Quote from: Pat on March 02, 2021, 07:37:17 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on March 02, 2021, 07:04:25 PM

Quote from: Pat on March 02, 2021, 07:02:06 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on March 02, 2021, 06:56:31 PM

Quote from: Pat on March 02, 2021, 06:44:24 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on March 02, 2021, 06:35:12 PM

Quote from: Pat on March 02, 2021, 06:13:55 PM
It's not about genre, though. Leveling is a game mechanic that incentivizes players, and doesn't really match any traditional genre or narrative structure. You can draw parallels to something like the hero's journey, but the parallels are very weak and not terribly useful except for borrowing a few trappings.

I am trying to think of one way that Zero to Hero does not match exactly with the leveling system.

Maybe no Training montage leveling system?  Help me out here Pat

Name one myth or legend that uses zero to hero in the same way as a leveling system.

Wheel of Time

Yes, that's one of those traditional stories that's been been passed down orally since the world was new and computers were big boxes.

Sorry that 80 million copies sold does not reach your high standard of something no one has heard of.

Still not a traditional myth or legend, which is what we were talking about.

Since when is Jesus not part of traditional myth or legend?

Quote from: Shasarak on March 02, 2021, 08:26:28 PM

Quote from: Pat on March 02, 2021, 07:37:17 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on March 02, 2021, 07:04:25 PM

Quote from: Pat on March 02, 2021, 07:02:06 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on March 02, 2021, 06:56:31 PM

Quote from: Pat on March 02, 2021, 06:44:24 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on March 02, 2021, 06:35:12 PM

Quote from: Pat on March 02, 2021, 06:13:55 PM
It's not about genre, though. Leveling is a game mechanic that incentivizes players, and doesn't really match any traditional genre or narrative structure. You can draw parallels to something like the hero's journey, but the parallels are very weak and not terribly useful except for borrowing a few trappings.

I am trying to think of one way that Zero to Hero does not match exactly with the leveling system.

Maybe no Training montage leveling system?  Help me out here Pat

Name one myth or legend that uses zero to hero in the same way as a leveling system.

Wheel of Time

Yes, that's one of those traditional stories that's been been passed down orally since the world was new and computers were big boxes.

Sorry that 80 million copies sold does not reach your high standard of something no one has heard of.

Still not a traditional myth or legend, which is what we were talking about.

Since when is Jesus not part of traditional myth or legend?

Didn't know Jesus was a protagonist in the Wheel of Time.

Quote from: Pat on March 02, 2021, 08:27:44 PM
Didn't know Jesus was a protagonist in the Wheel of Time.

Quote from: Pat on March 02, 2021, 06:13:55 PM
It's not about genre, though. Leveling is a game mechanic that incentivizes players, and doesn't really match any traditional genre or narrative structure...

Starting out as highly competent also works, but requires a different game structure. ...

I Don't think the structure has to be so different that one would have to switch to something like Gurps.

You don't have to start out highly competent. Reasonably so is fine. And "Leveling" is just an advancement reward mechanism.

Take 5e D&D. It could be hacked to start all PC's at a level 3 baseline. Reasonably competent.

You stop all HP advancement. Capped at level 3. You would have to adjust monster HP and Damage to match the new scale. I'd personally also hack/Trim the spell list/advancement to match *insert preferred magic level here*. And leave the rest of the leveling advancements pretty much the same.

Boom, you have a lower-powered game where the PC's start competent, and get more heroic overtime; they can do more damage, and are a bit harder to hit, etc.. But the fixed HP would give the PC's a baseline vulnerability that wouldn't be there in the standard 5e D&D HP level bloat model.

What I am getting at is that By Fixing HP at a given point, the d20/D&D system can be adjusted to better fit different genre's than it would if you just left the standard HP level bloat in.

Quote from: Jaeger on March 02, 2021, 09:37:41 PM

Quote from: Pat on March 02, 2021, 06:13:55 PM
It's not about genre, though. Leveling is a game mechanic that incentivizes players, and doesn't really match any traditional genre or narrative structure...

Starting out as highly competent also works, but requires a different game structure. ...

I Don't think the structure has to be so different that one would have to switch to something like Gurps.

You don't have to start out highly competent. Reasonably so is fine. And "Leveling" is just an advancement reward mechanism.

Take 5e D&D. It could be hacked to start all PC's at a level 3 baseline. Reasonably competent.

You stop all HP advancement. Capped at level 3. You would have to adjust monster HP and Damage to match the new scale. I'd personally also hack/Trim the spell list/advancement to match *insert preferred magic level here*. And leave the rest of the leveling advancements pretty much the same.

Boom, you have a lower-powered game where the PC's start competent, and get more heroic overtime; they can do more damage, and are a bit harder to hit, etc.. But the fixed HP would give the PC's a baseline vulnerability that wouldn't be there in the standard 5e D&D HP level bloat model.

What I am getting at is that By Fixing HP at a given point, the d20/D&D system can be adjusted to better fit different genre's than it would if you just left the standard HP level bloat in.

I've played with similar changes. I always thought from a world building standpoint that 3rd level makes a good upper baseline for normal humans. Level 4 seems a natural breaking point, for a number of reasons, including silly things like the 4 level title for fighters (hero). And while they're not quite as buff as in Chainmail heroes are probably past the point of any realistic human potential. Also note the -10 death threshold in AD&D (which is more a common house rule than a RAW, because there are far more limitations on it than most people remember), which effectively gives characters an extra 10 hp. And 10 hp ~= 3d6, so you could argue 1st level characters should be 4th level characters. There's even a quote from Gygax about starting characters at 3rd level.

And older versions of D&D already have a natural capping point, at name level. While hit points don't stop adding up, they flatten out to +X/4 (about) instead of +1dX+Con bonus. But it's not the +2/level to hp that prevents it from being a real cap. Though while saves and attack bonuses get better as well, the real problem is spells -- you don't just more of them past name level, you go from ice storm to time stop, wish, and gate; and even the spells already known escalate dramatically in power -- e.g. fireballs keep adding d6s after a fighter's hp level out and thus become deadlier and deadlier. First and foremost, any cap needs to include a cap on spells.

The problem with capping hit point advancement alone is the game would become even more deadly as you go up in level. Attack rolls improve, better magical weapons mean more damage, and both those means the 3d8 or whatever hp get blown through almost instantly. You're reversing the dynamic where characters start out fragile at low levels, and become tough. Instead, characters would start out with some toughness, but become increasingly fragile. It would really discourage combat of any kind.

Quote from: Jaeger on March 02, 2021, 09:37:41 PM
You don't have to start out highly competent. Reasonably so is fine. And "Leveling" is just an advancement reward mechanism.

Take 5e D&D. It could be hacked to start all PC's at a level 3 baseline. Reasonably competent.

You stop all HP advancement. Capped at level 3. You would have to adjust monster HP and Damage to match the new scale. I'd personally also hack/Trim the spell list/advancement to match *insert preferred magic level here*. And leave the rest of the leveling advancements pretty much the same.

Boom, you have a lower-powered game where the PC's start competent, and get more heroic overtime; they can do more damage, and are a bit harder to hit, etc.. But the fixed HP would give the PC's a baseline vulnerability that wouldn't be there in the standard 5e D&D HP level bloat model.

What I am getting at is that By Fixing HP at a given point, the d20/D&D system can be adjusted to better fit different genre's than it would if you just left the standard HP level bloat in.

My system has about the same rough start point as level 3 in 5e (though that point was more accurately derived from level 1 in 4E), but there's a midway point between full HD+Con at every level and "hit points are capped at level 3." The answer, unsurprisingly to me anyway (because 4E had a lot of good ideas that got thrown under the bus as part of reassuring people that 5e would pretend 4E never existed) was a fixed hit point gain that ignored Con modifiers that ranged from 4-6 depending on class.

So in mine most characters start at level 1 with 25 hit points (a standard level 1 monster deals about 10 damage, mooks deal 2-5-ish) and gain 5 for each additional level, so at level 6 you have 50, at level 11 you have 75 and at level 15 (max level) you have 95 (defender-types expected to soak a lot of hits get 24+6/level; 30 at level 1, 60 at level 6, 90 at level 11, 114 at level 15).

Damage also scales linearly while attack/defenses are pretty well fixed (+1 at 6th and 11th) so overall you can deal with about five times the number of same opponents at level 15 as you could at level one (my estimate is 5x and not 4x because that +2 does make a difference when fighting lower level foes); a notable improvement, but not enough to make one invincible when you find yourself alone against a dozen orc veterans at once (whereas two orc veterans would be dangerous alone at level 1).

Quote from: Jaeger on March 02, 2021, 09:37:41 PM

I Don't think the structure has to be so different that one would have to switch to something like Gurps.

You don't have to start out highly competent. Reasonably so is fine. And "Leveling" is just an advancement reward mechanism.

Take 5e D&D. It could be hacked to start all PC's at a level 3 baseline. Reasonably competent.

You stop all HP advancement. Capped at level 3. You would have to adjust monster HP and Damage to match the new scale. I'd personally also hack/Trim the spell list/advancement to match *insert preferred magic level here*. And leave the rest of the leveling advancements pretty much the same.

Boom, you have a lower-powered game where the PC's start competent, and get more heroic overtime; they can do more damage, and are a bit harder to hit, etc.. But the fixed HP would give the PC's a baseline vulnerability that wouldn't be there in the standard 5e D&D HP level bloat model.

What I am getting at is that By Fixing HP at a given point, the d20/D&D system can be adjusted to better fit different genre's than it would if you just left the standard HP level bloat in.

I have similar motivations as Chris, but somewhat different goals.  It's been interesting reading about his approach here while I go in a different direction based on the same thinking.

I started with the ideas that:

- The BEMCI/RC structure has everything you need, but some of it is tacked on instead of integrated into the system.
- The 5E approach to limiting most of the mechanics instead of 4E scaling is correct in thinking but flawed in implementation. 
- That the 4E scaling of hit points is the right idea, but out of control, and then 5E didn't mute it enough.
- That in the process of doing the previous two points, WotC also went too far with the mechanical limits and not far enough in others, just a tad too much "sameness" from 4E in the name of universal mechanics.
- If the "Sweet Spot" is in particular middle levels, why not stretch out the effects that make the "Sweet Spot" into most of them?

There's a bunch of other things in my design unrelated to that which are ideas I wanted to try in a D&D-like game, but the core is built on those assumptions.  From that, I reworked the hit points, attack bonuses, defenses, etc. to work like a cleaned-up, stretched-out early, compressed later, BEMCI/RC.  I backed away from the 5E proficiency bonus, because while contributing mightily to the simplicity of the game, it does wonky things to the math on non-combat checks.  Then the stretching out allows fighters to get up to +8 class attack over 24 levels while wizards get +4 over the same time.  Everyone else is at +6.  So not nearly as extreme as BEMCI/RC but back towards that from the standard 5E approach.  Meanwhile, hit points are set at a base of d6s, happening every other level, for a cap of 12d6 at level 23.  (Fighters also get a total of +24 points over those levels, other classes get a lesser amount, Wizards get the base.)  Then there is a very simple Life point mechanic that tacks on another 5 or so points at the start and eventually grows to 10-12 points.  Damage has, of course, been muted as well, though fighters have some options to really pour it on (as do a few others to a lesser extent).   Ability scores do not much change this (no massive Con bonuses for anyone).  It works out to a max approaching 80 for the very toughest warriors, less for others, but spread out over the whole level progression.  Ability scores are capped normally at +4, but in reality +3 is the normal max the vast majority of the time.  Same limits on magic items.  Typical armor is slightly less powerful, but other other options put the numbers back into BEMCI/RC territory. 

This is all giving me some of the many benefits of the "Name level" cap while stretching out the growth over a longer set of levels.  A 9th level character is roughly equivalent to a 7th or 8th level BEMCI/RC character, but hits a little harder and is a little more vulnerable.  It did require me to rework everything in the game to match, which makes it only semi-compatible to BEMCI/RC and similar systems.  It still is "Zero to Hero" but the Hero part is muted like everything else in the system.   

Something I didn't exactly plan much but got anyway is that it would be trivial to modify my base system into something more like some of the OSR approaches.  A GM could take the base game, make a few choices about allowed class/race/culture/path options, combine every other level into a 12-level game, and then provide those simplified packages as the "classes" for the campaign.  You couldn't exactly produce every option, but you could get darn close.  The result of that wouldn't be much different than what you've suggested.

Well I don't like CR because its coarse and rough and irritating, and gets everywhere.

For those that have run & played editions earlier than 3.X were encounters in those editions designed to merely remove PC resources as the adventure went along?

Part of what I don't like about CR is that I'm supposed to have smaller encounters throughout the adventure so the PCs don't have access to their full resources in the "boss fight".

I don't really plan campaigns that way and I think that has been a big part of throwing CR out of the window.

While I played using the Rules Cyclopedia & AD&D 2E I don't recall that design philosophy being on display.

Quote from: Sunsword on March 16, 2021, 01:13:01 AM
For those that have run & played editions earlier than 3.X were encounters in those editions designed to merely remove PC resources as the adventure went along?

Part of what I don't like about CR is that I'm supposed to have smaller encounters throughout the adventure so the PCs don't have access to their full resources in the "boss fight".

I don't really plan campaigns that way and I think that has been a big part of throwing CR out of the window.

While I played using the Rules Cyclopedia & AD&D 2E I don't recall that design philosophy being on display.

I think it existed. The idea that you pushed into the dungeon until you ran out of "resources", and then retreated to rest up.

3.0 and later editions seemed to want to codify these ideas until they were a simple formula. X adventures per Y day, boss at the end. And the problem with such design is that it starts assuming X adventures per Y day and a boss at the end.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on March 16, 2021, 04:12:44 AM

Quote from: Sunsword on March 16, 2021, 01:13:01 AM
For those that have run & played editions earlier than 3.X were encounters in those editions designed to merely remove PC resources as the adventure went along?

Part of what I don't like about CR is that I'm supposed to have smaller encounters throughout the adventure so the PCs don't have access to their full resources in the "boss fight".

I don't really plan campaigns that way and I think that has been a big part of throwing CR out of the window.

While I played using the Rules Cyclopedia & AD&D 2E I don't recall that design philosophy being on display.

I think it existed. The idea that you pushed into the dungeon until you ran out of "resources", and then retreated to rest up.

3.0 and later editions seemed to want to codify these ideas until they were a simple formula. X adventures per Y day, boss at the end. And the problem with such design is that it starts assuming X adventures per Y day and a boss at the end.

5e even implicitly includes boss monsters in the form of "legendary" monsters (legendary to who?). They seemingly don't fit into how CR was supposedly designed to work by adding legendary actions and abilities on top of a regular monster (which is exactly how Pathfinder mythic worked), but I'm not a master of the system.