Doyce has an interesting post on character advancement in RPGs. Go ahead and read it first. I’ll wait …
By and large I agree with him, at least in terms of what not to do.
I still find myself impatient with playing Level 1 characters. As has been observed before, I usually come up with a character concept long before I start screwing around with the rules to make that concept real. The image I have of a particular character is usually significantly higher than 1st level, and the threats I see the character having faced — and facing — definitely are.
I got imprinted (as Doyce would put it) in college, where it seemed like most games started off around 3rd, 4th, 5th level — high enough to have some decent competencies, low enough that there’s room for growth. I still tend to think in terms of 5th level as being the “defining” one.
That being said, I’ve found myself warming up to the concept of “starting from scratch” more over time, especially as various systems have tried to deal with giving people a thrill, even at Level 1. I mean, nobody really joneses going after a band of five rabid kobolds. But give the players something interesting they can do at 1st level, and you can get them hooked.
Besides which, it’s more about story, right? For me, at least. The story (in my head) usually presupposes a certain level of competency, true. Ultimately I have more fun in a campaign where I can be true to the character concept — competency and role-playing combined — than in one where either is forced to fit into too narrow boundaries. Doyce is right — that’s where something like Amber, or even Nobilis, has a lot of appeal.
I remember a game, very long ago, where I had a certain character concept. And being a kick-ass fighter was part of that, part of who he was, what had brought him to the place, personality-wise, where he’d come. I thought that was quite doable.
And it just didn’t work. The GM had in mind a lower level campaign, and somehow the disconnect never got discussed. My bad for at least my half of that. I went from being a competent guy with serious personality problems to being an incompetent guy with delusions of grandeur. Which can be fun to play, I suppose, but wasn’t what I had in mind. It ruined a lot of the fun in that particular series.
On the other hand, starting off with a decent scratch character, then advancing them, has a lot of long-term satisfaction, too. I can look back at some recent ones I’ve had and say, hey, look how s/he’s grown. It requires an investment from both the player and the GM to make that happen.
I guess what it comes down to is that there are times when it’s very appropriate to start things off at a higher level, and times when it’s appropriate to start things off from scratch. A good game system will allow both possibilities, and players should be able to swing both ways, depending on the campaign involved.
And, of course, it’s a judgment challenge for the GM — one that I face as much as any other GM out there.
I’ve found that I have more of an emotional investment in characters that started from scratch. Heck, my favorite character retired at 3rd level, to get married and raise a family! My co-players could not understand this, but it’s just something he had to do.
There’s certainly something to be said for that — though I think duration of play has something to contribute to that. Problem is, if you’re doing steady level increases, eventually you top out in the system, or have to come up with significantly different types of campaigns (Epic Adventures notwithstanding).
There’s a reason that most comic book heroes don’t go up in levels …
Yep. When all my players’ characters reached levels where dragons were as feared as hobgoblins, I just had everybody roll new 1st-level characters. There was some initial resistance, but they soon found it fun to play new classes and races.
Part of the problem was that one of the guys took his character into another campaign that was way out of proportion. He was soon able to whip up +15 daggers that let people fly at a movement rate of 24″, and armed all the players in my campaign with this garbage.
I later knew a guy who played only in games run by his dad. His character could blow himself up once per day, doing 1,000,000 hp damage to nearby enemies. Now I ask you…
I have mixed feelings on the whole thing, although your comment on 5th level is dead-on, from my perspective. It opens up a lot as that’s when things like fireball become available for use.
I like all levels of power in games; I’ve played more low-level characters than I’ll ever remember, but the high powered ones (Runequest, in particular) are etched in my mind forever.
Kim approaches new characters as a blank slate — she has little background on them and lets actions form the concept of the character. She’s able to do this extremely well; usually a sentence is all she starts with, if that.
I’ve also had characters shift concept on me, mid-stream. A happy-go-lucky ranger once turned to a darker path and became an inquisitor for a quasi-evil goddess (he viewed her as justice, not evil).
I could argue that comic book characters go up levels — look at the X-Men, in particular, not to mention the New Mutants. Heck, even Spidey learned new tricks over time as he became more competent.
I once (very, very early in my GMing career, back when it was DMing) let a person bring in a character from another campaign into a module I was going to run.
I later found out that, over the summer, he would run this character through games of his own making, leading to inutterable levels of high-powered swag this guy would carry around. (“I kick open the door and spray the room with 15 charges from my Rod of Lordly Might. What treasure is left?”)
Of course, this was later the same guy I had to kick out of a campaign I was running because he was cheating on his die rolls. Chronically. Constantly. In defiance of all the procedures I set up to keep it from happening. (I mishandled that situation badly, too, but one lives and learns. Or at least lives.)
As to comic book characters going up levels … hmmm. Your examples are decent enough, and arguably the Marvel characters have ratcheted up over the years, moreso than the DC ones.
Still — not much difference between Spidey, or the FF (save the Invisible Woman) over the last 40 years, personal trials aside. Cyclops got one big power boost back when the New X-Men were introduced; nobody in that crew has, I’d argue, increased substantially since then (Phoenix and Angel being noteworthy exceptions, but only with substantial outside intervention).
The New Mutants? Yeah, I suppose, though (a) they were designed to start as kids, and thus would be expected to develop some, and (b) aside from Cannonball, who really hasn’t changed all that much, we haven’t seen much of the “classic” NM until the most recent series, and I don’t know that their powers have changed all that much since we had.
Sort of hard for DC to power up, what with Superman, Wonder Woma, the Flash, Green Lanterns, Martian Manhunter, the JLA UberBatman and so on.
Some of the X-Men have jumped up recently, at least in the New X-Men to Authority power levels.
And they had Thor inherit the Odin-Power. I’m sort of curious to see what will happen since SHIELD or somebody nuked him and it just pissed him off.
Good point on the DC Uberheroes — though you could argue that Flash (Wally West) *has* had power upticks at multiple opportunities.
But even the next tier down are relatively static. Is Nightwing better than he was when he first took that name? Is Arsenal? Any of the Titans? Or Green Arrow, for that matter?
(Green Lantern, of course, got the temporary power-up to Ion. But that hardly counts.)