Quote from MPA >>

Quote from Born_of_fire74 >>

Quote from MPA >>

From what I have seen in the videos of people who post their sessions. I have seen some gamers not make level eight after 30 sessions.  I don't understand why.  Maybe they aren't fighting enough monsters?  If you have 6-8 people in a party, that's a lot of XP to divide up into tiny amounts unless you are fighting high CR monsters?

The DMG recommends the option to advance without XP.  You advance to level 2 after one session, level 3 after another and 4th level after two session. For every 2-3 sessions there after you advance a level.  So at a minimum you could reach 12 level in as little as 18 sessions approximately.  That's typically where campaigns fizzle, probably because campaigns are lasting years before they reach level 12.   I don't know.

The point being, the rules gives the DM a simple method to get guys to level, so I can't fathom why they would opt for more challenging/hard ways for them.  🤷🏿‍♂️

 The simplest reason is that they don’t want characters to level at that pace. I don’t want to be level 2 after one session. I don’t want to be level 12 after eighteen sessions. My DM doesn’t want it, nor do the other people we play with.

That said, I would point out that the question is not how many sessions between levels for the players but how much time passes in game for the characters. 

At issue isn't what you or your DM wants, but answering the OP's question of how long is it suppose to take to level up.  To which I provided a recommendation from the DMG for the OP.  

 The OP was not asking how long it is “supposed” to take. The OP is a DM with decades of experience and not worried about that kind of advice. She wants to know how long it takes actually, not theoretically. Nor was she asking about how many sessions it takes. The question was how much time passed in-game. Did all those sessions, be it 3 or 30, take place over an in-game week for your characters, or does it take a year, in game. For the characters, not the players. 

Technically, while you gave an answer, it was not an answer to the question I asked.

I asked you, how much time passes in your game world and got a response of "use milestone".

That's an answer that ignored the question I asked, and focused instead on something else: the nature of progression in the game overall, without regard to in-world time spent between levels.

After 45 years and umteen editionsof the game, I'm used to such, so I don't mind, but it is key to note that you did not answer the question asked.

Since it appears there is some curiosity as to why I asked the question, it is key to note that I use a hybrid milestone system in my games. While tweaking it and making it work with encounter and adventure design, I noted that the math for the time period around the Adventuring Day (which most folks think of as being the same as a regular day) was set up so that it could permit level progression (by either milestone or experience points) in a shockingly (to me) short time.

In doing the math for this, I realized that the expectation of my players and the expectation of the game rules themselves were counter to each other -- and so I was curious if other folks did this.

I am an old school type -- I see and enjoy the value of Milestones and such as a tool for a DM to control the speed of progression, however my players are not fond of that; they want something that is less "squishy", and this is in part because we have a focus on story, on character growth and development, and on making combat mean something far beyond just an excuse to use the special abilities.

That underlined part is important: since encounters are based on a budget of XP that is allotted per Adventuring Day (which can be of any length, but impacts the Rest system if you make it take longer than 1 actual game day, as demonstrated in the gritty realism option), when someone does combat, it does not have an impact on their overall growth or development as a character, and does not inherently and always contribute to a story line progression. 

THis is not a big problem for many folks -- hell, a bunch of people think D&D is basically a combat simulator and will use the most asinine arguments to "prove it", so for them, combat isn't something that you use to move forward a character's progression and development -- it is just a thing that happens a lot for no real reason in terms of character development.

So, in seeing this, and trying to find a way to link that need for combat to have a meaningful importance that ties into a steady progression system for PCs based on the function of experience points being used to determine an encounter, I had an odd question occur to me.

How long is it supposed to take? THis has importance and bears heavily on Adventure design and construction -- if I design an adventure to cover 2 to 4 levels, and that adventure is supposed to take a certain amount of time, then the plans, goals, and clues, and other elements of that story need to be known in order to help me, as the DM, trigger events in the broader world that surrounds the PCs for purposes of immersion.

That is, if I don't know how long it should take them to level up, then I won't be able to have the villain's particular plans and timetable sync up to it so that I know that while they are carosing one night, there's a major warehouse fire.

Probably not a concern for many -- I have exceptionally complex storylines and adventures that can have multiple paths to reach the end point, and all that. An early example of one of my planning sheets for campaigns gives an idea (and it is early -- I have moved into something more involved since). But it means that when I get to a scene, I need to have a good idea of how that scene is going to impact the PC's development as individual characters as well as how it affects the overall story and what their taking that particular path means.

Further, this has an impact on how difficult encounters are, when combat is involved -- the difficulty changes the scope and nature of the use of milestones, themselves, which have to be tied to both time (player requirement) and story (DM requirement) and make sense in the greater context.

Now, my personal curiosity about all of that led me to ask here, in much the same way that my tendency to use a wide range of genres in a single campaign or even a single adventure combined with the strong tendency of folks who only learned the game in 5th edition to think that the game is only for Heroic Fantasy and that "other games do other genres better" -- which is horse puckey, but hey, like all opinion (not fact) it is a YMMV situation.

So, I asked it here. I don't usually have ulterior motives -- they are a problem and an annoyance, so I pretty much just live upfront and ask what I ask because I want to know what I ask.

It makes me very good at my job, as well, which helps.

Enworld has up a pretty interesting interview with Chris Perkins and James Wyatt. One thing they talk about is abandoning the adventuring day. Here’s Perkins’ reply, which seems relevant to this topic.

Christopher Perkins: So what we've discovered over the past 10 years is that the Adventuring Day is bogus, that people aren't actually playing with it or using it or running their games that way. And so that, in a nutshell, explains why we abandoned it. What we tried to do this time around is make sure that the advice we're giving you and the tools we're giving you are actually tried and true. That they're getting used, they will be used. And so this was one of the things that we looked at and went, no. This is manifestly not what's happening in the community right now.

Quote from Xalthu >>

Enworld has up a pretty interesting interview with Chris Perkins and James Wyatt. One thing they talk about is abandoning the adventuring day. Here’s Perkins’ reply, which seems relevant to this topic.

Christopher Perkins: So what we've discovered over the past 10 years is that the Adventuring Day is bogus, that people aren't actually playing with it or using it or running their games that way. And so that, in a nutshell, explains why we abandoned it. What we tried to do this time around is make sure that the advice we're giving you and the tools we're giving you are actually tried and true. That they're getting used, they will be used. And so this was one of the things that we looked at and went, no. This is manifestly not what's happening in the community right now.

 
it really is a kind of whack concept, and decoupling it would be fine -- they've replaced it with something else, more episode related. What little I've heard so far is very promising.

I still have to have some way of dealing with time in relation to progress, especially as it relates to overall growth and progression.

That is certainly one possible way.

Not a solution to anything I am dealing, but thank you.

Note, there is no correlation between milestones (which have no numeric value, RAW) and XP.

How much time in-game does it take to level for your games?

Regardless of the method used for leveling (XP vs. Milestone), I feel the time it takes for a group of characters to gain a level (or multiple levels) has way too many variables to give a set answer.

Like many here, I have played and run games for many years. From my experiences, I can't say there has ever been consistency between various groups/campaigns regarding the in-game time it takes to level.  It largely depends on the group of players, the complexity and focus of the story, and even attendance at game sessions.  There have been several times I have improved a quick side quest session because a player or two couldn't make it that week where a major event was planned to take place.  

In the previous campaign I ran, it took the party about one year of in-game time to get from first level to 9th.  It was for a group new to TTRPGs, so the story was pretty straightforward with a balanced mix of RP, character development, and combat.  There was little "downtime" but the group spent a good deal of time traveling. 

Currently, I am running two different campaigns for separate groups.  For the first group (played in-person), the characters began the campaign at 4th level.  After about two and a half to three years of game time, they just hit 13th level.  For the second group (played via VTT), the campaign began at first level and after about three months of game time, they are currently 6th level.

The in-person group I play with gave me a break from DMing and one of our players is running a short campaign while I get some world-building done on the continent they are traveling to.  In about 2-3 weeks of game time we have went from 7th level to 9th level.

Quote from AEDorsay >>

Technically, while you gave an answer, it was not an answer to the question I asked.

I asked you, how much time passes in your game world and got a response of "use milestone".

That's an answer that ignored the question I asked, and focused instead on something else: the nature of progression in the game overall, without regard to in-world time spent between levels.

After 45 years and umteen editionsof the game, I'm used to such, so I don't mind, but it is key to note that you did not answer the question asked.

Since it appears there is some curiosity as to why I asked the question, it is key to note that I use a hybrid milestone system in my games. While tweaking it and making it work with encounter and adventure design, I noted that the math for the time period around the Adventuring Day (which most folks think of as being the same as a regular day) was set up so that it could permit level progression (by either milestone or experience points) in a shockingly (to me) short time.

In doing the math for this, I realized that the expectation of my players and the expectation of the game rules themselves were counter to each other -- and so I was curious if other folks did this.

I am an old school type -- I see and enjoy the value of Milestones and such as a tool for a DM to control the speed of progression, however my players are not fond of that; they want something that is less "squishy", and this is in part because we have a focus on story, on character growth and development, and on making combat mean something far beyond just an excuse to use the special abilities.

That underlined part is important: since encounters are based on a budget of XP that is allotted per Adventuring Day (which can be of any length, but impacts the Rest system if you make it take longer than 1 actual game day, as demonstrated in the gritty realism option), when someone does combat, it does not have an impact on their overall growth or development as a character, and does not inherently and always contribute to a story line progression. 

THis is not a big problem for many folks -- hell, a bunch of people think D&D is basically a combat simulator and will use the most asinine arguments to "prove it", so for them, combat isn't something that you use to move forward a character's progression and development -- it is just a thing that happens a lot for no real reason in terms of character development.

So, in seeing this, and trying to find a way to link that need for combat to have a meaningful importance that ties into a steady progression system for PCs based on the function of experience points being used to determine an encounter, I had an odd question occur to me.

How long is it supposed to take? THis has importance and bears heavily on Adventure design and construction -- if I design an adventure to cover 2 to 4 levels, and that adventure is supposed to take a certain amount of time, then the plans, goals, and clues, and other elements of that story need to be known in order to help me, as the DM, trigger events in the broader world that surrounds the PCs for purposes of immersion.

That is, if I don't know how long it should take them to level up, then I won't be able to have the villain's particular plans and timetable sync up to it so that I know that while they are carosing one night, there's a major warehouse fire.

Probably not a concern for many -- I have exceptionally complex storylines and adventures that can have multiple paths to reach the end point, and all that. An early example of one of my planning sheets for campaigns gives an idea (and it is early -- I have moved into something more involved since). But it means that when I get to a scene, I need to have a good idea of how that scene is going to impact the PC's development as individual characters as well as how it affects the overall story and what their taking that particular path means.

Further, this has an impact on how difficult encounters are, when combat is involved -- the difficulty changes the scope and nature of the use of milestones, themselves, which have to be tied to both time (player requirement) and story (DM requirement) and make sense in the greater context.

Now, my personal curiosity about all of that led me to ask here, in much the same way that my tendency to use a wide range of genres in a single campaign or even a single adventure combined with the strong tendency of folks who only learned the game in 5th edition to think that the game is only for Heroic Fantasy and that "other games do other genres better" -- which is horse puckey, but hey, like all opinion (not fact) it is a YMMV situation.

So, I asked it here. I don't usually have ulterior motives -- they are a problem and an annoyance, so I pretty much just live upfront and ask what I ask because I want to know what I ask.

It makes me very good at my job, as well, which helps.

 

 

 

 

 OK let me get this straight, you are asking how long in game time does it take for characters to level up? I don't know if 5 E has such a method or rule, but 1 E does give optional rules on how long it takes for a character to train and I guess there are calls involved with the training, in order for them to level up. Other than that, I have never heard of anyone wanting to know how long it takes for a player to reach a certain amount of levels. Which would also imply that they are aging in the game. Which also doesn't matter because there's no spot on the character sheet for the PC's age, which I think was there in the first edition.🤔

Quote from AEDorsay >>

Quote from Xalthu >>

Enworld has up a pretty interesting interview with Chris Perkins and James Wyatt. One thing they talk about is abandoning the adventuring day. Here’s Perkins’ reply, which seems relevant to this topic.

Christopher Perkins: So what we've discovered over the past 10 years is that the Adventuring Day is bogus, that people aren't actually playing with it or using it or running their games that way. And so that, in a nutshell, explains why we abandoned it. What we tried to do this time around is make sure that the advice we're giving you and the tools we're giving you are actually tried and true. That they're getting used, they will be used. And so this was one of the things that we looked at and went, no. This is manifestly not what's happening in the community right now.

 
it really is a kind of whack concept, and decoupling it would be fine -- they've replaced it with something else, more episode related. What little I've heard so far is very promising.

I still have to have some way of dealing with time in relation to progress, especially as it relates to overall growth and progression.

Honestly, this is one of those "don't think too much about it" areas if your campaign is one long chain of events without some big blocks of downtime; just need to suspend your disbelief a bit the same way you do when that plucky anime kid who just stepped into the setting a few weeks ago takes down someone who's had a couple decades to hone their skills. Probably the best general-use explanation there is for the relatively explosive progression a party can have is that level appropriate encounters are ostensibly very intense high-risk conflicts, and so getting into several in a short space of time forces the party to grow past their current limits to survive. And the reason this still makes individuals of their caliber exceptional once you're getting into higher levels is that setting-wise a win streak like that is long odds.

THe long rest return to full strength is a part of the “rapid” leveling problem. Requiring the “gritty” extended rest times and feeding in “down time” activities  that start to link the PCs not their communities and worlds can also extend the time needed to level as many of these activities. This is a larger problem in continuing world campaigns. When the “retirees” of a previous module/adventure are (at least theoretically) still around and haven’t aged significantly with nothing to occupy their time. Many of the modules actually try to solve this problem by having potential “rewards” they can receive that can be used to involve them “locally” so they become player NPCs in the world as some type of retired adventurers. Using exp for leveling also has the potential for helping the problem as something like a pack of kobolds shouldn’t be providing much if any experience to a tier 3/4 PC and only limited experience even for a tier 2. 

I am playing in a game that we hope will run a long time, and it's set up with a houserule that leveling up is tied to downtime activities. It's taking about 2-3 weeks in-game per level for characters to level up in the 1-5 level range. It will take longer after that. It means that the DM controls leveling through choosing to give downtime or not between story events, interestingly. Downtime is treated as a resource and there are other ways it can be used.

With most stories, there's really no reason events have to happen on successive days such that get to say level 5 in just 10 in-game days. I think it's nice to spread them out a bit so that your party does have more reason to have that experience and cohesion.  As DM you can typically control events so that they don't happen quite so fast.

Or you can simply not track time in game at all. It just depends on what kind of story you want to tell, and whether it's a more casual Adventurers Go Adventuring or if you want it to be more Characters Grow. For Characters Grow, you need time to pass so that the characters can age and develop.

Sometime around 2003-2005  I had a group of PCs I had been playing for 20+ years along with their followers and “ henchmen”. I didn’t want to simply dump them ( just slightly invested in them) so I setup my world as place they could reside as NPCs . Initially I tried to do exp leveling but with tier 4/epic levels it breaks down so I did my own “milestone” leveling that allowed me to extend the timing as I kept pace ( more or less) with the official FR timelines. Then along came 4e with its 100 year jump in time frame. Having a max level of 30 helped but I had to account for everything that happened in that 100 year period. At that point I had to deal with most of the human characters dieing off in the gap while the elves, dwarves, gnomes and half elves simply aged. To some extent I stopped trying to calculate experience or even “milestones”. I basically assigned new levels for various time periods depending on what the PCs were involved with. So some got a level every ten years, some every 5 and others every 20 depending on how active I thought they would be in the world.  With the coming of 5e and the level 20 cap I pretty much stopped the level progressions but added epic boons at about 1 boon/50k Exp. Not 30k.for PCs I have mostly followed the module progressions but tried to tie the PCs into the world with properties to run after the module is over. Basically turning them into player run NPCs that can show up in other modules if I and the player want. To some extent, since I run a modified FR world I try to place individual campaigns in different parts of Faerun so the new PCs aren’t likely to run into older ( bored) PCs that are more capable ( at least initially). That generally manages to solve the problem of rapid leveling and what to do after the campaign is done - the PCs have settled down and are resting on their laurels with no good reason to go adventure unless things get out of hand - they become the faction agents the new PCs mostly deal with  or the agents they run into along te way that help them out with info or other aide.

Quote from MPA >>

Quote from AEDorsay >>

Technically, while you gave an answer, it was not an answer to the question I asked.

I asked you, how much time passes in your game world and got a response of "use milestone".

 

 OK let me get this straight, you are asking how long in game time does it take for characters to level up? I don't know if 5 E has such a method or rule, but 1 E does give optional rules on how long it takes for a character to train and I guess there are calls involved with the training, in order for them to level up. Other than that, I have never heard of anyone wanting to know how long it takes for a player to reach a certain amount of levels. Which would also imply that they are aging in the game. Which also doesn't matter because there's no spot on the character sheet for the PC's age, which I think was there in the first edition.🤔

• ... you are asking how long in game time does it take for characters to level up?

Yes. That is what I am asking.

• I don't know if 5 E has such a method or rule, 

Yes, there is a rule in 5e for that. There's even rules on how to create downtime activities.

• but 1 E does give optional rules on how long it takes for a character to train and I guess there are calls involved with the training, in order for them to level up.

They weren't precisely optional back then.

•  Other than that, I have never heard of anyone wanting to know how long it takes for a player to reach a certain amount of levels. 

Yay! I get to be your first!  Wait until you end up in a generational campaign, then. It will be wild.

• Which would also imply that they are aging in the game. 

The reason they list lifespans is, in part, implying that PCs age in the game as well. 

• Which also doesn't matter because there's no spot on the character sheet for the PC's age, which I think was there in the first edition.

So, hold on, this might be a shocker:

1. there's no place for the description of a weapon -- how long is a longsword? No way to tell, not on the character sheet. Sure, you can look it up, but if its not on the character sheet, it isn't important.
2. There's no place in the character sheet for what happens when a PC has recurring expenses from property.
3. There's no space on the character sheet for Sanity, Honor, Renown, Hero Points, how tall you are, what your eye and hair color are, how much you weigh....

All of those things matter at some point in a game, using RAW and playing a published module. So, things that are not on the character sheet can matter.

Not only was age on the sheet in 1e, but there were rules for how aging impacted your ability scores

So, back to the question at hand...

In your games, how long in game time does it take for characters to level up?

In my games the characters level up basically whenever they accomplish a feat worthy of leveling up, (one set of PCs recently went from 11 to 13 in about 19 hours) but I acknowledge this is not super conducive to the broader quandary of "how long should a level 1-20 campaign take". I think that's an interesting thought experiment, so maybe we can drill down a little bit on that by checking some underlying questions:

1. Do we want to play a campaign in which the characters meaningfully age, and in which the passage of time is an important factor in the story?

Clearly I don't ordinarily prioritize this, but I think it would be an interesting change of pace, so let's say yes.

2. How much time needs to pass for the passage of time to feel like a relevant theme?

One way to try to budget this would be to pin the length of a campaign to some external phenomenon you want to use as a shorthand for the passage of time. Sure, the PCs are aging, but I'm not sure that's a good reference point for change in the world on its own; adventurers are somewhat apart from the world by necessity, and so you need a touchstone in the world that they regularly interact with to give perspective on how things have changed. If we accept this (and you don't have to, but if you don't you can probably check out of this post now), we can ask a third question:

3. What are some interesting touchstones we can use to time the campaign?

A short campaign (short for this type of story, anyway) could focus around the growth of a new settlement. This could just be a few buildings in the woods to start with, but within 5 years it could grow into a prosperous (or bleak, depending on how the campaign goes) little town. This would be about 96 days between level ups, or a little longer than 3 months. Maybe the PCs return to town each season between forays into the wilderness, and each time the town has developed a little.

A somewhat longer campaign might focus on the way a long (10 years or longer, at least 6 months between levels) war changes the landscape of two nations, and a very long (20 years or more, 1 year or more between levels) campaign could remind the PCs how much time has passed through the growth of a particular child. I think any of these could be a great experience for a group, it really just depends on what kind of vibe you're trying to create. Of course, a decade or decades-long campaign would require significant skipping of down time, and probably even some less intense up time. I think a lot of players would be happy to assume their characters are up to interesting (but not very interesting) things between the adventures you actually play out.

Ultimately, all of this takes the same general approach as my game where the PCs leveled up twice in less than a day; leveling should take as long as your campaign needs it to take. Setting a goal, e.g. "this campaign will cover 20 years time" and then working backwards feels like a completely valid way to run things in my opinion.

Separate thought: this reminds me of the way that, when you ask someone from most parts of the United States how far away some destination is, they'll almost always give you an answer in time, not distance. This tells us something about the way travel is experienced: since most people in the US travel by methods that are variable speed and low physical effort, the most relevant measure of their travel experience is "how long does it take".

The answers you're getting to this question demonstrate a similar phenomenon. Most D&D5 players experience level ups in terms of sessions or accomplishments, not in terms of game world time. You're asking something akin to "how many miles to the grocery store"; it's not just that people can't give you a firm answer, it's that even if they could give it, the answer to that question wouldn't represent anything meaningful to their experience.

In the current campaign I’m playing in we started at L5 and will be making level 6 this week ( if we survive the bbeg). This will occur after roughly 3 weeks of time in game. As per the startup from the DM we get together as L1 characters roughy 5 years ago and so it took us abut 1 yr/ level to get to the start of the campaign. Hope that helps you AEDorsay.

My players, in our last completed campaign, kept a journal from the time the characters "left home in search of adventure" through to the final story wrap up. This took 908 days in game. It took about 3 years of real time playing, averaging about 4 hours a week (factoring in weeks off and the weeks we added extra days).  They were probably level 20 during the final month of play, having started at level 1. In that time, they experienced much, built a stronghold from a ruined keep taken from brigands, and eventually a town surrounding it (like a bastion before there were bastions), traveled to other planes of existence and parallel worlds, took part in a brief war, explored several dungeons, slew dragons, giants, mind flayers, fiends, and more, travelled to a sky city by beanstalk, met kings and queens from several kingdoms, including those of other races (which they now call species), received titles of nobility, gathered forces and slew the Tarrasque, found dragon eggs, went on a quest to see them hatched, and then raised them, each character picked up NPC love interests along the way, all of them eventually marrying, and the female players became pregnant and retired from adventuring at the conclusion.  It was a full experience for all involved.

The problem with inserting months and years between adventures - because that's what you're doing, adding extra downtime to the game for the sake of what you feel is realism - is that you totally kill the pacing of the story. If you want any kind of overarching plot, the players are going to want to actively engage in that plot.

Say you finish an adventure when the party is at level 9 and tell them they need a year of downtime to train for level 10. Then after that downtime, it turns out the BBEG was busily working and now there's a new big problem to solve. Why, narratively, would the characters have done nothing related to the plot in that year? Why - if they knew there was a long-term plan by the BBEG - did they take a year off from active adventuring thus allowing its nefarious scheme to continue unchecked? Just so they could have a handful more hit points and a couple new spells?

In my experience, "realistic leveling" plays best in a campaign that does separate, mostly self-contained adventures that are loosely related or completely unrelated. Where the danger and tension is literally nonexistent in the periods where you steer the party into downtime. In a campaign that wants a well-paced story that spans several levels, you need to be prepared for the idea that those levels could advance in a matter of days.

It's possible to "gate" progress by tying them directly to features I suppose - i.e. you can't enter the tomb without this 3rd level spell and you can't get to level 5 unless you spend 8 weeks in training. But that feels so forced to me. That's not in the game rules anywhere, it's the DM going out of their way to justify this idea that leveling should take a lot of time.

It doesn't always have to. Olympic athletes can be in their teens/early twenties. Scientific research often moves in leaps and bounds. The majority of your training/preparation can be in your backstory and then the adventure is the catalyst that unlocks all the things you've been training for. Throw magic and divine intervention into the world and yeah, maybe the fighter doesn't need two years to learn how to swing his sword two times instead of one time. All the experience needed is literally, explicitly earned by adventuring.

In my opinion the story is what drives the experience, so leveling takes as long as the story dictates. I'm not as interested in playing Real World Medieval Simulator as I am telling a fun, engaging story. If that story doesn't have natural pacing breaks where downtime makes sense, I'm not going to impose it just for the sake of "realism." But I can see the argument for it if it makes leveling feel more impactful or weighty for your group.

In my current campaign, in the early levels the party would level up after every two adventure arcs, and there were a couple weeks of downtime built in to the end of each adventure arc. They were establishing a new city, collecting allies and resources and they needed to process that stuff. But once the main plot really got going, the pace picked up. By level 11 there was no time for downtime, they had too much stuff to do and not enough time to do it. Any downtime I impose at this point will feel completely forced, and I'll have to make up reasons that the bad guys also need downtime before their next big move. It just doesn't feel natural.

Quote from scatterbraind >>

The problem with inserting months and years between adventures - because that's what you're doing, adding extra downtime to the game for the sake of what you feel is realism - is that you totally kill the pacing of the story. If you want any kind of overarching plot, the players are going to want to actively engage in that plot.

 

  There is no reason a plot or a story has to have meaningful motion every single day.  In fact, that's particularly UNusual both in life and in fiction.

To quote MST3K, "First thing I'm gonna do, I'm going to buy me a montage."

Downtime doesn't have to be about not doing anything, not in session, and not in game time. It can be traveling, it can be building, it can be training, it can be researching, with every day the quest firmly in mind. Of course, there may be side quests that come up as well. But in session, it can simply be a moment of, "You travel the road for two weeks and finally arrive at..." and the like. Easy to insert without touching the pacing of the story at all. 

What's unusual is learning about the BBEG on Monday and then taking them out on Thursday. Or even in the same month. You'd think BBEG would have left some traces of evil before then.

The BBEG probably needs time to level up, too, get that order of steel in from the steel mill, bring in the Dwarven craftsmen to fashion it into the fancy spikes and whatnot.

Just to use everyone's favorite archetype, in the books Frodo has the One Ring for 17 years before he leaves the Shire.

Never really gave it much thought but generally, looking at my most recent campaign.

Session 1 = 120xp
Session 2 = 180xp (Players reach level 2) - Needed 300
Session 3 = 333 XP
Session 4 = 316 XP (Players reach level 3) - Needed 900

I do think the session length can impact the game, but in my group 4 hours is typical.

Given that math I would suspect that they will be earning around 450XP per session until they reach level 4 so I would expect it to look something like this

Session 5 = 450xp 
Session 6 = 450xp
Session 7 = 450xp 
Session 8 = 450 XP (Players reach level 4) - Needed 2700

My guess would be that they are likely to earn extra XP at some point during this cycle so realistically they will probably hit level 4 after session 7 as I offer bonus Xp for completing "quests" and they are likely to complete something at that point.

With that ratio, they will hit level 5 after 4-5 sessions.  level 6 after 6-7 sessions.  and so on.

So calculating that all the way through I suspect it will take around 229 sessions to reach level 20.  At 4 hours per session 916 hours.  We play once a week so about 4 years.

So yeah 4 years sounds about right.

Quote from scatterbraind >>

1 - The problem with inserting months and years between adventures - because that's what you're doing, adding extra downtime to the game for the sake of what you feel is realism - is that you totally kill the pacing of the story. If you want any kind of overarching plot, the players are going to want to actively engage in that plot.

 

2 - In my opinion the story is what drives the experience, so leveling takes as long as the story dictates. I'm not as interested in playing Real World Medieval Simulator as I am telling a fun, engaging story. If that story doesn't have natural pacing breaks where downtime makes sense, I'm not going to impose it just for the sake of "realism." But I can see the argument for it if it makes leveling feel more impactful or weighty for your group.

 

3 - In my experience, "realistic leveling" plays best in a campaign that does separate, mostly self-contained adventures that are loosely related or completely unrelated. Where the danger and tension is literally nonexistent in the periods where you steer the party into downtime. In a campaign that wants a well-paced story that spans several levels, you need to be prepared for the idea that those levels could advance in a matter of days.

 

4 - In my current campaign, in the early levels the party would level up after every two adventure arcs, and there were a couple weeks of downtime built in to the end of each adventure arc. They were establishing a new city, collecting allies and resources and they needed to process that stuff. But once the main plot really got going, the pace picked up. By level 11 there was no time for downtime, they had too much stuff to do and not enough time to do it. Any downtime I impose at this point will feel completely forced, and I'll have to make up reasons that the bad guys also need downtime before their next big move. It just doesn't feel natural.

 
I agree, wholly.

The question I asked is incidental to my working on that solution, not a seeking of a solution.  Even if someone offered me a solution, the best I could do would be to take the idea and see if I* can incorporate it into a personal solution, because that's one of our core principles (no 3rd party stuff).

It is why I am working on a solution to it in my games -- there needs to be time built into the story to enable that growth and character progression set up. And I did solve the problem, I'll note, but the question was still there. So I asked it. Not to help me with solving the problem, but because I was curious. My solution has some hiccups that I will resolve after the new DMG comes out because they made changes to stuff it interconnects with (CR, XP Values, Leveling, etc).

For my players, their PC's growth within the story is important. They want it to feel like they earned the stuff they do, as in make it a part of the game itself. This is in part because we are a large group in many games and we are of many ages and there's a whole subtext of "teach the kids about real life, too" and so forth, but mostly, it is because we have a primary POV of novels for our way of seeing the game.  In a novel, the best stories have characters grow and change a a result of both their individual efforts and as a result of the story -- they rise to meet the occasion. This means interacting with the social environment for immersion's sake -- it is all one big ball, not discrete parts.  To enable that, I have to be able to plan adventures around that.

You address this point in Paragraph 1. The blue part is the challenge: making it so that it is not a threat to the pacing of the story. As the DM, I control that Pacing in the narrative structure. I have a Villain, said Villain has a Plan, and Goals, and Motivations, and Wherewithal. Those things take time. I reveal that through the use of clues that lead to different things. A good example is a ledger entry that describes a meeting taking place at X time in X place. The purple part is an assumption; it isn't "realism", but there is some aspect of realistic, but it has to be done in line with the setting and the world and the established, player driven, player desired elements of growth.

It might help to know that the setting this takes place in has a system that ties into leveling, skills, crafting, and daily life (including NPCs and economics and such) that is referred to as Mastery. Mastery is a Tiers structure: 5 tiers -- Novice, Adept, Maven, Master, and Maestro. These are growth stages. To level up at these points requires some downtime and a whole roleplaying set up. There is dice involved, and more. These tiers are very much akin to the four the base game has, so there's a whole set up there. 

In Paragraph 2, you note that the story and leveling go hand in hand. I use a modified milestone approach -- certain key story beats grant a milestone, but it takes more than one milestone to level up. Milestones are wholly story driven, so the progression is tied to the story (somewhat -- it is only one way to gain a milestone). As a result, Leveling is predicated not on DM fiat, but on Player action -- if a Story gives you 3 milestones and you need 3 milestones to advance, well, now you can. Or you might not -- and the tier system means that doing so might take you a bit longer, while in between those points it is just a matter of doing it and learning the new features or whatever. If I just wanted to be the sole determiner of it, I would simply say "ok, now you can go up a level." That wouldn't fly -- it means that it is when I feel it is enough growth, as opposed as to when the players feel that.  It lifts the out of the immersion, as well, to a degree, but that's less key. But structuring it this way, it puts the whole leveling set up back in the player's hands, and that means I have to design adventures with that in mind.

Because of this, I have the ability to set pacing up, to structure the adventure to enable problems like a conflict between the main story, the side quest that sounds really cool, and different side stories. That's all on me -- when i gave them back their ability to determine how they level, I tied it into the pacing of the larger story. THis means that my Villains lans still happen, still progress, on a timetable that is unknown to the players. So while they are off doing the side quest, if they finish it too slowly, the Villain's plans move forward still, and they come back to a change -- or they come back to the villains adjusting still to what they did last time to disrupt those plans. But they might finish that sidequest fast, and come back to the main story without a bubble at all, just like f they have enough time to craft that item they want, or research a spell they are creating, or whatever. It's all with a focus on them, in the end.

In Paragraph 3, you talk about the style of campaign, and yes, mine is very much a series of fully, loosely, or not at all connected adventures.In the case of my current campaign, they are connected within each tier, and then slowly build up to a final tier of immense importance, that will determine the shape of the world for the next campaign (with new PCs). The first tier has 1 story per level -- and there's a subtle focus on coming to know the PC and the world (I don't do lore dumps). THe final tier has a couple stories per level, a pair of adventures per level. Now, my adventures are not book length monstrosities, and there are a ton of side quests, missions, and whatnot that happen along the way -- it is a player driven campaign, not a story driven one. In fact, my players (and one group is doing this) can completely ignore the man story and just do side quests and go off on tangents and they will still advance and do all the rest -- it's just slower. My campaigns, in rough note form, are about double the size of any book that's been published by WotC, but my adventures are much more like the anthology bits. Some do cover multiple levels -- it isn't even rare. But for planning and design purposes, it is still the same general basic core structure.

But because I control pacing, I don't have to worry about them rushing too fast, or losing the tension of the moment and really pushing forward, because it does follow a set path -- the race to the climax, the aftermath and denouement, the preparation for the next one that was foreshadowed during the last two, etc. However, my big challenge has been to figure out how to maintain that tension, balancing it with the issue of time, in this case, when it needs to be taken into consideration.

Incidentally, the time period basis came down to a Season -- 91 days. The main story is blocked out in Seasons. Sidequests, PC stories (imbroglios -- i jut love the word), missions, personal stuff, training, etc. -- all of that can be accomplished fairly easily in a single season alongside the main story. Since the main story isn't a requirement, it just happens and has impacts on the PCs as they do whatever -- but it also offers the fastest path to advancement, no matter when they hop into it.

That meant I had to redetermine level progression by XP, so that I could tie the XP values on a Daily basis into the Encounter system properly for figuring out the CR of a creature and the difficulty of a given encounter by setting up my budget for that encounter in terms of XP in a manner that allows the Players to still advance at a reasonably brisk rate without conflicting with the existing structures that are also player driven and desired.

Knowing that, I can now budget out the encounters within the different sections of an adventure (which I call Episodes) as well as the sections within each episode (which I call Scenes). Combat is only about 20% of my game -- a fight has a purpose, a reason, and contributes to the story as a whole (well not side quests and missions and such, but you know). And being able to budget effectively is really important when you have 20 different possible episodes and some are harder and some are easier and you never know which way the party is going to go.

The only time it isn't an issue is the climax -- but even then, I usually have two possible ones, reached by different paths -- and my budget is still the same, and so I have to use it for both of them and any other stuff -- which can make some of them a lot easier than might be thought of -- but that had to be added into the whole computation as well, so that wouldn't happen.

Moral of the story is never let a 27 year old raise a really observation at the Movie night that gets the DMs all arguing and then deciding that someone had better come up with a solution before everyone looks at you and grins just as the action gets interesting.