So one of my homebrew online campaigns has just reached its 18 month milestone, generally getting online once a week for 4 hours with just a few breaks. The party are just about to face the first BBEG and at that point will milestone up to level 6.
So how long is your current campaign and what level are your characters at?
My current campaign (A mix of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and some smaller adventures sprinkled to enhance the main storyline.) has been going on since November-- similar to one a week playing-- and they are at 3rd level. Hopefully, if the players make the right choices they will level up within the next three games.
Were on session nine of curse of strahd (we play twice a month since we all work seven's, and missed a week do to two players visiting family). Players started at level four and are currently level seven. Milestone leveling and curse of strahd should end with them hitting either 13 or 14 at their current path.. and yes I know that's not how the module is ran... when they said curse of strahd... well I went a little zany okay so sue me.
Edited to add:
The sessions last between four to five hours max (and we've never hit the max often) and we have distractions that happen during play because thats just how our group works *shrugs* (also one session their was a forty five minute hag conversation, so that happened.
One (Eberron) has been running since March 2020, so we just passed two years, but we took a 4 month break in the middle of COVID before picking back up. They'll probably finish at level 14 this fall.
My other Campaign started July 2020, and they're level 11 and about to finish Descent into Avernus by the summer.
Current campaign just ended two weeks ago. The meeting schedule was mostly twice a month with about 8 months of meetings once a week; sessions last approx 5 hours. It went for 36 months in total and the players were level 20 just before they took down the BBEG.
We have been playing once a week at five hours sessions since early march last year. Started at level 1, half the party got to level 6 in the last coulple of session and the other half is a couple thousnads xp away. It was a LMoP/DoIP campaign that got out of hand with homebrew. It is supposed to end one way or another in the next 8 im game days (so hopelly a couple of months irl) and then my brother will dm for us tyranny of dragons/hoard of the dragon queen.
We've been playing weekly with 3-hour sessions since July 2020, taking breaks around the holidays. Party just leveled up to 10, after session 70. They started at level 4.
My collection of knuckleheads likes to RP and banter in-character a ton, so maybe one day we'll actually finish this campaign...lol.
We have been playing for about a year now, about 2-3 times a month, 2-3 hours per session and the party is level 8. 3 PCs. We are just over halfway through the entire campaign (set in the Moonshaes, predominantly using the BG Moonshaes materials with some others thrown in and some written entirely by me). At the end, they should be level 12.
Current campaign is homebrew, meeting about three times a month for the last 6-8 months. Party started at 1st level and is roughly halfway between 5th and 6th level now.
So one of my homebrew online campaigns has just reached its 18 month milestone, generally getting online once a week for 4 hours with just a few breaks. The party are just about to face the first BBEG and at that point will milestone up to level 6.
So how long is your current campaign and what level are your characters at?
Your PCs are averaging 62.4 hours per level of play, including levels 1-3?
Wow, that is one slow running campaign. I assume that there must be an absolute tonne of RP involved, or do you just really enjoy the low levels?
My game is about to hit session 35, starting January 2021. Average session length is 4.5 hours, not including breaks. The characters are about to reach level 11. I use standard XP, and about 70% of XP awarded is from monster kills. I'd say roughly 50% of game time is spent on combat encounters, because my players and I favour long fights (encounters are relatively few, they just tend to go 5-7 turns).
So one of my homebrew online campaigns has just reached its 18 month milestone, generally getting online once a week for 4 hours with just a few breaks. The party are just about to face the first BBEG and at that point will milestone up to level 6.
So how long is your current campaign and what level are your characters at?
Your PCs are averaging 62.4 hours per level of play, including levels 1-3?
Wow, that is one slow running campaign. I assume that there must be an absolute tonne of RP involved, or do you just really enjoy the low levels?
My game is about to hit session 35, starting January 2021. Average session length is 4.5 hours, not including breaks. The characters are about to reach level 11. I use standard XP, and about 70% of XP awarded is from monster kills. I'd say roughly 50% of game time is spent on combat encounters, because my players and I favour long fights (encounters are relatively few, they just tend to go 5-7 turns).
They leveled from 1-3 in the first 10 weeks, I am doing milestone and they are perfectly happy with the pacing, the party is 8 players so things run a little slower just to give everyone space to do their thing. One of the players is in another campaign and has complained that that DM is leveling them far too quickly.
It depends on the players, the type of campaign you want to run and the story you are telling, I historically hav always run campaigns with a low progression, even with XP leveling in other systems I change the XP levels, there are 2 main reasons for this in DND first there are a load of low level monsters that don’t get much love because characters level too rapidly to make them a threat and 2 as you progress up the levels the game becomes hard to make challenging. Especially with a party of 8 :)
Current campaign is going on 20 months long, meeting once a week for ~4hrs, including breaks. 2nd party iteration (first iteration was lost to orcs at 7th level) is currently at 8th level about to level 9. We are using milestone leveling.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
So one of my homebrew online campaigns has just reached its 18 month milestone, generally getting online once a week for 4 hours with just a few breaks. The party are just about to face the first BBEG and at that point will milestone up to level 6.
So how long is your current campaign and what level are your characters at?
Your PCs are averaging 62.4 hours per level of play, including levels 1-3?
Wow, that is one slow running campaign. I assume that there must be an absolute tonne of RP involved, or do you just really enjoy the low levels?
My game is about to hit session 35, starting January 2021. Average session length is 4.5 hours, not including breaks. The characters are about to reach level 11. I use standard XP, and about 70% of XP awarded is from monster kills. I'd say roughly 50% of game time is spent on combat encounters, because my players and I favour long fights (encounters are relatively few, they just tend to go 5-7 turns).
They leveled from 1-3 in the first 10 weeks, I am doing milestone and they are perfectly happy with the pacing, the party is 8 players so things run a little slower just to give everyone space to do their thing. One of the players is in another campaign and has complained that that DM is leveling them far too quickly.
It depends on the players, the type of campaign you want to run and the story you are telling, I historically hav always run campaigns with a low progression, even with XP leveling in other systems I change the XP levels, there are 2 main reasons for this in DND first there are a load of low level monsters that don’t get much love because characters level too rapidly to make them a threat and 2 as you progress up the levels the game becomes hard to make challenging. Especially with a party of 8 :)
There's no right or wrong speed to level a party at, it depends on what they enjoy - 8 players is a really big party, so I guess things tend to take a lot more time than they do with a smaller party (my current party is 5 players, but I've played in a game with 8 and it was much slower progression wise).
One of the weaknesses of XP I'm finding is that in the mid levels it's really very quick, so I'm considering reducing monster XP a bit to slow things down.
So one of my homebrew online campaigns has just reached its 18 month milestone, generally getting online once a week for 4 hours with just a few breaks. The party are just about to face the first BBEG and at that point will milestone up to level 6.
So how long is your current campaign and what level are your characters at?
Your PCs are averaging 62.4 hours per level of play, including levels 1-3?
Wow, that is one slow running campaign. I assume that there must be an absolute tonne of RP involved, or do you just really enjoy the low levels?
My game is about to hit session 35, starting January 2021. Average session length is 4.5 hours, not including breaks. The characters are about to reach level 11. I use standard XP, and about 70% of XP awarded is from monster kills. I'd say roughly 50% of game time is spent on combat encounters, because my players and I favour long fights (encounters are relatively few, they just tend to go 5-7 turns).
They leveled from 1-3 in the first 10 weeks, I am doing milestone and they are perfectly happy with the pacing, the party is 8 players so things run a little slower just to give everyone space to do their thing. One of the players is in another campaign and has complained that that DM is leveling them far too quickly.
It depends on the players, the type of campaign you want to run and the story you are telling, I historically hav always run campaigns with a low progression, even with XP leveling in other systems I change the XP levels, there are 2 main reasons for this in DND first there are a load of low level monsters that don’t get much love because characters level too rapidly to make them a threat and 2 as you progress up the levels the game becomes hard to make challenging. Especially with a party of 8 :)
There's no right or wrong speed to level a party at, it depends on what they enjoy - 8 players is a really big party, so I guess things tend to take a lot more time than they do with a smaller party (my current party is 5 players, but I've played in a game with 8 and it was much slower progression wise).
One of the weaknesses of XP I'm finding is that in the mid levels it's really very quick, so I'm considering reducing monster XP a bit to slow things down.
For almost 20 years I have done a version of milestone leveling without even realizing I was doing it, either by tweaking how much XP I have to make sure a level was hit when I wanted it to be, or by just doing milestones myself before they even became a common thing, I can’t remember the first system I played that had a milestone equivalent. I have been playing TTRPGs 30 years now so guess those formative years really put me off XP lol. I would say you are half right, there is no right speed to level the party up, there are lots of wrong ones lol. It depends on the party but I have seen DMs get it wrong enough, either moving too slow for the players and not picking up on it, or going too fast for the campaign and causing themselves problems, or too fast for the players meaning they don’t ever get to explore and get to grips with the level they are on now. This is especially true for Spell casters who can pick different spells each day, clerics, bards etc. I find I like to give enough time that every player has had time to try out there new stuff at the level we are at now enough to get to grips with it, experience something new and then think about the next level point.
But yes with 8 the game slows down, especially remotely, just making sure everyone is happy and no one’s has anything they want to do can take a little extra time, which is fine it is what I bought into. I think it says a lot that with a party of 8 in the 18 months we have had 8 present for 80% of the time, and never had fewer then 6 turn up (in that case the missing characters are jaegurd) and when I touch base with everyone no one feels like they don’t get to have an input. I will be honest when I started the game I expected, just from past experience, the party to naturally whittle down to 5 or 6 lol.
Oh and the story I have been telling us slowed it down, Aboleth enslaving the population of a town, so I needed loads of RP moments early on to establish 10 or so NPCs so the party could then identify differences in behavior and actions and get suspicious as to the cause.
I have been playing TTRPGs 30 years now so guess those formative years really put me off XP lol.
OT: Not every game uses xp the same way. That threw me for a loop the first time I encountered it. After years of playing D&D I was like "What do you mean I only get 3 xp for today?!?!"
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
I've been running an online Curse of Strahd (gradually and increasingly modified as I get more annoyed by the adventure as written) for just over two years now, though it's only three hours every other week so, with missed sessions, it's only up to session 47, and the PCs are level 8.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
So one of my homebrew online campaigns has just reached its 18 month milestone, generally getting online once a week for 4 hours with just a few breaks. The party are just about to face the first BBEG and at that point will milestone up to level 6.
So how long is your current campaign and what level are your characters at?
My current campaign (A mix of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and some smaller adventures sprinkled to enhance the main storyline.) has been going on since November-- similar to one a week playing-- and they are at 3rd level. Hopefully, if the players make the right choices they will level up within the next three games.
Were on session nine of curse of strahd (we play twice a month since we all work seven's, and missed a week do to two players visiting family). Players started at level four and are currently level seven. Milestone leveling and curse of strahd should end with them hitting either 13 or 14 at their current path.. and yes I know that's not how the module is ran... when they said curse of strahd... well I went a little zany okay so sue me.
Edited to add:
The sessions last between four to five hours max (and we've never hit the max often) and we have distractions that happen during play because thats just how our group works *shrugs* (also one session their was a forty five minute hag conversation, so that happened.
I have two campaigns both at level 11 right now.
One (Eberron) has been running since March 2020, so we just passed two years, but we took a 4 month break in the middle of COVID before picking back up. They'll probably finish at level 14 this fall.
My other Campaign started July 2020, and they're level 11 and about to finish Descent into Avernus by the summer.
Current campaign just ended two weeks ago. The meeting schedule was mostly twice a month with about 8 months of meetings once a week; sessions last approx 5 hours. It went for 36 months in total and the players were level 20 just before they took down the BBEG.
I'm running a homebrew campaign that uses a bunch of dragons and stuff. It's been 2 months and my players are level 2.
This is my first campaign as a DM, so it's been interesting.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.We have been playing once a week at five hours sessions since early march last year. Started at level 1, half the party got to level 6 in the last coulple of session and the other half is a couple thousnads xp away. It was a LMoP/DoIP campaign that got out of hand with homebrew. It is supposed to end one way or another in the next 8 im game days (so hopelly a couple of months irl) and then my brother will dm for us tyranny of dragons/hoard of the dragon queen.
We've been playing weekly with 3-hour sessions since July 2020, taking breaks around the holidays. Party just leveled up to 10, after session 70. They started at level 4.
My collection of knuckleheads likes to RP and banter in-character a ton, so maybe one day we'll actually finish this campaign...lol.
The campaign I am currently DMing is going on 22sh months of almost weekly 3 hour sessions, and the party is 12th level. (We started at 10th though.)
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
We have been playing for about a year now, about 2-3 times a month, 2-3 hours per session and the party is level 8. 3 PCs. We are just over halfway through the entire campaign (set in the Moonshaes, predominantly using the BG Moonshaes materials with some others thrown in and some written entirely by me). At the end, they should be level 12.
Current campaign is homebrew, meeting about three times a month for the last 6-8 months. Party started at 1st level and is roughly halfway between 5th and 6th level now.
Your PCs are averaging 62.4 hours per level of play, including levels 1-3?
Wow, that is one slow running campaign. I assume that there must be an absolute tonne of RP involved, or do you just really enjoy the low levels?
My game is about to hit session 35, starting January 2021. Average session length is 4.5 hours, not including breaks. The characters are about to reach level 11. I use standard XP, and about 70% of XP awarded is from monster kills. I'd say roughly 50% of game time is spent on combat encounters, because my players and I favour long fights (encounters are relatively few, they just tend to go 5-7 turns).
That's about 288 hours of gameplay, and they've only gone from level 10 to level 12?
That's a pretty interesting way to play. Do your players not want to level up characters? For my players it's a big part of their enjoyment.
They leveled from 1-3 in the first 10 weeks, I am doing milestone and they are perfectly happy with the pacing, the party is 8 players so things run a little slower just to give everyone space to do their thing. One of the players is in another campaign and has complained that that DM is leveling them far too quickly.
It depends on the players, the type of campaign you want to run and the story you are telling, I historically hav always run campaigns with a low progression, even with XP leveling in other systems I change the XP levels, there are 2 main reasons for this in DND first there are a load of low level monsters that don’t get much love because characters level too rapidly to make them a threat and 2 as you progress up the levels the game becomes hard to make challenging. Especially with a party of 8 :)
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
There's no right or wrong speed to level a party at, it depends on what they enjoy - 8 players is a really big party, so I guess things tend to take a lot more time than they do with a smaller party (my current party is 5 players, but I've played in a game with 8 and it was much slower progression wise).
One of the weaknesses of XP I'm finding is that in the mid levels it's really very quick, so I'm considering reducing monster XP a bit to slow things down.
One campaign has been running for four years, the party is level 7.
The other campaign has been going for a bit over a year, and the party is level 9.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
For almost 20 years I have done a version of milestone leveling without even realizing I was doing it, either by tweaking how much XP I have to make sure a level was hit when I wanted it to be, or by just doing milestones myself before they even became a common thing, I can’t remember the first system I played that had a milestone equivalent. I have been playing TTRPGs 30 years now so guess those formative years really put me off XP lol. I would say you are half right, there is no right speed to level the party up, there are lots of wrong ones lol. It depends on the party but I have seen DMs get it wrong enough, either moving too slow for the players and not picking up on it, or going too fast for the campaign and causing themselves problems, or too fast for the players meaning they don’t ever get to explore and get to grips with the level they are on now. This is especially true for Spell casters who can pick different spells each day, clerics, bards etc. I find I like to give enough time that every player has had time to try out there new stuff at the level we are at now enough to get to grips with it, experience something new and then think about the next level point.
But yes with 8 the game slows down, especially remotely, just making sure everyone is happy and no one’s has anything they want to do can take a little extra time, which is fine it is what I bought into. I think it says a lot that with a party of 8 in the 18 months we have had 8 present for 80% of the time, and never had fewer then 6 turn up (in that case the missing characters are jaegurd) and when I touch base with everyone no one feels like they don’t get to have an input. I will be honest when I started the game I expected, just from past experience, the party to naturally whittle down to 5 or 6 lol.
Oh and the story I have been telling us slowed it down, Aboleth enslaving the population of a town, so I needed loads of RP moments early on to establish 10 or so NPCs so the party could then identify differences in behavior and actions and get suspicious as to the cause.
OT: Not every game uses xp the same way. That threw me for a loop the first time I encountered it. After years of playing D&D I was like "What do you mean I only get 3 xp for today?!?!"
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
I've been running an online Curse of Strahd (gradually and increasingly modified as I get more annoyed by the adventure as written) for just over two years now, though it's only three hours every other week so, with missed sessions, it's only up to session 47, and the PCs are level 8.