deaddmwalking wrote:Regarding spell levels/class levels. We currently have 7 levels of spells (instead of 9), and 12 class levels (instead of 20). We quickly determined that trying to divide up the spell levels into 12 groups was pointless and stupid. What we found instead is that every couple of levels access to spells that were obviously better than the prior list made sense.
That sounds very much like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. What the fuck? That was a bad way to present information in 1979, and it's more than forty years later and it hasn't gotten any better. You really need to ask yourself "Is this a bad idea that was correctly identified as being a bad idea
by children before I was even born?" And if the answer to that question is an unqualified
yes, you need to rethink.
DDMW wrote:No - we would say 'this quest is appropriate for level 5 characters'. We would know that level 5 characters would have appropriate abilities to handle the challenges they face regardless of class or build. Everyone gets level-appropriate abilities.
This is getting a little bit into a semantic circle jerk of self referential definitions. Obviously whatever abilities your system outputs for character level 5 are "level appropriate" by the definitions of your game, because you have defined the level appropriateness as being whatever the game outputs for character level 5. See: Reasoning, Circular.
But the way you have things set up you will
never be able to define a set of challenges that the set of possible 5th level characters are meaningfully appropriate for comparison to. From the magic lists alone, you have some people selecting options from the 1st level at 5th level and some characters picking from the 3rd level at 5th level (see what a fucking ballache this nomenclature is?). Therefore any challenge that you could construct or imagine that has a "you must be this tall to succeed" stamp defined by
access to abilities must contend with the fact that you do not know a priori whether characters will have access at 1st, 2nd, or 3rd level to abilities from any particular list at level 5.
- But Frank, what if all abilities scaled to character level, such that whether you were using a 1st level Biomancy ability or a 3rd level Biomancy ability, it was still a 5th level ability because it scaled to your character level?
I'm glad you asked, hypothetical rhetorical. See: that's bullshit. Some abilities are amenable to being meaningfully treadmilled, and others just aren't. Firebolt can replace itself with
Bigger Firebolt when you go up a level, but Comprehend Languages is just the thing in itself. You can arbitrarily declare some facet of the ability like
duration or
range to scale with character level, but you won't ever particularly give a shit. Having it and not having it is the
only meaningful variable, and anything else you try to vary by level is just fiddly bullshit that makes the parameters of the game hard to remember.
- But Frank, what if we gave a wide enough breadth of abilities at each level such that the team would meet their challenge benchmarks at each level no matter what selection of primary and secondary magics they had?
I'm glad you asked that, unnamed rhetorical question offerer. The reason that's never going to work is because it's obviously never going to work. You have 12 levels to test at, 9 potential primary magics by 8 potential secondary and 7 potential tertiary magics,
thousands of iterations for what is still in a very real sense just 9 flavors of magic. You're never going to be able to even run through all the possibilities of ability assignment for 12 levels of play, because that's over six thousand iterations. Is having Fire Primary and Water secondary something that is good enough, too good, or not good enough in level 10 adventures? You don't know, you've never even made a sample character that fit that description.
Look, there are lots of games which don't even have levels. You make whatever characters and the MC eyeballs the actual team and sets opposition accordingly. Champions, GURPS, Vampire, Shadowrun, and so on and so on. Nothing says you have to use levels in your game. But if you do use levels, they should have consistent meaning. Anything else is unjustifiable madness.
-Username17
