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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5521545" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is interesting, and different from my players. My players like the "power ups", but they tend to see it in terms of PC capabilities ("Now my guy can do this thing - like pull all the monster and knock them prone - that he couldn't do before.") I think they take for granted that the challenges they face will be correspondingly more difficult, so they'll need the powerups.What (I hope, and believe) stops this seeming like a stalemate/running-to-stand-still state-of-affairs is that the new challenges are more complex in various ways, both mechanically and in the fiction. So the reward for the powerups is not winning more easily, but rather being able to engage a different sort of challenge that is an observable development in both mechanical play and fictional circumstances.My own view is that, given that (at least as I see it) this is the sort of play experience 4e supports, the GM guidelines should say a bit more about how it can be done.This is also different from my group, and I can see how it would cause the sort of problems that you're talking about. My players are pretty ready to treat my description of the fictional situation as primary, and to fit the mechanical expression of a game element (be it a monster, a trap etc) into that fiction, rather than vice versa. So (as one instance) no one at my table batted an eyelid when the 10th level PCs had some trouble with a swarm of stirges, even though the last time they had fought stirges (and found them challenging then too) was 1st or 2nd level. But the encounter didn't make them feel like nothing had changed since first level - because unlike the earlier encounter it took place on the roof of a ruined temple at the edge of a 20' drop, and the only way the bulk of the PCs could get up there to help the scouting ranger was by the wizard casting Dimension Door. So it respected and rewarded their level-ups without requiring a one-for-one projection of those mechanical changes onto the ingame fictional situation.Whereas it sounds like your players are exactly vice versa - ie trying to read the fiction off the mechanics even when you're trying to tell them what the ficiton really is. I think 4e is probably a much harder game to run for those sorts of players - with the difficulty getting greater the more rapid and extensive the level gain - for all the obvious reasons you've talked about in this thread.By "situations" I'm meaning more-or-less what the 4e rulebooks call an encounter or a challenge - that is, the ingame/fictional circumstance that the PCs find themselves confronted by, and that they have to try and engage with and/or resolve in some fashion. So as far as I can tell you got the meaning fine!I try fairly hard to make sure each situation in the game has some sort of connection to the key themes of the campaign/PCs -even if it's just an evocation achieved by a monster origin. For example, I have a drow PC who is a member of a Corellon-worshipping secret cult, and whose goal is to undo the sundering of the elves - just putting fey creatues into an encounter makes it speak to the player of this PC in a way that it otherwise might not, and then as the encounter actually resolves it's likely that the player will inject something into that I can pick up on, or vice versa, so that the encounter starts to become a part (even if just a small part) of the bigger picture of the campaign.The idea is that, over time, these small pictures build up and provide the foundations for epic adventuring. (Quite a bit upthread Barastrondo posted about the problems in making epic tier speak to players who have built up their PCs in terms of character and social position in the prosaic mortal world. The technique I've just described is the one I use to try and straddle this gap, so that the more prosaic stuff that happens at heroic tier leads naturally into, rather than sits in odd contrast with - or even worse, is retrospecitvely rendered irrelevent or meaningless or worthless by - epic tier.)</blockquote>

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