taking 2 or 3 levels worth of stuff, each time you level up?

Referring to Condensing discussions, not Limiting discussions.

Does that really accomplish anything?

Quote from: Razor 007;1092950taking 2 or 3 levels worth of stuff, each time you level up?

No

The variant limits traditional progression to level 1 to 6 per RAW. Thereafter you can cash in XP for abilities. In the original it was 5,000 XP for 1 feat with up to 20 feats being able to be purchased in this way.

QuoteRules

Character progression from level 1 to level 6 is as per d20. Upon attaining 6th level, for each 5000 experience a character gains, they earn a new feat. A diverse selection of feats should be made available in any E6 campaign, however, feats with unattainable prerequisites under this system remain unattainable.

For the purpose of experience awards, treat each 5 feats as +1 CR (or level), to an upper limit of 20 feats. After this, it becomes more and more difficult to bring all a character's feats to bear in a given situation; although they continue to gain feats, 6th level characters with more than 20 feats can continue to be treated as if they were level 10 for experience and challenge purposes.

Quote from: Razor 007;1092950taking 2 or 3 levels worth of stuff, each time you level up? Does that really accomplish anything?

I would assume that a game which deliberately condensed the number of "levels" a PC was expected to progress through also condensed the number of beneficial traits/elements/improvements received at each level.

Otherwise, as you say, not much point.

Quote from: Razor 007;1092950Does that really accomplish anything?

Yes by changing power curve after you earn 13,000 xp in D&D 3.X.

I believe that "condensing vs restricting" is more Shadow of the Demon Lord (everything is covered in a 10-level advancement) vs something that takes a 1-20 advancement scheme and then only alllows you to use the first 6 (or 10, or whatever) levels of it. The former has the sole advantage of pushing enough together that there should never be "dead levels" where the advancement doesn't give you something more interesting than just a hit die and (possibly) a small increase to one or more static values.

Quote from: Razor 007;1092950taking 2 or 3 levels worth of stuff, each time you level up?

Referring to Condensing discussions, not Limiting discussions.

Does that really accomplish anything?

Theoretically, too few levels leads to a system where advancement feels stagnant, while too many levels leads to system bloat.  That system bloat can manifest in several different ways.

For example, there's nothing inherently wrong with trying to standardize levels, avoid so called "dead levels", and other such things.  However, if in the rush to stick an ability into every level, you start putting in abilities hither and yon, sooner than later you'll add some stuff that would have been better left out.  At that point, you'd have been much better off condensing levels, and thus restricting yourself to the most meaningful abilities.

For any given class and level based system, there's a sweet spot of an appropriate number of levels.  I don't know what it is, but I somehow doubt that it is always conveniently a multiple of 10.  Of course, with D&D games, making the spell levels follow traditional schemes limits your options.

Honestly, if you are doing this to an existing game, why not just play a different game?  Levels are ultimately a gauge of character's power level in combat. Yes, it's often only a rough guide, but it's still a guide.

3.x is perhaps the most notable one its applied to, but it has monsters that challenge epic level (20+) characters. So you're basically throwing away much of the game.

Quote from: JeremyR;1093002Honestly, if you are doing this to an existing game, why not just play a different game?  Levels are ultimately a gauge of character's power level in combat. Yes, it's often only a rough guide, but it's still a guide.

3.x is perhaps the most notable one its applied to, but it has monsters that challenge epic level (20+) characters. So you're basically throwing away much of the game.

And keeping all the things that work with level 1 to 6 and a bit beyond. Which is the point. Change the feel by changing the mix of stuff yet remain compatible with the mountain of material that was produced. We are doing this in the time we have for a hobby.

Shadow of a Demon Lord, 13th Age and Dungeon Crawl Classics all condense levels down to 10 levels.

There's some big benefits to doing so if you are basing your maths off the D20 SRD  (although these don't all apply to all of the above games)
- You don't need to keep scaling the numbers - you can keep improving every level without the numbers dwarfing the die roll
- monsters are a threat across a wider range of levels (basically you have a form of bounded accuracy).
- You can also keep hit die bounded if that is desirable - which again keeps low level monsters more of a thread.
- You don't need to fill up twenty levels with bloated class features, which are a nightmare to balance and playtest and can lead to the game breaking down - a good well-designed game across ten levels is just more achievable.
- Conversely you don't need dead levels to avoid this bloat.
- You can finish the campaign faster and are therefore, for many groups, possibly more likely to actually finish (although it's also possible to have 10 levels and just slow down the progression - this can easily be done by allowing features to be picked up between levels as 13th Age does, along with Earthdawn and Numenera which are non D20 systems.

In the game I'm writing I ended up settling on 15 levels. Most campaigns break apart due to real life before then anyway, but its long enough you can go for quite awhile if you desire to.

I use the approach that the early levels are extremely quick (Level 2 is meant to be hit after just a single adventure, Level 3 after a couple more and Level 5 by the time your adventure count hits double-digits), but then starts to slow down considerably (you'd probably need about a hundred adventures to actually reach Level 15).

This has pretty much the benefits of the 10 level version mentioned above; though my "bounded accuracy" is even tighter and PC "hit points" cap nearly everyone in high double-digit values so a dozen "zero-level" warriors would still be a threat to even a Level 15 warrior (and 2-3 dozen would be a meaningful threat to even a max level party if you intended to face them on an open field; employing tactics like cover and choke points are recommended regardless of your level).

The PCs get to choose one thing about their progression each time they level up (and about every third level get some other set class benefit) so there's a sense they're in control of their of progression, but the number of elements is still reasonable enough (about seven combat-related and seven non-combat related ones) that you can fit most PCs onto a single sheet of paper with descriptions of all their abilities on it.

5e D&D did a pretty good job spreading 1e-3e's first 12 levels over 20 levels.

Quote from: S'mon;10939085e D&D did a pretty good job spreading 1e-3e's first 12 levels over 20 levels.

Good one!