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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 5489497" data-attributes="member: 59082">Good point. Again, I think a middle ground is possible between 1E weaklings and 4E seasoned adventurers. I think it should be very, very rare that a 1st level character is killed in one blow, but that it could happen. The same goes for monsters - why do all orcs have 40+ HP? Maybe I'm exaggerating but it seems that even low-level monsters are too hard to kill. I'm not crazy about the minion idea because it just seems a bit silly, not to mention immersion-threatening, when you kill a death knight minion with one blow. I'd rather have a death knight be surrounded by a bunch of weakling skeleton warriors, some of whom might have higher attack bonuses.I like that a lot. I would probably add some kind of mechanical benefit, like a bonus to certain skills (diplomacy), and maybe some kind of valuable heirloom item. It could also be a kind of "legacy" background that improves over time.This sort of thing would be easy to make up and could be central to the character building collaboration between the DM and player. The player comes up with a concept based upon the campaign world, and the DM puts it into game terms. Or a player could just choose from a pre-determined list.Good point. A standard human guardsman might be an equal match for a standard orc warrior, so a 1st level PC would be slightly above that. A standard human guardsman might go down with one blow from an orc, while a PC would either take a crit to fell or two solid hits.I've never liked the fact that a high level PC could slaughter hundreds of 1st level PCs in a straight up fight. I'm not so sure this is the case anymore with 4E which, I think, softened the curve a bit from 3.5. On the other hand, if we want to make D&D more realistic than advancement should be quicker and first and then slower later on, in the same sense that if you are mastering any craft or art then you advance quickly and make slower and slower increments. To put it another way, there is more of a difference between a 1st year pianist and a 5th year, then a 5th and 10th year. I would even say that the advancement one makes halves each year, sort of like Zeno's arrow, or maybe reduces by a decreasing percentage, so that a 2nd year (or level) pianist is 50% better than a first; a 3rd 40% better than a 2nd; a 4th 30% better than a 3rd; etc.In game design terms, one can do this by either increasing the amount of experience and time between levels or decreasing the power increases at each level. D&D has, by and large, taken a rather flat approach to advancement and done neither, although I suppose level advancement used to take longer at higher levels, not so much in recent editions, especially 4th. In 1E characters dropped in power around 10th level and started getting less increases, especially with regards to HP.3.x seemed to be the worst offender in this regard; the difference between a 20th level character, with potentially 300 HP (a high CON dwarven fighter or barbarian), with that of a 1st level character being greater than in any game. The difference between a 20th level wizard and a 1st level wizard is even more extreme.Yes, true. Part of the problem is the twenty-sided die itself: it is a huge range of possibility, although this makes more or less sense depending upon the situation. For example, in D&D you always have a 5% chance of success and a 5% chance of failure. This works in most cases, but I can tell you that I wouldn't have a 5% chance of hitting a 105 MPH Aroldis Chapman fastball, and a master bowman would have less than a 5% chance of missing a point-blank shot. Perhaps a more realistic approach would have been to use a d10 and have a natural 10 give another roll and add (etc), and a natural one be a -10 and roll again. Then you could have  set DC without needing to have automatic hits for anything.Of course the d10 has less charm than the d20, so I wouldn't want to change it!Yeah, that sounds about right. Hector, on the other hand, might have been high Paragon with the rest of the major heroes being mid-Paragon. If Hector had defeated Achilles he would have made it to Epic.Agreed. But again, I think the d20 is inherently awkward in this regard with too wide a range of outcomes. Of course that adds more chance to the game and, well, it is a game. Maybe so. On the other hand, at the end of the poll it was very clearly stated:That seems like an invitation to speak our minds!</blockquote>

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