Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 1424254" data-attributes="member: 537">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 wayNow 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?</blockquote>

Verification