Why are they stopping at level 30?

[Emirikol]

I think Monte Cook talks about this in Arcana Evolved, where the classes go to 25th.
It's just a number to stop at, and prevents things from becoming unweildy. I'd really rather they stopped earlier, myself; I think all 'epic' play should be the province of a seperate book. I don't even like having it in the SRD.

Monte's spot-on, but I'd be willing to put money down that "unwieldy" will not have changed one iota from the statistical analysis wizard's wet-dream that 3x becomes at 15th+. I wonder how well they'll deal with that considering that Epic (i.e. 21-30)hasn't exactly been the top selling "levels" of the game because it gets so far past the "sweet spot" that keeps getting talked about.

jh

 

[Orius]

Like others have said, look at the the 3e Epic rules. While saying, "Ok, if the DMs want to take the campaign to level 100, they'll have the freedom to do so," wasn't bad within the idea of 3e giving DMs and players a lot of freedom to shape the game, it gained a reputation for being very broken on very high levels. Personally, if I'd run a 3e Epic game, I probably would have stopped somewhere around levels 25 or 30, so players could get a taste of Epic power before it just totally fell apart.

The level 30 cap might be based on a precedent in the 2e High Level Campaigns book. That book strongly suggested a cap of level 30, reasoning that at that point, even the weakest PCs are "5 times more powerful than the ordinary person" and are powerful enough to rival the abilities possessed by the gods' avatars.

In any case, I'm comfortable with an upper level limit of 30.

 

[the Jester]

1) The new 'fixed math' seems to be based on 1/2 character level. Since d20 breaks down when the modifier gets close to 20, anything above +15 (30th level) is going to be problimatic to balance because the random factor is increasingly irrelevant.

Here is the answer, imho. The math behind the game breaks down after about this level. Therefore, above this level you should not go.

 

[Cabled]

Rem,

I get the thinking that although they don't want it to be 3.x, they didn't know how to move beyond that. I agree that there needs to be some kind of limit (for gods/uber-epic/whatever), but why 30th? Why not 40th and have a longer sweet spot?

jh

Well, you're dealing with a base system of 20 (the d20) as the core mechanic, and I'm guessing they chose a hard upper limit where the hard modifiers and the random d20 came together to create the balance they were looking for...it really comes down to how your modifiers compare to the potential random element of the d20 roll. It sounds like they've done a lot more "numbers crunching" in the analysis of the core system than previous editions did.

So then they had a beginning point (almost completely random, d20 plus almost nothing) and an end point (d20 plus large modifiers). Then they decided how many levels to cram in there to get some feel they wanted, where each level seemed significant but a lower power curve than 3e had. 40 levels in thier current design would likely have made each level TOO similar to the one before, 20 levels was too similar to the power curve of 3e. I'm sure there was a little wiggle room...28 levels, or 32 levels, but 30 was a nice round number, and it's an even 150% of 20, which is your range of randomness for most everything, so it made the math easier when planning progressions.

 

[Lurks-no-More]

Rem,

I get the thinking that although they don't want it to be 3.x, they didn't know how to move beyond that. I agree that there needs to be some kind of limit (for gods/uber-epic/whatever), but why 30th? Why not 40th and have a longer sweet spot?

Design difficulties, perhaps; you'd end up stretching the good stuff too thinly, or have to build unelegant and awkward things into the system?


Also, 30 levels split nicely into three ten-level tiers of play.

 

[TwinBahamut]

I imagine a lot of the choice has to do with having three tiers of play, each of which has a different feel, and each of which has ten levels (a good, easy to remember number). They probably didn't want to have a number of levels per tier which is less intuitive (like 8 or 12), and I can't see how you could easily change the number of tiers, and still maintain a good progression.

There are probably other good reasons, but I can't think of them.

 

[Li Shenron]

Anyone know why they are stopping at level 30? Is this some magical number?

jh

Because otherwise they would need an infinite PHB

Since 4e is based on identical progression rates of everything for everyone, there is no real end level for the classes. But the further you go, the more spells, feats, and other stuff needs to be provided for characters to choose, so at a certain point you just choose an ending level, and a good criteria for setting that ending level is take a look at what the spells at such level can do. So probably 30level spells can make the PC a no match for 99,9999% of the world population.

 

[frankthedm]

I wonder how well they'll deal with that considering that Epic (i.e. 21-30)hasn't exactly been the top selling "levels" of the game because it gets so far past the "sweet spot" that keeps getting talked about.

WOtc said it a few times; They are dealing with it by stretching 3E levels 3-14 over 30 levels in 4E.

 

[Roman]

1) The new 'fixed math' seems to be based on 1/2 character level. Since d20 breaks down when the modifier gets close to 20, anything above +15 (30th level) is going to be problimatic to balance because the random factor is increasingly irrelevant.

I don't really agree. The modifiers of all classes advance at the same rate, so +15 at level 30 becomes the new baseline. If challenges at that level require rolls of ~15 points higher (e.g., ACs are 15 points higher, or instead of unlocking normal locks rogues face intricate lock mechanism, or... ) than those at level 1 than the amount of randomness in the game stays the same.

2) There are only so many rules that they can cram into a single supplement. Even if they wanted a game up to level 60, from what I can understand of the current rules that would involve doubling the number of options to give detailed 'trans-epic' character development rules.

Yes, this seems like a more likely reason than the above.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

Because they want to save the supplement for levels 31-60 for 2009.

I actually think you're onto something here. Also, I dont' really think that's necessarily a bad thing; such a high level of play probably should get its own book.