Second possible rules change for my forthcoming arc… two points:
1) Several people have said that DW’s power scale across the levels is pretty narrow, so mixing character levels (say, 1st and 6th) in a party is not a big problem.
2) However… I don’t know how far people have pushed this. 1st and 8th? One 1st in a party of 9th,9th,10th? Indeed, have they pushed it into the “beyond 10” range?
Reminder – when you qualify for 11th level, you may do one of:
a) Retire to safety
b) Take on a 1st-level apprentice as a second character, who then advances in your stead
c) Take a new class, losing most of your moves but keeping your attributes (which will be about +9 from the starting ones)
My concern is that both (b) and (c) will stretch the upper power limit quite a lot, leaving new 1st-level characters in the dust. So my inclination is to drop them and have characters not advance beyond 10th, except that they may retire to safety any time after becoming eligible for 11th.
Has anyone got as far as this, and got experience with (b) and (c)?
Thanks Marc Isaacs , interesting points both (less XP for chars that fail less, and failed rolls still giving players spotlight time), which I’d overlooked.
I’m in the same boat as Marc Isaacs; I’ve never played with a group that had a large gap between the characters’ levels. But as you said, the power scale in DW is pretty narrow. I think you might be worrying about a problem that might not exist.
Worst case, you start bringing in new and replacement characters at a higher level. I’m fond of starting at level 2, and that’s fine to a point. If everyone else is level 8, start the new player at 3 or 4. Everything sorts itself out after that.
I ran a group with 3 9’s and two 1’s with no problem. Since hp only goes up when constitution does the first level PCs have no trouble tangoing with the rest of the party.
That’s kind of what I figured John Kramer. The HP of monsters and PCs doesn’t scale with level. The PCs ability to hit and deal damage doesn’t scale with level. A few things go up slightly, but not so much that I think a large level gap would cause an issue.
Not to mention that the lower level PCs will quickly close the gap from failing, they may get to 9 before the rest of the party gets to 11
I think advancement in DW is about two things:
1) Having more options (read: moves) to deal with obstacles in the game.
2) Having higher attributes, thus being overall more competent.
Thus, all in all sending 1st level characters along with higher level characters shouldn’t be an issue.
And I don’t think anyone will make it to 9, before others make it to 11. The attribute increases only start to matter, when they push attributes into the next higher bonus level, and you don’t need double or triple XP to get from one level to the next.
Markus Wagner in my experience, the higher level characters fail far less often than the lower level ones, at level one you need 8 xp to level, at nine you need 16, assuming everyone rolls a similar number of times, the lower level character will absolutely gain multiple levels before the higher level ones gain one. Perhaps they won’t get all the way to ninth before the rest of the party is examining their retirement choices but it’ll be close.
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I love how DW does not have the balancing woes of other rpg’s.
Wynand Louw w absolutely one of my favorite parts of the system. prep for a four hour pathfinder session could take anywhere from 8-20 hours, prep for DW takes like an hour. Balance? Shmalance. I’ve flung first level PCs at dragons and high level ones at dozens of goblins and it’s never been under or over powered.
John Kramer Some of my best sessions have been zero prep.
Wynand Louw mine too. I’ll prep a couple fronts one week that the PCs won’t finish for several sessions, thus reducing my prep to just re-reading what I’ve previously written. The tipping point for me came when I realized I was spending 4+ hours prepping a pre-written adventure path for pathfinder.
That’s the crunch. It’s more work reading a module than dreaming up something in the car on your way to work.
Absolutely. It wasn’t just reading, tweaking the adventure as written and adding my own adventures to it as well as NPCs, they sell those APs as complete campaigns but they still really need a lot of work from the GM.
Thanks all – I’ll leave this for now and see what happens. I’m planning for an arc of 10-12 sessions, so we might get into the post-10th range.