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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kraydak" data-source="post: 3965906" data-attributes="member: 12306">There are a few other threats I could put this in, but I think it deserves its own.We have heard about WotC increasing the system's mathematical sweet spot.  What corresponds to that from a setting point of view, for a 1-shot adventure (what generic setting works best for a 1-shot)?  What world design implications does that have for short or long campaigns?I feel that both adventure flexibility and realism suffer if PCs are too strong compared to the friendly NPCs.  You lose the possibility of political/intrigue adventures, and (friendly) NPCs are unimportant to dungeoncrawls.  The later being less significant for 1-shots than campaigns, as it means that the NPC community won't be supplying the continuity.  (Superhero comics, with immense power disparities, can overcome this by making the heroes have strong relationships with mundanes that are hard to do in an RPG system, and by having the villains actually survive to increase the effective cast).  You also have to wonder how NPC communities survive at all in the face of world-ending (to them) threats.If the PCs are too weak compared to the (local, interested) authorities, then you wonder why the PCs are doing anything, and why people care about them.All told then, I think you'll find that the "optimal" generic setting for DnD would have the PCs with more projectible and less ablative power than the (local, interested) authorities, but less total strength.  If the NPCs have enough 1st level people to overmatch a 3rd level party, the NPCs can fend for themselves if needed *but* would suffer (expensive) deaths against threats the PCs could handle without losses.  This provides incentives for PCs to act as heroes, but also allow for back-up if needed, improve setting realism and avoid the PCs walking over the NPCs as if they didn't matter.  This, to me, is DnD's adventure setting sweetspot.  The PCs are important, but things wouldn't fall to pieces if they left and they have to take the NPCs into account.The problem then is that DnD's power curve is quite steep.  Unless the NPCs level up alongside the PCs (raising the question of where had all to heroes gone before time zero), you will exit the sweet spot unless you change your NPC cast.  You can do this by moving the setting (losing continuity) or increasing the scope of the setting (increasing the cast of NPCs to include more powerful ones who were busy off-screen before).  In short, you want a fractal campaign world, which at every scale has appropriately scaled NPCs to match but not overpower the PCs.  This means you need an excuse for the (powerful, off-screen) NPCs to stay off-screen.  A simple, "many threats, few heroes" will work, as well as having the powerful NPCs being prideful enough to avoid lowering themselves and dealing with lesser threats.</blockquote>

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