NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jasin" data-source="post: 3406342" data-attributes="member: 7531">It's been pointed out to me once that most people's character concepts are pretty static. It was in a different context (about characters changing from self-serving mercs into selfless heroes), but I think it still applies here, and that it's one of the reasons why people feel that high-level games become cartoonish or super-heroish in a bad sense.Everyone likes playing Ned Nimblefingers, rogue 1, a street urchin who manages, along with his unlikely companions an apprentice wizard and a young savage nature priestess, to defeat a plot by doppelgangers to infiltrate the Town Council, and gets to rogue 4 along the way.Most people would like playing Thanee of the Thousand Faces, rogue 13/shadowdancer 4, the Mistress of Whispers in the kingdom ruled by Aelfric the Paladin King, her once adventuring companion, who has creatures of evil more afraid of the night than Aelfric has them afraid of the day, who can wear anyone's face, and enter any fastness, even those with no locks to pick and windows to break, as she foils the plot by the Grey Council, a circle of Hextor-worshipping lich clerics, to bring down Aelfric's kingdom.But unless the campaign is crafted to take into account this change (and IME, it often isn't), many people feel a disconnect when they realize that after few months of sewer-crawling and monster-bashing, Ned Nimblefingers is now rogue 13/shadowdancer 4 and doesn't really fit the concept they set out to play, since he's now much more of a legendary ninja than a shifty urchin.It's not impossible to deal with this. Age of Worms, so far as I've seen, does a decent job. The PCs go from wannabe adventurers who get the idea looting an ancient tombs might be a way to some quick cash, through accidental saviors to a small garrison of besieged soldiers, to the darlings of Greyhawk's fans of gladiator games. (That's about halfway through.)But considering the range of power levels D&D spans, if you create a street urchin, or a merchant's bodyguard, or a poor peasant girl who spontaneously manifests magical powers, it's best to be prepared that those concepts won't work quite as well 15 levels later. You can easily start out as a poor peasant girl, but by 15th-level she had better evolved into a seductive manipulative sorceress who hides her humble beginnings, or the legendary saint touched by the gods, or something like that. A 16th-level, shapeshifting, teleporting, dead-raising, wind-walking poor peasant girl with hundreds of thousands of gp in magical equipment doesn't really make much sense.</blockquote>

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