Board Thread:Midian Ideas/@comment-4701109-20150103214101/@comment-24302820-20150104091310

From my personal experience, this can go awry pretty easily. After just one single-shot D&D game where I wanted to do a high-level story--giving the PCs access to upper level magic and their own followers--I had to deal with every player asking for free experience for YEARS. If I didn't answer in the hundreds of thousands or millions (and I never, ever did) they would get quite upset. Some of them even stopped playing if they didn't get at least 20th level and dozens of magic items right from the get-go.

Also, one doesn't have to look far to see Character Build discussions (especially with 3e or Pathfinder) where a character's entire life is laid out from first to twentieth level, even before attributes are rolled. I didn't want Midian to do this.

One more point I forgot to add to the previous post: age. Assuming a hundred experience points per month, with long periods between exciting times (healing, running your business, etc.) a character can expect to gain about 500 experience points over the course of a year. To get to 10th level, that's five decades--added to the age of majority--which doesn't fit in well with most people's desire to play a high-level campaign at all. Even assuming that the PCs in question are living lives twice as interesting as anyone else in the world, that's still a quarter-century of experience gaining to get to that point. In other words, your Human Advanced Patch PC isn't going to be in her early twenties. She's going to be in her forties or fifties at the start of the game.