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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kzach" data-source="post: 5817469" data-attributes="member: 56189">After much consideration, deliberation, and experimentation, I've decided that I'm firmly in favour of options over power. By this, I mean that I'm tired of levelling up and getting a +1 to hit and 5 more hit points.BORING.Getting more powerful causes half the problems in D&D. Instead, I'd love to see an options-based levelling system. Sure, your hit points, damage and attack bonuses go up as you level, but they do so at very slowly so that the difference between a 1st-level character and a 20th-level character in terms of damage and attacks and defences, really isn't that huge and that given the right circumstances, a 1st-level character could kill a 20th-level character. The biggest difference between the two, are options.The 20th-level character would have all those levels worth of extra options at their disposal to effectively deal with situations as they arise. These options could be anything that doesn't involve increasing statistics but still allows for a more powerful FEEL to the character.To put it into perspective, let's learn kung fu.Two students have trained for years and become 1st-level monks. One stays at the monastery whilst the other goes abroad to learn more about the art. Five years later, the travelling monk (now 20th-level) returns to the monastery and the two friends decide to have a sparring match for fun. The 20th-level guy is a little bit faster, a little bit more accurate, and hits slightly harder, but otherwise, the 1st-level monk is keeping up with him just fine. But then the 20th-level monk does a double flip over his 1st-level counterpart, creating an opportunity to strike from behind, thus denying the 1st-level monk his ability to block the attack. Later on in the fight, the 1st-level monk is almost defeated but pulls off a critical hit. The 20th-level monk, knowing a mind-over-body technique, halves the damage and then uses a ki focus technique to heal himself of a small amount, turning the tide in favour of himself and winning the match.None of these changed the character's ability scores, or gave him +5 to hit or +10 to damage, etc. but they still made the character more powerful and more importantly, more fun and interesting to play as it was levelled. Power curves cause all sorts of balance and logic issues at the table (the house cat for one, or the fighter ignoring fifty archers because he knows he can handle the damage, or town guards either having to be more powerful than the PC's, or be kicked in the head by any adventurer with a few kobold ears on his necklace), so why use them at all when the more interesting and fun option is... options.</blockquote>

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