Level based games and the "maximum" level

[souran]

In a level based tabletop RPG, how much playspace should be left at the maximum level?

D20 games and D&D historically don't really leave ANY room at the maximum level. It is extemely difficult to find challenges for D&D characters as they approach level 20. Characters of that level will already have lots of high end treasure. D&D just has never really expected players to keep playing level 20 characters for any extended amount of time.

Even attampts to expand the game beyond level 20 typically did so by adding additional levels you could get. "Epic" levels have tended to be additional direct advancement that pushed the retire and start over point to level 30.

By comparison, computer RPGs (especially MMOs) basically expect that you will hit a point where you stop leveling or least where they stop providing new features and abililties. For most games this is somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of the way through the game.


Should a table top RPG design in playspace at the level cap? Would a game like D&D be better served if instead of being 20 levels long it was 10 levels long, but figured you would spend half your time as a level 10 guy doing upper end stuff?

[VladtheLad]

You can never really lose your character in MMO's, so maybe that explains the level of focus on max level gameplay.

In older dnd if your fighter could reliably kill hydras and giants single handedly he had already reached the point people conceived back then as the absolute maximum.

All that said nothing stops you from beginning and freezing the game at a specific level. I think even Tome suggest doing that for certain play styles.

[jt]

World of Warcraft has a secondary gear-based progression that takes over when you reach max level. So you still have content matched to an ever increasing power level, they just use a different mechanic to meter it out.

You could stack as many layers of "and now we've maxed this thing out so we go by this other progression" as you want. You could switch to gear until you have the best gear then switch to skill points until you've hit diminishing returns then keep accumulating feats. And those could all be just to fight increasingly fancy orcs if you really wanted.

There's some limit to how many layers of "the same thing but more" people will actually put up with. And that's a taste thing - WoW players accept that palette-swapped wolves are more dangerous than last level's dragons, Gurren Lagann is about robots punching each other until they're bigger than the universe, and I think the locals on this forum would balk at more than one palette swap per monster (you can have orcs, and later lava orcs, but if you then try death orcs that's too many). Whenever you hit the max, you can get around it and keep going by using a qualitative change in how you advance in power, like how ACKS expects you to stop getting personally stronger and start building a kingdom. You could switch to a new level system, or other new power system, if you wanted to emphasize this.

If you really want to stop all character progression and hang out at the max, that changes the nature of the game quite a bit. The max level is the real game, and the rest is the tutorial as you grow into more complex powers. You'd probably want to design more like a board game and make characters less customizable (because you're interacting with customization less). Numerical progression also becomes less useful under that design - you don't need a tutorial for higher numbers, and big numbers can shut out old content that could have be mixed into the max level.

[Mord]

The problem with levels in all editions of D&D is that designers have never really advanced the idiom to account for the increase in player agency as levels rise. A starting Wizard might go on a quest for the town blacksmith where she uses Magic Missiles to exterminate rats in a sewer in exchange for some GP and a +1 resistance cloak. Mad Libs-ing the nouns in that sentence with more impressive nouns does not create an adventure worthy of a veteran Wizard. The high-level Wizard who goes on a quest for the Archangel Uriel where she uses Meteor Swarm to fry Pit Fiends in the Soul-Eating Citadel of Baator in exchange for some Planar Diamonds and the Diadem of Eternity is not actually going on a different adventure from the rookie.

This is part of why I find JRPGs and MMOs so unutterably boring. At the end of the day the effects are flashier but you're still doing the same shit for the same rewards, albeit at a higher level of cooperation and complexity. I'm not saying that the logistics or execution of a 40-man raid is easy; it definitely takes more skill and personal experience to do big raids as compared to slaying rabbits solo in the n00b zone. What I am saying is that the Lich King is a foe who is fought on exactly the same terms as a bunny rabbit, in the exact same idiom, and that's terrible.

So these minigames that kick in at high levels - where Fighters get promoted to Lords and start to interact with a kingdom management minigame and Wizards get their towers and start to make bears schtupp owls - these are the ones that are essential to making advanced play meaningfully diferent from low-level play. They also have never properly been fleshed out, because it's a different game.

To put things in business world terms: you might imagine that a software developer would level up from Developer to Senior Developer, then Manager, Director, VP, CIO, and ultimately start their own business and be CEO of that. At each step in that chain of management, the responsibilities and challenges of the role change drastically; no one expects the CIO to be responsible for personally writing the most difficult and complex new applications, nor does anyone believe he occupies his current position because he codes at a level five whole Super Saiyan tiers above that of an entry-level developer.

The D&D interpretation of that same progression casts each title change as cosmetic, over the reality that raw coding ability is continually improving over time. In the D&D universe, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the mightiest software engineers ever to have lived and is the only one at Facebook HQ who can cast the high-level coding spells that make the social network work because only he can achieve Super Saiyan 6.

This lack of vision into the practical effects and meaning of "gaining experience" is pretty widespread. Authority Equals Asskicking is a thing, as is the Peter Principle, exactly because most people are genuinely unclear on what it means when you are really good at your job and it's time to move up to the next level.

There's a tendency to imagine the career of an adventurer as being a climb up the Great Chain of Being, culminating in practical godhood:

That guy up there is level 20.

Without some recognition that the responsibilities of a wild boar, a human, an angel, and God Himself are different and the challenges they face exist in totally different contexts, all you are left with is a mathematical power progression where achieving max level just makes you the toughest rat slayer in creation.

[souran]

So these minigames that kick in at high levels - where Fighters get promoted to Lords and start to interact with a kingdom management minigame and Wizards get their towers and start to make bears schtupp owls - these are the ones that are essential to making advanced play meaningfully diferent from low-level play. They also have never properly been fleshed out, because it's a different game.

Except that quite frankly most people don't care for this at all. I used to think that this change the game method was the one true way (tm) but honestly, I now think that this is mostly a good way to have half your players stop showing up. There are a lot of people who just really don't want the game to turn into a kingdom management simulator at any point in the game.

Considering that the game they signed up for was a game of dungeon diving, I can't say I blame them. Nobody thinks that shadowrunners should eventually morph into corporate CEOs and run the megacorps they were previously raiding.

This lack of vision into the practical effects and meaning of "gaining experience" is pretty widespread. Authority Equals Asskicking is a thing, as is the Peter Principle, exactly because most people are genuinely unclear on what it means when you are really good at your job and it's time to move up to the next level.

All of this stuff is terrible though.

[maglag]

So these minigames that kick in at high levels - where Fighters get promoted to Lords and start to interact with a kingdom management minigame and Wizards get their towers and start to make bears schtupp owls - these are the ones that are essential to making advanced play meaningfully diferent from low-level play. They also have never properly been fleshed out, because it's a different game.

Except that quite frankly most people don't care for this at all. I used to think that this change the game method was the one true way (tm) but honestly, I now think that this is mostly a good way to have half your players stop showing up. There are a lot of people who just really don't want the game to turn into a kingdom management simulator at any point in the game.

Yeah, lots of people just want to keep stabbing bigger and flashier stuff in the face.

Speaking of jrpg comparisons, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 technically has some kingdom management in that you become leader of your mercenary village plus you can buy most of the shops in every town as your reputation increases.

However the only benefit of buying each shop is some small arbritary bonus like +X% running speed, and that the shopkeeper's lines change to treat you as their boss, and the whole mercenary business is basically sending your spare waifus blades in side-missions to help level them up and get some extra resources.

Most of the main story is still the main party just personally stabbing bigger and fancier enemies. You can't deploy your mercenary army to clear the wilderness, you can't decide what your shops sell or don't sell.

And honestly most players are just fine with that. It's a nice side experience now and then, but if I had to micro my shopkeeper business or face banrupcy, micro my mercenaries or they would rebel that would've just been a pain in the ass. Even just sending blades in side-missions sometimes felt like a chore, so I just started picking mercenary missions that take a lot of time to finish in the background. There's actually a chain quest in XBC 2 that's infamous for taking several real-world hours of microing mercenaries to finish and I'm just glad it's only one.

[Emerald]

To put things in business world terms: you might imagine that a software developer would level up from Developer to Senior Developer, then Manager, Director, VP, CIO, and ultimately start their own business and be CEO of that. At each step in that chain of management, the responsibilities and challenges of the role change drastically; no one expects the CIO to be responsible for personally writing the most difficult and complex new applications, nor does anyone believe he occupies his current position because he codes at a level five whole Super Saiyan tiers above that of an entry-level developer.

The D&D interpretation of that same progression casts each title change as cosmetic, over the reality that raw coding ability is continually improving over time. In the D&D universe, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the mightiest software engineers ever to have lived and is the only one at Facebook HQ who can cast the high-level coding spells that make the social network work because only he can achieve Super Saiyan 6.

This isn't so much an example of the game changing as you level as it is an example of multiclassing, though. To continue the metaphor, Programmer and Manager are two separate classes with different advancement progressions, which is why someone switching from a dev to a PM role is often referred to as "changing tracks" or the like.

Programmer starts at CS Intern and goes to Software Developer to Senior Developer to Principle Developer, with an option to PrC into either Engineering Director, Subject-Matter Expert, or Software Architect, and at no point does he stop dealing with the code and surrounding ecosystem even if he does go up in levels of abstraction from "Should this be a for loop or while loop?" to "Which virtualization technology best supports the growth of our application?" Manager starts at Team Supervisor and goes to Middle Manager to Senior Manager to Executive, with the option to PrC into either Department Head, C-Suite Executive, or Startup Founder, and at even the lowest levels he's managing people rather than doing hands-on technical stuff.

(This is actually a great analogy, by the way, because developers hitting an advancement ceiling and being forced to switch to some sort of management track to keep getting raises and promotions--when they'd much rather leave the boring people management shit to the computer-illiterate MBAs--is a real problem.)

In a D&D context, Mark Zuckerberg is indeed a fearsome software developer who maintains the servers at Facebook with his esoteric and arcane knowledge...and he's not a CEO who heads down to the server room occasionally to work his coding magic, he would never have become the CEO at all because he's a Software Wizard and multiclassing into a class that doesn't advance software progression is a terrible idea. Other people in the party are playing high-level Management Bards, Investment Clerics, and Operations Druids, and they have no more reason to multiclass than he does.


That's why a lot of people object to the "Poof, you suddenly have strongholds and minions, have fun with Logistics & Dragons!" suggestion in 3e and its derivatives: that isn't evolving the game, it's giving the characters playstyle whiplash.

It worked in AD&D because the assumption was that at 1st level you're hiring mercenaries and buying pack animals and such to be meatshields, carry loot out of dungeons, and such; at low levels you have a continual stream of new PCs dying and being created, often starting at 1st or at least a few levels lower than the party, so you have some somewhat-disposable PCs for various purposes; and at low-mid levels you're starting to recruit notable numbers of henchmen and need to buy ships and towers and such to transport all your followers and hold all of your loot.

In that context, reaching name level and getting free strongholds that you can then enhance with your loot and free renewable apprentices/subordinates/etc. that don't have to be run as main PCs is a natural progression that adds nuance (e.g. now you're a vassal of the local lord so you owe him taxes but can also call on his aid) and options (e.g. your followers gained at name level are generaly PC-classed and better than ones you can hire normally) to what you're already doing.

In 3e, though, you're expected to be essentially independent, parties are small and stay relatively uniform in level, hirelings and mercenaries are rarely if ever used, and the Leadership and Landlord feats are considered to be very powerful for a single feat and very annoying to deal with if multiple people take them, much less the entire party. In that context, switching to Logistics & Dragons midway makes no sense and is likely to lead, as souran noted, to people getting upset that the game changed out from under them.

And conversely, there are parties who play 3e and want to be army captains and evangelists and Hogwarts professors with bunches of minions at low levels, and feel constrained by the fact that Leadership and Landlord are mid-level options and they can't afford to spend money on hirelings and castles lest they fall behind on magic items. Those groups shouldn't be forced to go kill devils in the Soul Citadel at high levels anymore than dungeon-crawling groups should be forced to switch to Logistics & Dragons at high levels. The game does need to change as you level, but in the sense of gradual changes that add layers and expand the existing game, not drastic changes that throw out what came before.

[FatR]

I'd like to second the opinion that changing the fundamental core of the gameplay mid-progression is just a good way to make most of your players drop the game.

Furthermore, if you actually examine popular stories that feature a massive powerlevel progression, you'd note that their core elements do not change as PCs grow stronger. Various anime series would be a low-hanging fruit sort of examples to pick. So, consider: in the Wheel of Time series characters may accumulate followers and armies, collect artifacts and unlock new powers, split from one adventuring party into several, each centered around a member of the original one, but practically everything important is still done by the heroes and the inner circle of their closest allies going on quests, dueling baddies, and using plot devices, just as it happened in book 1. Politics, administration, logistics and other such shit remain window dressing even when PCs practically rule the world. Decorations change, scale of thing that PCs can affect grows, but the essence of the adventure remains.

The essence, however, should not be confused with methods. We all know what happened when developers of DnD decided that you not only should crawl dungeons for your entire career, you should crawl them in almost the exact same way from level 1 to 30. Specific challenges can and should grow outdated, so that players can feel that their characters actually progress with level growth.

[Korwin]

So, consider: in the Wheel of Time series characters may accumulate followers and armies, collect artifacts and unlock new powers, split from one adventuring party into several, each centered around a member of the original one, but practically everything important is still done by the heroes and the inner circle of their closest allies going on quests, dueling baddies, and using plot devices, just as it happened in book 1. Politics, administration, logistics and other such shit remain window dressing even when PCs practically rule the world. Decorations change, scale of thing that PCs can affect grows, but the essence of the adventure remains.

Why did you choose such an bad example?
By book 1 the main chars are not high level and they do have political problems later in the series?

[Username17]

Yeah, Wheel of Time is a surreally terrible example for people arguing that the game should start with 1st level Fighters fighting 1st level Goblins and end with 20th level Fighters fighting 20th level Goblins to use. As Robert Jordan discovered his money train and eventually got diagnosed with cancer and enacted Xeno's Paradox in real time the books got longer and longer and longer even as they got lost in the weeds of talking about more and more tangential things to avoid moving the plot forward. It's within the realm of possibility that you could find one of the later books that spent more word count on purely "high level" concerns such as logistics, politics, and mass battles than the first book has total words. Lord of Chaos is over eighty thousand words longer than Eye of the World.

If you wanted to give an example where the scope of the action doesn't really increase very much, you'd go for something like Game of Thrones - where the power ramp-up happens at such a glacially slow pace that there isn't really anything in the most recent book that couldn't have happened in the second book.

-Username17

[souran]

Yeah, WOT is actually one of things that caused to realize that while there is a natural story progression from adventurer -> king that most people don't care about that in terms of their table top rpg.

I was in college and talking about WOT and D&D with a friend when he indicated that the part of WOT he enjoyed the least, and why he was moving away from the series, was because he just didn't give a crap about the story now that the characters all ran kingdoms and churches and had armies.

For him, the thought of his character on the throne is part of the outro to the story with a voiceover saying "in time he became king by his own hand."

[angelfromanotherpin]

I seem to remember that BECMI D&D of all things had the progression of play laid out pretty well. You started as a dungeon crawler, became a lord of the realm, completed your huge sprawly Crusader Kings achievement to become a god, and then did whatever it was gods did.

[FatR]

Why did you choose such an bad example?
By book 1 the main chars are not high level

Well... duh? That's why the series has a power progression.

and they do have political problems later in the series?

Around 90% of which are resolved by doing some heroic deeds that convince everyone that the main character is indeed the dude prophesies talk about, or questing to kick shit out of an evil wizard controlling some nation, or questing for some artifact.

The closest thing WoT has to a full blown political conflict with intrigues, scheming and maneuvering is the White Tower rebellion shenanigans. Which ended abruptly not through said intrigues and maneuvering, but because an outside party uninvolved in all that stuff rolled in to stab faces, decapitating one of the official sides of the conflict, and an NPC basically handled PCs a list of evil conspirators on a silver platter.

Yeah, Wheel of Time is a surreally terrible example for people arguing that the game should start with 1st level Fighters fighting 1st level Goblins and end with 20th level Fighters fighting 20th level Goblins to use. As Robert Jordan discovered his money train and eventually got diagnosed with cancer and enacted Xeno's Paradox in real time the books got longer and longer and longer even as they got lost in the weeds of talking about more and more tangential things to avoid moving the plot forward. It's within the realm of possibility that you could find one of the later books that spent more word count on purely "high level" concerns such as logistics, politics, and mass battles than the first book has total words.

No, it is not. Soap opera and internal monologues about various issues characters have? Yes. Logistics? A quest for a magic artifact to quell worldwide abnormal weather about sums up the cases when logistics mattered in the series. Politics? I've mentioned that above. Mass battles? I wish they were there, but the closest things we get are brief moments of Mat excelling in tactics, while a huge battle in the background is only mentioned, and a troop of magic users effortlessly annihilating an army of grunts. Things only changed once Sanderson took over for the finale, and the whole Final Battle still ultimately was only meant to enable Rand's personal attack on the Dark One, a grand backdrop for the ultimate showdown of destiny, but a backdrop nonetheless.

So while characters were now all rulers of kingdoms and commanders of armies, not only that was essentially a method of writing page-wasting filler, as you suggested. It wasn't even that important by itself in terms of filler. High positions of characters just provided them easy access to lots and lots of people to have pointless conversations with and plenty of subjects they could ruminate about without actually moving the plot anywhere. And when the plot actually moved that was primarily through good old quests.

Besides, logistics, politics and mass battles are not high-level concepts, or at least not inherently so. Does Justice League care about armies of muggles, their logistics, or governments needed to provide those? Not really. Or speaking about fantasy. Black Company's setting spends a lot more time than most fantasy series on making armies and squads of grunts relevant in a world of powerful magic, and it is still the setting where 11 strong wizards defending against a 200+ thousands strong army with a force about 1/10 that size can annihilate the enemy, despite weaker wizards being available to try countering them - and while spending a lion's share of their energy murdering each other. To keep armies and states and stuff remotely relevant in a game like DnD you need to plan from the start that PCs will eventually start to operate on the scale way beyond the kingdom of swords and sorcery where they started, that they will move forward first to continental empires with dragon-riding knights, mage squads, and weird tech, and then to multi-world polities with fleets of spelljammers and dimensional-hopping legions of supermen immortals.

[Dogbert]

So, would anyone suggest to dissect (relevant)dnd classes and put a needle on the level at which a member of said class would say "ok why do I still bother with this shit again when I could be out there building or toppling kingdoms?" Perhaps split it in two different games? (since "tiers" seem to be a dirty word for some)... because clearly there is a level when the party can just tell the Quest Giver in turn "No, YOU go make US a sandwich!" (and by all means they should).

[FatR]

And regarding the original question of the thread. One of the unspoken assumptions throughout DnD world-building and adventure-writing was that heroes' power scale went to the heights of maybe Conan the Barbarian++. That was one of the reasons why getting into kindgom-building and politics was considered high-level content. But certain classes, and specifically those that kept getting new stuff at high levels, actually scaled not to Conan, but to Rand al'Thor or Pug the Magician, characters who could scatter smaller armies and plausibly overthrow whole kingdoms with just their personal might and a few friends to cover their backs. Outside of a few attempts to write a big pond setting for big fish, like Planescape, or the old Immortals set, these characters could run roughshod across DnDland as described, because high-level content to challenge them was just lacking. DnD starting with AD&D preferred to ignore the problems of high-level play and nudge players to retire their PCs long before level 20, rather than reexamine its core assumptions. Ideally, though, that should not be the case, and the game should support playing to and at level 20. As about planning for playing at the max level for extended amounts of time, I don't think it is a very good idea, because an epic fantasy story when a character becomes maximally powerful is probably on the fast track to conclusion. In fact, even in most CRPGs you won't hit the max level by just playing throughout the story, you would need to dig deep into side content for that.

[Josh_Kablack]

So, would anyone suggest to dissect (relevant)dnd classes and put a needle on the level at which a member of said class would say "ok why do I still bother with this shit again when I could be out there building or toppling kingdoms?" .

The answer from prior editions of D&D defaults to 9th level.

That's OD&D "Name level", and in 3rd ed. the CR system assumes that an 8 level difference is insurmountable under normal circumstances. So 9th is where you stop caring about how many orcs you can hack yourself and become concerned with how many men-at-arms you can command, to hack the orc hordes for you. And that gets into feeding and quartering those men-at-arms and hiring blacksmiths and so on.

Of course in 3rd ed, that's slightly over 100 even-CR encounters from first level. In 4th ed, the jump to "Paragon Tier" happens at 11th level -- but that's 100 balanced encounters of XP from first level. While it failed to deliver, "Paragon Tier" was clearly based off of the idea of Name Level and a changing game.

So if you want to be sorta-like D&D and sort-like what D&D was probably trying to be, then your heartbreaker should transition into realm management after about 100 fights with monsters.

[deaddmwalking]

I think that characters gain levels too fast under 3.x guidelines. A single adventure could reasonably be expected to have 10+ encounters, and leveling up during the adventure (every four encounters) is crazy fast.

[Josh_Kablack]

I think that characters gain levels too fast under 3.x guidelines. A single adventure could reasonably be expected to have 10+ encounters, and leveling up during the adventure (every four encounters) is crazy fast.

That really depends on the group and table and conventions. The XP tables assume 13.3333 even-CR encounters before leveling up.

I gamed with a couple different groups. The group that used minis and terrain and elaborate tactical set-ups would top out at 2 fights per session. So by the guidelines this was a level every 6 weeks. Actually a bit faster, since the fanfare of setting things up was such a big deal, fights tended to be above-CR, so this would be a level every 4 or 5 weeks. This is problematically slow, as players are only likely to see one meaningful levelup over the course of a typical campaign.

The just wave hands and sometimes scrawl on the chalkboard group at Pitt gaming club would easily burn through 4-6 encounters before anyone even had to take a bathroom break and it wasn't uncommon to hit ten a session.
So by the guidelines this was 2 levels every 3 weeks. This is problematically fast, as character abilities will mutate and become unrecognizable

All the other groups used pogs, or legos on the coffee table, or blocks-n-battlemat and fell somewhere in between those ranges in number of encounters per session.

In my own experience, the majority of games that make it past one session, last about one semester of play. That's 13 to 14 weeks, with each player (including the MC) expected to miss one session. Thus the most common case for continuing characters is to continue for about 11-12 sessions.

Within that framework, one level every 4 weeks is really about the minimum pace for levelling to even matter here, as that is two level ups and some play after each of those in a typical campaign. If you level any slower, then characters will only see one levelup where they get to use their new abilities afterwards before the game is over -- and not having multiple breakpoints where you get to play at each, severely undercuts the point of having a levelled system in the first place.

Conversely, two levels every three sessions is likely to result in a PC gaining 6 to 8 levels over the course of the semester, and that starts to become problematic as character abilities change faster than the players can keep up; world-building has to grapple with what that sort of power disparity means; and most troubling players are spending a notable chunk of table time just re-editing their character sheets instead of engaging with each other.

And of course the real sticking point is that the common case is not the only case. A small fraction of D&D games last for multiple years worth of weekly sessions. Those games that ran for over a hundred sessions are the ones we remember the most fondly. And if you level just once every five weeks in a game that goes on for two years, that takes you from 1st to 21st level -- when 2e and 3e capped out at 20th level.

[Dogbert]

There's also the thing of how often a table plays and the players' age range.

Sure, kids may have all the time in the world to play daily, but as soon as you get a job, a family, and otherwise responsibilities, you have to come to terms with a couple realities:

1) You can't play that often.
2) Your games will not last forever. People move away or get reassigned to different projects at work, couples get kids or switch jobs. Even if a group can commit to your game's schedule now, pretending this slice of paradise will last anything longer than six months is delusional. Still, even if your game was only to last four sessions, players like having something to show for their time.

Hell, even if you don't have any real responsibilities, gamers won't play the same one game forever and ever, new games come out and you'll probably want to try them out. Tabletop RPGs were never meant to be a monogamous marriage.

One of the few good things from 4E's DMG was the suggestion of budgeting your total available time and to plan the party's level progression accordingly (also, I found out the "six months per campaign" suggestion most accurate). Leave it to the neckbeards to "boast" about how "it took them six years to reach lvl 4," if I play dnd, I want the full ride! (and if the game will last six months at most, then give me the 20 levels in that time!)

[OgreBattle]

I figure the designers should understand what levels mean in their game, and what a level 10 20 game entails, before deciding to add even more levels.