Review of Character Tiers

Except for spell casting I don’t find changing tiers onerous. +/- 2 to attacks and defences shifts foes half a tier. +/- 3 moves a critter a whole tier. It’s possible you might not to use (or at least use with discresion) the most powerful feat/monster ability if you step down a full tier

My own are 2.0, 1.9 and 1.6.

I have this feeling that having such scattered exp levels is a result of a system being more complex than it needs to for Organized Play.

Consider the Crusade Arc. Ignoring the actual rewards I think it has enough story content to justify a full Tier bump. Survive the 5th Crusade, be Tier 2. Good milestone for the stories involved.

Beyond that given the relatively small play catalog and grouping modules by arcs this should be pretty straightforward. Coming of the Destroyer could be another Arc = Tier.

I realize I’m groping a little here but the idea of experience as a reward is somewhat antiquated. Seems to be that regardless of what happens in the mod -be the scale of the adventure immense or intimate- a thorough party gains 250 xp at the conclusion. The times it doesn’t the missing xp is effectively a penalty -lose 30 xp for missing a subplot, for example. And again it has nothing to do with how major or minor the event was nor how much a given character could have “learned” from it nor even if it was possible for a given party to find the subplot.

I’m not so sure this is necessary. With the smaller player base there isn’t any real “reward” in segregating the tables out by level and post-3.5 there just isn’t the same constant winnowing of characters. Surviving to Tier 3 is a bit of a feat, but not like making 15 in AD&D was.

I suspect everyone reading these words hasn’t seriously questioned if they’ll survive that long and if they’ve plotted their character’s development out to T5 like some folks say everyone should that’s a bald assumption of survival. It’s not an illogical one and I don’t miss the old black-hearted lethality of play -that shit was enduringly toxic- but now that we’re past that do we still need xp to separate the “heroic” from the “couldn’t make that Tracking check” players?

Back on the topic of exp awards being a monetizing of player engagement I think I can safely say we all see Arcanis play as being it’s own reward. The best example of this is players sitting down for a Classic -characters are provided and there is no progression in any way. You do it to do it, and what we do here isn’t really different.

Now having massive loot and xp windfalls for convention events is part of that fun and I think it’s fair for people that committed to showing up to skate a few grades above the rest, but for the rest what’s the value of staying with this old model?

There is the real worth of a hero’s legend coming with the accretion of adventure after adventure. We all had the folders full of weird and glorious miscellania like favors from obscure factions and strange stuff like a Priest of Saluwe wearing a Nerothian periapt with a bird skull as the centerpiece because the +2 Periapt you got was the +2 Periapt the mod writer listed.

But that’s 90% gone with the tide of consumables and enchanted weapons and all that crap. And with it went some pleasant spontaneity like seeing a unique new weapon (“hey the Apothic Spear is kinda sweet”) and deciding to take it out for a spin. Or getting your hands on a greataxe (which drools magma and screams for the souls of gnolls or something) so outrageously enhanced that leaving the safety and predictability of your chosen equipment is actually tempting instead of just stacking bonus on bonus from start to finish like you’ve planned you will.

I think too much mechanical predictability starts to turn Adventure Role Playing into Magical Combat Accountant. I doubt either Val’Holryn or myself have given much thought to our current kit but I know Val’Holryn and I can still remember particularly treasured trophies from literally a decade ago (like Moon Soo’s scimitar, the Axe-Hammer of Giants and more recently Thonanos, Spirit of Freedom, the Staff of Entrade, the Pelugred, etc) and that’s the kind of thing a game should aim to provide.

So while there is good reason to want your hero to be a creature of a thousand journeys who bears nothing pedestrian in their ruck mechanically the experience gaps between characters don’t mean much anymore and shouldn’t really be allowed to get in the way of a good game.