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Message: <blockquote data-quote="catastrophic" data-source="post: 5659509" data-attributes="member: 81381">I'm not talking about a points buy system. I'm talking about races and classes and dragons and dungeons and all that stuff. I'm just saying, level is a pretty dubious concept to build into mechanics in the way dnd tends to do- I know a lot of people like it, but there are a lot of benefits to dropping it, as Mike Mearls discovered in his recent colum. What i'm talking about is using level as a framing mechanism, and recognising that the red queen fallacy doesn't lead to good content. I know people like adding those numbers up, but it's not that un-dnd-like to realise how illusory those options are. If anything, taking out level would emphasise the other qualities, including the other uses of level- level as tier, level as narrtive device, level to define stakes. Take level out of combat stats, put it around the combat as the stakes of the battle. Now the issue there is progress- how do you feel progress without leveling up your combat stats? Well, it forces real progress. Progress in the story, progress in what is being fought for, the kind of progress that, for instance, has been clearly missing from the epic tier. I know this is extreme, but it would still be D&D.</blockquote>