Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5369296" data-attributes="member: 4937">shidaku: I'm not going to respond to that point by point because such threads have a tendency to grow.Instead I'm going to note one thing particularly, and make other random comments afterword.  You have your players spend 1st-5th level as mundane characters doing ordinary things against mundane foes.  You do ostencibly to make the higher levels feel more epic.But in point of fact, by your own admission, you never go there.  By your own admission, about the time your players are ready to be playing playing your worlds sidekicks and minor players, you're bored with it and ready to start over.I sense what seems to me to be a little bit of a failure of introspection.As for NPC's levels generally being proportionate to their age, I've never had a game last more than 5 years of game time.  No race ages so fast that that is particularly significant.  I'm not talking about players.  I'm making the assertion that most NPC's lack quite the potential, or the destiny, or the fast pace of challenges that PC's typically face.  You typical NPC does not face 5 life threatening challenges before breakfast on an almost daily basis.  They might face 5 such challenges in their whole lives, and mostly what they do is learn through the slow but proven method of practice, training and repitition.   Simply put NPC's aren't expected to earn nearly as much XP/day, and as such for a given level they tend to be older than an equivalent NPC.  You might find elderly wizards who are 9th level spellcasters.  They will be astounded at the natural talent and/or luck that has allowed the PC to master such potent magic at such a young age.  The wizard is a quite powerful character, but with a strength, dexterity, and constitution of about 6 he's hardly fit for adventuring.  As I said, '10' is intended to be a real average score in my world.  I stick to that firmly on the basis of having been in so many campaigns and looked at so many published works were the PC's have on average the lowest ability scores of any prominent character.  This is in my opinion not the optimal way to go about challenging players. I have a serious simulationist streak as a DM.  I like my world to feel at least on superficial inspection to be a functioning ecology.  We must include the sentient species in particular in this ecology.  If in fact there are areas where 1st level characters are extremely relevant, and yet there are whole crews of fierce 10th level bucanneers out there, one wonders why the 10th level pirates don't just go pillage and plunder the places that the characters were first level in, and stay well away from the areas where anything might challenge their skills and dominion.  And if there are 10th level pirates, then there is most likely 10th level barroom brawlers and 10th level city gaurds out there.  And if so, why don't they spread out a little?  And most importantly, if everyone has been going around killing things with the rapidty of the PC's and facing similar life threatening situations 'there whole life' just like the PC's, why in the world is there anything left alive?  Things couldn't breed fast enough to keep up with the XP demand.  What you describe sounds alot like the world of a MMORPG.  And such world doesn't have a functional ecology and to make it work, various meta-restrictions have to become real in game restrictions limiting people from interacting in precisely the ways I've described.  It doesn't 'hang together' for me when put into a PnP setting where players typically hold the setting to higher standards.</blockquote>

Verification