Character Calibration Revisited (?)

I'm not sure exactly when this article was written, but I found it via a message board posting dated September of 2007, so it's probably a year or two old at least. While it does deal with D&D 3.X, it does have some good ideas regarding the notion that, contrary to most D&D worlds, by and large most NPCs, even the most famous ones, should really only make it to 5th level or so, and that characters of 6th level or more are really superhuman specimens.

Now, it's easier to make this judgment with a system like 3.X that uses a level-based skill system, as you can say "you only need to be 5th level to have a rating of XY in this skill, which would allow you to do anything humanly possible with it". The exact numbers and figures used in the article can be debated to death, but the point behind it all is that what most players consider an acceptable level of character power and what, realistically, a character's power level should be, are two very different things.

This carries over into all sorts of gaming systems. Taking a look at GURPS (as we did yesterday), the typical PC in your "average" campaign is a 100 point character. But your average person is NOT a 100 p0int character - far from it. You could actually build perfectly acceptable, realistic people with Zero Character Points. It's not going to give you amazing characters, and you have to be willing to take on a few disadvantages, but hey - who among us doesn't have a few flaws? But even if you're generous and consider your typical person to be, say, a 25-point character, that means your average PC is four times as capable.

I guess the point I'm trying to convey here is that there really isn't much of a need to populate your campaign world with super-powered NPCs and monsters. Keeping a game "low-powered" might not be to everyone's taste, but players and GMs should try to get at least one campaign in where the PCs are kept at the lower end of the system's power scale. For something like D&D, this would probably mean a campaign that keeps PCs at 1-3rd level, with perhaps attaining 4th level right before the climactic end of the campaign. For a system like GURPS, this might mean PCs kept around the 50-point range. At this end of the power scale, there's a challenge for both sides of the table - the players have to learn how to take on challenges in ways that don't necessarily rely on statistical inevitability for success, and the GM has to find ways to challenge the PCs that extends beyond "just throw bigger monsters at them", meaning ways to make, say, the humble goblin into a foe to fear once again - something that is actually going to be difficult for GMs whose natural inclination is to power up their PCs as fast as possible so they can be presented with "real" challenges...

Anyhow, give the article a read, and let me know what you think, keeping in mind more the philosophy behind the argument and less the mechanics used to represent it.