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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 3631149" data-attributes="member: 1165">Lanefan has it right as far as gaining levels are concerned, I believe. Certainly it was my experience that you didn't "have to start over" and that you did, eventually, gain levels.I don't believe campaigns lasted longer "back in the day" and because the speed of gaining levels was slower, reaching name level (whatever that was) took longer or often didn't happen. Was name level about 9th-level in 1e?I believe that at lower levels gaming was actually deadlier in 2e (not taking into account such obvious things as gaming style, etc). Sure your enemies weren't uber, and were often quite wimpy compared to their 3e counterpart, and maybe you could deal 1d8+6 damage with your uber rolled Strength (enough to split any orc in twain) while they couldn't have more than 8 hit points, but good luck making yourself tougher. You had to roll exceptionally high to get more than, say, +1 Dex bonus to AC (and you couldn't even get bonus hit points for being a dwarven cleric with Con 17, due to silly rules). Buffs were rarer, healing spells basically sucked, saves started out mostly lame, etc. Maybe even the rules clarity was partially at fault; I never saw anyone cast Dispel Magic on an NPC using Stoneskin, for instance, until 3e came out (and then, in a 2e game, I suggested maybe someone should try casting that spell).In 2e, designing a powerful character without using kits or uber items boiled down to luck. How many 16s+ did you roll during char-gen? That was character power. Even with high stats, some classes plain stank. It wasn't like in 3e, where (using just core stuff and avoiding the obviously broken stuff) you can still build an optimized but reasonably powerful 1st-level character with a 15 or 16 in their "prime" stat... and double the hit points due to decent Con and rules that made having a decent Con actually possible.You were more likely to die in 2e because you couldn't make the save vs "paralyzation, poison or death" or whatever roll you had to make because you stepped on a pit trap, whereas in 3e any character who isn't going out of their way to have a high Reflex save is probably going to survive (albeit with injury) for accidentally stepping on a pit trap simply due to having more hit points, or could be pulled out of the trap and then healed afterwards, or maybe because making the "Find Traps" roll in 2e was very hard at low levels whereas in 3e it isn't that hard.Note that, due to a host of rules factors that might come up often in some games and rarely in others, we're never going to agree on this. A game where saves hardly came up might be less deadly, and there's no "rule" for saying how often saves had to come up in 2e.I played 2e a long time ago, so I don't really recall where all the character deaths came from, but I recall Dragon Mountain being deadly because several characters "touched things" without investigating first. I think in 3e traps would simply be more logical. (Dragon Mountain had some really inventive and deadly traps but, saving throw differences aside, there's no reason such traps couldn't exist in 3e and be just as deadly.)</blockquote>

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