Leveling assumptions then and now

[delericho]

no, thats not right.

Wizards in 2e have 10d6 fireballs.Those are so devastating to enemies that you don´t need much more. So a wizard of lvl 10 is about as powerful as a wizard of lvl 20 in 3e compared to the monsters.

Note that one of the key differences between 1st and 2nd Edition was the introduction of dice caps for some spells. A 20th level 1st Edition Wizard could throw a 20d6 fireball, it was only with 2nd Edition that this was dropped to 10d6.

 

[Hussar]

Meh. All I can say for me, and not generalizing to anyone else, is that it took about a year of play for us to hit in the neighbourhood of 10th level in 1e and 2e, and about a year of play in 3e as well.

My Savage Tide campaign played about 40 sessions and ended at about 10th level.

All in all, not a huge difference. 4 sessions per level vs 5 sessions per level according to RC's quote is pretty easily explained by all sorts of factors that have little to do with system and everything to do with group.

Obviously, YMMV and all that.

 

[SSquirrel]

I wasn't aware that there was ever a debate about 3E speeding up the leveling process. I thought that was pretty generally accepted. I also could have sworn I had read WotC folks say that it was intentional

 

[delericho]

I wasn't aware that there was ever a debate about 3E speeding up the leveling process. I thought that was pretty generally accepted. I also could have sworn I had read WotC folks say that it was intentional

Yes. WotC did market research, and found that most groups ran campaigns of weekly sessions for 10 months (I think it was the length of an academic year, which is about that), and they therefore built the game to run from 1-20 in that time.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that they found the average campaign length has actually shortened since then, and so they've build 4e to run 1-30 in less time. But I don't know - that's just a guess.

 

[SSquirrel]

Actually in post 46 S'mon addressed that with info from the 4E DMG and no 10 months is not the timeframe for 1-30

 

[catsclaw227]

In the not-very-many years since I've been tracking session numbers, I've found a single-track game attempting to play weekly tends to get in about 40-45 sessions a year, while a double-track (i.e. two different groups each playing weekly in the same campaign world) game gets in maybe 90-95.

Wow.... where do you find people that can play two times a week?!? For a whole year?!?

The thing is, for a lot of people I know, we can squeak in one game every other week, and even that's tough with kids, schools, jobs, spouses, other interests, etc.

Year 1: All campaigns except one either stay at 1st or poke their nose into 2nd. The one exception is a new one where advancement was sped up, it got to 4th in year 1.

Year 2: All campaigns get out of 1st; finishing at anywhere from 2nd to 5th. (one new campaign is still in year 2, with parties in the 3rd-5th range)

Year 3: All campaigns get out of 2nd, most are 4th-5th. (the other new campaign - the faster-advancing one - is still in year 3 and is around 6th at the moment)

Year 4: Range is 4th to 6th, except one disaster that went backwards from 4th to 2nd during the year! It would never recover from this, and by year 8 when it ended it still had not reached 6th level.

Years 5-8: The three big campaigns settle in to a 5th-8th range, with lots of ups and downs; except one party in one of the campaigns that stalled at 4th-5th, stayed there for 4 years, and never went further.

Years 9-10: Range is now 7th-9th for the three, again with ups and downs.

Years 11-12: The major parties from the two campaigns that got this far are in the 8th-10th range, with minor parties still as low as 6th in some cases.

Well, this is going to be by taste as well. Certainly there are others, like me, that wouldn't want to stay at 1st level for a whole year of playing every week, even if I could play every week. Even playing 1e, we didn't like the notion of taking forever to level up. We liked to see PCs increase in power and we also liked the idea of watching them grow powerful, Save The Princess/Kingdom/World, and retire. Then we'd play another campaign, sometimes in the same game world, sometimes not. But if I was only 7th level after 9 years? Not sure I would like that so much. Part of the game is the pleasure of growth and improvement. The story and the journey is great, but there should be rewards in the form of player advancement.

I am not a 1-20 in a year kinda guy, for sure. But 1-20 in 2-3 years? That's the pace I like.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Definitely not my experience. Even with direct damage spells, NPCs don't have many more hp in 3e and die very easily. Most monsters have a few more hp (Ogre 19 hp 1e > 28 hp 3e), some have double, but Wizards can just blast them twice instead of once and they have plenty more spell slots with which to do so. They can't be disrupted the way 1e M-Us can. I always found 1e 10th level M-Us powerful but limited, 3e Wiz-10s powerful and effectively unlimited.

Exception: The 2e Stoneskin spell, as written, made casters invincible.

Yes you could be disrupted, but more important: you could disrupt enemy spellcasters.

About hp: when I ran the module, trolls e.g. had double hp and higher regen. Hook horrors also had much more hp...

Maybe we just played different, happens all the time...

 

[SSquirrel]

My wife and I played in a 3.5 game and while the game lots of great character interaction, we were still only 3rd level after 9 months of playing, which was WAY slower than either of us were used to. Considering I hated anything under about 5th level in 1e/2e and begged to start at least as high as 3rd level in that game, but someone threw out the old crap about "If we skip those levels we'll never really know our characters". Sure I will, I'll write a paragraph or 2 and be done with it.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Another interesting note regarding how often treasure was found:

In G1, there is one major trove, which includes the means to continue on to G2. In Dragon we are given one account of how the module actually played, played by experienced gamers who did well in the tournament.

They missed it. They missed a lot of it. They missed the biggest part of it.

They got to the next round by casting speak with dead on a hill giant.



RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

More Goodies

Module B1, In Search of the Unknown (the module which gave us Quasqueton), was described as "especially designed as an instructional aid for beginning Dungeon Masters and players". Copyright 1979 and 1981, we might be able to glean what was considered "normal" by the game manufacturers at that time.

Two questions assail us:

(1) Were big dungeons normal? This has been disputed on EN World.

(2) Was finding all the treasure in a dungeon normal? This, again, has been disputed on EN World.

B1 will not allow us to answer what happened in any particular game, or if the expections of TSR really were the norm, but it will certainly aid us to determine what the good folks at TSR considered the norm when it was published.

Question 1 is only addressed once that I could locate:

With over fifty rooms and chambers noted on the two level maps by numbers (and several other unmarked open areas), there is plenty of space to explore (though this dungeon is actually quite small compared to most). - page 24​

So it seems that larger dungeons than this were considered normal by TSR. Indeed, 50 areas over 2 rooms is "quite small compared to most". Most dungeons were, therefore, quite a bit larger.

As to Question 2:

The treasures to be found will generally be small, although a couple of more lucrative finds are possible if the adventurers are clever or lucky. - Page 2​

and

Considering their very nature, treasures, in most instances, should be concealed or hidden cleverly. The Dungeon Master should use his or her imagination in devising ways to hide items from discovery. Some suggestions for treasure location might be: Inside an ordinary item in plain view, within a secret compartment in a container, disguised to appear as something else, under or behind a loose stone in the floor or wall, under a heap of trash or dung, or similarly hidden. Occasionally a treasure may be easily noticed, but this should be the exception rather than the rule. - Page 25​

This seems to indicate that cleverness or luck are required to find some treasures. Is there anything clearer, though? Page 24 comes to our rescue:

Although monsters will inevitably make their presence known, treasures are usually not obvious. It is up to players to locate them by telling the DM how their characters will conduct any attempted search, and it is quite conceivable that they could totally miss seeing a treasure which is hidden or concealed. In fact, any good dungeon will have undiscovered treasures in areas that have been explored by the players, simply because it is impossible to expect that they will find every one of them.​

Seems pretty unequivical (knowing full well, of course, that some will nonetheless equivocate).

It is "impossible" to expect that the PCs will find every treasure.

"Any good dungeon" will not yield all of its treasures.

Perhaps in another post, we will look at Mr. Gygax's words in The Strategic Review, where he discusses DMs who do not make their players work for the treasure they garner. Whatever do you suppose we will find?

It seems quite clear to me that a major paradigm shift has occurred!