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="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9074529" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Some like to call this the "paradox of tolerance," but I prefer to call it the challenge of respect. In order to have a place where people are genuinely respectful of one another, or at least actively avoid disrespectful behavior, you cannot permit disrespectful behavior, not even on the grounds that it is more respectful to be patient and forgiving when folks are disrespectful.Right. I was specifically speaking of the (many, many) old-school cursed items that are, fully by author intent, almost-indistinguishable from proper and entirely beneficial magic items. The ones meant to punish that "lazy" players who don't get things rigorously identified. I'm sure you've seen or heard of such a thing.That serves a very different function, so it really would not suffice as an alternative to "novice levels." But it IS a really great piece of design, don't get me wrong. It is not design for me, but I love how smart a design it is.The thing is, the funnel is a response to a related design issue. It isn't the need for useful tutorial levels nor to wanting to make the early levels dangerous, but rather to a knock-on problem that comes from making the early levels dangerous. Namely, it takes a long time to get anywhere with such stuff. Back when D&D was new, that wasn't as much of a problem for a variety of reasons--the people playing it were younger, often single with no children, focused on college or early career stuff, and things like video games, the internet, and various other forms of fandom had not taken off yet. Requiring several months just to get off the ground with a single character is rough in the modern context. The funnel beautifully solves that problem by compressing that in time. Every character is run through their early-level gauntlet simultaneously, and thus you're (very) likely to get at least one or two characters who survive to reasonable level, where mortality falls off pretty fast.It's a truly brilliant design move, comparable to some of my favorite design elements in 13A, which likewise solves some thorny design problems with really smart answers. But the problem it solves isn't the problem I had described. A related one, to be sure, but still distinct.</blockquote>

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