The Challenge of High Level Play

Posted by Sage LaTorra on Feb 20, 2012 in Indies & More | 3 comments

We’re back to levels this week in Legends and Lore as Monte looks at high level play. There are shades of BECMI all over this post.

First off a bit of history, since BECMI is a term I only learned in the past few years. BECMI is short for Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Immortal: the series of box sets released from 1983 to 1986 breaking down Dungeons & Dragons (as opposed to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) into level bands of play. Basic featured levels 1-3, Expert was 4-14, Companion had 15-25, Master was 26-36, and Immortal was “beyond levels.” Each one of these games had not only different levels of play but different rules of play. So, for example, rules for running a stronghold are in the Companion set, you don’t use them at lower levels.

It’s worth pointing out that some of these sets came with adventures that were as much a part of the rules as the rulebook. The adventures spoke to the GM’s responsibilities, how to create adventures, all that. In a lot of ways the adventures where the “how to GM” chapter.

Anyway, the BECMI chain sounds like Monte’s possibility of “different games” for different levels of play. It’s an interesting approach with a few pitfalls. The advantage to BECMI is that each set made it clear what you did in it; you clearly transitioned between sets. The problem of expectations that Monte mentions is negated by each game saying on the box what it does. If you want poor shmucks trying to clear out a goblin den you’ve got Basic, when a character gets to 4th level you know it’s time for a different game or a different character.

On the other hand if it’s all one book then you’ve got to somehow explain and sell different games in the same box/book. There’s not as clear a line between the dirty peasant and the mighty conqueror. You end up with one book containing rules that you don’t need until you’re effectively playing a different game. You end up presenting ideas like demons that get people excited to play the game but are mechanically only appropriate at certain levels. If I want a low-level gritty game with demons I’m out of luck.

I think that’s actually fine. It’s part of presenting a game with a vision instead of just a set of rules. If the scope of the rules and the level of the monster mean that you only deal with demons once you’ve got a small following that’s fine: it tells us something about the world. Demons are not to be trifled with lightly, they only come into play when there’s more at stake.

I’m probably in the minority here, I ‘m sure lots of people want to use demons whenever they please, so maybe this is a spot where the promised modularity of D&D Next can help. Instead of always scaling up in scope and complexity you can only scale one or the other. Maybe your character doesn’t get much stronger, but your place in the world changes. Or the reverse: your character gets much more powerful but you’re still clearing dungeons. And then there’s the orthogonal issue of complexity: is a high level character more complex than a low level character?

But the bigger question is: what happens to player characters over the course of play? This is something that every game has to answer.

The BECMI answer is: your character grows in power, complexity, and scope. This is a pretty classic D&D answer, but it’s not the only way to do it.

There are quite a few excellent games where changes of scope and weight are the main differentiator between the beginning and end of the game. In games like Primetime Adventures your character’s abilities are completely (or mostly) static, but the situation around them is shifting and changing. This is the TV show model:¹ Mulder and Scully aren’t noticeably more powerful in the last episode of the X Files (yes, I know, Mulder was gone by that point) than the first. 1. Which makes sense since Primetime Adventures is a game of TV drama. Instead they’ve become embroiled in huge conspiracies and a network of connected events. The characters don’t change in effectiveness but the situation and scope changes.

In some games you only grow in power but still do more or less the same thing. In Mouse Guard you are always Guardmice, even after many sessions of play when you’ve got many high-ranked abilities. In Dogs in the Vineyard you’re always riding into town to deal with the next sin. The level of power changes and the details of the threats change, but nothing like going from being a goblin-slaying peasant to being a teleporting general leading armies.

So this is the challenge to the D&D design team: tells us how you see high level D&D. Do we change scope, from adventures to running parts of the world? Do we grow in power significantly? Is the game more complex? Realizing that high level play may be an entirely different game is a great start, but how we need to know what that game (or games²) looks like. 2. Imagine a BECMI-style chain where you had options at each step. You go from Basic to Bigger Dungeons Expert or Larger World Expert or something.

As part of that vision, I’m not sure I agree that “the level of the game affects the complexity both of the story and the mechanics.” Consider Polaris where doomed knights fight demons in a dying world using only the simplest of mechanics. Or Burning Wheel where the elegant complexity of the mechanics brings depth to even your lowly Assistant Pig-Keeper. Don’t Rest Your Head involves multiple levels of reality right off the bat but the rules are dead simple.

The idea that level affects the complexity of story and mechanics is kind of an implicit statement of what advancing levels in D&D means. It’s a fine answer too. A traditional one. It’s how all previous editions have done it, more or less. But there are other approaches, where the complexity of the rules don’t tie to the complexity of the world, and where the changes in play over the long term are entirely different.