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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reynard" data-source="post: 4641113" data-attributes="member: 467">One of the stated design goals of 4E was to make the game play "the same" at 1st level as it does at 30th level.  Obviously, the details differ and things get more Epic, but overall it seems as though this goal was achieved (I haven't played that high of level yet, so I can only assess the rules as written).However, one of my favorite aspects of earlier editions -- particularly BECM and AD&D, but still to a lesser extend 3E -- was that the game did change throughout the life cycle of a campaign and an individual character.At low levels, the PCs had to work hard just to survive. Dungeon delving was dangerous business with death lurking around every corner.  Life was procedural and cautious, lest one fell victim to some monster or death trap.  After a few levels, however, things changed.  The characters became more confident in their abilities and could survive longer, go farther and dig deeper.  they could escape the dungeon and spread out into the wilderness, seeking adventure where it may be, regardless of how many miles they had to traverse to get there.  Certainly, danger still lurked, but mid level characters met it head on. And while dungeons till served as core adventure locales, they shared space with towns and exterior ruins and wilderness.  The world got bigger for them.  Once the low high levels were reached, the game changed again.  Followers came to serve the PCs and fortresses could be built.  Level adavancement slowed, making the killing of monsters and taking of stuff secondary to interacting with the world.  With newfound power (sometimes personal, sometimes political -- a dvision almost universally drawn down the line between "mundane" and "mystical") and responsibility, characters could engage and change the world.  Moreover, the threats faced by these characters were often those of high intelligence as well as great destructive power -- it was no longer an issue of simply slaughtering monsters, but of facing down real evil.  At even higher levels, characters often retired.  Those that didn't, though, could wage open war (the Companion war machine rules), seek immortality, traverse the planes and even face down gods.  While we don't know much about his early days, the progression hews close to the career of Beowulf -- adventurous youth, hero, ruler and finally meeting his destiny against the greatest of all foes.This changing game, I believe, kept interest alive in a way an "unchanging" one cannot.  One can only delve so many dungeons and face so many personal, equally powerful opponents in combat. I can think of no heroes in our tales and myths that ended just as they began, with only the scale of their destructive power having increased.I am eager to run 4E and see how it plays out.  But I am hopeful that when I do, the time it takes to advance though the Heroic and into the Paragon tiers resources like the DMG II and others will help change the game to keep it viable outside the limited realm of dungeon crawls and tactical combats.</blockquote>

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