How many levels does D&D need?

[coyote6]

I'll go with three: relatively normal (albeit fairly badass) folks, awesome heroes, epic/legendary heroes. Each level, the types of things characters are capable of would change -- e.g., at 1st level, you can individually fight one decent opponent or maybe a couple of mooks & collectively (as a party) take on a larger monster; at 2nd level, you can individually take on a larger monster, or fight groups of ordinary opponents, or collectively fight, say, a dragon; at third level, you can individually fight those tougher monsters, fight masses of minion-types, etc. Each level would be sort of like D&D 4e's tiers, except more explicitly divided & compartmentalized.

Then within each level you could have smaller advancements, too; perhaps call them "character points".

Then one group could play solely at level 1, or levels 1-2; or they could start at level 2 & work their way up to 3; or if they wanted to be Exalted, they could start at level 3.

That would be awesome.

Oh, and then you could make the basic combat system be gritty and somewhat harsh (it would depend on detail, but limbs could be hacked off, etc.), and then provide some other resource-based system that would allow more cinematic play -- an ablative pool of points that would be spent (automatically or by player choice) to completely avoid the horribly gritty effects of the base system. Then, when you were out of these "avoid being hit points", you would be in trouble. There might be tiers, where individual campaigns could decide how many of these points PCs would have -- e.g., None, Low, Medium, High, or whatever.

 

[Crothian]

At least one more then my campaign will take the PCs to.

 

[Woas]

Over nine thousaaaand!

 

[Umbran]

Some. It needs more than a couple, fewer than scads. A couple of handfuls, I suppose.

It really depends on what you're getting per level. Take the power range you want across a typical campaign - chop that up into pieces so that the power rise per level isn't too large to be awkward, and isn't so small that leveling up is a non-event.

 

[Herobizkit]

For 3e, 20 levels is fine provided that no class can advance higher than 10th. I have yet to play a campaign that reached level 20 (highest I ever got was 17th).

If you're playing gestalt rules, stop at 10.

 

[Haltherrion]

20 should be the end goal for reasonable people, Its a good round number that most people shouldn't reach too easily (assume start from lvl 1). 10 is too shortm most classes are just picking up steam at 8-10, and at 15 they should start coasting into a comfortably powerful character who reaches lvl 20 and is as famous as he needs to be.

I like 20 as the end goal. Since it is nice to have a system that works beyond your goal, the 4E cap at 30 works well for me. In our group, we often start around level 6-10 and play to level 18-20 for a campaign. It's nice for the system to have legs beyond 20 if we play a little beyond the climax or the campaign arc lasts longer than planned. Have to say I found the 3.x epic system not very usable.

That said, I like the fact that lower levels are more interesting in 4E than they used to be. Our new campaign is starting at level 1 and I expect we will probably tune our campaigns to end in the mid-10s for a while. But it's nice to have a system that covers both.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Generally, though, my ideal is probably 6-8 relatively slowly advancing levels, with time for "lateral" development in between (typically in the form of reputation, equipment, profession, knowledge, and other rp effects).

It really depends on what you're getting per level. Take the power range you want across a typical campaign - chop that up into pieces so that the power rise per level isn't too large to be awkward, and isn't so small that leveling up is a non-event.

What they said. It's a very subjective thing with a lot of variables.

I assume you know about E6, correct?

 

[DaveMage]

How many character levels? Infinite! There shouldn't be a cap.

Now, I could see a cap to class levels (you've "mastered" the class at a certain point), but for a character level, I don't think there should be a cap. After all, you may be the epitome of a wizard, but if there's a hard cap, once you reach that point, a limited character level game may be saying "there's no way you can learn to be a cleric now" you must, for eternity, be a wizard.

I don't like that limitation.

It's about imagination - why limit it?

 

[Oni]

99

or

60, with future supplements raising it to 70, then 80, then 85.




Seriously, 20 feels right for whatever reason, but the current 30 seems to be working just fine to me.

 

[Dice4Hire]

Since d20 is based on the twenty-sided dice, that is important when talking about class levels.

But if you are talking about the twenty-sided dice, then you also need to talk about expectations of power level. Should a 1st level (or 0 level) person be able to do things only high level characters can do (though less reliably).

I tend to prefer a system where the heroes are still in human realms of power, so I would go with 20 levels at most, with most bonuses going up to only +30 or so, and DCs capping out at 40 in all cases. So a normal human can do many things, and at mid-levels the heroes can potentially do anything, but reliably at top levels.

In 4E, the 30 levels work for me, mostly, but there is an immense difference from 1st to 30th level.