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arixe
2019-06-20, 11:14 AM
Been watching overlord and was curious if there were any systems with similar breakdown of levels for classes, 15 levels for basic classes, 10 levels for intermediate and 5 levels the greater classes with 100 level limit. Mostly is there a system with a leveling system that supports a reasonable time frame to get to 100.

NichG
2019-06-20, 11:28 AM
Lets say you have a campaign where you play each week for two years, then if you gained a level after each session it'd roughly fit the pacing requirements. The d20 part of things might make it hard, because there's not that much dynamic range on a d20. If you have numbers which go up an average of 1 per level, then after 40 or 50 levels the variance on the dice rolls will be pretty insignificant compared to the constant modifier. So you'd either need to have the raw numerical things go up only every 2-3 levels, possibly alternating with each-other in some fashion (skills improve on levels 1,4,7,...; attacks improve on 2,5,8,...; health+class features improve on 3,6,9,...).

Alternately, you could use a tiered skill system, so that for the first 20 levels you're raising Tier 1 'skills', and after Lv20 then Tier 2 skills are unlocked (but start at zero), and so on. The higher tier skills would have some reason why they're just outright better than the low tier skills, so even if you can guarantee a success with your low tier abilities, you'd want to design things so that it's probably better to take the risk to land the high tier ones instead. Or you could do a more modular approach where you can take varying penalties to your roll in order to add effects (take a -20 in order to negate miss chance, etc).

noob
2019-06-20, 12:19 PM
Try modern and put dnd epic rules in it then stack overwhelming encounter after overwhelming encounter: you will get to level 100 in 100 encounters.
Then afterwards you use a dozen of nuclear bombs per encounter because that is what it takes to fight the super tough chuck norrises.

Quertus
2019-06-20, 12:28 PM
Lets say you have a campaign where you play each week for two years, then if you gained a level after each session it'd roughly fit the pacing requirements. The d20 part of things might make it hard, because there's not that much dynamic range on a d20. If you have numbers which go up an average of 1 per level, then after 40 or 50 levels the variance on the dice rolls will be pretty insignificant compared to the constant modifier. So you'd either need to have the raw numerical things go up only every 2-3 levels, possibly alternating with each-other in some fashion (skills improve on levels 1,4,7,...; attacks improve on 2,5,8,...; health+class features improve on 3,6,9,...).

Alternately, you could use a tiered skill system, so that for the first 20 levels you're raising Tier 1 'skills', and after Lv20 then Tier 2 skills are unlocked (but start at zero), and so on. The higher tier skills would have some reason why they're just outright better than the low tier skills, so even if you can guarantee a success with your low tier abilities, you'd want to design things so that it's probably better to take the risk to land the high tier ones instead. Or you could do a more modular approach where you can take varying penalties to your roll in order to add effects (take a -20 in order to negate miss chance, etc).

Or you could just… a) face similar opposition, where the difference between +110 and +120 actually matters sometimes; b) use the epic rules (or, hopefully, something better) where +100 grants new capabilities; or c) grow horizontally when you realize that there's nothing left to challenge you vertically.

arixe
2019-06-20, 12:29 PM
Lets say you have a campaign where you play each week for two years, then if you gained a level after each session it'd roughly fit the pacing requirements. The d20 part of things might make it hard, because there's not that much dynamic range on a d20. If you have numbers which go up an average of 1 per level, then after 40 or 50 levels the variance on the dice rolls will be pretty insignificant compared to the constant modifier. So you'd either need to have the raw numerical things go up only every 2-3 levels, possibly alternating with each-other in some fashion (skills improve on levels 1,4,7,...; attacks improve on 2,5,8,...; health+class features improve on 3,6,9,...).

Alternately, you could use a tiered skill system, so that for the first 20 levels you're raising Tier 1 'skills', and after Lv20 then Tier 2 skills are unlocked (but start at zero), and so on. The higher tier skills would have some reason why they're just outright better than the low tier skills, so even if you can guarantee a success with your low tier abilities, you'd want to design things so that it's probably better to take the risk to land the high tier ones instead. Or you could do a more modular approach where you can take varying penalties to your roll in order to add effects (take a -20 in order to negate miss chance, etc).

See thats why i love this site so much. skill tiers sound perfect to keep things manageable and understandable.

@Quartus Ill have to look into epic rules I did so ages ago but never used them so they never stuck.

Porcupinata
2019-06-21, 05:09 AM
The closest I know is Lightmaster (https://gurbintrollgames.wordpress.com/lightmaster/), from the guy that did Dark Dungeons. It's a d20 conversion/clone of Rolemaster and it goes to 50th level like the original Rolemaster.

He addresses the issue of ridiculous skill totals by having diminishing returns for skills. To start with you're getting +1 to your skill per rank, but by the time you've bought twenty or even sixty ranks in a skill you're looking at only getting +1 per four or five ranks.

Even so, there is still a sidebar about how high skill levels can trivialise most challenges - but this is apparently intentional as it's supposed to let high level martial characters perform impossible-seeming feats even with huge situational penalties.