Originally Posted by RagnarokCzD
Originally Posted by GM4Him
DMing 101. Build the campaign so by the time they reach certain chapters, they are appropriately leveled. If your players are under leveled, give them a few more encounters to level them up. Random Encounters... Side quests... That is how you get them to the right level before they move on to the next part where they'll fight tougher monsters.
I would realy love to see how would you make this in VIDEO game where you CANT stich everything exactly for your party. laugh

This is already IN BG3. Gith fight. You can literally get there at level 2 or 3. That's WAY under leveled. And, frankly, level 4 is still under leveled, in my opinion, for that fight. It would be much less brutal, and I'd have to save scum a lot less on that fight, if I could get to level 5.

You can also get to the Underdark before you reach level 4, and even level 4 us under leveled for the bulette and even the minotaurs. If I reach it at level 2 or 3, I'm doomed.

Solution? There are plenty of side quests and such that you can do BEFORE you reach those tougher battles. If you speed run to the Underdark at level 2 and can't beat those fights, well, maybe you went a little too fast, and you might need to reload from a place where you can go around and do some side quests BEFORE going to the really hard level 5+ dungeon. That's kind of an RPG 101 thing.

What isn't an RPG 101 thing? Building a campaign or adventure around those who want to speed run it and rush to places that they are WAY too under leveled to handle. A good DM provides enough encounters for his/her players so that they can build up their characters enough to handle the next challenges that they are about to face. A bad DM allows players to rush into encounters that are WAY too powerful for them, unless they are absolutely determined to do so.

In other words, you don't throw a RED DRAGON at players when they're at level 4. If you want your characters to face a Red Dragon at some point, you give them a ton of encounters so that they build up to an appropriate level to face it. If they cut corners and face that dragon too soon, even after you've warned them multiple times to slow down and maybe try to build their characters up more, if they die at that point, because they stupidly ran to the dragon, that's on the players, not the DM.

On the flip side, if a DM plans for a big boss to be a Goblin Captain, but they build the encounters so that you could beat the Goblin Captain by the time you're a quarter of the way through the story, then a Goblin Captain is a super dumb end big boss battle. You don't cap the characters at like level 2 when they're a quarter of the way through the story simply because you designed the story for your big boss to be a lowly Goblin Captain.

See? Here again we come back to encounter building being one of the major issues with BG3. You start with encounters that are WAY too high level for you; fighting imps and intellect devourers at level 1 and 2. Not just 1 but like 3 at a time. You gain tons of XP so that you're level 4 long before you reach the Underdark, and then they cap you. Granted, it's EA, so hopefully they'd at least let you get to 5 or 6 by the Underdark, but the point is that they have you fight these super high level monsters that are way out of your league, they nerf them so you can beat them, and then they level you up too fast. Then you reach a point where you are suddenly over leveled, so they have to cap you.

BAD encounter building - and the punishment for bad encounter building is that the players suffer by getting level capped?

No. Makes no sense to me at all. Sorry. Frankly, that's a dumb idea. Plain and simple. I don't typically like to flat out call something dumb, but that's just plain dumb. Totally, 100% think that level capping is BAD game design all the way around. There are SO many other ways to build encounters to avoid level capping. SO many.