In fact, level inflation seems to be a common illness for those people obsessed with recreating “Settings.”įor example, if someone is playing in a Conan or Star Wars setting, it is always assumed that Conan, Darth Vader, or Luke Skywalker should be quite close to the upper tiers, towards the lvl 20 range.
![dragon magazine 342 dragon magazine 342](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51iA5fKWe1L._AC_UL320_.jpg)
In D&D, level inflation may be the consequence of not understanding the significance of level progression, what those levels actually mean and entail, and the common error of assuming that level 20 (or some other maximum) is something that has to exist in a setting just because it’s in a table in the book. And no matter where you travel, the entire world seems to scale to the level of your competence. So, at 1st-level, your average sewer has only rats, but at level 20 houses an entire hive of beholders. With extreme level scaling, your character is always at the center of the normal distribution, no matter how powerful he gets. I’m not, however, trying to get very precise here I’m just using those images as a nifty visual help. In other words, when the medium (most common) level is not lvl 0-1 characters but tends towards aberrations in the 7-13 range.
![dragon magazine 342 dragon magazine 342](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/615MDLylJfL.jpg)
If you want to get technical, I guess “level inflation,” closely related to “level scaling,” can be described as what happens when the distribution of character levels in an RPG setting, game, or campaign stops following a power-law distribution and is forced to follow something more like a normal distribution. So here it is, with some minor variations, the post I wanted to write three years ago but never did for some reason: Level Inflation in D&D is a disease clerics can’t cure. Having a means of bringing characters back to life in Dungeons and Dragons (Resurrect, Reincarnate, ect.) undermines the whole threat of death in the game.- Santa Law Dog December 17, 2019