T w e n t y S i d e d
From The Archives:
Marvel's Civil War
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
The Brilliance of Mass Effect
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
The Biggest Game Ever
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
I know that DM of the Rings is meant to be a parody of both Lord of the Rings and of bad D&D campaigns, but I can’t believe this games DM was so bad as to make an encounter where they gained more than one level after the end.
In some game systems, regardless of xp accrued, characters can only gain levels (or equivalent) at certain points in the story, such as when in a civilised, safe location in-game. Many GMs may ignore this restriction, but not all. If those moments are too widely separated, it may be possible to accrue a truckload of xp before one comes around, and this group have had a mass battle (Helm’s Deep), and a bunch of roleplaying and combat since leaving Edoras. However, since Edoras was distinctly challenging when they first arrived and there was little to no downtime before they headed off to Helm’s Deep, their last safe haven plot point might well have been Lothlorien. If the challenges of Moria had been enough to get them close to levelling but not quite there, then I could quite see a battle of rolling for each individual orc – and presumably accounting for each individual xp award the same way, since that seems to be the way this GM works – putting characters in a position to level more than once. In a situation like that, dictated by the structure of the adventure (I.e. events outside the players’ control) it would take a fairly nitpicking GM to stick to the rule of one level at a time, which was certainly a thing in Basic. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the case here.
It just makes me appreciate systems with ‘milestone’ levelling more. No more tracking ever-increasing numbers and grinding every little thing to gain levels – it just happens after story beats or when the DM thinks it’s appropriate. Much better.
It gives the DM a lot of power, but that’s not a new thing or exclusive to this situation.If you can’t trust the DM, you’ve got problems WAY before you consider gaining levels.