Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Reynard" data-source="post: 9169482" data-attributes="member: 467">This is mostly a half formed thought experiment than an actual proposal, so bear with me.I was thinking about building a level-less game on the 5E chassis, and figure the tiers of play would make good benchmarks for GMs to establish the baselines for their campaigns in general. That is, tier 2 play would always be around 7th level in comparative power, and &quot;advancement&quot; would be purely diegetic (drink!) and equipment based.Ignoring for the moment the exact mechanism of the &quot;point buy&quot; system of building characters at these tiers (because, frankly, I have not thought that deeply about it yet) I was hoping to get an idea of what the benchmarks for each of the tiers actually are. Given that 5E classes and subclasses are not particularly well balanced against one another, this is going to be more art than science, but even so it might be worthwhile to at least try.Let's start by defining the tiers. The easiest method is probably to follow the Proficiency Bonus increases, so tier 1 is levels 1-4, tier 2 is 5-8, tier 3 is 9-12, tier 4 is 13-16 and tier 5 is 17-20. This also maps pretty well to big power bumps for full casters. But beyond that, how do we determine appropriate benchmarks for ability scores, hit points, class abilities, damage output, etc...?What do you think?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Reynard, post: 9169482, member: 467"] This is mostly a half formed thought experiment than an actual proposal, so bear with me. I was thinking about building a level-less game on the 5E chassis, and figure the tiers of play would make good benchmarks for GMs to establish the baselines for their campaigns in general. That is, tier 2 play would always be around 7th level in comparative power, and "advancement" would be purely diegetic (drink!) and equipment based. Ignoring for the moment the exact mechanism of the "point buy" system of building characters at these tiers (because, frankly, I have not thought that deeply about it yet) I was hoping to get an idea of what the benchmarks for each of the tiers actually are. Given that 5E classes and subclasses are not particularly well balanced against one another, this is going to be more art than science, but even so it might be worthwhile to at least try. Let's start by defining the tiers. The easiest method is probably to follow the Proficiency Bonus increases, so tier 1 is levels 1-4, tier 2 is 5-8, tier 3 is 9-12, tier 4 is 13-16 and tier 5 is 17-20. This also maps pretty well to big power bumps for full casters. But beyond that, how do we determine appropriate benchmarks for ability scores, hit points, class abilities, damage output, etc...? What do you think? [/QUOTE]

Verification