hyzmarca wrote:Really, the effectiveness of a low level character in a high level party depends on the usefulness of low-level abilities. If a level one character can do things that make it easier for the other characters to win, that's okay. He doesn't need to be able to win on his own.
If low-level character were useful to win, any BBEG would have several low-level minion helping him, and Fireball would be praised as a great spell.
It's not the case, so I guess everyone agree low-level characters are useless in high-level party.
virgil wrote:IIRC, for the old editions of D&D, the XP it took to go from level X to X+1 was enough for a level 1 character to reach X; and so being a cheerleader for a session or two was all that happened before being able to meaningfully contribute again.
If it's quick, what's the point ? You already didn't play the end of the encounter, the cleaning of the dungeon, etc, but it's not enough and the game would be better if you couldn't play during a few hours more ?
Anyway, I've already seen that in MMORPG: a high level character fights trash mobs for several hours, while a low-level character waits nearby and gains xp. It's quick as well as boring as hell. Why would you play that in a TTRPG, you have the choice and you already know the end result (boring fights, mobs die, new character reaches a high level) ? Are you never doing any fast-forward, do you play every boring part of an adventure ?
maglag wrote:I've seen several D&D players advocate that they'll rather lose levels than treasure.
Because level are easier to repair than treasure. It doesn't mean losing level is fun. It means repairing magical objects is insanely hard.
Been there, done that. Many years ago I actually had a D&D group where when we got a new player or somebody needed a replacement, we would go to the wilderness to farm low-level random encounters for the new lv1 characters to catch up (the high level characters would also hold back from doing anything to don't "suck" exp).
And you still can't tell the difference between D&D and mobas ?
Maybe you should try that in LoL. You do nothing during the first 30 minutes, then your level 10 team brings you to the wilderness to farm low-level encounters to catch up, and you see what happens.