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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hautamaki" data-source="post: 5469851" data-attributes="member: 42219">Hey all, I have pretty limited RPG experience having lived for almost a decade now in China, where both players and materials are of limited supply, so I was hoping to get a bit more perspective on some design challenges.I have a lot of the 3.5 books, and even the 3 core 4e books, but for various reasons I am currently DMing a 100% homebrew system.There are a lot of design challenges to be addressed in any RPG system but what I want to discuss first is how to find the balance in character advancement where it's still meaningful for the players, but doesn't become so bogged down with gigantic numbers, 100s of choices (of spells/powers etc), and massive amounts of modifiers, many of which will change over the course of the battle.Frankly, I don't think 3.x D&D handles it well at all, and becomes a chore to run battles past 12th level, being almost unbearable at 20th+.  I don't have any first hand experience with high level 4e so I don't know if it does a better job there, but in general I'd love to hear if there are any systems/ideas about character advancement that you think handle high-level gaming really well.What I did: for HP; diminishing returns.  As characters gain levels they earn fewer hp starting on their 6th level, and fewer still on 12th, 18th, and so on.For attacks: characters can normally attack at most twice per round.  But damage output does continue to increase, so high level battles don't last much longer than low level battles.For options: I run a low-magic homebrew (for many reasons, but high level bogging down of combat is one of the main ones) so while there are a huge number of feats (many of which have magic-like effects) for every class to choose from (a few dozen) it's nothing compared to managing hundreds of spells like 3.x.For modifiers: I tried to design the character sheets so that the various modifiers can be easily and clearly displayed, calculated, and used during the battle without having to spend too much extra time re-calculating things.What are your thoughts about how character advancement is handled by various systems?  For anyone who also made/runs their own homebrew system, how did you handle this design challenge?</blockquote>

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