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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6636900" data-attributes="member: 4937">The 1e tables explicitly when up to 29th level for some classes, and for most classes other than Druid, Monk, and Assassin were explicitly unbounded.  Yet I don't recall ever thinking that it was implied that we ought to be playing 29th level M-U's and 34th level thieves just because the rules provided for it.   I think it would be very difficult to pin point the change in mindset, but the important point is that whatever caused the change in mindset the designers were catering to it and had the same expectations.  Some theories:1) Rise of MMORPGs/cRPGs:  In a MMORPG, you are 'expected' to reach a hard level cap.  Indeed, in a MMORPG, many consider that the game doesn't 'get good' until you are playing the end game content at the level cap, and so there is an expectation that everything to that point does not matter except your mechanical design for the character as it will be played when it matters.   Hence, a tendency to plan out every step of the process with the ultimate goal of designing an interesting and optimal character at the level cap.   The attitude of writing up optimized builds down to the very equipment you'll be carrying at the level cap, is ported directly from people's response to Blizzard games like Diablo and World of Warcraft.2) Forgotten Realms as Definitive D&D:  Whether I like it or not, and I don't, the FR have become for this generation the definitive notion of the D&D experience (at least, in the plurality or the main).  And the FR was the first AD&D game world that took seriously the 29th level M-U's and 20th level Paladin's implied by the 1e charts and assumed that these represented not merely possibilities or a handful of legendary figures likely confined to the heroic past, but numerous, active, present movers and shakers.   In the FR, if you weren't at least 15th level, you were pretty much a nobody.  Even the bartenders were retired 10th level adventurers, and every single port town (it seemed) had a 7' tall 20th level fighter dual wielding longswords as the leader of the local watch or militia.  The average village could field a midlevel adventuring party, leading one to wonder what the 1st level adventurers were for.  Why are you hiring us to clear out the goblins as if they were a threat when the town drunk is a 8th level thief, the mayor is a 12th level M-U, and the corporal of the watch is a 10th level fighter?  There were ordinary merchants that were 25th level fighters, and there were enough Archmages to fill Congress.  Players that came out of this environment tended to have a mindset that paralleled the idea that a 10 Int was exceptionally stupid and justified playing the character like Forest Gump.  You'd see 8th level called a 'low level character', when back in the day it was considered a 'superhero' - practically a cape with a sword and not that far from being Batman, Oliver Queen, or that sort of thing.</blockquote>

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