I think that
- Very powerful PCs may be fun to play (I freely admit that I got a big kick out of the reaction of the gate guards on the Sleeper linear when I told them who I was) but they're possibly less fun for other people to play around (I've been playing one of the more powerful PCs for a fairly long time, now - what do other people think about this?).
- Low level PCs are less fun to play than mid level ones, so simply reducing rate of XP award is not a good solution.
- Long-term PCs are more fun than newer ones, and also more fun to have around, at least for me, so encouraging more retirals or deaths is not a good solution.
and that as such we should probably make the XP curve more non-linear than it is. Low level PCs should if anything gain XP faster than they do, I think, but the rate at which you gain XP should fall off as your XP total rises more steeply than it currently does - a 300+/360+/420+ character should earn significantly less than the advertised amount of XP for a linear. I would say that a flat award of 18 - (level x 2) XP per linear might be a good approach - so a 150 XP character gets 12 XP, whereas a 400 XP character only gets 4. --Jacob
- I like the principle but not necessarily the implementation. But yeah; your philosophy is I think correct: it should be easy to get to mid-level and hard to get sillily high. -TheKremlin
- What implementation(s) would you prefer? A different formula for "less XP for high level PCs linearing"? More radical XP gain deterioration from linears? Differential monster XP? Or something cleverer/less obvious? --Jacob
- I'd rather fix the power curve than the XP gain rate, so that at higher levels you get a little more flexibility and endurance but not vastly more capability. Of course this further encourages multiclassing. Hmmm --Tristan
- Changing the power curve involves rewriting the whole system; changing the XP gain rate involves changing one number that doesn't unbalance anything else. If we were starting from scratch I might well agree with you, though.--Jacob
- I don't mind having the very powerful PCs around (though it annoys me when their players then say "XYZ is easy" and "anyone could have done foo") - I think they add interest, and good roleplay can be had out of the assymetric relationships that result. I think it's important that the highest power levels do not look unattainable for a starting character - ideally I'd like to see the cap for normal play be reachable in one or at most two years. I do think low level PCs are less fun, and would if anything rather allow people to start a bit higher (the big problem with this being that one nasty poisoner can wipe out several interesting characters. I'd like to think the society is more mature than that, but...) --Lmm
- It strikes me that power is partially relative; and partially not. Lmm just there stated that he likes it to be easy to get to "high level" ; what this effectively means is everyone able to throw out the high-level effects and hence everyone having ranged close-to-instakills, powerful effects and so on. Right now our system balances up to about 250xp and then starts to fall apart a bit above that; if we want people reaching high levels we need to make the system balanced for it. Fundamentally; we need to decide what sort of power we want a normal PC to have; personally I'd rather the average level be 170-220 or so, where the system is nicely balanced. Occasional high-level PCs sure; but it seems at the moment that we're moving most of the game into the unbalanced region and the region where the sillily powerful effects occur. It is like epic D&D - fun to play with sillily powerful effects perhaps, but hardly balanced or as interesting long-term as lower-level play. So; I'd rather have slow advancement and slower advancement at the highest levels such that we stop all *that* many people having the top end of abilities. It isn't much fun to die from a quad-through venom-12 or a freeze-300. Equally, I have fun as is, so I'm not going to be militant about this. -TheKremlin
- I think there's a lot to be said for this - I think the system works best between about 180 and 240 XP - but a crucial part of changing what "power" is would be to reduce the number of high-level NPCs. I'm pretty much always in favour of this in any case, because it means either a) more PC screen time or b) less far-fetched justifications for the PCs getting all the screen time or both. --Jacob
I've found that I enjoy playing more as a more powerful character; I don't think this is about power relative to other PCs, because that hasn't changed noticeably, but rather compared to NPCs and in absolute terms, if such a thing even exists. Trying to put a finger on the precise point the change happened I think it was when Ruth died - a well respected warlock, and rightly so, but we were able to finish the mission she couldn't. There's a feeling of being the best the city has to offer, which is, in my view, as it should be, given how many things we expect the PCs to handle because the NPCs don't. At the start of the points plot I had a hard time justifying not just leaving it all to the Warlocks (level 2 mages feel like they should be ten-a-penny; I know that officially the brotherhood is full of people who can't even enchant a focus, but we never see them, and they don't feel realistic); by the end, I knew I could handle things better than they could, and this didn't feel like an artificial "NPCs are incompetent" thing; I was noticeably better than the starting adventurers / caravan guards / etc. we meet. One could argue that it's only by having grown in power relative to what I was at the start that I have that feeling, but I don't think that's it; there's a dramatic enough difference in my actual abilities to justify it. (I know mages were uppowered during all this, but I think that's also irrelevant, because I felt powerful before that change - it was the lv3->lv4 difference that did it)
For the absolute part, I think the fireball spell made a huge difference (quad is so much better than triple because we have so many people on 4/2, but that's another discussion) - being able to flatten a "typical" person, not often, but if you really need to, is what I feel as about the right power level, and a much more enjoyable point at which to play a character than when you need to cooperate to get anything at all done (having to work together for anything like linear scale is fine, but robbing a random peasant should be something a character can be confident of managing by themselves - not just likely to manage it, but confident enough that they could e.g. do it to show off - unless other characters intervene, IMO).
Finally, occasional high-level PCs I don't like when they have a level of power that looks unattainable for a starting character; I think "10% of the bar could squash you like a fly, it'll take you three years to get that strong" is far worse than "50% of the bar could squash you like a fly; you'll be that powerful in six months". Having most characters around 170-220 would be fine (with NPC levels adjusted appropriately), but then I would want the XP cap to be about 300 (and we can't do that when we have characters above that in play, so I would try and achieve the same ratio by increasing the level of a typical character, and then make the system balanced at the levels we use it at); when we have characters on 3x the XP of others, trying to challenge a linear party including a high level character results in monsters who are more powerful than the low level characters in the party, which is not how it should be. (This may seem to contradict what I said above; I guess don't mind very powerful PCs, but I do mind PCs who are much more powerful than other PCs)
Sorry for being so long and rambly; I hope I've managed to get most of what I mean across. --Lmm
Changing the rate of XP gain and the XP curve isn't something I'd like to commit to especially since we're rewriting three out of six classes at the moment and we rewrote two of the others last year. Balancing the system for higher-level PCs is something we can only do by playing for about a year with a lot of higher-level PCs, because otherwise we just don't see enough of them. --Valtiel
- Changing the XP curve needn't interact with other changes to the system - it won't effect class balance at all, and vice versa. If we *were* to change the XP curve to make reaching very high levels harder, then we'd be left with all the pre-existing high-level PCs who would remaing significantly harder than everyone else, so it would be better to do so at a time when there were fewer rather than more of them. Do we expect the number to increase or decrease? --Jacob
- I would expect the number to gradually increase, with a big jump downwards at the end of each year as people leave and/or 3ygb; therefore I think the best time to make a change would be the end of any year. --Lmm