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View Full Version : Low level hierarchies in campaigns



aspekt
2015-02-26, 02:18 PM
I have been reading some Eberron material for the first time to prep for another campaign stage in an ongoing game.

It bothers me that campaign settings seem to have such weak PCs in comparison to overall game power and scope. In particular I am thinking of PCs who hold rather high positions of authority. This is not the first time I've noticed this in campaign settings, but it's the first time I've attempted to make sense of it rather than just overwrite it.

While I understand that adventuring levels would be low amongst high ranking political and social figures. It makes less sense that the majority would be operating with medium to low levels in their political and social classes.

I get that not everyone will be a ruler with advanced levels in Aristocrat for instance. But why would everyone show this lack of experience?

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-26, 02:44 PM
Define your perimeters of "low level".

I've seen in oft stated that the majority of people would never reach 6th lvl in their lifetime. So anything over that is in the top five percent.

Ashtagon
2015-02-26, 02:51 PM
I get that not everyone will be a ruler with advanced levels in Aristocrat for instance. But why would everyone show this lack of experience?

Conversely, why should they? Given that once you are past level 12, each time you gain a level you are basically defeating at least a few encounters that are equivalent in danger to fighting off adult dragons, you have to start wondering where all these encounters are coming from if the local lords are much higher in level than that. Either the local lands are absurdly dangerous, in which case why are the peasantry even alive, or the lords aren't exactly the stay-at-home type looking after the actual running of the kingdom (in which case who are the guys actually in charge of running things, and where are their stats, since they are the ones the PCs will actually meet in practice if they ask to speak to the local lord).

Basically, extraordinary levels call for extraordinary dangers. You don't get that simply running a kingdom.

There's also the narrative point: If they can solo the BBEG, why are their hiring PCs?

aspekt
2015-02-26, 04:11 PM
I'm sorry if my point wasn't clear, but I was more interested in why their non-adventuring class levels, such as Aristocrat, tended to be so low.

However, your point does stand as a very good explanation of why their adventuring levels tend to be lower.

Ashtagon
2015-02-26, 04:13 PM
Why should their non-adventuring levels be high? To gain a level in aristocrat, they still have to earn XP. And if it is challenging for a warblade 12, how much harder would it be for an aristocrat 12?

johnbragg
2015-02-26, 04:32 PM
I'm sorry if my point wasn't clear, but I was more interested in why their non-adventuring class levels, such as Aristocrat, tended to be so low.

However, your point does stand as a very good explanation of why their adventuring levels tend to be lower.

Let's simplifying the math a bit and say that it take 10 level-appropriate encounters to go up a level for an adventurer.

That number assumes potentially-lethal encounters. Non-adventurers are facing mostly non-lethal threats, so let's handwave that it takes them 20 level-appropriate challenges to level up.

The problem is that, after 1st level, the challenges don't scale. You're getting a handful of "level-appropriate" challenges, but mostly the same kind of challenges you were facing at 1st level. So say it takes a Expert 1 20 CR 1 challenges to get to Expert 2. To get to Expert 3, he or she needs to grind through 40 more CR 1 challenges. Expert 4, 60 more CR 1 challenges. Technically, it's worse than that, because the XP return on a CR 1 challenge slows down, but let's say that balances out the handful of CR 1+ challenges that come along.

Aristocrats are going to advance somewhat more quickly, because they're going to face more CR 1+ situations than a master craftsman or sage in a library will. But it's pretty hard to block out what the career of an Aristocrat 7 looks like, unless it's a career that would have been dramatically easier if they took PC class levels after Aristocrat 1.

Telok
2015-02-26, 04:33 PM
It's a combination of legacy effects, story requirements, and ignoring (or being ignorant of) the side effects of the game rules.

In AD&D you had something called the 0-level commoner. This was because everyone had pc classes, a monster style stat block, or didn't matter. NPC classes hadn't been invented yet. So kings, princes, nobles, and such generally had fighter levels (some had wizard or were dual/multi classed but no thieves or clerics were nobility) because that was simplest and being a fighter in AD&D wasn't the gimpy limpy it is in later editions. So you got this legacy impression that 90% of the population had one hit die. Which wasn't really true, 90% of the population didn't matter so they didn't really get stats. That's what the 0-level people were, unstatted but interactive scenery. In 4e D&D they would be minions. But in olden times people who mattered had pc classes because in D&D butt kicking equals authority.

Someone mentioned the story reasons above. Simply it's a matter of capability. If the pcs are bigger than life superheroes then in D&D everyone else but the BBEG is lower level than they are and if the king's guard is 12th level the pcs have to be 17th. Not everyone wants to run high level games so all the npcs have to be low level. On the other hand if the pcs are normal or average level why would anyone hire them when they could do it themselves. So for the story to work npcs have to be weaker than the pcs but not so weak that they can't do their jobs. So you make the npcs weak and then cut everything else down to where the npcs are just good enough to get along. Unfortunately that dorsn't work real well in D&D. It means that the average commoner who took a single rank in a craft skill hits the dc for a masterwork item 10% of the time.

Which ties into people not realizing what the game rules do to the setting. By making everyone effectively a pc, then making them weak enough for low level pcs to matter, then dropping the difficulty of everything to where the npcs can cope, when pcs over 8th level interact with the world they go through it like a blowtorch through warm butter. An 8th level core 3.5 D&D bard can destroy any social encounter in the default Ebberon courts and a 12th level wizard or cleric is a demigod amongst men who can pimp slap the king to death while an entire army watches, helpless to do anything.

My solution is to accept that in D&D butt kicking equals authority and use the fact that the npc classes go higher than 6th or 8th level. I have a houserule meteric that gives me kings, queens, and npc heroes that are 12th to 14th level aristocrat/expert/warrior multiclasses. Then I rely on the fact that the npc classes aren't as powerful as the pc classes (well, mostly <cough> fighter <cough>) to justify the pcs being heroes. You do need a wizard and psion version of the adept class though.

This is mainly a 3.5 D&D thing though, but that's where Ebberon is. AD&D had the powerful lords and loose enough rules for things to work. 4e simply didn't stat anything the players weren't fighting and turned everything else into a level appropriate skill challenge. I can't say what 5th does yet, I don't have enough experience with it so far. Most other systems I've played avoid this by either making the pcs equal to the npcs and special through luck, destiny, or grit, or they embrace the superhero/god aspect and normal people are just scenery.

johnbragg
2015-02-26, 04:49 PM
Which ties into people not realizing what the game rules do to the setting. By making everyone effectively a pc, then making them weak enough for low level pcs to matter, then dropping the difficulty of everything to where the npcs can cope, when pcs over 8th level interact with the world they go through it like a blowtorch through warm butter. An 8th level core 3.5 D&D bard can destroy any social encounter in the default Ebberon courts and a 12th level wizard or cleric is a demigod amongst men who can pimp slap the king to death while an entire army watches, helpless to do anything.

Again, the game was developed and tested for low and mid-levels. It was never really supposed to work past 10 or so. ("Name" level in OD&D, 2E basically capping hit points at 9th level, etc) Just like the Epic level rules weren't particularly expected to work well--you're pushing the game beyond its limits, things are going to break down.


My solution is to accept that in D&D butt kicking equals authority and use the fact that the npc classes go higher than 6th or 8th level. I have a houserule meteric that gives me kings, queens, and npc heroes that are 12th to 14th level aristocrat/expert/warrior multiclasses. Then I rely on the fact that the npc classes aren't as powerful as the pc classes (well, mostly <cough> fighter <cough>) to justify the pcs being heroes. You do need a wizard and psion version of the adept class though.

That's a perfectly valid approach, if you don't want to do E6. (Or even if you do--nobody says you can't run two campaigns).

aspekt
2015-02-26, 05:10 PM
Having started with 1ed the butt-kicking solution has been my go to answer. Honestly, I had never really stopped to wonder about the mechanics of it I just adjusted the ruling NPCs accordingly.

But reading the Eberron material it started to bug me that every piece of published campaign material seemed to inexplicably do the same thing to ruling NPCs.

Seeing as the likelihood of this trend actually being inexplicable was rather low, but the chances of my ignorance of the reasons probably high, I came here.

Thanks everyone I appreciate the responses.