Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 3518623" data-attributes="member: 3424">Or: some thoughts on DM expectations of PC competenceSo, I was having dinner in a restaurant next to a video game store today, and I could see a trailer for some video game playing on one of the screens in the store. It seemed to be for a game similar to Ninety-Nine Nights, in which one PC effectively takes on an army and wins (given sufficient skill on the part of the player, of course).It occured to me that given the standard assumptions of gear and so on, high-level D&D PCs will eventually be able to perform such superheroic stunts. However, such a high level of competence may come as a nasty surprise for a DM who fails to realize how much more capable the PCs have become after gaining just a few levels.So I guess, in a rather round-about way, what I'm wondering about is this: should the game be more explicit about what PCs at each range of levels are likely to be able to do? Should certain types of challenges have a "trivially easy to overcome by a party of level X (or a level X [class])", e.g. once you have a 5th level cleric in a standard four-person party, starvation is almost never a problem. The standard D&D paradigm of PCs acquiring ever-increasing levels of competence also might not suit all DMs, and an explicit breakdown of what the PCs are expected to be able to do would allow DMs to decide on their individual "sweet spots" where they can end or drag out their campaigns.What do you think?</blockquote>

Verification