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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 7499978" data-attributes="member: 6802765">I would absolutely play in a game without leveling.Advantages:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">It's easier to tightly weave the mechanical abilities and the fluff of your character when you only have a specific level to consider. For example, if as a Sorcerer you're picking your spells based on a theme, you can pick a theme that's well-represented on the Sorcerer spell list at the static level of the campaign. You don't need to worry about continued progression as a Sorcerer diluting your theme due to a dearth of relevant spells.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">You have time to learn from experience how best to employ the abilities you have in a wide variety of circumstances. With normal leveling, you get a few dozen encounters at most before your accumulated practice with your character becomes outdated by the arrival of new abilities. This also applies to learning how to operate effectively as a team with the other PCs.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Following up from the previous point: as the players' skill at using their characters' abilities increases, they can challenge more powerful opponents (albiet at a slower rate than with leveling). I personally find it particularly satisfying to defeat powerful opponents through clever use of abilities, and this campaign format would emphasize that. (Note that this point has more salience in a Combat-as-War game, where there is more opportunity for creatively using abilities to tilt the odds in your favor before the battle begins. In a Combat-as-Sport game, where the difficulty of an encounter is primarily determined by the relative stats of the combatants, there is less room for defeating opponents significantly more powerful than you are.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">In-world resources become much more important when they're the only available method to increase power. This increases PC interaction with the setting, which I consider a good thing. For example, in a game with leveling, knowing that you'll have to ultimately defeat a Big Bad 10 levels higher than you isn't as big a deal, because you can count on gaining more levels before the confrontation. In a fixed-level game, to have any hope of success you're going to need to interact with the world to accumulate as many advantages as you can: political alliances, magic items, armies, intel, favors, spies, etc. Similarly, level-appropriate consumable resources become much more relevant because they won't quickly be overshadowed by higher-level permanent abilities.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">For sandbox games, the players' choice of direction to take the campaign becomes much more relevant to whether/how they can achieve their goals. With leveling, any direction the characters pick is likely to lead to accumulating experience, which makes their goals easier to obtain even if they didn't make meaningful progress towards those goals. By contrast, without leveling, in-game decisions are the primary driver of whether the characters make progress towards their goals. The risk of losing ground is also much more acute when there isn't the general trend of steadily-rising levels to compensate for any in-world setbacks.</li> </ol></blockquote>

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