One thing I really like about Dishonored's game design is that while you gain in power as you go through the missions ("level up"), the kinds of threats/obstacles you face mainly increase in variety rather than power level so you actually can *feel* more powerful by the end.
The first levels of the numbered games have you escaping from captivity through hostile ground with nothing but the two most basic weapons in the game and no superhuman abilities, and it can get pretty desperate.
Then you get even a single mind-bending magical superpower that almost no one else in the game or world has and it immediately changes the dynamic.
And by the end of the game you're effectively a physically embodied God of Vengeance (or Instrument of Justice), stopping time, body-jumping, teleporting, summoning, all while armed with experimental weaponry few have access to.
And while you might face foes who have *some* of the same tricks, no one has quite the bewildering array you have. The witches and the whalers can do stuff you can't do but they are mostly susceptible to the same tricks as everyone else.
One of the things I didn't like about 4E's design was it was based on a treadmill power progression. Between level 1 and 11 you might have increased your hit chance by +10, but you're facing enemies who are 10 points harder to hit.
4E at least had a progression that did give you a wider variety of things to do as you gained in power but still the basic assumption of the game was that you would face challenges that require you to use all of them.
The character progression stories of 4E were that if you played to level 30 you would become a literal or metaphorical god and eventually pass literally or metaphorically into a realm of legend but if you played strictly to spec the treadmill wouldn't really let you feel that.
And that has a lot to do with the 4E design being unduly influenced by game forum discourse around the concept of "balance" so the notion was basically to provide guardrails and training wheels, invisible and insistent as possible, to make every fight balanced.
And there was room for easier fights and harder fights within that framework, with the assumption they'd average out over your Notional Adventuring Resource Day (or NARD, if you will.)
Dishonored is having a huge impact on my D&D-alike tabletop project, and not in a "It's a grimdark whalepunk world with a chaos mechanism" sense but more in terms of how to work a linear character progression that allows meaningful choice with each level of advancement.
Like there is a lot of discourse in indie game dev along the lines of "Why are you still trying to work with character classes and levels at all?" but... there's something appealing and satisfying about reaching a new plateau and having stuff to choose from.
You can go totally a la carte with the cool stuff to choose from, but if power level/game balance is a concern at all then it's hard to ensure that players aren't being punished for making "the wrong choices" without a level progression that ratchets their power level upwards.
A game with Dishonored's assumption that most people in the world and most threats you face simply aren't getting the cool stuff at all (mostly) or the same degree (for the rest) means that More Cool Stuff == More Power, relatively.
Couple that with a level progression along the lines of either 4E (higher levels means Better At Everything) or 5E (higher levels means Better At All Your Stuff) and I think you're getting somewhere.
Old School D&D didn't have the treadmill problem because a goblin was a goblin and a dragon was a dragon regardless of your level, and you could be fighting a hundred goblins at level 17 or (briefly, anyway) a dragon at level 1.
(Or a hundred goblins at level 1.)
(Or a hundred goblins at level 1.)
Which is fine for a roguelike gameplay experience, where you can make the choice to go into the dragon's lair anytime you wanted to roll up a new character.
4E's lore really fully embraced the idea of adventurers as superheroes - Martial Power being an almost magical thing that some rare mortals can tap into, Clerics and Paladins being distinct from priests and holy knights, imbued with abilities few will ever see.
But the gameplay experience, if encounters and adventure structure followed the specified guidelines, would never really reflect that. Everywhere you went you would be met by forces designed to turn any fight into a grueling tactical battle. Which 4E was pretty good for!
Like, this is a design choice I disagree with in the sense that I would have preferred a progression of power that gave a campaign more of the feeling of something like going through Dishonored, or a Fallout game, not in the sense that it didn't work at all.
I put Fallout games in the same category as Dishonored here because if you're collecting gear and the fruits of experience, you're going to be advancing in ways that the threats against you basically don't.
And Fallout being a mostly unbounded open world also means you can Walk Into The Dragon's Lair when you're totally 100% unprepared for what you find there. The progression does expect a certain level of threat escalation. More so when you add in DLC that is explicitly leveled.
And the individual DLCs for Fallout: New Vegas still follow the progression of: you enter this new region possibly somewhat unprepared for the threats you face there, but by the end, you're navigating mostly the same threats, mostly easier.
Now, the thing about tabletop gaming is that the escalation of obstacles/threats is something that is entirely under the control of a responsive human agent. You can run a game of 4E exactly as written in terms of what the player characters can do, without the treadmill.
And you could run a game of 5E where the gamerunner is "leveling" the stats of bandits and wolves so that at level 15 the PCs have the same challenge from random wood encounters as they had at level 5.
The cool stuff that epic level rogues in 4E could do include stuff like stealing a moment of time or a bit of magic, or eluding the laws of physics, but you basically have to set aside a lot of the game's assumptions to feel like this makes you the greatest thief who ever lived.
Because the assumptions are geared towards putting you into a succession of more or less equally desperate fights for survival where the outcomes are victory or death. You always face foes who are almost exactly equal to your phenomenal abilities.
One of the reasons Dishonored games are so cathartic to me is that each playthrough -- slightly less so on NG+ mode -- starts out with the feeling of a desperate struggle and works its way up to "How will I choose to moonwalk past these people in my way?"
(Or moonwalk *through* them, as befits your chosen approach/character story.)
And there are some elements of luck and system mastery to that, as if you never get or learn to appreciate the best MP management perks then later missions in Dishonored could remain much more a puzzle of resource management.
But once you figure out something like "Oh, this bonecharm lets me completely refill my MP any time I'm somewhere with indoor plumbing", then all your cool stuff becomes much more cool-down oriented than limited use.
Similarly, the NPC AI in Dishonored games does a pretty decent job of having people react to impossible things happening in front of them, in both scripted and emergent ways.
Like last night I dealt with an ambush involving a total of 6 Howlers by stealthily domino-linking four of them and then shadowkilling one of them. The two who watched several of their comrades vanish in front of their eyes FREAKED OUT.
And I label that emergent because I don't think anyone programmed as specific an event trigger as that, that's probably just how they would have reacted to anyone dying mysteriously in front of them.
But they also have specific lines/reactiosn for if you magically appear and then vanish from sight right in front of them.
It's really a great, responsive gameplay feeling to hear someone bragging about how they don't care who you are, you'll still bleed the same as anybody, and then leave them bewildered and swearing when you drop out of nowhere to take out their partner and vanish.
...this is a very unfocused thread but I think my big lesson here is that what tabletop can really learn from video games is stuff about how to manage *flow* in game progression, here meaning the overlapping area of character power/threat/story progression.
For all that I talk about 4E's treadmill it was exciting to get a new level in 4E because more levels meant adding another shiny piece to your character's stock of What Cool Things Can I Do, which could also help grow your character's story.
And of course, when talking about video game flow vs. tabletop flow... one problem with trying to do this exact progression with group tabletop is you can't just keep reloading the Desperate Escape prologue level until you survive.
Absent a Continue/Reload system, if you're focused on creating that kind of flow, you need to treat the low end of the experience tables as a sort of tutorial level. E.g., when I run 5E these days, I use more like 4E starting HP rules without otherwise adjusting the difficulty.
Giving everybody an extra ~10 HP at level 1 makes a huge impact at level 1, which matters less with each successive level.
