My hunch, is that 10 Levels is about right.  At least to me.

Fewer Levels = More Meaningful Levels.

Increments of 1 in 10, are easy to comprehend.  10% of "X", etc.  1st Level is a far cry from 10th Level, but you believe you can get there.

So is 5 in 10.  50% of "X".  Half Way There.  By 5th Level, you are truly good at what you do; and when you do it, it has a significant effect.

At 10th Level, you are one of the best at what you do; on the entire Material Plane.  You Rock.  When a party of 10th Level Characters, works together; Adult Dragons fall.  Young Dragons run away.  Ancient Dragons have to take notice.  Beholders have to fight for their lives.

I'm in favor of a 1-10 level scale for the reasons that you state. I'll add: in D&D generally high levels are just silly. I don't know how the game world is supposed to function when you've got spellcasters running around that can teleport, scry, turn into monsters, disintegrate foes with single spells, clone themselves, create contingency spells, live in pocket dimensions, and other weird stuff. I've never seen a game that actually worked if you actually embrace these shenanigans.

A mechanical 1-20 is also reasonable, as long as the power progression is more limited in scope. To me the main thing is just limiting how much of a linear bonus you are going to accrue relative to the resolution mechanic. If you're getting more than half the potential range of outcomes on a static modifier system math tends to start breaking down.

Looking at 1-20 systems, classes often end up with dead levels. Must be because there are too many levels and filler creeps in.

1-12 might be better for evening out progression. I despise adding level to roll, but throwing in a class skill competence bonus that maxes out at something sensible works. 12 levels could evenly space out +2,+3,+4, or +6 total improvements to sme parameter, whether competence bonus or ability score.

I've been running White Star recently, which uses Swords & Wizardry with maximum 10 levels. It does seem to work very well. With XP needed doubling every level from 2nd (2000-4000-8000-16000-32000 etc) progression slows down enough that characters don't run out of levels quickly. It's definitely a more comprehensible and workable range than 20 or 36.

I think D&D has always had a bit of an issue in that it was really designed around 1-9/10/11, with the higher levels more for BBEG NPCs and such, and the d20 mechanism, spell system etc work best at those levels. This was exacerbated in 3e and ameliorated a bit in 5e, but the problem is still there. Players see 20 levels and want to get there, but the game is most fun ca 3-10; high level play tends to feel disappointing unless the PCs have worked up from low level, are highly integrated in the world, and experience it as a 'reward' for achievement.

For 5E, IF they built good and challenging monsters CR 10 to 25, then higher level play would work.  However the designers of 5E had a full on brain aneurism trying to design monsters for higher level play, they just didn't do it.  I have to regularly review CR and make adjustments to XP and at times enable milestone advancement for portions of my campaign due to XP inflation the 5E designers put in the game.  I generally stop 5E play at level 14 to 15, the 4th tier of play is just broken.  To keep the players entertained at level 16, I have to run back to back deadly encounters and they level up too fast to get any story line done.

Lets look at the Lich, a D&D classic.  Its a CR 21, has AC 17 and 135 hitpoints.  It can be one shotted in the first round by a party of 5 level 15 players fairly reliable.  You have to add blink to its spell list to give it a better chance of surviving and to give it time to at least get mirror image up, the bare minimum for a caster to survive a party.  And then you have to add a bit of minions to protect him as well upping the perceived CR for the encounter higher.  The Lich as written with the spells given is at best a CR 16 encounter.  If the party beats it, they get CR 21 xp at 33,000 XP advancing them farther than what they should have for the fight.  The lich would need to have 220hp+ to be a CR 21 encounter, and it would then last the frontloading of attacks.

I like the style at Lvl 10 you are "Name Level" and are now dealing with far different responsibilities. Sure it could mean the occasional dragon slaying, BBEG superhero squad regional shake-up adventure. But I love the whole "headache of juggling competing responsibilities" making Name Level Regional Power Holder a great jumping off point. It's a time to decide to retire the campaign (off into the Conan sunset with you!) or play a new type of game, domain management.

Stretching it to lvl 20 with oodles more widgets (a la WotC D&D) is more for players and wishful daydreaming than actual play I want to run, or play -- the bookkeeping gets tiresome.

I don't think there is an ideal number of levels, only an ideal for a particular target of play.  Especially if you drop the idea of getting a new hit die every level up to Nth level, and don't get crazy about needing something new every level, especially on those levels where you do get a new hit die.

Rather, it's more about the pace of leveling, absorbing your new features, and how granular you want that to be--then designing that to also accommodate the different expected "tiers" of play, whether those are explicit or not. 

The granularity makes the biggest difference when you have choices.  I find that the game works best when a new level involves no more than one major choice, and maybe a minor one or two, tops.  Otherwise, leveling becomes a little mini-game of character building with its associated analysis paralysis.  If the system doesn't have any real choices, however, you get what you get, and that doesn't take long.  So you might as well collapse what you get into a convenient package.  If you allow leveling during adventures, then small, granular choices often work better.  It's disconcerting when a character gets a major new thing in the middle.  If you don't, that question goes out the window, and might as well collapse.   

Likewise, a player should have time to absorb their current abilities before getting flooded with some new ones.  Coarse granularity makes the most sense when you want to emphasize that even more, almost make the game feel static at times.  If you want slow but steady growth, a fine grain works better.

However, mainly I like to play different tiers with the same system, without strange edge cases.  Which means I want the first 3-5 levels to be for barely scraping by, another 3-5 levels on the upper end for running wild, and a solid 10-15 levels or so in the middle ranging from competent to edging into high powered.  If you just want to play the middle all the time, then sure, start level 1 at darn competent, and run 10 to 12 levels up, and you can take advantage of the level itself in your mechanics without the numbers going wonky.  It's simpler, but more limited. 

I think sometimes people get OCD about starting at first level.  If the game says you are competent at fifth level, and the game is about competent characters out of the gate, then treat levels 1-4 the same way you'd treat level zero commoners, and start everyone at fifth.  Those extra four at the beginning aren't hurting anything, really, and they even make it a little easier for the GM to show some differences in the NPCs without resorting to stupid tricks.  That doesn't work if the system was designed for levels 1 to 9/10/11 and other stuff got tacked on later.  It does work if the system was designed that way from the get go.

My own system uses 15 levels with the expectation that using the normal leveling rate you'll burn through to level 6 relatively quickly (15 or so adventures) and get to 11 slowly (about 80 more to reach 11) and, if the campaign is still going, eventually reach level 15 (about 200 more).

Basically, it works out to a soft cap of level 10-11 with few campaigns ever actually reaching the hard cap (and there are options even if they do).

I can't take full credit though... the idea is somewhat based on Palladium's 15 levels in which Kevin described that in most campaigns you'd progress fairly quickly to level 4-5 and then slowly thereafter... and that nearly every long running Palladium game I've ever been in ended by level 10-ish at the absolute latest.

Also relevant is that the overall rate of upwards gain is relatively low; your "hit points" (I call them something else because in-universe they're more accurately "don't actually get hit" points) at level six are only twice you're starting number, only three times starting by level 11, and not quite four times by level 15. Your defense bonuses are also relatively static (gains about +2-4 on a d20 over the 15 levels). The result is that, while it may take twenty goblin raiders at level 15 instead of five it would take at level 1 to overwhelm you... enough mooks will ALWAYS be a threat in an open fight even when you're a max level champion.

The ideal level range is completely reliant on how leveling works and how the system is configured. I could see levels higher than 10 working if level progression gains were relatively minimal, particularly in the HP front (or equivalent). But in D&D or derived games level 10 or so seems as high as you need.

Levels higher than that seem to exist mostly because players have a psychological need to advance indefinitely, or at least have advancement stretched out to high numbers, to create the impression that you always have something to strive to get at. But mechanically the game doesn't seem to adequately support levels higher than 10 because level 1 (or 0) is supposed to be the baseline level at which most of the world's population exists, and level 10 already far outstrips level 1 in terms of power to a super heroic degree. So level 10 characters already are godlike compared to the rest of the population—you don't need 20+ levels to get there. Making a 20 level progression kinds redundant outside of maybe truly epic where characters are literally gods in the making, fighting cosmic level threats and such.

Quote from: Wisithir on October 13, 2022, 01:36:58 AM
Looking at 1-20 systems, classes often end up with dead levels. Must be because there are too many levels and filler creeps in.

1-12 might be better for evening out progression. I despise adding level to roll, but throwing in a class skill competence bonus that maxes out at something sensible works. 12 levels could evenly space out +2,+3,+4, or +6 total improvements to sme parameter, whether competence bonus or ability score.

This is close to my take on it, and I've actually been working on a system with a 12 level (soft cap) progression where characters get a Competence Bonus (literally called that originally, but renamed "Aptitude Bonus" recently) based on their level. However, this bonus is a small (+1/3rd level, +4 max by level 12) universal bonus added to ALL abilities—reflecting a character's overall competence based on their level—and additional bonuses are gained based on the character's focus on specific abilities, specializations and things like that.

The idea is to automatically increase the character's abilities as they advance in level to prevent the player from having to level up each ability individually, so they can focus on picking only the abilities they truly want to be good at as a one time selection, then leveling does the rest. All characters get a number of Primary and Secondary abilities during character creation (the rest are Tertiary, with a base of 0), which provides a flat starting value modified by their competence bonus as they progress in levels. A limited number of additional Secondary abilities can be aquired later by selecting them as Perks (equivalent to Feats), and characters get one Perk per level to select any abilities, including skills (treated as specialties), powers and stuff that might be considered "class" abilities in D&D.

Leveling is potentially open ended, with characters getting only one perk and +2 HP per level above 12. But all other progression benefits stop by level 12.

When I look closely at 1E, I find that progress flatlines dramatically at around 7th level. But it depends on a lot of things.

So to give an idea of what I mean, if you assume as a roughly reasonable expectation that a 7th level fighter has picked up something like gauntlets of ogre power (or maybe just has an 18/00 STR on his own) and has a +4 weapon, you can hit AC 5 on a 2 or better. And you don't get better than that at hitting AC 5. By the way, rounded to the nearest integer, AC 5 is the median, mean, and mode of all ACs in the Monster Manual. And there actually isn't much of a correlation between AC and how powerful a monster is. So what this means is when you hit this level as a fighter, you don't get any better at hitting the majority of monsters in the game. And with each level you gain, the list of monsters against which it matters keeps getting smaller and smaller.

With the magic-user, when you consider recovery time for rest and recouping spells, if you assume a maximum of 12 hours of down time per game day during an active adventure, after 7th level you aren't able to recoup all your spell slots daily. You top out in terms of firepower. With the higher level spells and spell slots you gain, all this really does is gives you a broader array of options. But it doesn't actually give you more firepower.

That's not to say there aren't other factors. Fighters go up to 2/1 attack routines at 13th level. Thieves are able to cast spells from scrolls at 10th level. So there are still goodies to snag above 7th level. But it's worth noting that while a 2nd level character is roughly twice as tough as a 1st level character, a 4th twice as powerful as a 2nd, and an 8th roughly twice as powerful as a 4th, a 16th level character is only nominally more powerful than an 8th in addition to perhaps having an extra widget or two.

But I have no desire to arbitrarily set a top level and truncate the rest. I don't see a benefit to doing so if the game is functionally doing it on its own. But there would be a potential drawback to imposing a ceiling. And that's because all my analysis rests upon certain assumptions which might hold. And then suddenly you need access to those extra levels. For instance, a 7th level fighter might have only a 17 STR, no gauntlets, and only a +2 sword. He needs at least another 4 levels to make up the difference. A cap would only be getting in the way.



There is some important context that goes with this. The monsters in the original Monster Manual are carefully crafted with strengths and weaknesses such that a very low level party can legit defeat any monster in the book under the right circumstances, but any one of those same monsters under different circumstances can absolutely menace even an extremely high level party.

Fiend Folio was also pretty good at making sure monsters had strengths and weaknesses like that.

But by MMII, you start seeing the abandonment of the idea of having monsters being challenging and beatable for all levels, and you start getting, well, these monsters strictly only work for high level characters, and those monsters strictly only work for low level characters. That changes the character of the game and makes level more important. You start to see more of the powerful monsters with AC's better than 5 and/or Magic Resistance. So that expands the list of monsters for which level matters, meaning the curve doesn't level out quite as much after 7th.

5E dialed all that back for sure. I think it was in kind of a ham-fisted way. We're going to have 20 levels, but... the difference between level 1 and level 20 now is like the difference between roughly level 5 and level 13 in 1E terms. So you're stretching out an 9-level range to 20 levels. So compared to D&D in the traditional sense, 5E is like having a 10 level system with semi-levels.

Quote from: Jam The MF on October 13, 2022, 12:14:51 AM
My hunch, is that 10 Levels is about right.  At least to me.

Fewer Levels = More Meaningful Levels.

Two questions:

1) Does it really matter if level gains are meaningful? Because compressing the level range just reduces the granularity.

2) Why create a maximum level? How sure are you that playing a level 10 character will be fun but playing a level 11 character won't be worth doing? Isn't it always better to create a system where the level tables extend infinitely and then just stop playing once you've hit a point where you aren't enjoying the game as much?

Quote from: hedgehobbit on October 13, 2022, 12:33:38 PM

Quote from: Jam The MF on October 13, 2022, 12:14:51 AM
My hunch, is that 10 Levels is about right.  At least to me.

Fewer Levels = More Meaningful Levels.

Two questions:

1) Does it really matter if level gains are meaningful? Because compressing the level range just reduces the granularity.

2) Why create a maximum level? How sure are you that playing a level 10 character will be fun but playing a level 11 character won't be worth doing? Isn't it always better to create a system where the level tables extend infinitely and then just stop playing once you've hit a point where you aren't enjoying the game as much?

Does More Granularity = More Fun for the Average Player?

Quote from: Jam The MF on October 13, 2022, 01:26:09 PMDoes More Granularity = More Fun for the Average Player?

Having your character get better is fun. Therefore, the more often you level up the more fun. That's why most video games that have levels have ranges such as 1-50 or even 1-100

I like 20. I don't usually play past 10, but 20 makes sense for me.

Say, level 10 PCs are kings with their castles, towers, etc. MUs can create magic items, fighters raise armies. Few PCs get there but the ones who do become legends.

Conan, Elric, etc. Also, wizard who can cast wish, topple cities, and so on. Most of them NPCs, not more than half a dozen in the entire world.

But in my own games I haven't exactly managed to get past 14 or 15 (mostly because I am a fan of B/X and my own retroclone goes to level 10, since there is no domain management).

Also, I find level 1 PCs are just too weak. They can die from falling 10 feet or after a single minute fighting a goblin. So I sometimes start on level 3.

I played a SotDL campaign form levels 0-10, about one level per adventure (as recommended in the book). It works for weaker PCs, but even then my players found the "zero-to-hero" too extreme.

I do not think there should be many new features every level. My players forgot half their features in 5e by level 10. B/X, OTOH, has too few features for fighters, etc., so I add three to five feats per PC over 14 levels.