In the computer games, I’ve always enjoyed the higher levels (and the epics) more than the lower ones. At the higher levels you get to encounter more interesting enemies and themes, not Orc #445 or Yet Another Spiderling. You also have a lot more skills powers at your disposal to solve problems with – as do your enemies, which means more interesting battles instead of “attrition by hit dice”.
But we’re only level 12 so far. Am I missing something that happens later on?
Mostly because interesting encounters get more difficult. At high levels, the party has access to a huge array of potential spells, and skills can do nearly impossible tasks. Even death starts to turn into a minor inconvenience. They can hop around the world, do almost anything they want, and there’s not a lot of normal monsters which could stop them. At the sme time, not every player really wants to delve into the kind of tasks appropriate for high-level players, and not every GM wants to develop the major challenges involved. And players will go well out of their way to completely screw over an encounter - and they logically should.
To use your example, a high-level party will often turn up its nose at fighting anybody unless there’s a significant reward or reason for it, and virtually the assumptions around 3.0/3.5/4 completely flatline if you start thinking in terms of one big fight a day instead of multiple balanced encounters.
It’s usually reckoned to happen at around level 15.
First of all, mechanically things start to fall apart by mid level and by high level they’re completely off the rails.
Your fighter was as useful as the party wizard or druid at low level. At mid level he wasn’t as useful but still worth bringing along. By high level there’s almost no point in showing up if you’ve got a team of spellcasters who know what they’re doing. 4th Edition seems to have fixed a lot of this but I’m a 3.x boy at heart and I won’t be running 4th for the first time until my current 3.5 campaign wraps up.
Second of all, and this is a matter of opinion, but I feel that things start to fall off the rails story-wise as well. I don’t like having lots of high-level NPCs because I think the logic of the world starts to unravel. Now this is something that you can feel free to ignore: If you’re having fun there’s no reason to drag yourself down with a vain attempt at realism, but it’s something I can’t help but be bugged by.
My campaigns, including the one I’m running currently, tend to run based on a slanted scale I’ve set up:
1 - 5 = Low Level
6 = Borderline
7-11 = Mid Level
12 = Borderline
13+ = High Level
The world is full of low level characters, while mid level ones tend to be the generals of armies, kings of nations, cultist leaders, etc. High level characters more or less don’t exist and are things of myth. The campaign will wrap up as the characters approach, and eventually, manage to barely breach my amended version of “high level.”
Again, opinion, but I think mid-level play (as I define it above: levels 6-11) is where D&D shines the most. At that point characters have acquired enough feats and spells to shine in their roles without things getting too convoluted. There’s actually a movement among gamers to play a version of D&D they call E6, where level advancement ends at 6, though characters can continue to accumulate feats. I haven’t tried that but it seems born of the same issues I have with the game. All this being said I really am a huge fan of D&D, I just think I’m aware of its limitations.
Also, I want to address this in two points: You have to keep in mind that the computer games are pretty different than an actual session of D&D. You give me a level 20 wizard in Baldur’s Gate and I’ll be toasting enemies left and right, but it’s nothing compared to the shit I can do in the pen and paper game. I don’t even really want to start to describe it. My character wouldn’t even need to be present to lay waste to things and he would pretty much sealed against anything not powered by DM-fiat.
And as to the interesting enemies, I think that comes down to the DM. The players in my current campaign level slowly, their characters are only midway between levels three and four at the moment, but I think they’re given plenty of interesting things to deal with: A few sessions ago they investigated the disappearances of men in a coastal city and eventually discovered a hag in heat was behind them all. A party of five level three characters against a CR5 monster with invisibility-at-will was plenty interesting.
Then, last Thursday, they rescued a nymph, made tricky by the fact that if any of them saw her they’d be struck permanently blind (according to the rules-as-written the blindness thing is something she can turn on and off but I’m kind of a bastard). Who were they rescuing her from? A band of (blind) grimlocks. Figures. So yeah, a game can be a hack-and-slash yawnfest at any level, it’s going to depend on the DM.
The best campaign I know started some characters at zero-level (as village militia recruits), who had to earn experience points to get to 1st level. None ever surpassed 9th, over several real-time years of continuous play; only a couple got that high. It was freaking great. It’s all about the storytelling, and characters with real limits on their abilities, relative to their opponents and the game world, make for the best stories.
The system isn’t really set up right to accommodate 0th level, but I wish it were.
I’ve heard people complain before about characters sucking at first level. They’re right, they do. But that’s a feature, not a bug: You’re supposed to suck at first level. A first-level “adventure” should generally include a lot more running than fighting, because any fight at all carries a real and significant risk to it. This often ends up forcing good role-playing solutions to problems.
I think at least for D&D 3.5 this is due to the “linear fighters, quadratic wizards” issue. At higher levels there are more “save or die” spells, so unless you have good saves in every categories, you’ll be on the defensive all the time. Even if you have saves, a well-prepared wizard still have a chance to one-shot you, say 50% of the time?
As mentioned, you have lots of resources at your disposal - spells, magical items and such. It’s harder to come up with challenges that tax all those resources without it being extremely cheesy. If a band of level 20 PCs run about with Fly spells, wand of magic missiles, etc. they can easily take over a town, or a city or a country, unless their opponents are likewise of that level or higher. Every court will have a high-level wizard (a loyal one, no less); every dungeon will have to feature some utterly horrible monsters – which becomes just another monster of the week – because the PC has ran into so many of them.
However, for high level play where players can be deities and such, I’ll recommend Mutants and Mastermind. The 2nd edition is quite close to D&D in terms of mechanics. There are formulas which you can use to calculate DCs for outrageous tasks, such as trying to hit the moon with an arrow.
Planescape is, I believe, the official cosmology of the 3.5 D&D world (I won’t talk about 4e because I’ve never played it or read about it too much.
So, you’ve got your campaign settings which are basically “planets”. Mind you, even a flat-earth setting where you can literally sail off the end counts as a “planet” in this sense. Each campaign setting is surrounded by a huge bubble that encompasses the campaign setting and the solar system its part of. So in Eberron, where the 13 other planes are the moons, they’d all be inside this bubble. Same with the moons of the planet Faerun is on, and the suns of both planets. Spelljammer (which, according to Planescape, is semi-canon) involves piercing the bubble and physically sailing in outer space from setting to setting. That concept was pretty much abandoned, but the structure of the universe stayed the same.
Now, the outer planes as described in Planescape are there for both the material plane (the standard campaign setting) and alternate material planes (other campaign settings), with a few exceptions. Eberron, for example, is isolated from the standard D&D Outer planes. It’s still canonically possible to go from FR to Eberron, but much harder than going from FR to Greyhawk, which is just a short trip away (relatively speaking).
That was how things stood when Planescape was out in 2e. Planescape is, as Miller explained, referenced many times in the 3.5e books, which means it’s still canonical (although it isn’t the official setting anymore, which is a shame; Planescape is possibly the most well thought out campaign setting in D&D. At least it isn’t too hard to convert to and from). Spelljammer is a little more questionable. On the one hand, Spelljammer was canon in Planescape, which means that if Planescape is canon than Spelljammer should be as well. On the other hand, there are barely any references to it in the newer books. Lords of Madness is the most obvious one, explaining that certain abberations came to whatever campaign setting you are playing in by traveling from distant planets. Elder Evils is another; some of the world-shattering apocalypse beasts come from other planets that could really only be reached by Spelljamming.
D&D is a lot more open-ended than a computer game. At level 1, this shows up by letting you do creative stuff like tip over a table to provide cover, or take an enemy hostage to force the others to negotiate. By mid levels, you can do things like bypass entire dungeons with the creative use of a spell or three. By level 20, you can find out who the next Big Bad Evil Guy will be, Teleport to his house before he even turned to Evil, and wipe him out. Or just Gate in a Solar to do it for you.
I love starting below level 1. I’ve DMed a campaign where the players started off as Commoners using Non-Elite Array (10s and 11s in all stats, basically) on a farm (Don’t worry, everything they owned was burned down by Orcs 10 minutes into the first session). I replaced each PC’s Commoner level with a single level in an NPC class after two sessions, IIRC, the class chosen being determined by their actions while Commoners. Nope, they didn’t get to pick. Finally, after a while, they got their NPC class replaced by a PC class (I gave each one a couple of options, based on what they did so far) and finally got to roll their stats. They had the chance to replace that class with another when they gained their second level. After that, leveling up in the same class was simple enough, but multiclassing (even from Fighter to Rogue or something else simple) required at least a miniquest and a prestige class required a major quest line.
It’s not something I’d do every time, but having Bob the Guy Who Started As a Commoner And Is Now a Paladin slay a dragon is pretty damn satisfying ;).
But “linear fighters, quadratic wizards” isn’t a flaw of D&D 3.X - it’s a characteristic of the fantasy genre as a whole. A powerful spellcaster is *always *more powerful than a powerful warrior. I can’t think of a single exception in any book, movie or TV series.
That’s why I think that a balanced party may actually be a bad thing at higher levels. Either have them all be warriors and rogues, in which case they can be Robert E. Howard characters defeating evil sorcerers through cunning and audacity; or have them all be spellcasters, in which case they’re Harry Potter.
Yah, it may be an emulation of the high-fantasy genre, but it doesn’t make for good gameplay for some people. Again, the fan base is split on this. D&D 4E makes all classes linear and good at one thing. Even Fighters and Rogues get daily and encounter powers. With D&D Next on the pipeline, there has been lots of back and forth on whey they should and shouldn’t keep LFQW.
For me LFQW just doesn’t cut it for me. Wizards just have the answer to everything and anything. Which may be why I prefer my games to be on the low fantasy scale. Different cuts for different people.
The way my group solved this spontaneously (both in DnD and in other rules) was by always having the mages specialize in “stuff other than fireballs”; it was both more balanced and more interesting. My higgish-level who got turned into iresurrectable steam thanks to a DM mistake* specialized in illusions and disguises, for example. At the time of his death he could make our group of five look and sound like a small band of orcs - so long as nobody other than him spoke. His greatest offensive spell was a well-cared-for sword. Another one was a teleporter: most agressive spell, a really long “long door” he’d use to drop the dwarven warrior with the limited charges fireball hammer on top of the meanest-looking opponent; he was also very fond of porting people upwards (oops).
the DM was my brother. He’s not the DM any more but he’s still my brother and ‘our NPCs hadn’t performed any actions’ is one of those in-the-family lines no outsider will ever understand.
Actually, Wizards most definitely weren’t “more powerful” before 3rd edition. Which isn’t to say they were useless or even weak beforehand, but there wasn’t the arbitrary “power level” crap which keeps coming up.
Before 3rd edition, each class its own role, and there wasn’t a lot of crossing over. Wizards had a lot of powerful spells - but the higher-level stuff was also very vulnerable, slow, and tricky to use. It frequently required special setup work and could be defeated by a perfectly normal person who knew what to look for or how to counter. It was also ungodly dangerous. A 2nd edition wizard was far less limited. His Shapechange spell was “Turn into a monster. Any monster. Period. Dragon? Yup. Beholder? Yup. Undead horror with easily-abused abilities? Duh!”
Of course, there was a price to pay for all that. Wizards were vulnerable and likely to go down like a chump if not protected. There were no superwizards or God-clerics. A single Fighter was often quite capable of defeating the high-level wizard personally. One of the reasons for the Linear Warrior, Quadratic Wizard trope is that in 3rd edition, they removed virtually all weaknesses for spellcasters.
I know that 4e got a lot of hate, but this was my favorite thing about it - the classes were much better balanced and the role system helped to define individual classes more effectively.
What were some of the Wizard’s weakness in AD&D2, and how did D&D3.5E negate that? Off the top of my head, there are 2 big ones - Fighters and other monsters have their saves getting better and there is nothing much a wizard can do about that (save for a couple that gives a penalty to saving throws) and that there is a casting delay for longer spells, allowing them to be interrupted easier.
While it’s been a LONG time since I did any serious digging in the Early Editions, my memories disagree with pretty much EVERYTHING you write here.
First edition and second edition had, in my opinion, far and away the MOST broken spellcasters - though first edition had the curious limiter that you were unlikely to ever actually REACH high levels, or be any good at them if you got there unless you were either really lucky, or broke/ignored a lot of rules (Demihumans basically couldn’t level past 9, period, except as rogues, and you needed good stats that you were unlikely to have if you wanted to use spells of any sort of higher level.). First edition spells were patently silly though and many of them were completely broken. Basically, the only reason first edition wasn’t even more broken than other editions is that you generally didn’t make it to super high levels.
Second edition made things worse, overall, and IMHO, 3rd toned down the stupidity of a lot of spells - unfortunately, this had the effect of new spells rising to the top.
To sum up: No, I don’t think LFQW was in any way a “3rd edition problem”; Wizards were RIDICULOUS in early editions.
Well said. Some 3E spells are stronger than their 1E counterparts (e.g. spells with saves, as noted by Crowbar of Irony +3), but some 1E spells were way, WAY better than their 3E counterparts. Like Shapechange (as noted by smiling bandit), Polymorph Other and Polymorph Any Object.
But it’s incredibly easy for DMs to limit mages. If you find particular spells problematic, just make those hard to acquire or absent in the game world. Or rewrite the in-world ‘versions’ of them. Those spells with wizard’s names on them were developed–made up–by a wizard-character’s player and his DM; there’s no reason you can’t do the same.
