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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KesselZero" data-source="post: 5927129" data-attributes="member: 6689976">I play sandbox-style, and I see what you're saying, but I personally still support flat math. I believe what the designers are going for is: 1. You'll have some modest to-hit bonuses across the life of your PC, but since monster ACs won't scale, those modest bonuses will be very meaningful. 2. You'll increase in power in other ways, mostly through higher damage and more options. In my playtest, I was able to one-shot some hobgoblins by hitting them with Burning Hands and rolling max damage. In a few levels or so, I should be able to kill them with the half damage I do on a miss-- so it doesn't even really matter that I'm not much better at hitting them. I'll also have more powerful spells than Burning Hands. 3. In a sandbox specifically, I think flat math will help make parts of the world stay meaningful longer. Say your characters take on an orc chieftain at level 3, and defeat him but let him escape. If at level ten he comes back with a new, bigger army, you won't need to replace him and his goons with higher-level versions of the same thing just to make them relevant. He'll need that bigger army, because the characters are tougher. But he'll be the same chieftain and he'll have the same soldiers. Conversely, a level 5 party may make a daring raid into giant territory to steal a prisoner out from the nose of one guard, whom they just barely overcome. Ten levels later they can return and wipe out the giant clan entirely-- and you don't have to level up or replace the giants, just let the PCs fight them all at once. I think what I'm trying to say is that I believe flat math will be very powerful for the verisimilitude of a sandbox, since monsters will stay meaningful for a long time, and can be encountered multiple times, without having to be artificially leveled up or otherwise altered. 4. Also good for verisimilitude is the fact that AC now makes more sense given the reality of a monster. A 10th-level orc won't just magically have a higher AC because he's 10th level. He'll have more HP, sure, because he's tougher and more experienced, but his armor won't suddenly be better or his skin tougher. This also should mean that we can add armor to monsters as a way of toughening them up (giving kobolds chain mail or something) that makes sense in the game world and doesn't break a preset pattern of math.</blockquote>

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