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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jester47" data-source="post: 1321880" data-attributes="member: 2238">Levels are an interesting concept, and I think that the concept of levels is one of the hardest things to reconcile with believability in D&D.  When I think about levels as a concept and how they are supposed to work, I think about fridgeworld.  I use fridge world because it is so far from the fantasy tropes that we are acustomed to that you can then see the mechanics clearly.  Fridgeworld simply a world populated by things you would find in your fridge.  Katsup, old pizza, banana pudding, apple, jam, lunchmeat, etc.  If banana is 12th level and apple is 5th level, banana is gonna kick apple's butt.  If they have the same levels there is a pretty well matched fight.  Assuming the rotten class and the paragon of freshness class are balanced.  When we look at it this way, we find out that levels are largely relative to the player characters.  Anything that is supposed to be dealt with later has a higher level than the player characters.  The more immediate the threat, the closer to the level + 4 range the situation gets.  Of course the players can break this by directly confronting the high level NPCs right away, but this ussually hurts.  So in short, when thinking about apple vs. banana, think about how long you want it to take before they have the final showdown, or how long you want to wait until apple and banana are considered equal.  Then fill the space with appropriate adventure.  The problem is that what happens when the NPC is too powerful or not powerful enough for the adventure alotted between the introduciton of said chaacter and the characters equivalency.  Basicly a good DM can balance this.  To use FR, when the characters reach near epic levels is when they actually start haveing conversations with Elminster.  If they start at level 1 and in three weeks of game play are at level 20 and dealing with Elm, then you have what is called a munchkin game.  If you start at level 20 and introduce Elm in fairly short order you may have a munchkin game but you also might have a serious roleplay thing going on.  Or you may have the characters start off at 1 and the super evil powerful wizard they have to defeat is...Level 5.  And it takes sessions and sessions to get to him.  This may be a little bit too slow for some.  So the BIG lesson here is that Levels essentially are a tool for pacing players characters WRT story development.  The levels of your Uber NPCs are relative to the type of game you want to run.  I would wager that hack and slash worksbest when the PCs are lower level than thier aversaries.  You really can't do anything but roleplay when you are more powerful than the adversaries (well you can but the fun is in the roleplay rather than the fighting).The problem that I have with levels is that as level increases so must the challenge to keep the game interesting.  And this sort of takes away in the realism of the situation.  I think it adds a level of complexity that does not need to be there.  Heck I mean in Lord of the Rings even Gandalf runs from Orcs.  Elminster on the other hand does not need to.  Aside from Gurps is there a system that does not use levels?  A levelless d20 would be interesting.  Aaron.</blockquote>

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