Points of Light - Help me make sense ?

[fafhrd]

The freak show strolls into your town. You have never seen a eladrin, a dragonborn or a tiefling in your life. Maybe you have heard stories about such....maybe not.

As a villager, how are you going to react?

Frankly, this sounds like fun.

 

[BlackMoria]

Frankly, this sounds like fun.

That is the norm for some of my campaign. And it can be fun.

But it can get old real fast too.

 

[Pbartender]

If not, where does initial PC experience come from.

It could simply be natural talent for a particular set of skills...

The farmboy has never picked up a sword before, but he instinctively understands what it means to cut, parry and thrust, and straight off he can do it without thinking twice about it. What's more, he's found that he enjoys the thrill of the battle and that gives him a certain confidence that more than makes up for his lack of training.

 

[Stalker0]

As a villager, how are you going to react?

Sure, you can play it otherwise but points of light is about insular and isolated communities and such communities tend to cleave to their own and mistrust all others.

Even if the communities are insular, doesn't mean they have to be homogeneous. You could still have group of dragonborn and elves and the like. In fact, perhaps a number of half breeds as well. They just haven't gotten a lot of new stock from other communities.

While villagers will likely be a bit distrustful at first, I could see the party receiving hero's benefits in short order. The villagers will likely want news of other communities, and any group capable of defending villages against the darkness will be highly respected and valued

 

[fafhrd]

I think I could keep it fresh.

-Some villages are going to do the close the doors and windows thing, at least until the village elders get the feel of the party.

-Some might lie on a trade route, with curious wide-eyed villagers coming to see the fey people they've only heard about from the occasional passing merchant or troubador.

-Other villages might be settled near lands attached to some of the exotic races. There I could see a mostly tolerant community with a few neerdowells who rustle up a posse to harass the party in the dead of night.

-Distraught people suffering from some depredation or another might look upon the party as a divine answer to thier many prayers for succor.

-It would also be fun to turn the whole thing on its head and have a town of dragonfolk rally to defend the town from the horrid ape things.

EDIT: made it readable

 

[Cactot]

It could simply be natural talent for a particular set of skills...

The farmboy has never picked up a sword before, but he instinctively understands what it means to cut, parry and thrust, and straight off he can do it without thinking twice about it. What's more, he's found that he enjoys the thrill of the battle and that gives him a certain confidence that more than makes up for his lack of training.

...or if you really wanted that backstory you could have him use a hammer, mace, axe or spear, all simpler weapons to use and much easier to explain away through backstory. Swords are typically experts weapons, they are much more fragile, expensive, high maintenance and difficult to use than their simpler counterparts. Shield + blunt weapon, axe or spear = very intuitive fighting "platform".

ALSO, judging by the low level monsters and the human guard we have seen, it does not really seem that 1st level adventurers are THAT much more powerful than their mundane counterparts (other than the second wind and healing surges, etc), just more naturally gifted. If i see standard peasants with 10hp i will be VERY surprised, I would figure they would be at least as strong as a standard kobold.

 

[Iron Sky]

I see another problem with 'points of light' - insular communities.

...

Now consider the 'freak show' - a party with dragonborn, a few tiefling and eladrin come into your principally human village.

...

As a villager, how are you going to react?

I would say this would depend on whether most villages in your game are racially pure. If they have any different races mixed in, they'd probably be more likely to accept other races but probably have a health suspicion of anything "from the outside" anyway.

Which actually brings racial inter-breeding abilities into question. If a village is small enough, you need a certain number of distinct family groups to avoid inbreeding. If you have 100 humans and 10 dwarves in a village, unless they can inter-breed and make "half-dwarves," you're going to have some pretty inbred dwarves in a few generations unless there's some outside "contribution" to the gene pool. There's a plot hook I've never used before...

As for the OP's question, I guess it depends on how common/extraordinary you think of heroes as being. I think it leaves the PCs some interpretation as to why they are so "good". Maybe they have natural talent, maybe they are experienced campaigners, maybe they are blessed by the gods, maybe they made pacts with dark powers.

In most 3.5 games, 1st level PCs have no choice but be "newbs" unless you start at higher level. This way the PCs can decide why they are as competant as 1st level 4E characters are, rather than being average Joes off the street/apprentices/cannon fodder like in 3.5. I know my players almost always have more interesting and varied backstories for their new Exalted characters(starting out with some power) than they do for their 1st level DnD ones, because their increased competance allows for a wider variety of previous experiences to reach their semi-competant place.

If players don't want to make backstories, 3.5's 1st level characters work great, in my experience, but I'd rather have my characters come up with why their characters are cool now rather than starting weaksauce, surviving the first few levels, and spreadsheeting their way to the cool character they want to play.

 

[JPL]

They're getting away from the "humans as default culture" thing, so I would think when the dragonborn strides into town, it's more like . . . I dunno . . . living in downstate Illinois and meeting a Canadian. Maybe you never met a Canadian before, but you've heard about them. And you don't start screaming OUTLANDER! OUTLANDER!

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

...or if you really wanted that backstory you could have him use a hammer, mace, axe or spear, all simpler weapons to use and much easier to explain away through backstory. Swords are typically experts weapons, they are much more fragile, expensive, high maintenance and difficult to use than their simpler counterparts. Shield + blunt weapon, axe or spear = very intuitive fighting "platform".

ALSO, judging by the low level monsters and the human guard we have seen, it does not really seem that 1st level adventurers are THAT much more powerful than their mundane counterparts (other than the second wind and healing surges, etc), just more naturally gifted. If i see standard peasants with 10hp i will be VERY surprised, I would figure they would be at least as strong as a standard kobold.

Hmm. I thought that the 3.x "non-combattant" classes would actually look like Minions - and thus, the 4E first level equivalent of a Commoner or Expert would have to live with no or 1 hit point. (Any attack that hits kills him.)

That said:
Maybe adventurers are really a special bunch of people. Something - luck, innate talent, their bloodline, etc. - makes them stand out when facing adversary. They might have lived their entire life as a farmer, but when the Kobolds come to steal the village pigs, then they are the ones that survive the first skirmish - and press on.

Off course, this hardly works for wizards. Still, you don't neccessarily need an academy or a fully fledged spell caster to explain his abilities. Maybe the village elder gave the young wizard a book that happened to contain spells. The elder didn't bother experimenting with this, but this foolish young boy did. When he was alone, herding the sheep, he read the book, and learned how to cast the few spells in the book. When we first meet him in the adventure, he has some tricks up his sleeves - and unlike others, this young man keeps his head together and casts the spells.

On odd-ball groups with Tieflings and Dragonborn: Keep in mind that these are core races in 4E. They might not be the most common bunch of people, but they aren't unheard off.
The PoL background implies that there once where big nations and kingdoms, but they fell. This means every place has a time when things where still cosmopolitian. Today, things might not work that well anymore, but the Tieflings and Dragonborn that traveled the world during the high time of the last Empire had to settle down somewhere.

Most people might still try to avoid Tieflings or Dragonborn, but they'll avoid hostility - everybody knows there was a time where they were all united.

 

[Bandreus]

I don't see PoL as a great issue. You can think at it like low mid age europe. Maybe communities start rising in the most comfortable corners of the land, near rivers, lakes, the sea, where the soil makes harvesting or farming easier, near valuable resources, on hills or other locations that make self defence more effective. The known world is generally supposed to be not a densely populated place (at least by civilized/benevolent species), so settlements tend to be far from one another and mostly indipendent.

OTOH, I don't think this should necessary mean coomunities are that small to lack for the most basic facilities. Given that the World is largely wild and dangerous, I find it perfectly natural, even for the small towns, to set up their own institutions. Without the strenght to train trein own forces, how could that tiny point of light survive to the surrounding darkness?

Also the PoL thing does not seem to be paired with a low-magic assumption, wich would seem to fit it quite naturaly. I just took the new core setting as a way for WotC to easily bring more action and adventure to players and DMs. You can quickly mold the world to fit your needs without having to design a lot of stuff before playing.

The power for 1st level chars is something more tricky. Every class is going to have a lot of power from the start so, even with good backgrounds, players who want to play their way up from the paesant to the growing hero carreer may really have an hard time. Even if we can assume that the basic folk are capable to fight for their life in a dangerous environment, what we know now tells us that 1st lvl PCs are clearly well above the average townspeople more than they were in previous editions.
It would be nice to have something like optional 0lvl characters to be able to roleplay your early hero-wannabe life. But that's something I'll start to think about when I read the full classes