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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7724880" data-attributes="member: 6873517">It is useful to consider the fact that preferences in games like RPGs is rooted in psychology (of course). Mostly I'm focusing on D&D here, just to put some fences around things. Players of RPGs like future advancement, much like people in the real world do. People vastly prefer salary increases to the opposite: Think about whether you would prefer to have $50K, then $60K, then $70K in years 1, 2, and 3 of a job versus the opposite. From a purely rational standpoint you should prefer the opposite because it's got immediate payout. I'm sure there will be folks that argue this point because it seems counterintuitive, but consider: You might not survive to collect the $70K in year 3. Furthermore, inflation will have reduced its value to some degree. Therefore, you should go for the immediate payout. However, people tend to prefer the first one. There are various arguments about why, but one reflects on the value of "savoring" future advancements as a psychic good. So power growth in characters feels natural: You think about the goodies you can't yet do but will be able to and work towards it. A lot of the enjoyment of the game comes from thinking about what you can't yet do but hope to do someday. Managing challenge levels and expectations require balancing the probability of victory to make it "just right". A combat with a bunch of goblins at low level is tough. A few levels later and they're chumps. Eventually they're not worth the RL time to fight so they stop appearing in the game. Again, real life tends to work this way. Young animals that play fight with each other give up when they consistently lose and the victors stop bothering, seeking better challenges. A game that's too easy prompts boredom, while a game that's too hard prompts learned  helplessness. Unfortunately, these two aspects are not completely simpatico, particularly with a simulationist type world design. In a simulationist world, the PCs should actually meet chumpier monsters like goblins with fair frequency. However, the players and DM will get bored with that. This is true even in CPRGs, where too many chump encounters is boring and frustrating to the players and DM alike. Game time is, after all, limited. Furthermore, really huge hordes of monsters are frustrating to run using the base rules, meaning that the "quantity" method of threat increasing becomes challenging to run.  There are various ways to handle these design dilemmas, but because they are dilemmas, there won't be a totally satisfactory solution. What has been called "Gygaxian naturalism" posited that characters would start with smaller threats (kobolds, goblins) and continually graduate to bigger ones (over time, orcs and hobgoblins, bugbears, ogres, etc., up to giants and dragons). Similarly they'd have better capabilities and items become available. Some characters, particularly spellcasters, changed qualitatively over the course of an adventuring career. Most notable was the wizard, who started as a feeb with a few rare tricks but had some pretty notable bumps in power at level 5 with the advent of fireball, and going up with "wall" spells (level 7), teleportation (level 9), and so on. Over time, the wizard became one of the mightiest characters in the game, though still vulnerable if mobbed or caught after a long battle. Threats similarly scaled: Often this involved going further "down" in the dungeon or from relatively tamer environments closer to civilization to more dangerous ones further away. Of course you could subvert this with "killer kobolds" or having the chump monsters flee occasionally. Higher level characters also tended to switch into other tasks, such as founding a stronghold, reflecting a certain life cycle of a character. 3E was pretty hardcore simulationist, and had a huge power scale advancement over the course of a campaign. A game like 4E, which is explicitly and very stridently gamist and strongly rooted in video games and minis games, tiered threats and put a number of them at different levels. So you'd have orcs that were leveled up. You didn't really graduate from threats, they advanced with you just as much. There still was some qualitative shifts in advancement but characters' powers didn't shift so much the way they did from lower to higher levels either. 5E seems to be kind of halfway between 4E and older versions of the game. Power creep is a separate concept from advancement. If often happens because original content becomes obsolete when newer content gets released. In some cases this isn't bad: The original content might have been underpowered and should have been replaced. In other cases, it happens because designers just aren't as careful with later content. Finally, it is likely to be inevitable when one considers that more options provide more opportunities for synergies, some of which won't have been anticipated by the designers but will be found by people really focused on optimization. I very much agree with another poster who notes that the action economy is the key to preventing real power creep issues. Things that happened in prior editions were things like off-turn actions, free action, or the ability to chain attacks together. The bonus action and the reaction (much as Mike Mearls, who IMO seems to have a decidedly poor feel for rules design, dislikes them) are actually pretty good things because they cut down on how much a player can milk those off-turn actions. (Off-turn actions also slow the game down a lot, which is really annoying for people who are sitting and waiting.) The action economy always was the way. In 3E you could allow Unearthed Arcana "gestalt characters" in a campaign. I did. On paper they look terribly OP, but in reality they really weren't because they could still only do so much in a round. Furthermore, they tended to have some MAD issues, which helped too.</blockquote>

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