The concept of the Red King's Race is that you have to run really hard to just stay in place. In video games this tends to amount to "succeeding a higher level area requires both a higher level character and higher level gear".
D&D 3e and 4e both considered this an expected part of the game -- the monster math assumes you have level-appropriate gear. This was enormous in 3.x, by level 20 gear was expected to provide about 8 points of attack (enhancement bonus +5, and a +6 stat item) and 15 points of ac (deflection, enhancement, natural). This drops to a still significant 6 points in 4e (over 30 levels), but 5e doesn't seem to assume anything at all, you can keep up with average monster AC on just ASIs and proficiency bonus, and while keeping up with save DCs without a paladin on hand is rough, there simply isn't a lot of +save gear.
There's another type of level scaling you sometimes see in video games, where the monsters just level up with the PCs -- go into the bandit cave at level 1 and find level 1 bandits, go into the bandit cave at level 20 and find level 20 bandits. It's pretty controversial in video games so I doubt it will be popular, but might as well ask.
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The concept of the Red King's Race is that you have to run really hard to just stay in place. In video games this tends to amount to "succeeding a higher level area requires both a higher level character and higher level gear".
D&D 3e and 4e both considered this an expected part of the game -- the monster math assumes you have level-appropriate gear. This was enormous in 3.x, by level 20 gear was expected to provide about 8 points of attack (enhancement bonus +5, and a +6 stat item) and 15 points of ac (deflection, enhancement, natural). This drops to a still significant 6 points in 4e (over 30 levels), but 5e doesn't seem to assume anything at all, you can keep up with average monster AC on just ASIs and proficiency bonus, and while keeping up with save DCs without a paladin on hand is rough, there simply isn't a lot of +save gear.
There's another type of level scaling you sometimes see in video games, where the monsters just level up with the PCs -- go into the bandit cave at level 1 and find level 1 bandits, go into the bandit cave at level 20 and find level 20 bandits. It's pretty controversial in video games so I doubt it will be popular, but might as well ask.