Rate Of Advancement Question, Or "Is the XP chart changing?"

[papastebu]

I doubt that they will go this far, but I would like to see it not matter so much about leveling up. The characters could gain/improve abilities and powers and skills as they choose, and pretty much when they choose, with some sort of purchase mechanic. Leveling up would be cool, but for those like myself, who are, shall we say, "gifted with less patience than the baseline populace", waiting wouldn't be so deadly boring.

 

[KidSnide]

My guess is that rapid advancement won't be as big an issue at the high levels, because they're flattening the power curve. Didn't someone say that levels 4-14 in 3E is going to be equivalent to 1-30 in 4E? If so, then each individual level will represent a much smaller increment in actual power, so you won't get as much of the "peons to demigods in 6 months" feel.

Well, they may flatten the power curve, but that's not the same as expanding the sweet spot. When they said that they wanted the feel of 3E levels 4-14 to apply to 4E levels 1-30 that doesn't mean that a 4E L30 character is as powerful as a 3E L14 character. Frankly, since 21-30 is supposed to be epic, I imagine a 4E L30 character to be similar in *power* to a 3E L30 character. (4E L1 will likely be stronger than 3E L1, since 3E L1 is viewed as too weak to be fun.)

The aspect that will be leveled out across L1-30 in 4E is the *complexity* of playing the characters. For example, I expect there to vastly fewer buff effects to avoid the massive accounting involved in high-level 3E play. Similarly, with per/encounter abilities replacing much of Vancean memorization, I expect there to be less pre-game prep work. A L30 caster will have a less mind-numbingly large number of choices with which to deal. However, fighters of all level will gain maneuvers, and so those characters will have an increased number of reasonable choices.

If I had to guess, like Tome of Battle, we will see characters replacing weak spells/maneuvers/abilities with more powerful spells/maneuvers/abilities as they gain levels. The number of choices will stay within a reasonable bound even as the individual choices get stronger.

 

[drothgery]

Didn't someone say that levels 4-14 in 3E is going to be equivalent to 1-30 in 4E?

I think that was said in a the context of 'enlarging the sweet spot'; in 4e they want you to have interesting options without getting overwhelmed from 1-30. But they've also said that 21+ is supposed to be Epic, so I'm thinking a 30th level character has powers that a 14th level 3.5 character -- or even a 20th level 3.5 character -- wouldn't have anything to compare to.

 

[hong]

Well, "epic" is one of those words that is a bit vague in this context. They could just be using the plain-English meaning of epic: someone who can do stuff that's just way out there, in the realms of the miraculous or godlike. Using this, a spell like resurrection is plenty epic, despite being "only" 7th level.

D&D power levels have been divorced from everyday discourse ever since the ELH, and in a sense ever since 3E came out. In 1E through to 3E, by the time you're 9th (character) level you could be pretty epic: you can teleport around the world, raise people from the dead, mow through hordes of mooks, etc. 3E upset things though, by increasing the speed of levelling so that high levels became much more accessible than before; in turn this created the problem of what to do after players had reached those levels. Hence the ELH, and its "more epic than the epic stuff you could do already" vibe. So if 4E can turn the clock back, and reduce power levels at the top end, that would remove some of this dissonance.