I am currently running a campaign in which all characters have written backstories with clear goals in mind. Besides that the world has a larger problem going on that is slowly building up and will intertwine with some of the goals of the players.
I expect to eventually have all their backstory goals fulfilled and the main campaign arc ended. The question I have is, how long would something like this normally last? How many sessions would you aim for? I am mainly wondering this because I try to gauge how often I should allow the characters to level up (we are using milestones).
We are a group of 5 players and 1 DM, we play every week for about 4 hours.
I personally run a variation of milestone leveling that works as follows the party does a number of adventures equal to their level to level up, until beyond 5th level, at beyond 5th level it just takes 5 adventures to level up. Assuming an adventure every session it would take 90 sessions to get to level 20 using this. That's around 21 months, three months less than a full two years, assuming you run a session every week. If you run XP it will probably take a little less time, but any level 1 to 20 campaign will take at least a year of weekly sessions.
I'd recommend for a longer campaign to run levels 1-15 as levels 16-20 are nearly impossible to balance around and the length of a level 1-20 campaign gives way too much time for something to go wrong with the players (either scheduling-wise or for interpersonal issues to crop up). You will likely have to replace a few players in a level 1-15 game.
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call me Anna or Kerns, (she/her), usually a DM, lgbtq+ friendly
It is an unanswerable question. "It depends" is the only appropriate answer. Is it a Milestone based campaign? Is advancement based on XP? How much RP is there in a session, versus stuff that gains XP, or are players rewarded for RP? Or a DM may say arbitrarily that "players level every 5 sessions", at which point the answer is obvious.
There are an infinite amount of answers to the question.
Honestly this is very subjective and also depends on the genre of fantasy you're interested in and the kinds of problems you want to throw at your players. The early levels lend themselves more to man-vs-environment, horror or small-scale local problems. Level 5-10 characters feel more like elite athletes and combat veterans. By 11+ they start feeling more like superheroes and by 17-20 they could potentially go toe-to-toe with godlike beings.
If you want them to feel like bad-asses quickly then get through the early levels fast, but think about how high you want them to go or they might outgrow the main conflict of your story.
My general rule is that I want leveling up to be common enough that players have time to get used to how they play and try out their new toys at a level, but not so long that they feel stagnant, though I've never run a full level 1-20 campaign (closest I've come was 1-17 in 4e). I would avoid progression faster than 2-3 sessions per level, but you can easily go slower if you have enough content, the players are having fun, and you think your play group will be stable for long enough.
I agree with Pantagruel. You need to have some time with one level to appreciate the change to another level... So at least a couple of sessions for each level.
If you work out the math, at 2.5 sessions per level (the mid-point between 2 and 3), x 20 levels, a 1-20 campaign would be about 50 sessions, or 1 year if playing weekly, 2 years if playing bi-weekly.
Hm... Right now my campaign is not moving quite that quickly.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
It massively depends on the individual campaign. My game has been running weekly for about two and a half years, and the party just hit 7th level last week.
Personally, I go 2 adventures per level until level 5, and 4 per level after that. (My sessions are usually around 4 hours and cover a full adventuring day.) So 72 sessions. That said, I usually end campaigns around level 5, and have never gone higher than 11.
Running two campaigns - one with milestones for about a year. Those players just hit level 6. The other one is with XP and has been going like 1.5 years. Those players are at level 5. Both have been weekly (probably averages biweekly with missed games) with 2 hour sessions.
While I appreciate the romance of going 1-20, I’d say don’t tie yourself to that. Tell your story, work in the backstories, and let the characters get to whatever level they get to. Then let it end when it’s ready to end. If you only make to 16, great. If you have to start giving out epic boons for going over 20, great.
Otherwise, if you force it to go to 20 exactly, you risk either having to drag things out too long to fill space, or hurry them too much and gloss over things to end in time. Let the story be as long as it needs to be, and let the levels fall where they may.
It massively depends on the individual campaign. My game has been running weekly for about two and a half years, and the party just hit 7th level last week.
Same.
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?"
As people have pointed out, there is no clear answer. What I would suggest is asking what kind of game you and your player want to play. Are you all about epic adventures over long periods of time or are you more interested in "street level" adventures? Remember that you don't have to spend an equal amount of time on each level. Usually you tend to go through the first three or so levels fairly quick and then you progress through the levels slower sinc ethere are other ways than levelling up to award progress. If you feel taht it's the most fun at around level 10 you can stay there for quite some time. On the other hand, if the story demands that you progress to higher levels you shouldn't hold off for too long.
It also depends on how much downtime you prefer. It can be fun and sometimes make a lot of sense if you take long (in-game) breaks in your adventuring. I wouldn't recommend leveling up during downtime since that's kind of boring, especially if you're using milestones.
In a game I'm currently in the characters have gone from level 1 to level 11 in just a few months of in-game (practically no downtime) time but we've been playing for a few years which is totally fine for the kind of game it is.
I look to give out a level every 3 sessions or so. On average.
The Adventurers League rules state that your DM will inform you when you have gained a level, otherwise you gain one after 4 hours of playing, or 8 hours of playing beyond level 4. If you are looking for something "official" that's about as close as possible.
I've been in a campaign that has been running for three years now? A lot of that time has been mainly waiting, delays and actually getting back on the ball again with lots of complicated RL stuff getting in the way. With lock-down we've had an easier time getting time and having sessions together but we've been trying to rush it some more in order to much more play time in. Role-play being the weakness of our group; we can do it well but we have a very hard time keeping it going long enough to have enough fun out of it so we're just back to "DM! More monsters to kill!"
At this rate? I would wager a year from now that the campaign will be done. Our DM is getting a bit of burnout with this one so he wants to get it done and over with since we're nearing the end. His hope is that we'll be level 20 by the time for the final battle but we will see.
I have recently finished DMing a campaign from 1-20 and it took around 2.5 years to finish with meeting every other week (with a few weeks over the course being taken off for things we couldn't help.)
Our group is me (DM) and 6 players. And we used milestone.
The 15-20 stretch was rushed through (each milestone was 2 level ups until 19) and they were happening about 2 sessions apart.
What we all agreed on is that once you legitimately play a character for 2.5 years from level 1-15~ you inevitably start to get tired of them. Not necessarily like "uggh I hate this character" but more like a "hey, wouldn't it be fun to play something different?" So by the time we were at 15, the party (and ME) were ready to move on to something new.
I see people on the thread talking about balancing issues in tier 4 but I think that's due to the CR encounter balancing system underestimating PCs. I just started throwing multiple crazy high CR enemies at them and just "letting the players deal with it". At that point, they have so many tricks up their sleeves that there's usually nothing to worry about lol
I have recently finished DMing a campaign from 1-20 and it took around 2.5 years to finish with meeting every other week (with a few weeks over the course being taken off for things we couldn't help.)
Our group is me (DM) and 6 players. And we used milestone.
The 15-20 stretch was rushed through (each milestone was 2 level ups until 19) and they were happening about 2 sessions apart.
So did you rush the last few level ups because you really wanted to play at higher levels or because you needed to be at high levels to finish the campaign? Was there some reason why you couldn't just have the grand finale sooner so that you wouldn't have grown tired f your characters, as you say?
I have recently finished DMing a campaign from 1-20 and it took around 2.5 years to finish with meeting every other week (with a few weeks over the course being taken off for things we couldn't help.)
Our group is me (DM) and 6 players. And we used milestone.
The 15-20 stretch was rushed through (each milestone was 2 level ups until 19) and they were happening about 2 sessions apart.
So did you rush the last few level ups because you really wanted to play at higher levels or because you needed to be at high levels to finish the campaign? Was there some reason why you couldn't just have the grand finale sooner so that you wouldn't have grown tired f your characters, as you say?
Pretty much, my BBEG was completely homebrewed with a party of like 8 level 20's (some people's alt characters coming back). They technically fought it at level 15, and got it about 1/2 way done before they fled, trained, and refought it.
Pretty much, I wanted them to have the feeling of losing, training montage, and coming back to laydown the revenge smack down in a REALLY heavy cinematic ending. This was our first campaign that got this far from level 1 so there was a lot of emotionally charged moments like flash backs mid battle giving crazy buffs and summoning NPC's they met along the way.
It only felt right that this campaign ended at the max leaving them feel like demigods (which IMO is the true purpose of Level 20).
Now in the current campaign which takes place 150~ years after this one, their characters ARE seen as essentially gods/folklore/Urban legends so it was worth it having them get those levels.
My answer to this is what do the players want? Has a conversation been had with the players about the rate of progress? I know I would personally hate any campaign where I played 10 sessions or so between levels. It would drive me insane and would seriously impact my decision as to whether I would want to start that campaign. But at the same time I probably wouldn't want to level up every session. Others may feel very different and want progress to be slow, or super fast.
I tend to find levelling up no less than once every 5 sessions a reasonable balance for "most" players, with potentially faster levelling later on. Though how you run this, and if you have them progress in non-level based ways, will change how this works.
All in all, I would just suggest talking to the players and finding out what type of game they want to play and just making sure you cover those bases as best as you feel confident.
While I appreciate the romance of going 1-20, I’d say don’t tie yourself to that. Tell your story, work in the backstories, and let the characters get to whatever level they get to. Then let it end when it’s ready to end. If you only make to 16, great. If you have to start giving out epic boons for going over 20, great.
Otherwise, if you force it to go to 20 exactly, you risk either having to drag things out too long to fill space, or hurry them too much and gloss over things to end in time. Let the story be as long as it needs to be, and let the levels fall where they may.
^^^^ This
If a PC builds a character out to level 20 before the campaign starts, 99% of the time the character is not actually going to end up growing in the same way.
Campaigns are similar. They should not be rigidly planned out every step of the way. Being able to adjust and react to things as you go is a huge strength of D&D. Just play and don't sweat it. The handy thing about milestones is that you are not beholden to any strict structure, you can just level up as it seems appropriate. That may happen quickly early on and much more slowly in later levels. Or vice versa depending on the needs of the narrative.
Dear Dungeon masters,
I am currently running a campaign in which all characters have written backstories with clear goals in mind. Besides that the world has a larger problem going on that is slowly building up and will intertwine with some of the goals of the players.
I expect to eventually have all their backstory goals fulfilled and the main campaign arc ended. The question I have is, how long would something like this normally last? How many sessions would you aim for?
I am mainly wondering this because I try to gauge how often I should allow the characters to level up (we are using milestones).
We are a group of 5 players and 1 DM, we play every week for about 4 hours.
I'd love to hear what you people think!
I personally run a variation of milestone leveling that works as follows the party does a number of adventures equal to their level to level up, until beyond 5th level, at beyond 5th level it just takes 5 adventures to level up. Assuming an adventure every session it would take 90 sessions to get to level 20 using this. That's around 21 months, three months less than a full two years, assuming you run a session every week. If you run XP it will probably take a little less time, but any level 1 to 20 campaign will take at least a year of weekly sessions.
I'd recommend for a longer campaign to run levels 1-15 as levels 16-20 are nearly impossible to balance around and the length of a level 1-20 campaign gives way too much time for something to go wrong with the players (either scheduling-wise or for interpersonal issues to crop up). You will likely have to replace a few players in a level 1-15 game.
call me Anna or Kerns, (she/her), usually a DM, lgbtq+ friendly
It is an unanswerable question. "It depends" is the only appropriate answer. Is it a Milestone based campaign? Is advancement based on XP? How much RP is there in a session, versus stuff that gains XP, or are players rewarded for RP? Or a DM may say arbitrarily that "players level every 5 sessions", at which point the answer is obvious.
There are an infinite amount of answers to the question.
Honestly this is very subjective and also depends on the genre of fantasy you're interested in and the kinds of problems you want to throw at your players. The early levels lend themselves more to man-vs-environment, horror or small-scale local problems. Level 5-10 characters feel more like elite athletes and combat veterans. By 11+ they start feeling more like superheroes and by 17-20 they could potentially go toe-to-toe with godlike beings.
If you want them to feel like bad-asses quickly then get through the early levels fast, but think about how high you want them to go or they might outgrow the main conflict of your story.
The Forum Infestation (TM)
My general rule is that I want leveling up to be common enough that players have time to get used to how they play and try out their new toys at a level, but not so long that they feel stagnant, though I've never run a full level 1-20 campaign (closest I've come was 1-17 in 4e). I would avoid progression faster than 2-3 sessions per level, but you can easily go slower if you have enough content, the players are having fun, and you think your play group will be stable for long enough.
I agree with Pantagruel. You need to have some time with one level to appreciate the change to another level... So at least a couple of sessions for each level.
If you work out the math, at 2.5 sessions per level (the mid-point between 2 and 3), x 20 levels, a 1-20 campaign would be about 50 sessions, or 1 year if playing weekly, 2 years if playing bi-weekly.
Hm... Right now my campaign is not moving quite that quickly.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
It massively depends on the individual campaign. My game has been running weekly for about two and a half years, and the party just hit 7th level last week.
Personally, I go 2 adventures per level until level 5, and 4 per level after that. (My sessions are usually around 4 hours and cover a full adventuring day.) So 72 sessions. That said, I usually end campaigns around level 5, and have never gone higher than 11.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
Running two campaigns - one with milestones for about a year. Those players just hit level 6. The other one is with XP and has been going like 1.5 years. Those players are at level 5. Both have been weekly (probably averages biweekly with missed games) with 2 hour sessions.
While I appreciate the romance of going 1-20, I’d say don’t tie yourself to that. Tell your story, work in the backstories, and let the characters get to whatever level they get to. Then let it end when it’s ready to end. If you only make to 16, great. If you have to start giving out epic boons for going over 20, great.
Otherwise, if you force it to go to 20 exactly, you risk either having to drag things out too long to fill space, or hurry them too much and gloss over things to end in time.
Let the story be as long as it needs to be, and let the levels fall where they may.
Same.
"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 do 1 or 2 sessions per level at 1 - 5 and 3 or 4 session per level after that.
If I was to make my campaign go from 1 - 20, we have sessions every 2 weeks, so it'd take about 2 years for the whole campaign.
As people have pointed out, there is no clear answer. What I would suggest is asking what kind of game you and your player want to play. Are you all about epic adventures over long periods of time or are you more interested in "street level" adventures? Remember that you don't have to spend an equal amount of time on each level. Usually you tend to go through the first three or so levels fairly quick and then you progress through the levels slower sinc ethere are other ways than levelling up to award progress. If you feel taht it's the most fun at around level 10 you can stay there for quite some time. On the other hand, if the story demands that you progress to higher levels you shouldn't hold off for too long.
It also depends on how much downtime you prefer. It can be fun and sometimes make a lot of sense if you take long (in-game) breaks in your adventuring. I wouldn't recommend leveling up during downtime since that's kind of boring, especially if you're using milestones.
In a game I'm currently in the characters have gone from level 1 to level 11 in just a few months of in-game (practically no downtime) time but we've been playing for a few years which is totally fine for the kind of game it is.
Hope this helps.
I look to give out a level every 3 sessions or so. On average.
The Adventurers League rules state that your DM will inform you when you have gained a level, otherwise you gain one after 4 hours of playing, or 8 hours of playing beyond level 4. If you are looking for something "official" that's about as close as possible.
I've been in a campaign that has been running for three years now? A lot of that time has been mainly waiting, delays and actually getting back on the ball again with lots of complicated RL stuff getting in the way. With lock-down we've had an easier time getting time and having sessions together but we've been trying to rush it some more in order to much more play time in. Role-play being the weakness of our group; we can do it well but we have a very hard time keeping it going long enough to have enough fun out of it so we're just back to "DM! More monsters to kill!"
At this rate? I would wager a year from now that the campaign will be done. Our DM is getting a bit of burnout with this one so he wants to get it done and over with since we're nearing the end. His hope is that we'll be level 20 by the time for the final battle but we will see.
I have recently finished DMing a campaign from 1-20 and it took around 2.5 years to finish with meeting every other week (with a few weeks over the course being taken off for things we couldn't help.)
Our group is me (DM) and 6 players. And we used milestone.
The 15-20 stretch was rushed through (each milestone was 2 level ups until 19) and they were happening about 2 sessions apart.
What we all agreed on is that once you legitimately play a character for 2.5 years from level 1-15~ you inevitably start to get tired of them. Not necessarily like "uggh I hate this character" but more like a "hey, wouldn't it be fun to play something different?" So by the time we were at 15, the party (and ME) were ready to move on to something new.
I see people on the thread talking about balancing issues in tier 4 but I think that's due to the CR encounter balancing system underestimating PCs. I just started throwing multiple crazy high CR enemies at them and just "letting the players deal with it". At that point, they have so many tricks up their sleeves that there's usually nothing to worry about lol
So did you rush the last few level ups because you really wanted to play at higher levels or because you needed to be at high levels to finish the campaign? Was there some reason why you couldn't just have the grand finale sooner so that you wouldn't have grown tired f your characters, as you say?
Pretty much, my BBEG was completely homebrewed with a party of like 8 level 20's (some people's alt characters coming back). They technically fought it at level 15, and got it about 1/2 way done before they fled, trained, and refought it.
Pretty much, I wanted them to have the feeling of losing, training montage, and coming back to laydown the revenge smack down in a REALLY heavy cinematic ending.
This was our first campaign that got this far from level 1 so there was a lot of emotionally charged moments like flash backs mid battle giving crazy buffs and summoning NPC's they met along the way.
It only felt right that this campaign ended at the max leaving them feel like demigods (which IMO is the true purpose of Level 20).
Now in the current campaign which takes place 150~ years after this one, their characters ARE seen as essentially gods/folklore/Urban legends so it was worth it having them get those levels.
My answer to this is what do the players want? Has a conversation been had with the players about the rate of progress? I know I would personally hate any campaign where I played 10 sessions or so between levels. It would drive me insane and would seriously impact my decision as to whether I would want to start that campaign. But at the same time I probably wouldn't want to level up every session. Others may feel very different and want progress to be slow, or super fast.
I tend to find levelling up no less than once every 5 sessions a reasonable balance for "most" players, with potentially faster levelling later on. Though how you run this, and if you have them progress in non-level based ways, will change how this works.
All in all, I would just suggest talking to the players and finding out what type of game they want to play and just making sure you cover those bases as best as you feel confident.
^^^^ This
If a PC builds a character out to level 20 before the campaign starts, 99% of the time the character is not actually going to end up growing in the same way.
Campaigns are similar. They should not be rigidly planned out every step of the way. Being able to adjust and react to things as you go is a huge strength of D&D. Just play and don't sweat it. The handy thing about milestones is that you are not beholden to any strict structure, you can just level up as it seems appropriate. That may happen quickly early on and much more slowly in later levels. Or vice versa depending on the needs of the narrative.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm