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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5659789" data-attributes="member: 82106">OK, so what you are proposing is to eliminate half-level bonus. As I said above, you can do this. In fact I worked up the math for that quite a while back. There are a bunch of other things that have to be changed in minor ways, but it does NOT work without the other effects of leveling. Now, I haven't played this variant, it was purely a paper project. I am strongly of the opinion monsters will still fit into a very definite set of level brackets. They may be wider than the existing ones, but the big iconic monsters are going to need to be tougher, that is just basic necessity. You can't really bake this kind of thing into a game. It is a matter of expertise at designing and running a campaign.  The combat mechanics ARE the power curve. There is no other meaningful power curve. It is practically tautological given that D&D focuses quite a bit on combat between monsters and adventurers the only meaningful power curve is how bad-assed your character is. You can have story based things that can be quite significant, but your player is not going to feel like his character is really a big hero if he can't go out and slay a dragon, which needs to be something he's got to work up to in order to be interesting. Except it HAS been bringing people back and driving campaigns forward for neigh on 40 years now. I know it has worked for me since before the days of AD&D. I don't disagree that RPGs have unique features and bare power progression is not one of them, but I think it IS an aspect of the game that enhances the other aspects. It is hard to say if 4e has too much or too little of a power curve. I'd observe that it is flatter than any previous edition (especially that of 3.x which was WAY steep).  I don't think it is presumptuous. As I said before, after 35 years of GMing all sorts of games with all sorts of power curves from nothing to 2e my observation is that the steeper power curve games more reliably delivered a long term forward moving style of game. Some genre don't work well with leveling and steep power curves, like CoC. Others really could probably have used some degree of power curve, like Traveller where its complete lack was an active flaw in the game. I ran a long Traveller campaign, but the players always lacked real drive. It sputtered on and off for 4-5 years. Meanwhile our D&D campaign ran solid from 81 on up through the early 90's and I'm pretty sure some spin-off games are STILL running in one of my co-DMs current group. When the PCs would run into old characters like Francis McGillberry or Triborb VII everyone would be "ohhh, that guy's powerful, lets learn how to do that!"</blockquote>

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