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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 3966007" data-attributes="member: 1210">Truncated, but:I think that this is a very interesting and thought-provoking position. I agree about a "fractal" campaign world, but I look at level distribution a little bit differently. In the epic 3.5 game I am running, many of the npcs that the party is on par with are npcs that they have known about since they were, sometimes, 1st level. They simply aren't moving in the same spheres as those epic npcs until they are near their level. For example, Sybele, one of the pcs, at low levels, did some work with a group of elven revolutionaries. One of the highest leaders of the revolution was secretly a beautiful grey elven enchantress professor at the city's college. She is named Estelias, and Sybele occasionally saw her on the campus or in the city, but never interacted with her directly until she was much higher level. Estelias was simply operating on a different level. While Sybele might be concerned with finding out the motivations of the secret orcish spies from Valonia, Estelias would have been concerned with whether Valonia as a nation could be subverted to aid the revolution. Now, in 4e, we're going to have the "3 tiers" of heroic/paragon/epic. I would suggest that the local non-pc heroes in a given 'point of light' are all heroic or lower level. Paragon-level characters are no longer "local heroes"; they are local legends, who have traveled across multiple 'points of light' and left tales of their prowess in many of them. Traveling merchants, few though they might be, also tell their tales (and likely provided them with some adventures as caravan guards across the hostile wilderness, too!). Epic characters, on the other hand, are the guys who actually build a new empire, create the answer to famine or plague, or otherwise change the world. One thing I have always felt was nearly required in order to maintain any level of verisimilitude is the idea that there are only so many high level npcs out there. I mean, how many different 20th level characters are out there that nobody's ever heard of? Not too many, imho and imc... except for maybe those that don't want their existence to be known. So the low-level pcs hear stories about the high-level npcs. Maybe at mid-levels they meet one or two of them briefly, either in order to learn some spells, buy a magic item, train, take up a mission, etc.  And then at high levels they kill them and take their stuff (or vice-versa, or they marry them, or... whatever).</blockquote>

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