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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3294055" data-attributes="member: 4937">Power Creep is two basic problems.First, the overall increase in the size of numbers across the board.  The problem with this is that it makes the game harder to track for no real increase in playability.  Diablo was a game deliberately designed to power creep, with numbers getting bigger and bigger but the overall play experience staying roughly constant.  This is not so much a problem in a CRPG where the machine can keep track of the numbers and were the goal is not playability but 'replayability', but it is a problem in a traditional pen and paper game.  If compared to a previous version of the game, every has twice as much hitpoints - including the monsters - and everyone does twice as much damage in the average round, if all the AC's are twice as high but so also are the bonuses to hit, then we've doubled the numbers for no better reason that some munchkin thinks bigger numbers are inherently cool.  It's like doubling wages but then doubling the price of everything you pay for.  That's just inflation, not an improvement.  And at best, it makes it harder to do the math to make change and carry around enough bills to pay for things.  At worst, it throws off game balance and reduces the enjoyment of game experience because not everything got scaled evenly, and for example, combats last fewer rounds and are more dependent on luck (usually the throw of the initiative die is the deciding factor).Second, an increasing gap between the power level of starting characters and the most powerful characters in the game world.This one is particularly annoying because it creates all sorts of subtle problems with versimilitude.  In first 1st edition you already had this problem in that your average 12th level character was probably the match for any 300 normal inhabitants of the world.  But first Forgotten Realms and then later 3rd edition in general really took this problem to the extreme.  As the assumptions about what 'high level play' meant increased to greater and greater power levels, the disparity between a high level character and an ordinary citizen became extreme to the point of ludicrousness.  How do 0 level humans survive in a world where even 18th or 28th level characters can be regularly challenged?  How do 1st level characters even survive on a world where their exist CR 28 challenges?  Are epic characters a dime a dozen and continually saving the world from horrors of cosmic proportion somewhere out of sight?  Why do nations bother to maintain armies at such great expense when those armies are helpless against even single 20th level characters?  How do ordinary villages survive when the CR 15 monsters comes out of the woods and there is no one above level 5 in the neighborhood?  If high level magic is so common why does most of the world look like a medieval village?  Why is it that when you reach 10th level everyone is a 5th level fighter or higher, but back when you were 1st level people needed your help?   If every bartender out there is a 9th level fighter, what good is an 'adventurer'?Settings like that invalidate the basic assumptions of what low level play is.  If you start out in such a setting (whether Dark Sun or the Forgotten Realms), the concept of a 1st level hero becomes ridiculous.  In order to make your character survivable, much less useful, you have to start play at third level or fifth level or some such.  And that is power creep.I love the adventure paths, but why is it that the universe so orders itself that there is a lovely little sheltered area suitable for low level characters and then an orderly progression all the way up to low Epic level?  Why don't the villains from chapter 2 invade the area of chapter 1, and the ones from chapter 3 invade the area of chapter 2 and so forther rather than wait around for high enough level adventurers to come around and kill them?  In some ways, I think Red Hand of Doom and Dragonlance do a much better job with handling the problem of power disparity between high and low level, because in a since in those campaigns the bad guys do exactly that.Eberron is another good example of a setting that tries to deal with those issues.  It reduces the assumption about what high level play is down to a more managable level.  It makes assumptions about how common magic changes the face of society, and so forth.  I'm not saying that every setting should look like Eberron, but I am saying that cannonical Forgotten Realms is ridiculous IMO as is the assumption that an Epic campaign can exist in the same conceptual space inhabited by 1st level adventurers..</blockquote>

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