NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5534796" data-attributes="member: 2067">I dunno. It seems more like early 4e's baby-with-the-bathwater approach to trying to save the DM time in this case to me. The idea is that a "normal person" doesn't provide any challenge for a "heroic" PC, so they don't need stats, they don't need rules, and they can exist as pure story entities, and providing anything more than story for them is the worst kind of raw fanwank that produces nothing of use for actual play, but plenty of message board narm moments from the obsessive simulationists out there. I think this approach neglects the fact that part and parcel of the fun of gaining levels and increasing in power is that you can compare what you're capable of at low levels and high levels, and you can compare what you're capable of to what people who aren't heroes are capable of. That change in feel over time, the fact that what was once dangerous is now a cakewalk, the fact that no mere town guard could kill that goblin king -- that's an important sensation for the power fantasy of RPG game play. Your characters don't exist in a vacuum, and they can't, if their deeds are to have any meaning beyond the gameplay of rolling dice and doing math. Otherwise it feels empty and vapid in the extreme. FWIW, 4e has softened in many respects (there's no first level gods, and town guards peter out at about 10th level), but they still really do struggle with the implications of this design choice, such as in their inability to do epic level as anything other than "more of the same, now with bigger numbers!"I'm not sure it's a CR-system-style problem (that's just a way of ranking enemies -- XP totals did the same thing) as much as it is a problem with tearing the sim out of D&D by its roots in an effort to save DMs pointless work, and finding a problem where there was supposed to be a solution.</blockquote>

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