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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5142437" data-attributes="member: 4937">There are so many agendas going on here below the surface that I'm finding it very hard to avoid the temptation to address the agendas of the people responding to the post, rather than the bare question.1) Character advancement is not an essential part of an RPG.   The original version of Traveller didn't have rules for character advancement.   Many superhero games don't assume any sort of character advancement.  So, the numbers don't have to go up.  2) Having the numbers go up can be a meaningless excercise.  In some computer games, Diablo immediately comes to mind, the math was arranged such that a character who did X damage to a monster with Y hit points, when they advanced such that they did 10X damage they monsters would have 10Y hit points.   You could play the game over as a higher level character and for the most part the game played the same.  Concievably, you could fix the math so that regardless of level, the game played exactly the same.  If you did that, leveling up would be a meaningless exercise - the illusion of advancement without the reality of it.  Such games would actually play better as pen and paper games if the numbers stayed small and managable, since in effect, you are doing all the bigger math for no purpose. My understanding is that the problem of scaling monsters to the character power is so bad in some computer games that its actually disadvantage to level up.3) It's quite possible to design a sandbox-ish world where nothing evolves in response to player character power, but yet, regardless of the player character power challenges are to be found.  You do this by creating barriers between different power groups and niche enviroments for them to inhabit.  A lich sealed in a tomb that only a powerful party could breach can live right underneath the village of commoners you explored at 1st level.  You also concentrate heavily on how the lower powered members of the ecology plan to deal with their high powered neighbors, and quite possibly slow down the advancement rate in some fashion.  At the far extreme end of this you get somewhat deginerate states like 'Tucker's Kobolds', but its quite possible to make the 'ordinary' inhabitants of your world relevant threats for very long periods of the campaign without scaling up those ordinary threats from what was a reasonable challenge at low levels.  You do this numbers, tactics, terrain or circumstance advantages, and so forth rather than raw power.  You also pay special attention to 'level invariant attacks', that is, abilities which remain somewhat useful regardless of how high level the defender is.  For example, a touch attack is almost always threatening.  A spell effect that still has some effect when the save is made is almost always threatening.  Abilities that offer no save, like magic missile, are almost always threatening.  Monsters with level invariant abilities can be used as challenges over very wide ranges indeed.4) It's quite possible to design a rules set which lacks D&D's trademark ability to take a character from ordinary mortal all the way up to demigod, yet still have character advancement.  5) Someone already mentioned it, but its the pinball effect.  Very rarely is anything in a pinball game worth 1 point.  Most of the time doing anything is worth at least 100 points.   The newer the game, the more likely it is that anything is worth at least 1000 points.   The extra zeros are of course unnecessary for keeping score, but they give the illusion of greater success.  Would you rather score 1,000,000 points from the jackpot or 1000?   One looks more impressive than the other, but the 1000 point jackpot on the older game is probably physically the more impressive feat.  Pinball game designers know however that the customer will stop feeding customers into the game machine when they become frustrated with the amount of skill required to achieve a greater success.  The trick is to give the illusion of success without increasing the amount of play time a quarter actually purchases.   Most modern cRPGs are dreadfully easy having been designed such that a minimally skillful player with a casual level of commitment will certainly complete the game.  In a modern game, 'finishing the game' is the expected result for all players.   Older cRpgs (and video games in general) tended to have less content but much higher difficulty levels to maximize the play time.  If you grew up with that environment or with games inspired by tournament modules, inflating numbers to create the illusion of success or games where winning is the expected outcome for all players regardless of skill or commitment can be annoying.6) cRPG's generally are some of the worst offenders here precisely because the whole concept of levelling up works against the need for high levels of skill.  In a normal video game, a scene can normally only be passed if you develop sufficient player skill.   But in a cRPG, you can get through a scene by either developing greater skill or by leveling up to the point that the challenge can be defeated at your current skill level.  Guess which tends to be easier?</blockquote>

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