Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5665110" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't disagree with anything in this post, but just wanted to pick up on this: it's a funny state of affairs if we take it for granted that, in order to get to play the game we want to play, we have to spend some time playing a game we don't so much want to play.I think this is very much about playstyle, and what the participants are hoping to get out of the game.To generalise slightly, in classic D&D play - the sort of play that Gygax gives advice on in the closing pages of his PHB - the character is not the main focus of play. Exploration of the dungeon is the main focus of play, and the PC is a means to that. And often there may be in fact multiple PCs per player, or a PC and his/her henchmen, etc.In this sort of play, levelling is perhaps less important, because you can explore the dungeon whether or not you gain levels. And levelling is also a reward - a reward for skilled play in extracting loot.When play is more focused on the character, however, than the challenge conceived independently of the character, then it seems fairly natural that character development should become more important. (As well as general changes in the attitude towards the PC and its centrality, there are also changes in adventure design - in an adventure path, for example, where the general sequence of events may already have been predetermined by the module writer, the details of his/her PC may be the main point where a player feels s/he can easily make a contribution to the fiction.)And if character development has a mechanical aspect, then it makes sense that, as character development becomes more important to play, so that mechanical aspect becomes more important too.And I don't think this is a simple crunch/fluff issue. There is almost nothing that is different, fluff-wise, between a 1st level AD&D thief and a 9th level one - only the ability to Read Languages. Whereas even between a 1st level and 2nd level 3E rogue, there may be a change from being a comparatively incompetent swordsman to a comparatively competent one (as Weapon Finesse is acquired).In 4e the integration between mechanics and "fluff" is also fairly tight - especially because of the contribution that paragon paths and epic destinies make to the description of a PC.So to flip it around - if you want levelling to matter less to your players, perhaps try and look at a game where (i) levelling has less of an effect on the key story elements of a PC (this is hard to achieve in any edition of D&D for spellcasters, but is achieved for martial PCs in classic D&D), and (ii) where the PCs carry less of the burden of the overall story in the campaign, and are not the main point at which the players get to inject their priorities and ideas into the story.</blockquote>

Verification