I've always had alt-itis, I guess. I generally don't get any D&D character past 4th level except under extraordinary circumstances. Tonight, though, I thought I'd do a quick comparison check to see how the experience tables I have worked up for my game (based loosely off of 3rd Edition's charts) stacked up against the old 1st Edition AD&D tables I grew up using. What I saw surprised me a bit.
At 11th level, a Paladin from 1st Edition had amassed over a million experience points. By 15th, the Thief class crossed the one million mark, followed only by Bard at 16th level (which doesn't really count since it was the 1st Edition equivalent of a Prestige - you had to be both a Fighter and Thief for 5+ levels before you could become a Bard). To get to 20th, you're talking 3.3 million for the most lenient table, ranging up to nearly six million points for Paladin.
By comparison, the pure 3rd Edition chart is child's play: 2nd level at a mere 1,000 points (The least expensive in 1st Ed., Thief, was 1,251), 10th level at only 45,000 which provides you with a "massive" gap to the 190,000 total needed for 20th level. Add to that the fact that 3rd edition experience is granted, according to the DMG, as an even split to all participants in an encounter (rather than being awarded individually based on damage dealt and treasure found - a bane to all low-level spellcasters) and you have what seems to be a supercharged elevator to the top. No wonder WotC came out with Epic Level handbooks so quickly!
I remember, as a child, sitting in a restaurant with my parents, and overhearing a conversation from a booth behind me: one guy was telling his friends about a campaign that took place in some tower, and his Paladin character made it all the way up to 50th level, only to be defeated or level-drained or some-such, and had to start over again at the bottom, so he did it again and got up to 50th level, and he got booted back down again, etc. Being the naive, inexperienced youth that I was, I got excited because they were talking about D&D, and I suppose I asked my mother why she didn't seem interested in asking them to game with us. That's when she explained to me the concept of "Monty Haul" gaming, and why it was generally considered to be a lesser form or of poorer quality among serious gamers.
I have to wonder if WotC was intentionally reducing the difficulty in such a manner, hoping to snare old and new players alike by promising greater rewards at a much quicker pace. Perhaps they thought that the attention span of modern gamers wouldn't last as long as it used to? Or maybe they simply believe most gamers play infrequently enough that too wide a gap between levels is discouraging, a belief I can't readily refute given that I typically only manage 1d4+1 sessions a year.
Now, however, I'm left with the concern that my own table is likewise too lenient. After all, even my highest chart only requires about 370,000 points for 20th level, and that assumes a character with a maximum class load.
I could make a return to the charts of old, or try to find some balance between the old and the new. After all, with the more generous experience rewards given by 3rd Edition rules, it might somewhat bridge the gap between players of different editions. Or, I could shove it off to the side for now, perhaps ruminating further upon it when I actually have players with characters above 4th level in the current system. At present rate, that might only take five years.
4 comments:
First of all, any issues with your current chart would come from how easy or difficult it is to -gain experience, not whether the chart has bigger numbers. You could have ten points to next level if an entire campaign resulted in only one point. In truth, I've considered that method - give a point per campaign waged by each character, level increases happening after a certain number of games/campaigns. For one thing, it would save a lot of gaming time that's usually spent figuring up how much experience each character earned.
Secondly, I know you've seen me experimenting with how much experience to give. You can adjust on the fly if you need to. Fair warning, though, one of my biggest mistakes ever was to let people know my methods for assigning experience. Now, when I do something different - even for legitimate game reasons - the players know something is up, either in game or out.
I'm actually fairly interested by that method.
3rd Edition states that it is expected a character will level after having approximately 4 "at-level" encounters, with the number of encounters being adjusted up or down based on whether the party is fighting less or more difficult foes. Does this seem to be an appropriate average to you, or is this too lenient? Or is it distasteful simply because the players are given an expectation of when they "should" level?
One of the reasons I haven't used this method, yet, is that it does require a judgement call on what's an average number of missions before leveling. And, it doesn't take into account multiple missions in one game, etc. I think four is not onerous. I would, myself, probably do another scaled situation, such as 1-4 missions for first level, 2-6 for second, 4-8 for third, and so on - or whatever numbers made sense when I seriously considered switching.
The players have their own opinions on when they should level whether you agree or not. ;)
That which is gained too easily is not valued as much. Don't get me wrong, I love getting stuff for my character. It's like Christmas without the credit card bills. But when it comes too fast, not only does it become less special, it also becomes difficult to adjust to all the gained spells/abilities/etc. This is true for the DM as well as the player. In fact, I'm convinced that many DMs use level-drainers for exactly this reason - they weren't ready to run challenging campaigns for 50th-level paladins.
Obviously there has to be a balance so that people can have fun. People like to hear that *ding!*. Just not so rapidly that it becomes a ringtone.
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