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Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Poll Results are in: Old School Spell Level Caps for the Win (Barely)

There can be only one - well, not really. Everyone has their own preference of where to cap spell levels at.

The preferred cap for 38% of the poll responses was 6 magic-user / 5 cleric, which corresponds to OD&D.

Right behind that was 9 magic-user / 7 cleric, which of course matches up to AD&D. That came in at 33%, but by pure numbers only a difference of 7 votes.

Capping at level 9 for magic-users and clerics is a 3x concept if I'm not mistaken, and came in at 24%.

Honestly, it's a bit across the board, and not one answer was overwhelming in it's responses.

Kinda tells me a have a nice cross section of mostly OSR type readers on this blog, but also a chunk of 3x / Pathfinder / why play a game with levels in it readers too.

That's okay, in the near future I should have my copies of Drinking Quest in hand. I suspect that game will appeal to readers and gamers of all editions and rule sets ;)

(there were 127 total responses to the poll - thanks to all who took the time to respond)

2 comments:

  1. My most common system at the moment is Pathfinder which I recently GMed for 2 years. Despite that I chose wizard 6 and cleric 5 because of design issues. Raise Dead, teleport and disintegrate are capstone spells (as you can see in games of a similar era like Rolemaster).

    By expanding the level range, you introduce extremely hard to balance magical abilities to the game. If Raise Dead is a fifth level spell, then you need to have even more awesome versions of raise dead in levels 6 to 9.

    I think recognizing the original design space for spells leads to a much improved game. By your mileage may vary.

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  2. My preference for 6 and 5 is straightforward: I've never played in a game where a PC was high enough level to cast a 6th level spell. I've never played in a game where the party was high enough level to be feasibly able to beat a caster capable of 6th level spells in direct conflict. So for me, anything above 6th level is redundant.

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