is complicated and varied.  One of the most important is that the fictional position of being dead is one of the most absolutely helpless that a character can be in.  Combat just tends to trump all other strategies because of that, unless you have some sort of mechanically enforced fiction in your game that killing your enemies doesn't solve problems (because it massively debuffs your character or because it massively makes the problem worse).   Note even then that these problems probably wouldn't effect NPCs, who could still generally trump any PC strategy through simply making them dead.For the vast majority of the community, this isn't an assumption.  Skilled rules smiths and skilled designers are the exceptions in the community and not the norms.   The vast majority of players, even pretty good players, aren't also skilled rules smiths or skilled designers.   And ideally, they are capable of recognizing this and recognizing that content provided by the skilled designers is superior to what they could make themselves.  I guess it would be a false assumption that all the best content comes from professionals and that there aren't amateur designers of equal worth, but one thing about professionalism that isn't a false assumption is that the marketplace tends to weed out the inferior work over time.  Thus, the average community member is making a reasonable assumption that the professional stuff will be more reliable than picking something from the community.  Remember, low skill designers can't reliably recognize bad designs.   This is the reason that the amateur community often tends to be dominated by the lowest skilled designers who, suffering from a specific case of Dunning-Krueger effect, assume that they are actually very good designers.  It's not that there wouldn't necessarily be a lot of good amateur content out there, but if you had a Wikipedia or something where content could be added, very quickly it would fill up with tons of ill thought out suggestions alongside the better quality stuff.</blockquote>

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