Sword and Sorcery and Maximum Character Potential

[cranewings]

I've always liked the idea of games where characters start out near their maximum potential as fully realized adult adventurers.

No matter what they do or where they go, they won't become more powerful as a matter of scale.

I was thinking of running a game where the characters start out at 5th level and stay there. 5th level would be human maximum unless you found a way around it, like by making a pact with an evil god or something. Maybe characters could spend XP on skill and feats occasionally or something.

A part of the idea of this would be that individual people who train hard can quickly, and without gathering experience just by killing things, rise up to their maximum level. For 90% of people, max level would be 2. For others, maybe it would be a d6-1 or something. So a young man might be level 2 and on the rise, but most people, no matter how hard they practice, will ever really have what it takes to go past that.

[Salamandyr]

Have you looked at E6? It's a community based effort to create a ruleset based on 3.5 that runs from levels 1 through 6. It sounds like this may be very similar to what you're going for.

[cranewings]

Salamandyr wrote:

Have you looked at E6? It's a community based effort to create a ruleset based on 3.5 that runs from levels 1 through 6. It sounds like this may be very similar to what you're going for.

I usually run E6 and have a pretty good set of rules I complied for it from all the forums about it. This would be different in that you would start at 5 and stay there.

I sort of want to take out the whole idea that anyone can go up in level from adventuring: that to level you need a perfect storm of natural talent and experience, and that people with talent will get their levels by living life rather than by specifically killing enough XP worth of monsters.

I get that you can do with little adjustment to the rules other than where you start and how you advance. It is more about the social implications of who is good that are interesting. The idea that identifying young people with potential is meaningful.

[Set]

Using a less level-based game system, such as Mutants & Masterminds (perhaps flavored with material from Warriors & Warlocks, although this isn't strictly necessary) or GURPS Fantasy or even a fantasy-themed use of the Storyteller system (perhaps not Exalted, 'though...), is one way to go for a more static game, where the heroes start out as heroes, and only grow incrementally, over time.

Sticking to D&D/PF, a game that started at 2nd level might avoid some of the bother of 1st level characters (woo, my druid has *two* spells today, crap for armor and his best weapon is a spear!), with a slow progression up to E6, combining some of the slow-drip fun of 'leveling up' with a flatter progression (while still allowing for young heroes at level 2 to be less advanced than the 'old masters' at level 6).