Doug McCrae
Legend
Why earn more money? All you do is spend it on more expensive stuff.
Why must numbers go up?
- Thread starter Meatboy
- Start date
True... But the speed limit doesn't increase just because you got a Porsche.
Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
Arguably the original traveller was like this, and did just fine
In games like that with no leveling up or skill improvement, rewards tended to be story-related (money, equipment, prestige).
Cheers
Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
Oops, you beat me to it!
Sammael
Adventurer
But you have enough cash to lease a racetrack for a day...
Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
I remember a lot of discussion on ENworld after the release of 3e, discussing the extent to which the basic adventuring model had been influenced by computer games (nothing new under the sun!) and one of the big issues at the time was that it 'appeared' that they had been inspired by the 'scaling enemies' of diablo and its like.
Earlier versions of D&D had different creatures as different levels of threat, and if you wanted threatening orcs at 10th level you didn't slap levels on the orcs - you just upped their numbers. The slower scaling of AC meant that they could still be a threat to many of the PCs in a party.
I think my personal preference for D&D is probably the model from 1e and earlier, to be honest.
Earlier versions of D&D had different creatures as different levels of threat, and if you wanted threatening orcs at 10th level you didn't slap levels on the orcs - you just upped their numbers. The slower scaling of AC meant that they could still be a threat to many of the PCs in a party.
I think my personal preference for D&D is probably the model from 1e and earlier, to be honest.
Arguably the original traveller was like this, and did just fine
In games like that with no leveling up or skill improvement, rewards tended to be story-related (money, equipment, prestige).
I was thinking of games which had very little to no story-related rewards. Something where the player's character sheet remains the same throughout the game with very few to no changes, other than maybe changes in hit/health points during injury and healing, and stuff from failed saving throws.
A few 1E AD&D games I played in back in the day resembled this. The DM did not give out any treasure, other than the MacGuffin of interest which was to be returned to the king/patron/etc... requesting it. The DM also did not give out any magic weapons, and did not bother with keeping track of XP. So we had no easy way of "leveling up" other than finishing the quest by bringing back the MacGuffin, and the king/patron/etc... giving us training as a reward.
For the most part, our characters died in numerous TPKs and we churned through as many as a dozen characters. Our character sheets changed very little during the entire game, other than hit points and whatever bad stuff happened whenever we failed a saving throw. A few players even had their level demoted to "level 0" or particular stats permanently decreased, by particular monsters or failed saving throws.
In the end, we never had the opportunity to retrieve the MacGuffin and never leveled up. The DM didn't even give any hints as to where to search for the MacGuffin.
For the most part, we got bored after a few months of playing this way, and eventually changed the DM to somebody else. Even to this day, none of us will play in any games with this particular DM. Not even if he paid us to play in his games.
Last edited:
Hussar
Legend
There's another point that's not been discussed I think. While the numbers do get bigger, they don't all get bigger all the time. It becomes possible to choose alternate tactics because, while some creature might have a good defense against your strongest offense, it might only have a weak defense against your second best offense.
Whether this is in combat or not, doesn't really matter.
With higher numbers, you gain more wiggle room to expand outwards from a single tactical decision.
In earlier D&D, a fighter attacked. That's ALL he did because it was always the best thing to do. Push? Swing from the chandelier? Why? It's been said in this thread, the AC's of the opponents went up a LOT slower than your straight up offense. Choosing to do anything other than attack the AC was a tactically inferior choice.
However, with a broader range of number, all increasing at different rates depending on a number of factors, you gain a broader spectrum of tactics to choose from.
Whether this is in combat or not, doesn't really matter.
With higher numbers, you gain more wiggle room to expand outwards from a single tactical decision.
In earlier D&D, a fighter attacked. That's ALL he did because it was always the best thing to do. Push? Swing from the chandelier? Why? It's been said in this thread, the AC's of the opponents went up a LOT slower than your straight up offense. Choosing to do anything other than attack the AC was a tactically inferior choice.
However, with a broader range of number, all increasing at different rates depending on a number of factors, you gain a broader spectrum of tactics to choose from.
Celebrim
Legend
I can see this argument in retrospect, all though, in my opinion (and its an opinion only), the trend that started in 3E (abilities, skills, AC etc. all tended to scale directly with HD) became much stronger and clearer in 4E.
This is more or less true, but not of the orcs. By mid-level to high level, 1 HD creatures needed 20's to hit everyone, and had more or less become mooks to be slaughtered that did not represent threats except in the 100's. However, scaling up only as far as the 3+1 HD bugbear tended to remain a least something of a challenge throughout the likely scope of a campaign. The main difference in 1e and 3e that did somewhat help the Orc out was tracking facing, which made getting flanked signfiicantly worse in 1e than in 3e RAW.
The more I play, the more I realize that not everything in 3e was an actual improvement from 1e. If I went back to 1e, there would be concepts I'd want to take with me, but I'm beginning to see various things that were dropped or changed that 1e should have retained.
ExploderWizard
Hero
Tactical variety is all well and good but when the d20 roll becomes just kind of an add on to the hit bonus, things get ridiculous. Any target numbers expanding too far beyond the range of the die being used for resolution is approaching bloat. This doesn't mean that modifiers have no place in the system but it does mean that an AC of 30+ is just silly unless one were using a d30 to resolve hits.
