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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jasin" data-source="post: 3696451" data-attributes="member: 7531">Indeed. As you say, the DM should lead by example.I wasn't saying that this is a player issue or a rules issue (or even a GM issue); just making a general observation about the game's zeitgeist, as it were. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I love the examples in your post, BTW. Spot on for what I had in mind.I didn't expect to like it, in good part because of the "world is as derived from the rules" philosophy you mention, but I do. IMO, Eberron managed to skirt many of the pitfalls of adventure design while avoiding most of them.But the reason I mentioned it in the context of this discussion is that the NPC in Eberron are of decidedly lower level than in, say, Greyhawk or FR, which definitely helps foster the atmosphere I was talking about.I don't have a problem with 20th-level being relatively easily achievable, from a meta-game perspective. I want to occasionally play 20th-level characters, I want to be able to take a single character from 1st-20th without investing as much time as in a PhD, and I don't think D&D should by default be a vehicle for personal achievement like mountain climbing.However, while I don't need to be truly impressed with a 20th-level character, I would like for the imaginary world to be.Of course, in a game that's all about you the player playing the role of you the character, this kind of disconnect between the player's and the character's perspective isn't something to be simply dismissed. But I don't think it's an insurmountable problem.The examples in your post are excellent. An additional way to create this sort of atmosphere would be to structure adventures so that, as a default, there's lots and lots of downtime, so that PCs don't shoot up from 1st-20th in a year of in-game time (even if they do so in a year of real time).I'm not convinced it's just the XP progression.Our highest level 2E game ended about 9th level or so, and as much fun as it was, it didn't really feel that epic either. Not because it was easy getting there, or because we weren't powerful; but because we, and the DM, pretty much acted the same way as at 1st, only... bigger. No commoners were really in awe of our ability to burn a village with a gesture or raise the dead back to life. Nor did we act as if we really expected them to be.I also experienced this in a 3E Eberron game where levelling was painfully slow. But at 8th-level (in Eberron, where this is slightly below the level of generals, kings, House barons, and high priests) we were going around the city solving serial killings. Not that it wasn't fun, but if you think about it outside the context of D&D, it's not really the kind of thing people who can litterally scatter armies of normal people should be doing.I think it has mostly to do with the world atmosphere the DM presents and forsters, and whether the players buy into it.And also, how much the players are willing to change their mental image of their characters as they go up in level.I've posted about this here, but I can't find it, so here's a <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.frp.dnd/msg/f99c68cd748b38e8" target="_blank">link to Google Groups</a>. In short, I think many people have trouble switching modes from Brother Ted, the young blessed initiate (Clr1) to Saint Theodore, the the man who conquered Hell in the name of Light (Clr21). If you start out as Brother Ted, at Clr13, you're likely to still be Brother Ted, only with cooler superpowers, both in your mind's eye, and the DM's (and therefore NPC's) mind's eyes.</blockquote>

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