Just a quick followup question to my last post:
Has anyone ever used the "one share per level" method in the PHB?
As in, 5th level fighter gets 5 shares, the two 2nd level guys get 2 each, the 2/3 Fighter/Thief gets 2 + (3/2) = 3.5 shares?
It's one of those weird level-isms (er, game-isms?) that we never used, but I'm curious if anyone ever did in their games.
My first thought was how unfair this would be, but on second consideration, in a party of mixed levels, I think the upper level characters are assumed to require/have more magical items than lower level. As such, dividing it up by something that represents your expected power level makes some real sense.
ReplyDeleteAt least in Pathfinder, the game which I'm most recently familiar, all characters have the same XP-->Level progression, so doing it by levels like the PHB suggests would provide the same relative oomph to each character. Though I think the character that has 2 levels in thief and 3 in fighter would get five shares, rather than 2.5, in the Pathfinder rules.
Well in AD&D, multi-class was done concurrently, not consecutively like in 3e or later. If you were level 2/3, you were doing both together and dividing your XP between the two as you got them, not choosing a class when you leveled up like I know 3e D&D does.
DeleteYes, in Pathfinder (like 3.x) your character level is the sum of your class levels, so that makes the math that much easier if you use such a system.
DeleteI can see where it's a valid one, but to borrow a phrase from this very blog, it's a very dissociated mechanic.
Ah! So they're really the same thing - based on total number of XP? So long as that's true, the shares work out fine.
DeleteSince most of the 1e and B/X XP requirements go up geometrically after a point, meaning to need all the XP you earned up to level 5 to get to level 6, it almost sort of makes sense to do this. It's closer to having each PC get an equal share towards their next level, but the math doesn't work out to compensate. If you just do equal shares then the lower level folks will catch up faster and there won't be as much of a power difference in the party. The share-per-level system does seem like one of those 1e things that makes sense in the abstract but has the wrong mechanic attached to it. And the multi-class part just seems arbitrary.
ReplyDeleteIt does seem like it's geared towards semi-competitive pickup groups playing in a set game. So I bring my 7th level guy, so I get 7 shares of treasure, because that's a "fair" way to divy it up.
DeleteWe did something like that for the henchmen, but I don't remember doing something like this for the PCs. Since they were typically close in level anyways, thanks to the 3.5 catchup method for XP, it would have just led to bitching.
ReplyDelete