Okay so go look across the internet or your local store and you’ll find d20 roleplay everywhere. It’s omnipresent and kind of the new standard rules system for every game. However all is not perfect or really even well thought out…
At first level you’re basically a commoner with potential. Sure you’ve usually got better strength and constitution (or whatever) than your common pleb but in actual proficiency and competence your about trainee level. Then you go out on your quest for the lost squidgy spoon or your mission to save the republic from dark side wielding bunnies for say two weeks. Now two weeks in an intense engagement means that you’re racking up the good old experience at a frightening rate. It means that when you return to your hamlet you are now usually capable of taking on the guard sometimes all at once as an individual!! It works out that once you’re level 5 then those who are at level 1 no longer pose much of a threat if at all. It also means that for some mystical reason you increase in skill at basket weaving only by killing ugly looking things with a sword or a blaster. Strange no?
So in two weeks you’ve learned rapidly as apparently the crucible of fire is really, really hot… hot enough to forge a steely person in a short space of time and give a brilliant mind enough space to come up with eight new spells for their spell book in their spare time. Time, it seems, has little meaning in a world with few clocks…
Then there’s another problem, you see that skill you’ve built in basket weaving… that was something you learned as a side skill, a hobby, something entirely unrelated to what you were doing and the source of your xp. Well somehow you got better at your hobby than the professional back at the village who has being doing nothing but basket weaving and has even been in competition for two weeks! Obviously that doesn’t make sense unless you started out a novice and he was a genius and by the time you got back you were an decent amateur and he was still a genius but more often than not that’s not the case, you start out at his skill level and by the time you get back you can wipe the floor with him.
So just level up the civilians at the same rate? No. Firstly it would remove the desire to adventure as characters could just sit at home and level up with the common people. Secondly what would the ruler of a nation do if everyone in his domain could shoot fireballs from their finger tips or cut down men like wheat with a sword?
The only recourse left to a DM is to give their professionals bonuses to their skills (irrespective of actual level) and disallow players putting skill points or training into skills they have not trained or practised sufficiently. That and to try to ensure that the characters lives isn’t one long fight, day after day [see coming rant about getting the setting wrong… ALL THE FRICKIN TIME!!].
Another problem with the whole concept of levels, they are supposed to represent the level of power you control, the degree of mastery you have at your chosen speciality, the amount of punishment you can take and therefore the level of threat you should face for it to be a challenge. However not all lvl 5 characters are equal. You build one for combat and you build another for skills and the combative one will survive where as the skill based character will only show up the combat based character outside of combat.
So the solution is to ensure that all lvl 5 characters are equal? Well no. 4th edition d20 made several changes to the whole underlying structure of the level based system by ensuring that no matter what class or combination of classes you play all your bonuses to hit or resist are basically the same. The only problem is that it’s now impossible to build a character based on being fantastic with a blade for example, or at least it is in any meaningful way. Sure you can do it by taking feats to pull off fancy manoeuvres but basically you’ll miss more often doing that because fancy means hard in d20 and you’ll only hit with the same regularity as everybody else normally. So essentially by trying to ensure that no one is going to die due to not being a combat based character they’ve managed to “nerf” combat characters.
So the problems produced by a level based system, whether directly as caused by using levels or merely the common example of the use of such a system, is that you advance too quickly and without reference to the amount of time passed plus no matter what you do you have to allow people to choose a speciality and be better than everyone else at it. Basically then there needs to be a system where the advancement is slowed but allows for differing capabilities without incurring a flat capability curve where everyone is the same.
First off I’ve had the argument about levels with a friend and after calling each other a few names we established that you can slow down the almost blinding process of power gain by making each level a smaller step up in power and having more steps in the whole process so instead of 20 large levels you’d have perhaps 50 odd much smaller power creeps. I mean I’ve played D&D and Star Wars in d20 versions and I know the anticipation of the next level as a player, the desire to gain one more level and progress to the next stage. Even as a player I’d say that there’s a problem as you advance so quickly you lose all concept of low powered heroism in the desire to amass as much power as you can as soon as you can and that in the end the characters story seems short and hollow. Devoid of those pointless things which real people go through, those things which make up essential parts of their personality and life history. Of course to encourage such non plot related advancement there would have to be some kind of mechanic.
One game I used to play when I was at university skipping lectures was Rifts. Their skill system (which encompassed combat to my knowledge) was d100 based and the advancement scheme was linked to when you used the skill in question though it didn’t include combat to hit rolls as a skill (if my memory serves me correctly). The concept was that say you had a skill of 67% and your class listed the skill as +7% advancement. When you used the skill in game you got to tick the skill, then when you advanced (I think it was still level based to a certain degree) you rolled against each ticked skill and if you failed the roll (as in rolled 68%+ in this example) then your skill increase (again in the example the skill roll would then become 67+7=74%). That system seems to me to be better linked to what is actually happening than the d20 version where you’re free to increase whatever skill you like where you get situations where a wizard (for example) keeps plumbing points into concentration so they can cast in combat better when they never actually cast in combat because they lack the skill to do so, surely learning should be related to practice right?
Anyway in terms of balance you cannot get away from the campaign vs character class problem. If your campaign is combat heavy then any character who’s class does not focus on combat will be at a severe disadvantage. This problem cannot really be compensated for adequately in the design of the classes without making everything too homogenous. I believe that actually, in this case, this should NOT be addressed by the rules as it should be left up to the individual player and group whether they wish to select character classes tailored to the game style or deliberately buck the trend to play something “different” (a challenge perhaps for a seasoned player?) However this does not remove the responsibility completely from the games designer and introduces another flaw in the d20 systems, one of prescription.
With d20 classes they tend to produce six million variations in one game and only half a dozen in another (for example D&D 3.5 Edition vs Star Wars Saga Edition). Why produce so many variations in one game and then only six in another? Well it’s to do with how prescriptive you make the classes.
In D&D if you pick the fighter class then this effectively describes your character. Right from the word go you are more prone to be a fighter or take a fighter style class than anything else. I did once mess around with a wizard fighter starting off with wizard (to keep with the background fluff that it takes a whole lot longer to learn how to be a wizard than it does a fighter (another statement made out of the blue just to fit in with people’s preconceived ideas about what are essentially fantasy concepts without form). Now by the end of the characters career, an epic 32nd lvl, the character was a monster in combat but even then he wasn’t durable to the same degree as a pure bred fighter nor as skilled (something I worked out later via number crunching). Most of the characters melee prowess was fighter based but the real power came from his arcane abilities stacked alongside enabling him to shift his defences and offences to suit the enemy.
In Star Wars you have a similar affair with the Soldier and the Jedi being more durable than a Scoundrel and this being evident no matter what course you take as the original bonuses to hit points are quite disparate (30 vs 18!!) but within each class there are different paths of talents and the reduced skill list allows you to produce widely different characters. For example we ran a test adventure with two soldiers, one trained as a pilot and little else but who was a better shot and more capable with armour whilst the other carried no ranged weapons but could fight hand to hand and was a deamon mechanic. They played totally differently and if you had a D&D player look on the game they’d probably come to the conclusion that the two characters were of different classes.
Now the prescriptive route does offer certain advantages as it restrains characters from becoming too broad and not allowing each individual player their own spotlight but then this is weighed against the need for complicated multi-classing rules to allow people to play a wizard who can hold his own in melee for example. However there is large gaping flaws in the whole concept.
Firstly the idea that all wizards conform to one strict map of progression (for example) is ridiculous as people learn at different rates, things happen, maybe someone teaches them a higher level spell first as a kind of test (why on earth you can’t cast every spell you know as a wizard is beyond me as it’s all described as formulae and is therefore unrelated to personal power). In effect what the game designers are saying is that to become a wizard you really would have to tick certain boxes and therefore to some extent all wizards will be alike… but that’s more high school than high fantasy isn’t it?
Secondly, who’s to say that a person is defined by their choice of profession? Due to certain game balance issues and not really looking out for paths of “optimisation” (read power gaming) the game designers didn’t go for free form development as if you had say a wizard with decent fighting skills then he might outshine the fighters and the wizards as there’d be little he couldn’t do. So instead they introduce the idea that classes don’t always mix very well, which is fine but then they introduce more classes in later books until the combination possibilities overwhelm the original balances and you end up with wizards with full BAB (as I adequately showed to my group before the later choices came out which would have really upped the power levels on that character!!!). It seems that once you start out trying to limit several powerful options from being combined by separating them out into individual classes and setting restrictions on how those classes can be combined you have to continue in precisely the same vein. Deviation brings with it new paths to power, new options with which to build the uber character. For example, in the main rules of D&D there was ONE option for combining divine and arcane casting. It required you to basically give up on high end powers and efficiency in favour of a broader spell selection and some interesting class features… then you find later that there’s a class combining Druid with an arcane class without much in the way of limitations. It gets even worse when you look at truly complex characters. Get a couple of class features and powers working off charisma (a sorcerer/ paladin say) and then take the Harper Paragon class… this then ups your charisma repeatedly which with the other mechanics like magic items and the increase one characteristic every four levels can build up to a sizable charisma score (like 30+!!!) which then feeds everything else your character is built upon and makes you much more than you should be for your level. Yes this is power gaming and yes to some extent this is solely the problem of the DM but the game designers have to take some credit for setting the game up so it can be “twinked” so.
Thirdly (this is the one which really gets my goat) is that with the whole system being prescriptive you can’t play whatever character you want, not unless you include a whole lot of caveats like some insurance advert! For example, I want to play a wizard who isn’t some ancient fop with no clue which end of a sword to use. Now I can do this just using the basic wizard class. I play an Elf (automatically proficient with longswords) and just take wizard levels and ensure my strength is decent (12 or so). Now fast forward to 10th level. My BAB is now 5 which means that with my +2 sword I might have +9 to hit (presuming I’m dedicated enough to have invested in weapon focus) which in terms of a 1st level fighter is good (say the example fighter has 16 strength) compared to his +5 at first level but then advance him to say 7th level and now with his +1 sword he’s at +12 (presuming he’s invested in weapon focus too). So despite investing feats and race choices into being a wizard who can fight I’m several levels behind the fighter… sounds about right? Well here’s the kicker, the disparity only grows at higher level, my casting will suffer as I won’t have invested as much of my resources in it and still at 20th level I won’t be any kind of match for a monster or adversary as they are levelled to be a challenge and if they can challenge a fighter then I’m screwed because at the end of the day when all is said and done it’s all down to the math and my bonuses are tiny in comparison. So basically I could play a wizard who can fight but I may as well not bother because the only time it will have any impact is when I’m squaring off against a local ruffian who’s bit sized encounter wouldn’t ruffle the feathers of a 1st level party. Not only that but to get that far I’m sacrificing my casting ability which means I’m undermining the one thing I’m good at to become semi proficient in something I’m always going to be poor at. Not a great trade.
To underline the problems of later classes though were I to build this character with the prestige classes of Abjurant Champion and Eldritch Knight I could end up with (if I recall the maths right) a BAB of 17 and a caster level of 18 at level 20. That means I’m only 15% behind a 20th level fighter and 10% behind a 20th level caster!! Chances are that combination would be able to beat either if done correctly.
Now I can see the point of “so what, some characters will be more powerful” right… it’s not a problem because it’s not systemic it’s individual? Not so.
If you have a group of players who are familiar with the system enough to be able to call to mind the features of all the basic classes in the PHB then what’s to say they won’t build a group of these higher powered characters? If so then what are your options as a player? You can either take one of these tightly scripted routes or settle for being worse than everyone else in your party. Sometimes neither is a good option.
The solution to these many problems? Currently I don’t have a cohesive system which corrects these flaws. That’s not to say I believe they can’t be corrected. It’s my opinion that there’s a better way, it’s just I’ve never detailed one yet. Perhaps I will… I could blog it…
