The talismanic lure of high levels

[hong]

So, in various l*w mag*c threads around the place, I see how a lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too. They don't want the assorted magic doodads and superpowers that define high-level play in by-the-book D&D, but they still want to get those levels. In particular, they seem to want at least 20 levels of advancement, which seems to be the default "ceiling" for D&D in people's minds.

Now there's nothing wrong with having your cake and eating it too. For every cliche there's an equal and opposite cliche, and in this case it's cutting off your nose to spite your face. Which would be silly.

That said, what _is_ it about being 20th level that makes it so important? Various reasons I've seen mentioned:

- you need it to generate a character who's super-competent compared to the norm; they can beat up mooks and even above-average opponents without too much trouble

- the extra skills and feats are needed to represent all the personality or background traits they'd have picked up

- being limited to fewer levels implies they're handicapped or useless in some way


Now these all seem like rather flimsy rationalisations to me. Competency is defined on a campaign-by-campaign basis; what's super-competent in one campaign might be just average in another (Sea Wasp, where are you?). You could reduce the default ceiling of 20 levels to, say, 10 levels, and everything would shift to match: instead of a 20th level character representing the best in the world at their chosen field, it would be a 10th level one. All the above statements would now apply to the 10th level cap, demonstrating that 20 levels is, essentially, arbitrary.

Getting extra skills and feats is perhaps a fairer reason, but it would be much easier to just hand out these things at a faster rate per level, rather than keeping things the same and changing everything else to match the reduced level of magic. That way you don't also have to deal with the other baggage of high levels, like hit points, BAB, saves, broken spells, etc; plus you can also address the issue of hyper-specialisation that D&D tends to encourage.

But people still want to get to 20th level.

Why do they REALLY want to get there? I can think of two reasons:

- history. D&D has always had a 20-level framework, and the zeitgeist treats those 20 levels as a given, no matter what a game might actually be like.

- psychology. The reward structure of D&D is all about getting those juicy rewards (levelling up) every X number of sessions. Halving the expected number of rewards should also be expected to halve the attraction of a game.


Any comments, people?

 

[Olive]

I think that they are interesting observations, and I basically agree with them.

 

[S'mon]

I think it's the advancement people like, we like to see our PCs getting better. Level 20 is only important because it's the default level cap. I think what players want is to see their characters get more powerful, by and large as often as possible and as much as possible. Runequest type skills systems have very frequent advancement, but it's so minor, so 'granular', that there's no real sense of progression. By contrast, Levelling Up in D&D is always a big deal, it gives a real sense of increase in power. Players are generally ok with not levelling _every_ session (except if you're 1st level - somehow surviving a session at 1st & not levelling is always frustrating!), but they want to see appreciable progress towards levelling every session.

 

[Frostmarrow]

So you are basically saying that if you want a low-magic campaign all you have to do is halve the XP awarded? You'd get to 10th level instead of 20th in the same time frame-time?

Interesting.

 

[hong]

So you are basically saying that if you want a low-magic campaign all you have to do is halve the XP awarded? You'd get to 10th level instead of 20th in the same time frame-time?

Interesting.

Well, I don't think it's THAT simple, but it would certainly seem to involve a lot less work than the alternative.

 

[Frostmarrow]

Halving the XP is is easy enough. But what about gold? Halve that too, or does it not matter much?

I don't have my books here and I can't remember what wealth a 10th level character is supposed to have amassed. But if we compare twice that number to what a 20th level character owns we'd see if low-magic (in gear) would be the result.

I'd hate to recalculate the treasure of every single encounter, but halving the XP awarded would be simple.

 

[Snoweel]

I addressed this in the other thread (the one with the poll), but it basically boils down to overall capability, particularly in relation to the average 1st level mook.

A 20th level character with a maxed-out skill can hit DC43 without any modifiers; a 10th level character cannot.

A 20th level fighter with a CON of 14 will have about 150hp and thus higher combat surviveability than the 10th level fighter with half those hp.

Assuming a badass solo foray into the local orc den to slap the chief about (for not handing over protection money or whatever), the 20th level character will not only be able to cop twice as many chops to the head with orcish greataxes (a bit of whimsy there - I'm aware that hp loss is an abstraction) as the 10th level character, but has twice as many attacks per round, and is twice as likely to hit with his first one.

You've kind of addressed feats and skills, but I certainly disagree that speeding advancement is any easier a fix than weakening magic in a campaign.

Speeding the acquisition of skills and feats doesn't address the surviveability (hit points) loss or BAB pussification of capping advancement at 10th level, and would still require a major modification to the CR system and other game balance issues anyway.

Do you not see how much easier it is to just nerf magic and keep the 20 levels?

 

[hong]

I addressed this in the other thread (the one with the poll), but it basically boils down to overall capability, particularly in relation to the average 1st level mook.

A 20th level character with a maxed-out skill can hit DC43 without any modifiers; a 10th level character cannot.

I'm unaware of any CR 10 obstacle that would require DC 43. Spotting an invisible creature 20 feet away is DC 24. Following tracks that are a week old, over hard ground, is a base DC of 27. Crafting a complex or superior item is DC 20. Opening a good lock is DC 30.

Further, boosting skills is, by the book, a relatively inexpensive process. There's a 12th level character IMC who has Spot +26. Even if you limit item bonuses to +5 max, a rogue with 18 Dex (reasonable enough at 10th level) and a cloak of elvenkind would have Hide +22.

The more extreme skill DCs get, the more removed from reality the tasks are. Since one of the aims that many people who like "low magic" seem to have is to get the game to a closer version of reality, not being able to hit these extreme DCs is entirely reasonable.

Now _you_ may have an entirely different vision of "low magic" to everyone else, one that still requires people to be able to do funky things with skills. And in your case, I have an entirely different solution for you (

Spoiler

imbued magic

), but let's not hijack the thread.

A 20th level fighter with a CON of 14 will have about 150hp and thus higher combat surviveability than the 10th level fighter with half those hp.

Assuming a badass solo foray into the local orc den to slap the chief about (for not handing over protection money or whatever), the 20th level character will not only be able to cop twice as many chops to the head with orcish greataxes (a bit of whimsy there - I'm aware that hp loss is an abstraction) as the 10th level character, but has twice as many attacks per round, and is twice as likely to hit with his first one.

A typical 1st level orc warrior has an attack bonus of +3. A fighter in full plate and large shield already has AC 20, and with minimal boosting can get that up to 23 or higher. Such a character is effectively invulnerable to orcs.

The power difference between 1st and 10th level is _vast_. I've chucked big orc mobs at my group when they were 7th-10th level, and they cut through them like a hot knife through butter. The only things that slowed them down were the ogres with fighter and barb levels. Even the 2nd level "elite" orcs didn't do much, except take two hits to die instead of one, and that only because my hit point house rules give mooks more toughness to start with.

Speeding the acquisition of skills and feats doesn't address the surviveability (hit points) loss or BAB pussification of capping advancement at 10th level, and would still require a major modification to the CR system and other game balance issues anyway.

Since the people who want extra skills and feats seem to want these to "round out" their character in terms of personality, background skills, and so forth, this should not be a problem. You may have 5 extra feats, but they're all spent on +2 to Diplomacy/Intimidate, +2 to Hide/Move Silently, +2 to Bluff/Sleight of Hand, etc. It may increase a character's _flexibility_, but for any given challenge, it shouldn't impact their _power_ that much. Unless these people are really saying they want more powerups to munch out their PCs, of course.

Do you not see how much easier it is to just nerf magic and keep the 20 levels?

Well, heck, I could just drop all spellcasting PCs from my game too. That would be the easiest way to make it "low magic".

 

[S'mon]

The 10th-11th Fighters IMC were taking out 6th level orc warrior 'mooks' with single hits, power-attacking. I definitely agree with Hong - 10th level is so vastly tougher than 1st that to a 1st-leveller a 10th level adversary might as well be 20th for all the chance they have. My 3.0 DMG specifically says that you can run a game with 1/2 the XP and 1/2 the wealth-per-encounter, and it will all work out Balanced (ie "good"). There's no reason not to have a world where 10th is the cap and 11th+, if it exists, is Epic/Transcendent, the realm of gods & legendary heroes. It would look quite like 1e Greyhawk & Deities & Demigods - King Arthur as 14th level Paladin, etc. It was 2e that brought in the idea that PCs were actually expected to advance up to 20th, in 1e 10th level PCs were happily trashing 66-hp Lolth on her home plane!
The only thing I'd suggest is that for such a game, it would be good to award skill points outside the regular levelling-up mechanic; you could award skill points for training, life experience, use of skill in-game etc, which would help compensate for slower PC advancement.

 

[hong]

The 10th-11th Fighters IMC were taking out 6th level orc warrior 'mooks' with single hits, power-attacking. I definitely agree with Hong - 10th level is so vastly tougher than 1st that to a 1st-leveller a 10th level adversary might as well be 20th for all the chance they have.

Two sessions back, the group was fighting a big gang of assassins (4th level ftr/rogues). A bunch of them rushed up to the fighter/barb (12th level) and attacked. Of course, they all missed. So the fighter goes into his whirlwind attack routine with his glaive, Power Attacking for 10. He chops up 4, switches to his dire pick using Quickdraw[*], chops up another 4, and finishes with a x4 critical on the last hapless assassin for 125 points of damage, killing him 5 times over. That's beyond mostly dead, it's beyond all dead, it's a whole new category of dead that goes beyond dead as we know it.


[*] I'm not sure whether you can change weapons in the middle of a WWA, but I'm all for spectacle. If you have the choice between two equally compelling alternatives, go for the one that causes the most damage, I always say.