Worlds of Design: The Destination, Not the Journey?

Leveling is an integral part of fantasy role-playing games in all its forms RPGs, but it wasn't always that way. How did we get here?

"Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome." - Arthur Ashe

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

Video Game Levels​

Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have their roots in tabletop games, as established by the original Dungeons & Dragons rules. The concept of leveling up was just one aspect of D&D, but you wouldn’t know that from playing CRPGs, where leveling up happens frequently and continuously throughout the game.

Much of this comes from Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games, that are often RPGs, such as World of Warcraft. A new expansion comes out that lets characters rise to a new higher-level limit, and many players scramble to get to that limit ASAP. After all, acquiring experience is the gateway to more powerful characters. Some players bring this expectation of steady leveling up to their tabletop games.

But wait a minute … aren't RPGs about adventure, not about ticking off another box?

Leveling Up Your Tabletop Game​

Most of the changes from AD&D in later editions have increased the focus on leveling. Obviously, not all RPGs are going to have this orientation, but I use this example D&D is by far the most influential game simply by virtue of numbers of players.

The prominence of leveling up isn’t an accident. First Edition and earlier D&D play becomes more challenging to manage at double-figures levels, so there aren't many levels to level up to. Players focused on the adventure, not on leveling up, because leveling up didn’t provide nearly as much variety in a character’s development. Second Edition continued this trend. This has certainly been true in my experience, in which we’d sometimes not bother to add recent experience to our total, then added it up and found we had gone up a level some time ago, but not noticed!

All that changed with Third Edition. Third Edition, 3.5, and Pathfinder massively expanded the number of options available to characters, and many of those options were only available through advancement. Creating a character concept became not just playing a role, but plotting out the character’s ability to achieve that role through the right combination of race, class, and levels.

In Third Edition you are supposed to rise a level after about 11 encounters, and could have several encounters in one adventure. The number of encounters and leveling options contributed to a focus on leveling as the objective rather than the adventure itself. You can see this change in focus when converting earlier characters to Third Edition: when I set out to convert some existing First Edition characters to Third, the first thing I did was double their level to be at a near-comparable place in progression. The game was also designed to scale up to 20th level (and later 40th), much more than First edition could handle, so there are many more levels to attain.

Fourth Edition D&D streamlined some aspects of earlier editions of D&D while emphasizing teamwork. Characters had many powers that only helped other people in the party. Individual characters were very hard to kill, but didn’t necessarily have a lot of offensive capability. One of the criticisms leveled at Fourth Edition was that it felt more like a MMORPG (like World of Warcraft), with level advancement one of the aspects that they had in common.

Does This Matter?​

The focus on leveling is a play style choice that can affect how players play the game. If the entire group is aligned with the goal of becoming as powerful as possible as quickly as possible, this isn’t necessarily a problem. But when only one player is focused on leveling up, experience points matters more than playing a role, which is how we got the “murder hobo” archetype of characters that care less about being well-developed characters and more on killing monsters and taking their stuff.

Fifth Edition changed course with “bounded accuracy,” which means while the fast progression is still there, there are limits to the benefits of that progression. Characters don’t die nearly as easy in First Edition, but the focus has shifted somewhat off straight advancement. We can see the callback to the earlier style of play with milestone advancement, where leveling happens after a certain number of sessions or after a significant story-related event in the campaign.

Leveling up can certainly be a goal for a group. But when it’s the goal for just one player, teamwork breaks down (see my thoughts on the importance of teamwork in D&D in my article, “How D&D is Like American Football”). And that can be lethal for a party or a campaign.

Your Turn: How much do you focus on level advancement?

 

[Blue Orange]

I think what happened was less 'levels became more important' and more 'people kept wanting more levels'.

I went back through 1974 little-brown-back OD&D a little while ago for a different project, the earliest possible version of D&D after it evolved from Chainmail miniatures. Levels are very much a part of the reward structure of the game that far back, with characters who level up getting more HP, better attack chances, more and better spells, etc.

However, what you saw with D&D and later with MMORPGs was power creep. You stat out 6 levels of spells, so now people want levels 7, 8, and 9. You make the rules for the first 15 levels or so in the B/X version of BECMI D&D--so basic D&D went up to 36 and later beyond with the Companion, Master, and Immortals sets. They would try to cap it at various level limits (most commonly 20), but then were able to sell 'epic level rules' or the like with more powerful monsters, spells, and rules for divine ascension.

You see the same dynamic in MMORPGs as initially stated, with new levels being added on to attract new players.

There have been games, often aiming for genericity, like GURPS, Savage Worlds, and FATE that avoid levelling in favor of skill improvement. Vampire didn't really have levels, though I guess if you went with diablerie you might lower your generation, but you did increase your disciplines, and Mage had Arete and Werewolf Gnosis. You even have games like Call of Cthulhu with its Sanity stat where characters get less powerful with time and eventually go insane (Vampire's Humanity stat kind of worked the same way). But you have to be willing to tell a tragic story, and I suspect that's less appealing to most people.

Life sucks. As time goes on you get older, decrepit, and die. Your assets might increase over time if you're upper-middle-class or higher and don't catch any bad breaks like a long illness or divorce, but that's not the case for most people these days. But at least your characters can keep growing and gaining.