Would you play a D&D campaign without leveling?

[pogre]

Eh... I don't think I agree. It might be fair to say "D&D has become about zero to hero," but that wasn't always the case and is not baked into it.

I meant 5th.

I do think XP or progressive levels are a big part of the D&D experience baked into the rules and expectations for the game.

Not saying you cannot play with static PCs - it is just that IMO you are rowing upstream against the rules' structure.

You could play an all political intrigue game with D&D rules too.

I just think there are better rules systems for this.

 

[Teulisch]

i once suggested running a game (pathfinder) where the players would start at, and stay at, level 7. they all loudly refused and hated the idea.

there is a lot of potential for the idea, but a lot of hate for the idea of a game with 'no advancement'. i find level 7 interesting, as thats where 4th level magic is. you get a lot of useful abilities, and can fight interesting monsters. mostly, i like the idea of staying at a level longer than the current encounter model would allow because it changes how you play the game. you could have a longer adventure with a given level of encounters, more content at that level.

of course, 9th to 11th is where named level really starts, and people start to build castles and such in the old days.

 

[MNblockhead]

Yes, but not a long campaign.

I would, however, be very interested in one-shots and mini-campaigns using pre-gens or characters created within specific parameters that "fit" the scenario.

Also, fun, create a one-shot meat-grinder scenario with enough randomness and well-design challenges to make it highly replayable and then have the players try different combinations of parties to see how well they do against it.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I am curious why you (and some other folks) think this. If you you work with a static power level in other games, why not D&D? Is it specifically that the games you mentioned are somewhat more narrative focused and such a campaign would require a narrative focus? If not, what then?

In my experience, the sense of constant is advancement is one of the things that keep players coming back to a D&D game. I've played through two Pathfinder campaigns that lasted 40+ sessions each, and I ran a D&D 5E campaign of similar length, but I've never seen anything like a Shadowrun or GURPS campaign that lasted anywhere near that. Players tend to make a character, play through 2-6 sessions, and then go off to play something else (or at least start over with new characters).

It's hard to say whether that's an issue with the slow progression-model, though, or just a small sample size. After all, most D&D campaigns don't last that long either, so maybe I could get one long Shadowrun campaign if I made fifty attempts.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Although earlier I answered "yes, in a heartbeat" I think, like some of the other posters, that I would still prefer to play in a slow-leveling campaign. Maybe 20% of the standard AP rate.

 

[Umbran]

I am curious why you (and some other folks) think this. If you you work with a static power level in other games, why not D&D? Is it specifically that the games you mentioned are somewhat more narrative focused and such a campaign would require a narrative focus? If not, what then?

I think there's a bit of a list of things.

Broadly, doing the same thing over and over again gets boring. There are several ways to deal with this in a game - D&D's native solution to it is to gradually increase power and largely combat-focused options for characters over time. If you set that aside, the systems skills, character powers, and suchlike are fine to play, but were depending on advancement to change up the player's approach to problems. They are not so well-suited avoiding play becoming repetitive if you remove the advancement.

I'd want to know more precisely what you mean by "narrative focus" before I try to address that. I can say that I think that social interactions become more important if you aren't convinced you'll eventually be able to punch your way through all problems, and D&D's social skill (and/or social challenge) system is bare-bones, to say the least. There's no approach to following the party's political status, either, which may be a hindrance in such a game as well. Various games based on other engines do these things better than D&D does.

 

[Reynard]

I think there's a bit of a list of things.

Broadly, doing the same thing over and over again gets boring. There are several ways to deal with this in a game - D&D's native solution to it is to gradually increase power and largely combat-focused options for characters over time. If you set that aside, the systems skills, character powers, and suchlike are fine to play, but were depending on advancement to change up the player's approach to problems. They are not so well-suited avoiding play becoming repetitive if you remove the advancement.

How do FATE, Gumshoe and Cortex+ overcome this repetition in a way that D&D can't?

I'd want to know more precisely what you mean by "narrative focus" before I try to address that.

I am familiar with Gumshoe and have a good bit of experience with FATE but only know Cortex by people talking about it. In FATE and Gumshoe at least, there are some player-facing narrative control mechanics. That's what I mean by being more narrative focused.

 

[Mercule]

I meant 5th.

I do think XP or progressive levels are a big part of the D&D experience baked into the rules and expectations for the game.

Now, all of this I can get behind. There is definitely an expectation of improvement and 5E has it to a higher degree than 1E (but lower than 3E). It was the "zero to hero", specifically, that I disagreed with.

In the earliest incarnations of the game, a 1st level character was just good enough to warrant a separate figure, rather than a stand, on a battlefield. They weren't "zero", but they weren't unrealistic, either (at least not fighters/men-at-arms). In 1E, even at "name level", a PC fighter didn't really get above 1980s action movie hero level. After that, they were mostly retired. I'm not sure whether Gygax actually intended PCs to make much use of the higher level spells or if they were added mainly as an way to excuse/explain the abilities of certain NPCs.

So, "capable to heroic" might be more accurate, but it doesn't have the same ring to it. So, "zero to hero", but only for certain definitions where "zero" means capable and "hero" doesn't exceed a reasonable threshold for suspension of disbelief. It's capable of handling "rube farmboy to slayer of gods", but it tends to break down, especially at the upper end of that. As you say, there are better systems.

 

[77IM]

Yes, but only if the level is "20."

 

[Umbran]

I am familiar with Gumshoe and have a good bit of experience with FATE but only know Cortex by people talking about it. In FATE and Gumshoe at least, there are some player-facing narrative control mechanics. That's what I mean by being more narrative focused.

Gumshoe doesn't have much in terms of player-facing narrative control in the base mechanics. Some individual games might add such, I guess, as I haven't read them all. But I run two sessions of Ashen Stars a month, and it doesn't have such in the mechanics - it has some advice in scenario design, but that's mechanics agnostic, and not what I'm referring to.

Cortex (and Cortex+) and FATE certainly do have such narrative control elements.

How do FATE, Gumshoe and Cortex+ overcome this repetition in a way that D&D can't?

First, it is not "can't". Insofar as any game can be houseruled up one side and down the other, there's nothing that absolutely cannot be done. I am instead focused on "does not, as written, have mechanics or really good guidelines to do". The measure by which I decide if I would not use a system for X, is how much effort I need to put in to make it do X.

Overall, what these games have are skill and conflict resolution systems that have some depth and tactical opportunities. D&D has loaded its tactical richness into combat, and by comparison the rest of the skill and resolution system is... shallow, uninteresting, and lacking in ways to approach or handle complex problems. Thus, if you then effectively freeze development in the combat system, there's nowhere else for a player to look.

In addition, several of these games have explicit ways to handle character development and change, without outright advancement in power. In FATE, for example, there are times you can trade skills around, and even alter Aspects, effectively giving up power in one place to pick it up in another - balanced in overall power, but changing dynamically over time.