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="pemerton" data-source="post: 8288490" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with this.I think it's just more evidence that, in classic D&D, a lot of this stuff hadn't been thought through. It was being made up as they went along. [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] already noted that the whole intended correlation between being a skilled player and having a character of meaningfully high level tended to break down due to weak GMing (and I think that the notion of "weak GMing" here is probably broader than "Monty Haul"); in these passages in the DMG we see Gygax struggling to work out how to preserve the correlation while also making concessions to the reality that 1st level is only fun so many times.In the same book, on p 12, we can see him trying to cope with the tension between the promise of heroic fantasy and the reality of trying to collect coppers on the first dungeon level without being ganked by fire beetles:It has been called to my attention that new players will sometimes become bored and discouraged with the struggle to advance in level of experience, for they do not have any actual comprehension of what it is like to be a powerful character of high level. In a well planned and well judged campaign this is not too likely to happen, for the superior DM will have just enough treasure to whet the appetite of players, while keeping them lean and hungry still, and always after that carrot just ahead. And one player’s growing ennui can often be dissipated by rivalry, ie, he or she fails to go on an adventure, and those who did play not only had an exciting time but brought back a rich haul as well. Thus, in my opinion, a challenging campaign and careful refereeing should obviate the need for immediate bestowal of levels of experience to maintain interest in the game. However, whatever the circumstances, if some problem such as this exists, it has been further suggested that allowing relatively new players to participate in a modular campaign game (assuring new players of characters of higher level) would often whet their appetites for continued play at lower level, for they can then grasp what it will be like should they actually succeed in attaining proficiency on their own by working up their original characters and gaining high levels of experience. This reasoning seems sound, and provided there is a separation of the two campaigns, and the one isn’t begun until new players have had some number of expeditions as 1st level characters, it is not destructive to the game as a whole.That passage is not any sort of deep expression of a design philosophy! It's an expression of thinking on the run about how to make the game work as soon as it has left the particular ecology of Gygax's table in Lake Geneva.And to be clear, I don't hold it against Gygax that he was making this stuff up on the run (cf: I do hold it against him that he didn't bother to edit his manuscript to try and at least group discussions of the same topic together!). What I do tend to object to is RPGers who, 40+ years later, treat this stuff in the DMG as if it has Biblical significance and can never be departed from or improved upon.</blockquote>

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