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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9613912" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Perhaps they are; perhaps they are not. Their presence is still valid evidence that this situation is way more complicated than "the game was clearly always focused on totally mundane folks". Evidence that there has always, even from the earliest foundations, been at least the intended direction of growth.Alright. I guess I see that as...not that hard to implement? Like I'm not really sure whether any edition of D&D has failed to support doing such a thing if the DM wants to. 5e doesn't make it easy, but neither did 3e ~15 years before, so it's not exactly like it's a fresh problem.Well, that's precisely why I believe novice levels and "incremental advance" rules are so terribly important. The typical baseline is relatively high, so players can get to the Cool Heroics quickly; that players in general don't have much interest in being totally green, but rather favor those who have already "cut their teeth on" adventuring, and are now ready to do some bigger, badder things. But! Full-throated, emphatically not denigrated support is given to anyone who wants something different from that, and for folks who want the process of reaching further heroics (whether or not one starts green or experienced) to be a slow and methodical process, not major leaps and bounds.[SPOILER="Digression defining these things, just in case"]Just in case the names aren't clear, "Novice Levels" (or other names) allow you to break down the spectrum from "functionally no power whatsoever" and "99% of a fully-developed 1st level character" into many chunks, preferably with a diversity of approaches rather than one single fixed progression. This can do all sorts of useful things beyond the extremely important support for folks who prefer a "zero to hero" arc! Frex, they give the designers the power to write well-structured adventures where players develop their class features rather than just picking everything all at once (e.g. you have the choice of picking up a sword or a wand, of wearing heavy armor or light armor or no armor etc., and these choices narrow down to a small set of "okay, what are you?" answers.) They can be super useful for developing NPC characters who progressively get added to stables of characters, and for "funnel" adventures where high lethality is expected but some progress still makes sense. And I'm sure there are more!On the other hand, "incremental advance" rules are ones I first encountered with 13th Age, where instead of directly levelling up, every so often the DM says the party has gotten an "incremental advance", where they get to pick just one thing they would pick up by gaining a new level. In 13A, this can take the form of picking up a higher level spell, or (for Monks) getting more Ki points or a new Form, or increasing ability scores if your next level would do that, or getting the next level's HP, etc. Such rules empower DMs to spool out the levelling process almost indefinitely, while still giving players the feeling that they're going somewhere and making progress. It's, as far as I can tell, an almost pure win-win, and such rules don't even need to take up that much space either, so it's not like they're a huge design burden either.[/SPOILER]Looping back to the green-vs-experienced thing, I know I've read stuff from Gygax on this whole greenhorn-vs-old-hand thing...that can't really be read as favoring the former. (Also, I promise I'm not citing because he's a ~special authority~, but rather because his words show us where D&D started, so we can speak of the historical trends and where D&D grew from; it's a history argument, not an authority one.) Even to Gygax, a 1st-level character wasn't just an ordinary commoner, they were already at least slightly a cut above, and this just intensified with level.In the ideal D&D that exists in my head, there would be robust support for both characters and challenges in the Novice Level range, including "intro" adventures for more typical characters, funnels for old-school-style campaigns, and "West Marches" type campaigns that are meant to grow naturally over time. "Level 1" would start out, as you say, pretty robust--because many players need that robustness because they're going to make lots of mistakes, and getting burned every time you make mistakes disheartens and drives away many players, rather than inspiring them to try harder. There's only so many times you can fail before you throw in the towel, y'know?</blockquote>

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