I was watching a video the other day about how in the world’s most popular rpg it becomes incredibly difficult to run a game at high level, for a plethora of reasons. Admittedly, I have never run a high-level game in D&D but years ago I had high level characters in campaigns and I agree with most of what the presenter was saying. Mainly, play just became unfun (balance, time for fights, etc.). Also, the struggle was no longer there for the PCs. We didn’t have to scrap and scrape to survive. I'm sure we were abusing the rules as our PCs were essentially in god mode as we murder hoboed entire villages and laid waste to everything in our paths. And this at first was fun but that campaign quickly ended and looking back I think it was because we all felt that there was nothing on the line, no risk. It’s like putting in all the cheat codes, beating the game, unlocking all the secrets, and then what?
When I made FAL I never wanted PCs to be able to arrive at that level of play through normal play. I never wanted an orka to be able to one-on-one a dragon in face-to-face combat. I wanted the players to continue to feel that struggle and that need to survive regardless of how powerful their characters became. So, a lot of the rules, the increase in HP and the maxing out of stats and all that is really meant to keep PCs (usually) in a space that always poses a degree of risk for their survival.
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