Quote:
Originally Posted by maximara
the major downside of levels - stuff that gave you problems at low levels is can now be one shotted with ease and you have to come out with all kinds of wacked out reasons as to why many of these guys are still a problem.
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That problem isn't exclusive to systems with levels. Consider if it were worded as "the major downside of point-buy -- stuff that gave you problems at 50 points can be one-shotted with ease at 1000". You're objecting to having a wide range of possible power in a setting, not the mechanics by which it's measured and allocated.
The drawbacks to levels are that they're generally of large granularity, so there are big jumps between adjacent levels, and also usually broad, fixed packages of ability, making it harder (not impossible, but harder) to have different characters or trade off for specialties.
Both of those can be considered advantages, of course. Just depends on what you want. Similarly, the wide range of power is often appealing to players. You can feel a sense of improvement when you can go back and one-shot that stuff that used to give you trouble. It's harder to feel that you've really learned and gotten better when you get 3 points toward an abstract accumulation that will eventually let you buy the smallest quantum of upgrade to a single skill of the dozen or so you routinely use to do your job.
As to why that stuff still exists, the settings give you the easy and obvious answer -- there's bigger, badder, stuff that demands the attention of the high-level characters. I think of it as the "Pug problem", from Feist's series*, so it's not unique to MMOs or CRPGs or even games. There's always a reason the more powerful characters are busy handling some problem that's a foe beyond any of you (fly, you fools!) while you go off and level up somewhere more level-appropriate.
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* If you haven't read them, "Magician" and the rest of the books set in Midkemia. Pug is a servant boy in a castle. In the best D&D zero-to-hero style, he has adventures, becomes a magician, then world-hops, winds up at the most powerful magician ever, defeats the big bad guy, becoming famous and respected and noble and all. In later books he even turns down becoming the god of magic. Pretty much every book after the first one, Feist has to insert some scene explaining why Pug the famous master magician doesn't just pop over and solve the problem. Pug's usually busy keeping cosmic menaces from destroying the world or for that matter the entire material plane while the new heroes actually solve the problem.