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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5659536" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't think it would feel like D&D at all. It would also just beg the question of "why don't we just go kill Orcus?" given that there is no longer a power curve in the game AT ALL you no longer have a way to measure what you can go up against. There are in fact no longer a hierarchy of greater difficulty at all. Yes, you can have 'progress in the story', but we ALREADY DO have that. Having played a lot of games, and numerous games which lacked any real notion of advancement (CoC and Traveller spring instantly to mind, but the original Gamma World would also fall into this category) the main issue with campaigns in all of these games is that there is very little organic to the game driving anything forward. This is fine for a game like CoC where the characters basically exist to inevitably die horribly and the drama is only in HOW. Gamma World was a kind of 'beer & pretzels' situation (Boot Hill pretty well fell in here too, as does Paranoia) where characters were pretty much disposable and the game revolved around your gear.Traveller OTOH really illustrates the issue. It was always rather hard to drive a campaign forward in that game. You could present various plots and tie them to PC background and you could appeal to simple greed, but in the long run the GM would pretty well inevitably find that the players were simply finding less and less reason to bother when they logically could just sell off their 800 ton Corsaire for 100 million credits and go kick back on some nice tropical planet somewhere. Long term campaigns really NEED some power curve to help pull them forward. It is by far the most reliable method of doing that and IME D&D has always excelled at being a system suitable to long-term campaigns and overarching stories. You CAN significantly change the way leveling works. For instance you could remove half-level bonuses. 4e would actually work OK without them, but you STILL need levels to allow for increased capabilities. The PCs at a minimum are going to need to have increasing damage output and other improved capabilities. This can all come from feat and power acquisition (and/or items), but it has to come from SOMEWHERE, and hit points certainly need to increase if you intend to have durable characters facing greater and greater challenges. Which is why I say you need some kind of progression system, and for D&D levels actually make good sense. You could use point system or CoC-style 'use it and improve it' but you also need to have a way to increase toughness and measure what you need to be taking on.</blockquote>

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