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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6539107" data-attributes="member: 4937">The big advantage of the 1e XP system is that if you restarted at 1st level, by the time the rest of the group went from level X to level X+1 (assuming you were treated as a full party member and the DM didn't stick you too hard with the never quite generic training time/costs), you would have gone back to level X and now be essentially just a level behind where you would have been. As for rats showing up as low level encounters, rats are acceptable as low level encounters if encountered in the context of performing some otherwise heroic task.&nbsp;&nbsp; Many people after all are afraid of rats, rats have a certain mythic resonance, and a swarm of rats has a lot of visual appeal as a foe (especially if they are all the size of small dogs).&nbsp; I believe that the real complaint against 'killing rats in a basement' is that it's a sort of mundane, non-heroic sort of quest, that we'd expect of a real life exterminator.&nbsp;&nbsp; The rats themselves aren't the problem.&nbsp; You don't need to hire heroes to do that; you could just hire a professional ratter with his terriers, traps and clubs.&nbsp;&nbsp; Killing rats in a basement isn't a good structure to a quest.&nbsp;&nbsp; But killing giant rats in the Temple of the Sewer God beneath the ruined city of Lost Felpar that the swamps have consumed might be, and encountering a swarm of rats as one of a varied sort of encounters in some dungeon certainly is.&nbsp; Nor for that matter do rats have to be just low level encounters.&nbsp; I tend to not throw rats at low level characters in my homebrew, because seriously, the rats are a civilization not to be taken lightly.&nbsp; A single rat swarm is CR 2.&nbsp;&nbsp; You don't want to get the rats mad at you.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6539107, member: 4937"] The big advantage of the 1e XP system is that if you restarted at 1st level, by the time the rest of the group went from level X to level X+1 (assuming you were treated as a full party member and the DM didn't stick you too hard with the never quite generic training time/costs), you would have gone back to level X and now be essentially just a level behind where you would have been. As for rats showing up as low level encounters, rats are acceptable as low level encounters if encountered in the context of performing some otherwise heroic task. Many people after all are afraid of rats, rats have a certain mythic resonance, and a swarm of rats has a lot of visual appeal as a foe (especially if they are all the size of small dogs). I believe that the real complaint against 'killing rats in a basement' is that it's a sort of mundane, non-heroic sort of quest, that we'd expect of a real life exterminator. The rats themselves aren't the problem. You don't need to hire heroes to do that; you could just hire a professional ratter with his terriers, traps and clubs. Killing rats in a basement isn't a good structure to a quest. But killing giant rats in the Temple of the Sewer God beneath the ruined city of Lost Felpar that the swamps have consumed might be, and encountering a swarm of rats as one of a varied sort of encounters in some dungeon certainly is. Nor for that matter do rats have to be just low level encounters. I tend to not throw rats at low level characters in my homebrew, because seriously, the rats are a civilization not to be taken lightly. A single rat swarm is CR 2. You don't want to get the rats mad at you. [/QUOTE]

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