Level-based play has been the foundation of roleplaying games since the creation of RPGs five decades ago this year — because D&D was the first formal and lasting incarnation of the RPG, and D&D had levels. Even though there were plenty of early RPGs that took a different approach (including Traveller, my second RPG), whither D&D went over fifty years, a lot of other games have followed.
Level-based games are generally great. They provide a setup that gives GM and players a fixed framework for reckoning the relative power of the characters, the creatures they fight, and the world around both. All of that is useful, as can be demonstrated by how popular level-based games continue to be. But there’s been one chronic downside to level-based D&D since the very beginning of the game, which is that some levels are a lot more fun to play through than other levels.
The Range of the Game
Since the AD&D days when I first started playing, Dungeons & Dragons has always had a sweet spot — from 3rd level through to 10th or 12th level. This isn’t a hard and fast rule. It’s a statement of my own experience and personal preference for sure, and as a broad level band, it’s not exactly a “spot” either way. But from AD&D through to 5e, this range of seemingly ideal levels has been something that many players, not just me, have picked up on.
The sweet spot of the game is the range of levels through which D&D feels most firmly anchored to the characters who drive the game. It’s the stretch of play through which D&D and related d20 fantasy games maximize fun, minimize complication, create the best balance of risk and reward, and shape stories that feel most strongly anchored to the player characters. The sweet spot starts after the point where you get to stop worrying about one bad encounter catalyzing a campaign-ending TPK, and extends up to the point before the stakes of the game too often stop feeling personal and real.
It’s actually kind of weird that this sweet spot has been pretty much the same for players across multiple editions of the game, starting with AD&D, moving through 3rd edition, and now with 5e. But under the hood, despite each edition’s many mechanical differences, there’s a consistency and continuity to the kind of play experience that level-based advancement creates. Over four-plus decades of the game solidifying and revising its AD&D form, many, many players have identified that sweet spot and focused their play inside that level band. And because I’m one of those players, the feel of play that 3rd-level to 10th- or 12th-level D&D has long generated is the exact feel that CORE20 focuses on.
When I cranked out the first set of house rules that have since become the CORE20 system, I wasn’t thinking very much about the math of the game, because the math of the game at that early point was just the math of 3e D&D. But as I worked with the system and sketched out the first sense of how advancement by feat slot might work, I found myself guided by that long-held instinct that the game felt the most fun within that sweet spot. And I realized that in the course of working up the version of d20 fantasy that I’d always wanted to play, I could focus on that feel by addressing the two issues that bookend the D&D sweet spot — low-level characters (and in particular in 5e D&D, 1st-level characters) being way too easy to kill; and high-level characters too quickly becoming so all-powerful that the challenges they faced inevitably detach from real character story.
From Squishy to Superhero
In its earliest forms, D&D had a penchant for killing off starting characters, a style of play that’s been embraced in a charmingly retro way by newer games like Dungeon Crawl Classics and Shadowdark. But even with 5e D&D, plenty of GM advice and books (including a book I co-wrote) talk about treating the 1st level of the game as its own separate tier of play — and getting through that tier as quickly as possible to avoid characters getting splattered by a couple of bad d20 rolls.
In all versions of D&D, the squishiness of low-level characters relative to the foes they’re expected to face off against means that for many players, the lowest levels of D&D aren’t nearly as much fun as the levels that follow. And that’s why CORE20 doesn’t start at 1st level. A starting CORE20 character is still a relative neophyte compared to many of the threats they’ll face and the NPCs in the world around them. But the array of feats that a character can select with their 20 starting feat slots makes them more capable than the 1st-level characters of any version of D&D, in most cases recreating the feel of a 3rd-level character in 3.5e or 5e. And after starting within that sweet spot, CORE20 stays there.
At the other end of the level spectrum, beginning with 3rd edition in 2000, D&D expanded beyond some of the baseline paradigms that had defined the game through the AD&D years. And in the course of doing so, D&D effectively became a kind of fantasy superhero game. You were presented with a fixed progression of 20 levels of class features for all character classes, and the full expectation that rising to 20th level to become the most powerful heroes in the world was the central point of the game.
To be clear — there’s absolutely nothing wrong with playing fantasy superheroes. The original success of 3e bringing D&D back from the brink of bankruptcy proves that fact, as does the success of 5e bringing the game back from the brink of cultural irrelevance. If playing fantasy superheroes straight through from level 1 to level 20 and saving the multiverse through campaign after campaign is your jam, I love you for that. But through two decades of playing and working on D&D from 3rd edition on, I’ve thought a lot about how in the AD&D version of the game that’s the clear ancestor of 3e and 5e alike, it wasn’t always usual — or even expected — to play characters all the way up to 20th level as a matter of course.
In only a few cases did the character classes of AD&D actually have interesting class features at higher levels — and in most of those cases, those classes had a hard cap well below 20th level. Starting at between 10th and 12th level, the iconic AD&D classes got less robust in terms of their hit point progression. There was a clear mechanical cutoff point at which the world said, “Your hero isn’t going to be as good at this hero stuff as they used to be.” So in the AD&D days, it was pretty typical to play a character to anywhere between 9th level and 12th, and then retire them. Not because you had no options for continuing, but because that was the general level band at which you often felt like your character had accomplished what they first set out to do all those levels ago. That was the far end of the sweet spot.
Endgames
Even in the 5e era with a full 20-level setup and plenty of class features at the high end of the game, it’s a well-known phenomenon that most D&D campaigns end well before the apex of 20th-level play. In endless surveys and polls (including data shared from D&D Beyond at different points), a significant percentage of players report that they don’t run their campaigns much beyond 10th level. And I think the reason for that is that players instinctively recognize the special feel of the game within the level band that is the sweet spot — and the quite different feel that takes over if the game continues past that.
CORE20 has thus been built to let characters hold within that range of power where they’re strong enough to face off against the threats of the campaign, but not invulnerable. As with pretty much any RPG, the dangers the characters face off against will inevitably grow stronger. The monsters, environmental threats, and exploration and social challenges that give a party of 20-feat-slot starting characters a really hard time can typically be handled with ease by a group of veteran 40-feat-slot characters with a campaign’s worth of experience behind them. And even as that campaign continues and the characters get even more powerful, CORE20 makes it the most fun to build your character out with new features and new talents while holding within the sweet spot, rather than to simply focus on maximizing combat numbers the way superhero fantasy does.
It’s not impossible to build a superhero adventurer in CORE20. And again, if that’s your jam, the game will work with you to build a superhero adventurer unlike any that a class-based game can create. But doing so isn’t as easy or as instinctive as building a character who just stays in that sweet spot for the full length of their adventuring career — embracing the version of d20 fantasy that even many 5e players brand new to the game recognize as the best way to play.
In the next CORE20 design diary, I’ll talk more about the particulars of how CORE20 character building incentivizes staying in the sweet spot, through focusing on building characters horizontally rather than with the vertical focus that level-based games create.
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Questions about the feel of play or anything else in CORE20? Email CORE20@insaneangel.com or join us on the CORE20 Discord server and ask away!
(Art by Eric Lofgren)
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