The Gaming Den

I take a great deal of enjoyment from stabbing goblins in the sewer and shooting crossbows as a wizard, so 1-8 for me.

This might partially be because making a level 6+ character and assigning magic items and skillpoint stuff is really annoying for me.

*Whoops I left out 15+ but it would've been the joke choice as nobody actually 'plays' lvl15+

I really like playing in the 10+ region the most, however I do like getting to that point. So I like a game that starts somewhere in the 6-8 region and levels up into the teens. It provides the sort of game that very few systems do (whereas you actually have a huge choice of stuff for "I need you to deal with rats in the basement"), gives players a lot of options, provides the kind of high-stakes world-changing situations that are awesome... and it lets players outgrow the setting.

I prefer the low levels - not level one, which is a swingy mess most of the time - but especially 3-6, which seems to be where the sweet spot of performance lies and where the GM (which is what I usually am) gets to do the most. I've gone higher, but it bogs down and the system mastery investment becomes cumbersome. I dislike spending more time monitoring and considering character capabilities than simply building the story.

I usually like playing in a campaign starting at level 1 and I find that things really start bogging down around level 10+ so I voted for 1-8.

I would have liked to see an option like 3-8 instead of 1-8, but I picked 1-8.

6-11ish. I like the lower levels too, but I feel that the mid levels are where the most fun adventures are had - you can have dramatic and high-stakes adventures, do highly dangerous things with confidence if you need to, and shake up most settings without totally outgrowing them. That's when the game takes best advantage of being level based IMO.

The game is pretty boring in the 1-4 range. It's swingy, you don't have a lot of abilities, and noncombat utility is pretty fucking abysmal and doesn't really do anything interesting.

The game starts to break down in the 11+ range. The math breaks down completely if it's even managed to survive this long, you either have too many abilities or still absolutely none at all, and the noncombat utility coming online tears the game to pieces and nerfing/sandbagging is required at every turn simply to keep the game running at all. Which is a shame, because a lot of the abilities in this range that don't break the game are actually kind of interesting, but you're never going to see them, because you will either never play this far or you won't use them because you are busy breaking the game with scry and die or some shit. Sympathy is a 9th level spell. What the fuck. You spend an hour making an object fun to touch for almost two days. It's a flavor/trap spell at best, and it turns out that for the level its at that flavor is 'shit.'

Discussions of levels in 3.5 just make it more clear that you can't Ship of Theseus the edition into something good one house rule at a time while remaining backwards compatible at each step. If you want D&D to deliver on its promises you will at some point need a new edition that is actually good.

I like the 6 to 11 range myself. You can finally do things but the game doesn't break down (completely) yet.

At levels 1-3, swingy combats and wonky math is actually an upside for me. It makes the characters lower-investment, and that's OK. Options take less thinking, and no matter what you built you can always contribute because you have thumbs and speak.

At levels 4-8, the math is good and combats are fun. Numbers haven't broken in half, and you get to fight cool monsters. You have enough levels that you can spend a few on multi-classing, prestige classes, or stupid templates, but the game requirements aren't so bad that a 2-lvl deficit makes you useless.

Too high beyond that, your character creation gets difficult and option paralysis can set in for new players.

...You Lost Me wrote:At levels 1-3, swingy combats and wonky math is actually an upside for me.

Maybe we have different definitions of "swingy", but I find higher levels are more like rocket launcher tag than levels 1-3.

I personally start all games at level 3 and play to, like, level 10 or something, assuming the game lasts that long. Levels 5-8 are probably the best, but start requiring some real gentleman's agreements on what kind of caster shit you're allowing.

hogarth wrote:

...You Lost Me wrote:At levels 1-3, swingy combats and wonky math is actually an upside for me.

Maybe we have different definitions of "swingy", but I find higher levels are more like rocket launcher tag than levels 1-3.

My definition of "swingy" is based on random chance instead of the actions of the players. So yeah, rocket launcher tag vs rocket launcher at a different level is totally irrelevant, and the relevant thing is that it is entirely based on chance at low level, and entirely based on player actions at high level.

I prefer 6 for the L.Bolts and Fireballs. Warriors get an extra attack too.

Our game went all the way to lvl 20, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

...but then, my GM is CharOp friendly and all into psionics, so the party was truly level relevant all the way (in fact, so competent that during the late endgame, combat used to end before I had a chance to get an action... and I was the party's wizard).

Dogbert wrote:Our game went all the way to lvl 20, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

...but then, my GM is CharOp friendly and all into psionics, so the party was truly level relevant all the way (in fact, so competent that during the late endgame, combat used to end before I had a chance to get an action... and I was the party's wizard).

What were the non casters doing to be relevant at the 10's?

I really wanted to say 10-15, I really do want to play at those levels. It's really at those points the classes start doing really super awesome stuff. It's why in part I only want to play [Tome] classes as the only worwhile thing, with Pathfinder I'd play the "Martial Master Fighter" but that's a 6th+ concept only.

As a DM I preferred the 6th-11-ish range being somewhat easier to run. I use [Tome] predominately nowadays, and my longest other campaign ended at 14th before unrelated issues broke it down. I can attest to the issue being that you can only have a party size so big, otherwise with [Tome] PC's high lethality to the monsters, some PC's that rolled low on initiative won't even get a turn. I also had to rewrite some parts of Monsters stats, just so they would have actual level appropriate stats for the opposition (surprising how many monsters are actually very underpar compared to Rogue/Wizard-level PC's).

OgreBattle wrote:What were the non casters doing to be relevant at the 10's?

Mainly doing bucketloads of damage (there wasn't a lot of problem solving other than the occasional puzzle monster, but interaction was great). We had a psychic warrior, a soulknife (from psionics revised), and two arcane archers.