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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8586530" data-attributes="member: 42582">It doesn't seem especially counterintuitive.The 500 gobins is a bit of a red herring, for the reasons [USER=6701124]@Cadence[/USER] posted not far upthread: there is a rather arbitrary cut-off between (on the one hand) goblins, kobolds and 0-level mercenaries and (on the other hand) everyone else; but as you note, there is a different "steepness of the curve" between versions of D&D which produces the sort of phenomenon [USER=6855114]@Helldritch[/USER] is pointing to.But the fact that a high-level AD&D character demonstrates the heroic ability that results from this steepness of the curve doesn't tell us anything about how hard it is to get a character to high levels as if the game is played either as presented, or as is typical.I can't comment on 5e, but the relationship between game play (as presented in the books) and levelling in 4e D&D is radically different from how it is presented in B/X and Gygax's AD&D. In the classic game, levelling is a pay-off for skilled and lucky play. It is possible to play a whole session of classic D&D and yet - due to back luck or poor decision-making - find little or no treasure and hence earn little or no XP. In 4e, though, playing the game means engaging in encounters and pursuing quests, and those are the very things that earn XP and hence levels and hence trigger the GM to provide treasure parcels. As a result, in 4e (as presented in its rulebooks) levels become simply a device for pacing the story of the PCs; they are not a reward for good play. (Even in 4e there's always the chance of PC death, but it's obviously lower than in classic D&D given the changes to the relativities of starting hit points and typical damage ranges, and Raise Dead is available relatively cheaply from 8th level.)Another difference between classic D&D and 4e follows from the one I've just described: in classic D&D, Monty Haul play is a degenerate form of play, because it subverts the game's reward mechanism. But in 4e play there's really no such thing as a Monty Haul/non-Monty Haul contrast: the challenging part of 4e play isn't in finding the loot and advancing your PC, but rather in deploying your player-side resources successfully from moment-to-moment in conflict resolution. The degenerate case, for 4e play, is the GM presenting conflicts which don't place demands on the players' mastery of those player-side resources, and hence can be resolved by just "going through the motions" of play.I don't know enough about 3E or 5e to know how either fits within this framework of comparison between classic D&D and 4e.</blockquote>

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