What does a Level represent?

[James Maliszewski]

I'm curious: do you treat Levels as purely meta-game concepts or do they have an in-game meaning?

[ffilz]

These days, I would not look to any justification for levels outside of the rules, and the whole mega-dungeon concept, though I guess I like the idea of the heroic mold (and thus buy into that justification for level limits on non-humans).

Trying to make a consistent meaning of levels for in a consistent world with cities and towns and nations, kings, and serfs, and all that seems to be a way to failure and frustration. If you want to play in a world, a game system without a drastic change in combat ability as characters develop is important. Character's still need a way to develop, but it has to be in a way that maps to what you want to be important in the world.

Frank

[crimhthanthegreat]

IMC levels as it relates to characters is not an in-game concept for characters at all, it is used purely by the ref and players to track and determine the advancing growth and improvement of the characters in some areas. However, the term is used as it relates to dungeon, since characters tell each other stories about how many levels deep into a dungeon that were able to penetrate.

[Deleted]

I take the same approach as Crim on this; a character level has no meaning in-game; it is only used as a descriptor for XP earned & the PC growing in power. Now level in the dungeon sense of the word has plenty (i.e., "My compainions were eaten by Thouls in the 5th level of The Rot Lord's inner sanctum"). ;D

[badger2305]

crimhthanthegreat said:

IMC levels as it relates to characters is not an in-game concept for characters at all, it is used purely by the ref and players to track and determine the advancing growth and improvement of the characters in some areas. However, the term is used as it relates to dungeon, since characters tell each other stories about how many levels deep into a dungeon that were able to penetrate.

Exactly. Discussion of character "levels" is frowned upon because it shortchanges role-playing.

[foster1941]

For clerics and magic-users level absolutely represents actual rank in the church or mages' guild, respectively (a theurgist outranks a conjurer outranks a seer outranks a medium, etc.). For fighters it's a bit more uncertain -- one part of me likes the symmetry of having a fighters' guild as well, but the other part recognizes the usual counter-arguments towards having such a guild.

[calithena]

Foster - that interpretation is not unreasonable, but is it directly supported by the LBBs?

[James Maliszewski]

calithena said:

Foster - that interpretation is not unreasonable, but is it directly supported by the LBBs?

What's interesting is that Empire of the Petal Throne, which is roughly contemporary with OD&D and obviously derivative of it, makes a much more explicit connection between levels/level titles and social position, with high level warriors, for example, being general of Tsolyánu. I can't recall OD&D ever making such a connection, explicit or implied, but I can certainly believe that it was the intention that they be understood in this way.

[foster1941]

My bad, I forgot to include the "in my campaign" disclaimer on my post. I don't actually know whether the "guilds" explanation was intended or used by the game's creators and wasn't intending to make any claims there (though the use of Orders -- professional guilds that function analogously to D&D's classes/levels -- in Gygax's later Lejendary Adventures game suggests that the notion isn't entirely alien to one of them, at least).

[Finarvyn]

Early on we used to use the level names as significant parts of the character evolution process, so that a character might be "Melf the Enchanter" or whatever. As time passed we sort of dropped that part, perhaps as later editions quit printing the level titles.

As to what a level "means" I suppose it's just a template of skills clumped together to allow for uniform progression. In other words, as a DM it's nice to know that a "fighter, 5th level" has certain things it can and cannot do. Skill-based systems tend to blur those lines, which is fine but I prefer the stairstep approach found in levels.