It's worth distinguishing between advancement being quick in game and out of game, as the original post was about in-game time flow, not out of game. The number of sessions required to reach a given level won't change if you have to spend more downtime between combats.
on the contrary, advancement in-game is entirely dependant on out of game advancement. at least when it comes to leveling. a player who plays every week will be leveling up and finishing his campaign much sooner thena guy who plays every 2 weeks. heck i know people who play once a month. and i know people who play once a year. also in your sentence you seem to hink only combat gives XP. thats not the case ! a campaign shouldn'T be going on for more then 3 years. imagine critical role and their 5 year campaign. the only reason it was going for 5 years was that level 1 to 9 had taken them 2 years playing on and off for about once a month. sometimes two. after that only 2 years were necessary to go from 9 to 20. and thats with slowed advancement !
the reality being... most campaigns do not get off the ground more then about 2 years. after that people come and go. my original group of 5 years ago, has changed drastically from then. while i maintain a group of players every friday night. its hard to keep players going if they don't want to continu going. one of the player was 12 when he joined our table... 3 years later, he left... he wasn't into d&d anymore. je liked his time, he thanked us, but he had to concentrate on other things he liked and that was sports. some friends who came to play, played like 5 games and then decided their life didn't allow them to go on fridays... they started their own games insteads on weekdays.
imagine if every campaigns had to go for 10 years... i can guarantee that none of those campaigns would ever finish ! they'd lose their players way before the end of that campaign. i have players right now... who have never gone the distance before... even myself who has been playing for 30 years, had never completed a campaign until about 2 years ago. and my new campaign has been running for 1 year and a half now. those players are wondereing if the campaign is about to end or not. they are not used to go that far. they have never ever completed a campaign before. they like it, they totally enjoy the pacing and all. but the fear of the campaign getting blown off by players leaving is very real !
the way i solved that problem, as i tell them... simple, my game is coop in and coop out. if we're missing players, we play anyway... heck i'd play with only 1 player if that player really wanted to. the players are fine with that. and if new players comes in, then they can just slide right in. if they leave, they can just leave and thats it. the real problem is that too often DMs don't want to play if they are missing 1 or 2 players out of 5 6. thats a mistake if you ask me. if you wait to have all your players at all times, then it just won't happen too often. and thats is coming from a guy who's been playing on and off for 30 years. on and off because i had to cancel way too mnay games due to 1 or 2 players never being able to come to the game. at some point, i had enough of it... i wanted to play and put my foot down... we're playing reguardless of if you come or not. i'm through not having my fun or my players not having their fun because one player is missing.
now we all have fun, sure some players miss once in a while due to work or school or whatever else... but in the end the others all had fun and when that person comes back, they get to listen to the incredible story of the others. just yesterday we played with 4 players and me as the DM. 3 people were missing.we almost were missing the fourth who arrived late as usual. funny story... the game advances much faster when there is less people. they had fun, they fought a purple worm random encounter, met some druids in random encounters. because they rolled natural ones on their d20 random encounters. then they arrived at the volcano they were supposed to visit to gain the artifact. they discovered an entire fortress full of wyverns and giants as well as dwarves... yeah flying above the mountain to avoid every encounter didn't go in their favor once at the top. but they never realised there would be a fortress att he top. they never thought the volcano would be inhabited. thats where we ended up. if i had dismissed the game, these players would of felt bad not playing. the one who arrived late already can't make it every games, imagine if i had to cancel a game when he can make it. it would be devastating for him.
moral of the story... don't let one or 2 players missing stop your gaming. i can understand if you preffer to have 3 or 4 players coming in. unlike me who would DM for just 1. but... please think of your players... some really want to play and its their way of letting the job steam go off. don't remove that from them.
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It's worth distinguishing between advancement being quick in game and out of game, as the original post was about in-game time flow, not out of game. The number of sessions required to reach a given level won't change if you have to spend more downtime between combats.
on the contrary, advancement in-game is entirely dependant on out of game advancement. at least when it comes to leveling. a player who plays every week will be leveling up and finishing his campaign much sooner thena guy who plays every 2 weeks.
Which is totally missing the point. There are three different time scales for advancement: how much time passes in-game, how much play time is involved, and how much time passes out of game. If PCs gain a level every session, but every session takes four hours and covers a year in game and you play every month, reaching level 10 takes 9 in-game years (slow), 36 play hours (fast), and 9 out-of-game months (medium).
Like a few other posters here I started playing this great game in 1976. Unlike many of them I stopped in 1985....And now Im back ! Read this thread with interest and a little puzzlement. I started a campaign a month ago - playing 3 sessions so far, and my players just scraped level 2, next level xp gap is three times the size.
I cannot see how they will hit level 20 in the time spans talked about, but hey maybe I am wrong and if I am - guess what - I will change the rules to make it harder to level...
There seems to be a weird fixation ive seen in these forums that we must stick to the rules at all costs....well we didnt in the old days...they even have a name for this "homebrew" implying that its somehow illicit. Well soz.....so imho if you feel the pace in your campaign is too fast....slow it down by changing the rules / alter your world appropriately.
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Udain, I'm right there with you. I came back to the game because my son started playing 3.5e. When he switched to 5e he started DM-ing. I started looking over his shoulder and offering tips to worldbuilding. He took most of my ideas. Now a friend wants to introduce D&D to his kids. I decided, 'what the heck' and so I've joined in their campaign with half adults and half kids.
We played the first session and leveled up to level 2 after defeating a couple zombies, skeletons and three shadows, then three harpies, and then a group of goblins teamed up with a group of kobolds that tried to burn down a village we stayed in overnight. In the second session we defeated a Hydra and that got us to level 3. In the third session we defeated a band of worgs and goblin riders, and then we went on to scare away the rest from their lair. We defeated twelve zombies and a guardian something that was a watered down version of a Beholder. After the third session we had hardly made a dent in progressing to fourth level.
At one session a week, we wouldn't likely get to tenth level unless the DM decides to make this a much more combat heavy game. We don't appear to get XP for anything but combat. He is using the milestone leveling system so the whole party stays at the same level. As a Bard, leveling only from combat is not the best for me, but it is necessary to keep the party together. I think if the DM were awarding XP for RP, I'd be a full level ahead of the other (players) characters already and he doesn't want that, and I don't know that I would either.
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Level 1 advances to level 2 in 4-6 hours of game play. Level 2 advances to level 3 in 6-8 hours of game play. Level 3 advances to level 4 in 12-16 hours, 4 to 5 takes 24-30 hours. After that it normalizes with most levels taking 12-16 hours. Part of this is how experience gaps are done, part of this is both encounters and intraparty roleplay takes increasingly longer as it gets more complicated, intimate, subtle, and numerous, and part of this is how I DM, which is to try getting them to level 3 quickly while they take care of "local" problems, and than they get into one of two main plotlines, which will require more than just encounters to uncover.
Interestingly enough, when I'm a player, the DM tends to do something fairly close as far as pace of play is involved. Course the core of the group has been playing together for a couple of decades off and on.
Level 1 advances to level 2 in 4-6 hours of game play. Level 2 advances to level 3 in 6-8 hours of game play. Level 3 advances to level 4 in 12-16 hours, 4 to 5 takes 24-30 hours. After that it normalizes with most levels taking 12-16 hours. Part of this is how experience gaps are done, part of this is both encounters and intraparty roleplay takes increasingly longer as it gets more complicated, intimate, subtle, and numerous, and part of this is how I DM, which is to try getting them to level 3 quickly while they take care of "local" problems, and than they get into one of two main plotlines, which will require more than just encounters to uncover.
Interestingly enough, when I'm a player, the DM tends to do something fairly close as far as pace of play is involved. Course the core of the group has been playing together for a couple of decades off and on.
if you ever played with my groups... you'd get that this is next to impossible to do as the group tends not to take decisions by themselves or take an unconsiderate amount of time to decide. aka, let's decide next session. and then next session is half the session for them having to considerate the new stuff they thought about in the meantime before the session... sometimes games do not go forward and i am not the kind of DM that just blatantly say "hey this happen cause you are undecided". i respect my players. unfortunately... we're playing 4hours a week and sometimes it takes upward of 7-8 sessions before a leveling happen. i'm trying to stick to 4. which is level up per month. which means about 1 to 3 in about a month. then like 5e says int he book, trying to level up every 3 4 sessions afterward. so basically a campaign should be finished from 1 to 20 in about... a year and a half. just to show how whack this game has been... we're reaching that year and a half mark soon and we are barely level 10 about to be 11. so i'm far off my mark with this group. whats funny is how undeciding they are. they know, they try to be going forward, but somehow there is always something keeping them up from going forward. something they are doing, not me. they are in an open world and as i said... "they choose" where to go. i think the thing is, they have too much on their plate at this point. but thats because they didn't do a thing at the beginning and decided to act only when time was running out. and now they fear losing the world they live in because of their indecision.
as an exemple... the same group was the worst power rangers ever. because yes, i did a power ranger esque game with them... they literally skipped every fights because they feared whatever consequences they thought would be hapenning if they did participate. i literally told them, if this was a power ranger show, you'd be the worst of all the shows. they all laughed at this.
so yeah the problem with these calculation, is that tey are entirely dependant on the group you are playing with. some takes more times then others and others would go faster then some others.
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It's worth distinguishing between advancement being quick in game and out of game, as the original post was about in-game time flow, not out of game. The number of sessions required to reach a given level won't change if you have to spend more downtime between combats.
on the contrary, advancement in-game is entirely dependant on out of game advancement. at least when it comes to leveling. a player who plays every week will be leveling up and finishing his campaign much sooner thena guy who plays every 2 weeks.
Which is totally missing the point. There are three different time scales for advancement: how much time passes in-game, how much play time is involved, and how much time passes out of game. If PCs gain a level every session, but every session takes four hours and covers a year in game and you play every month, reaching level 10 takes 9 in-game years (slow), 36 play hours (fast), and 9 out-of-game months (medium).
you know game time is irrelevant considering how fast things go ? i mean, we have a little over a year done on this campaign and my players barely passed the 2 month in game time. seriously, time is whatever we want it to be in the game so why calculate that ? 4 hour sessions doesn'T represent 4 hours in the game. if that was the case then the players would be gone every fights when they start to argue about strategies. in my games, a 4 hour session is often resulting in barely an hour passed in the game. the only time they go forward is when they agree to skip time forward. but often then not they just want to role play every seconds of it.
most campaigns are resolved in a matter of months in-game. again, in-game time is entirely irrelevant because it can be whatever the DM wants it to be.
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We don't appear to get XP for anything but combat.
heres your problem to begin with... even in the old days, the books was suggesting getting XP as a reward for even role playing a thing. meaning XP isn't just about combat. it is supposed to be given by everything the players does.
exemple of my actual game... my players gain XP from defeating monsters of their levels. so no destroying a goblin village in hope to gain level up. my players are also rewarded for doing stuff that interact with the world around them. exemple of asking people to gether information, or asking the blacksmith for a special treatment in exchange of a quest. my players also gain XP from completing quest and objectives given by NPCs or other stuff.
with all that in mind... going from 1 to 2, which is only 300xp is not a long process, it is something we attain in the first hour of the game. from level 2 to 3, thats 600... that is still nothing to get at, we reach that after the next 2 hours. thats literally a 3 hour session from level 1 to 3. honestly thats what the book says we're supposed to get at.
yeah the problem is that people don't like the idea of gaining levels for anything else then fights, but really fighting isn't the only thing that gives XP. does that mean your DM doesn'T give you XP when you decide to flee a fight ? does that mean your DM doesn't reward you for using diplomacy instead of your sword ? sorry to say but that DM , if he does that... is turning you into murder hobos.
and thats my problem with the DMs of today, it seems like they reward only fighting and not cleverness.
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Killing things is most certainly not the only way of gaining XP
As I track players I annotate back through where they have been and assign based on tasks completed, puzzles solved etc. Giveing larger rewards when they start to understand plot lines.
Running away, when needed or creatures fleeing death at the hands of the players if damaged in combat also awards xp
Along with role-playing ....this is a role playing game after all !!
IF you arent designing your adventures and campaigns with these sorts of challenges - then you are selling your players short.
Have to add the ancient practise of converting gold value to xp is not a rule I miss!
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It's worth distinguishing between advancement being quick in game and out of game, as the original post was about in-game time flow, not out of game. The number of sessions required to reach a given level won't change if you have to spend more downtime between combats.
on the contrary, advancement in-game is entirely dependant on out of game advancement. at least when it comes to leveling. a player who plays every week will be leveling up and finishing his campaign much sooner thena guy who plays every 2 weeks.
Which is totally missing the point. There are three different time scales for advancement: how much time passes in-game, how much play time is involved, and how much time passes out of game. If PCs gain a level every session, but every session takes four hours and covers a year in game and you play every month, reaching level 10 takes 9 in-game years (slow), 36 play hours (fast), and 9 out-of-game months (medium).
you know game time is irrelevant considering how fast things go ? i mean, we have a little over a year done on this campaign and my players barely passed the 2 month in game time. seriously, time is whatever we want it to be in the game so why calculate that ? 4 hour sessions doesn'T represent 4 hours in the game. if that was the case then the players would be gone every fights when they start to argue about strategies. in my games, a 4 hour session is often resulting in barely an hour passed in the game. the only time they go forward is when they agree to skip time forward. but often then not they just want to role play every seconds of it.
most campaigns are resolved in a matter of months in-game. again, in-game time is entirely irrelevant because it can be whatever the DM wants it to be.
It's very relevant because that is what the thread originally was about.
Somehow at some point discussion went from the fact that leveling fast in game time breaks verisimilitude to the discussion about level pacing in real life.
you know game time is irrelevant considering how fast things go ? i mean, we have a little over a year done on this campaign and my players barely passed the 2 month in game time. seriously, time is whatever we want it to be in the game so why calculate that ? 4 hour sessions doesn'T represent 4 hours in the game. if that was the case then the players would be gone every fights when they start to argue about strategies. in my games, a 4 hour session is often resulting in barely an hour passed in the game. the only time they go forward is when they agree to skip time forward. but often then not they just want to role play every seconds of it.
most campaigns are resolved in a matter of months in-game. again, in-game time is entirely irrelevant because it can be whatever the DM wants it to be.
It's very relevant because that is what the thread originally was about.
Somehow at some point discussion went from the fact that leveling fast in game time breaks verisimilitude to the discussion about level pacing in real life.
It is irrelevant, because that player wants to level slower, its one players perspective, or DM perspective. nothing in the DMG forces that player to play by the rules, it is his choice entirely. that's why we all said its irrelevant. because in the end, most players do not even go the distance. how many players back 30 years ago could boast having gone from 1 to 20 ? i for one achieved that about 5 years ago, after about 30 years of playing the game. and i was the DM, the many roads and roadblocks i had to overcome for my players to enjoy that feats of strength was uncalculable.
so the original poster says its a lifetime because back then it took a lifetime to level up. could just imagine critical role or any of the tabletop games on the net taking 10 years to level up to end game ? the only game doing this is acquisition incorporated and the reason they are doing it is not even because of leveling itself, they are doing it because of the power levels. they are at 9th level and will stay there for eternity because beyond that, its ridiculous. at least they have a reason for doing this and its logical. the first poster... literally said he preffers 2e because leveling takes ages.
so why is he even playing for leveling then ? its irrelevant !
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The OP is not stating anything about levelling really at all. It is that leveling itself, which in ways "caps" content, is done very quickly in the game world under the premise of all published modules and the basis of 6-14 encounters per level to level. So in one game world day one goes from 1st to 2nd level, one or two more in game adventuring days and one is third level. Within 10 adventuring days one is 5th level.
Compare that to Dragonlance and the novels, Raistlin is a first level mage at the beginning, and over the course of two years in world time becomes 5th level.
It took a CHARACTER's lifetime to level up, not a PLAYER's.
you know game time is irrelevant considering how fast things go ? i mean, we have a little over a year done on this campaign and my players barely passed the 2 month in game time. seriously, time is whatever we want it to be in the game so why calculate that ? 4 hour sessions doesn'T represent 4 hours in the game. if that was the case then the players would be gone every fights when they start to argue about strategies. in my games, a 4 hour session is often resulting in barely an hour passed in the game. the only time they go forward is when they agree to skip time forward. but often then not they just want to role play every seconds of it.
most campaigns are resolved in a matter of months in-game. again, in-game time is entirely irrelevant because it can be whatever the DM wants it to be.
It's very relevant because that is what the thread originally was about.
Somehow at some point discussion went from the fact that leveling fast in game time breaks verisimilitude to the discussion about level pacing in real life.
It is irrelevant, because that player wants to level slower, its one players perspective, or DM perspective. nothing in the DMG forces that player to play by the rules, it is his choice entirely. that's why we all said its irrelevant. because in the end, most players do not even go the distance. how many players back 30 years ago could boast having gone from 1 to 20 ? i for one achieved that about 5 years ago, after about 30 years of playing the game. and i was the DM, the many roads and roadblocks i had to overcome for my players to enjoy that feats of strength was uncalculable.
so the original poster says its a lifetime because back then it took a lifetime to level up. could just imagine critical role or any of the tabletop games on the net taking 10 years to level up to end game ? the only game doing this is acquisition incorporated and the reason they are doing it is not even because of leveling itself, they are doing it because of the power levels. they are at 9th level and will stay there for eternity because beyond that, its ridiculous. at least they have a reason for doing this and its logical. the first poster... literally said he preffers 2e because leveling takes ages.
so why is he even playing for leveling then ? its irrelevant !
You keep confusing what this is all about.
It's about how unrealistic it is that a hypothetical Frodo Baggins starts at level 1 in Shire and drops the Ring at level 15. It's not about how many meetings at the table there were.
And AFAIK CR had a one year time skip, at least during first campaign.
Also, when speaking of CR - at least the players there travel long distances so it adds days/weeks to their "adventuring time".
you think the journey from the shire to the mordor took more then a year ? calculate it the way you want man, but the story of frodo baggins took about a month at best. so you are telling me that the whole trilogy was them going from level 1 to 3 ?
the problem is not about how long it takes to level, it is about how stupid people have created their world in. exemple... JRR created his world with leveling in mind. aragorn wasn't level 3 or 4 when he met the frodo baggins and his crew. he was probably much higher level then them. same for boromir, he was probably much higher level then them.
the problem comes from people who do not think their world should be high level and thus when the players comes to high level, their world falls apart. in my world, sorry but level 20 druids happens. they are the ones governing the tribes. same for any capitals, the generals are about level 15 and the king is almost always a level 20. so in my world leveling is not about how godly you become, it is about how fast you learn stuff. and heroes are supposed to be heroes for a reason. not everybody can beome an adventurer, so why would your heroes be common people that advances at the same pace as your common people ?
its not the leveling process who makes no sense... it is the world around the heroes ! if your world make sense, then your leveling will make sense.
of course it makes no sense for heroes to be level 10 if the world around them is at most level 5. there are other adventurers in the world, not just your heroes. there are other people that are capable of doing what they do, otherwise how would those characters learn ? but why are kings not doing the stuff then... listen at yourself... maybe because the king has other things to do then bail out a bunch of adventurers against goblins. that king has gods to stop ! as your heroes goes up in level, so is their renown and eventually they will either meet gods who are wanting them in their army or kings who wants them to be allies. but if your world always depends on heroes because your world is always defenseless because of low levels... then i ask, why are villages still standing in a world where monsters can just dominate people ?
take monster hunter for an exemple... do you think your character who starts level 1 is really just a commoner in the first place ? they wouldn'T throw people on that island if they had no experiences at all. so you could say your hero is about level 3 to 4 when they start, yet they start you level 1. again, if your world makes no sense, then your heroes makes no sense. leveling is a problem only if you can't understand how the leveling works.
tell me... why isn't bruenor doing a thing to help your characters when you play in forgotten realms, why isn't do'urden doing a thing to help you ? they are there, they are much higher level then you. so why aren't they doing things, why isn't your characer actively seeking them for help. why isn't the whole world actively asking them for help ?
why isn't gandalf always casting spells and fighting to solve the problem himself ? isn't he much more powerfull then any of the halflings ? the only reason to keep frodo since the beginning is because he resist the urge of the ring. remove that and you realise that the whole trilogy isn't even capable of doing a thing. yet the elves, the humans and the dwarves are already capable of defeating soron and his armies. sure they will lose people, but they can win. they already have in the past.
now thats a world that works. that is believable and leveling make sense. leveling is as good as your world is. if your world sucks, then your leveling sucks.
as for your CR argument about a year going by... they didn't even level up during that year. not a single level. so that argument falls short !
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you think the journey from the shire to the mordor took more then a year ? calculate it the way you want man, but the story of frodo baggins took about a month at best. so you are telling me that the whole trilogy was them going from level 1 to 3 ?
the problem is not about how long it takes to level, it is about how stupid people have created their world in. exemple... JRR created his world with leveling in mind. aragorn wasn't level 3 or 4 when he met the frodo baggins and his crew. he was probably much higher level then them. same for boromir, he was probably much higher level then them.
the problem comes from people who do not think their world should be high level and thus when the players comes to high level, their world falls apart. in my world, sorry but level 20 druids happens. they are the ones governing the tribes. same for any capitals, the generals are about level 15 and the king is almost always a level 20. so in my world leveling is not about how godly you become, it is about how fast you learn stuff. and heroes are supposed to be heroes for a reason. not everybody can beome an adventurer, so why would your heroes be common people that advances at the same pace as your common people ?
its not the leveling process who makes no sense... it is the world around the heroes ! if your world make sense, then your leveling will make sense.
of course it makes no sense for heroes to be level 10 if the world around them is at most level 5. there are other adventurers in the world, not just your heroes. there are other people that are capable of doing what they do, otherwise how would those characters learn ? but why are kings not doing the stuff then... listen at yourself... maybe because the king has other things to do then bail out a bunch of adventurers against goblins. that king has gods to stop ! as your heroes goes up in level, so is their renown and eventually they will either meet gods who are wanting them in their army or kings who wants them to be allies. but if your world always depends on heroes because your world is always defenseless because of low levels... then i ask, why are villages still standing in a world where monsters can just dominate people ?
take monster hunter for an exemple... do you think your character who starts level 1 is really just a commoner in the first place ? they wouldn'T throw people on that island if they had no experiences at all. so you could say your hero is about level 3 to 4 when they start, yet they start you level 1. again, if your world makes no sense, then your heroes makes no sense. leveling is a problem only if you can't understand how the leveling works.
tell me... why isn't bruenor doing a thing to help your characters when you play in forgotten realms, why isn't do'urden doing a thing to help you ? they are there, they are much higher level then you. so why aren't they doing things, why isn't your characer actively seeking them for help. why isn't the whole world actively asking them for help ?
why isn't gandalf always casting spells and fighting to solve the problem himself ? isn't he much more powerfull then any of the halflings ? the only reason to keep frodo since the beginning is because he resist the urge of the ring. remove that and you realise that the whole trilogy isn't even capable of doing a thing. yet the elves, the humans and the dwarves are already capable of defeating soron and his armies. sure they will lose people, but they can win. they already have in the past.
now thats a world that works. that is believable and leveling make sense. leveling is as good as your world is. if your world sucks, then your leveling sucks.
as for your CR argument about a year going by... they didn't even level up during that year. not a single level. so that argument falls short !
No I don't think that the journey of the Fellowship took more than a year and that is my point - that if you made Frodo a playable character according to the DND 5 Ed. rules, you'd have to level him up like crazy during his journey up to the point where he can solo a whole Uruk-hai group. Which would be unrealistic, because he clearly can't do that.
As for what you are writing next, I have no idea what kind of point you want to make. It looks like words for words' sake. Whatever makes you think that the argument falls short because the CR crew didn't level up during downtime is also beyond me.
I will remove myself from this discussion because there is clearly some miscommunication here that cannot be resolved in a discussion since I believe I made myself clear and you somehow went to compare relative power of Gandalf and Aragorn to the hobbits and asking why some high level NPC aren't helping you in your quests.
I think 5e gives players and DMs the tools they want to craft the stories they prefer. A sorcerer could conceivably come into the fullness of their power within the course of a month, because their power isn't the result of study or experience. It is part of their nature and that can, as they say, escalate quite quickly.
At the same time, there are variant options that can emulate the older flavor if that's what your table wants.
Among some things:
1. Checkpoints instead of XP. Characters gain points for leveling that are not XP and are dependent on completing objectives and plots rather than butchering the countryside. They can earn these as fast or as slow as you like. The recommendation for tiers 1 and 2 is 4 checkpoints per level for levels 1-5, and 8 from levels 5 to 10.
2. Variant rests. Short Rests take 8 hours. Long Rests take 1 week. Your wizard needs an entire week of downtime to recover spent spell slots and prepare a different set of components and such for prepared spells. Fighters take longer to recover. Adapting Relaxation XGtE rules on the longer scale, Relaxation takes 7 weeks to end bad effects and restore lost ability points. Characters also don't regain all their HP after a long rest, they have to spend HitDice after a week to regain lost HP, and then rest again, probably, for another week to get ready for another foray.
3. You could specify that character must train or study in order to synthesize the power and experiences they've gained over the course of an adventure. Expanding on the Variant Rule in the DMG to make it even longer and more expensive, training or studying from levels 2-4 would take 70 days plus 140 gp in costs. From 5 to 10, it would take 140 days of training plus 280 gp in costs (that's almost 5 months of just training). For superheroic characters in the 11th-16th levels, true champions of the realm, each level up would require 210 days (7 months) and 420 gp in costs.
Just continuously training from levels 5 to 10 would take 840 days (nearly three years) alone. If you include the amount of time traveling, healing up, and actually adventuring, that's your 10 years from levels 1 to 10.
It bears mentioning that none of this is supposed to simulate realism. Hitpoints aren't realistic and just never will be. Human bodies aren't bags of hitpoints. Hitpoints are an abstraction meant to simulate luck, toughness, and plot armor. A character at 1 hitpoint may not actually have been physically hit by anything at all! He's just on his last legs and now lacks the ability to defend himself from a killing blow that gets past his defenses. This metaphysical durability has no basis in reality. Whatever the length of recovery is meant to portray a flavor of campaign.
you think the journey from the shire to the mordor took more then a year ? calculate it the way you want man, but the story of frodo baggins took about a month at best. so you are telling me that the whole trilogy was them going from level 1 to 3 ?
*** a bunch of blah blah drivel ***
as for your CR argument about a year going by... they didn't even level up during that year. not a single level. so that argument falls short !
What was the differences in Frodo's abilities from the time he was in the Shire to the time he left Mordor? He learned to use a sword, kinda. He could get about, fairly stealthily, but really needed the ring or the cloak to avoid detection. So from Sep 22 (When Frodo left the Shire) to Mar 25 (Ring was destroyed) Frodo gained a level in Rogue, at best 1/1 Fighter/Rogue. That's it, though if one wanted to argue another level of either, it would be fine. During the same time, none of the other heroes, save Aragon, show any significant increase in their competency, proficiency, or skills.
Years or weeks for leveling up, doesn't really matter, one can argue that the amount of experience one gains in their first battle in the military is more than what one learns from the rest of their battles. Both The Big Red One and Band of Brothers illustrate this quite nicely.
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on the contrary, advancement in-game is entirely dependant on out of game advancement. at least when it comes to leveling. a player who plays every week will be leveling up and finishing his campaign much sooner thena guy who plays every 2 weeks. heck i know people who play once a month. and i know people who play once a year. also in your sentence you seem to hink only combat gives XP. thats not the case ! a campaign shouldn'T be going on for more then 3 years. imagine critical role and their 5 year campaign. the only reason it was going for 5 years was that level 1 to 9 had taken them 2 years playing on and off for about once a month. sometimes two. after that only 2 years were necessary to go from 9 to 20. and thats with slowed advancement !
the reality being... most campaigns do not get off the ground more then about 2 years. after that people come and go.
my original group of 5 years ago, has changed drastically from then. while i maintain a group of players every friday night. its hard to keep players going if they don't want to continu going. one of the player was 12 when he joined our table... 3 years later, he left... he wasn't into d&d anymore. je liked his time, he thanked us, but he had to concentrate on other things he liked and that was sports. some friends who came to play, played like 5 games and then decided their life didn't allow them to go on fridays... they started their own games insteads on weekdays.
imagine if every campaigns had to go for 10 years... i can guarantee that none of those campaigns would ever finish ! they'd lose their players way before the end of that campaign.
i have players right now... who have never gone the distance before... even myself who has been playing for 30 years, had never completed a campaign until about 2 years ago. and my new campaign has been running for 1 year and a half now. those players are wondereing if the campaign is about to end or not. they are not used to go that far. they have never ever completed a campaign before. they like it, they totally enjoy the pacing and all. but the fear of the campaign getting blown off by players leaving is very real !
the way i solved that problem, as i tell them... simple, my game is coop in and coop out. if we're missing players, we play anyway... heck i'd play with only 1 player if that player really wanted to. the players are fine with that. and if new players comes in, then they can just slide right in. if they leave, they can just leave and thats it. the real problem is that too often DMs don't want to play if they are missing 1 or 2 players out of 5 6. thats a mistake if you ask me. if you wait to have all your players at all times, then it just won't happen too often. and thats is coming from a guy who's been playing on and off for 30 years. on and off because i had to cancel way too mnay games due to 1 or 2 players never being able to come to the game. at some point, i had enough of it... i wanted to play and put my foot down... we're playing reguardless of if you come or not. i'm through not having my fun or my players not having their fun because one player is missing.
now we all have fun, sure some players miss once in a while due to work or school or whatever else... but in the end the others all had fun and when that person comes back, they get to listen to the incredible story of the others. just yesterday we played with 4 players and me as the DM. 3 people were missing.we almost were missing the fourth who arrived late as usual. funny story... the game advances much faster when there is less people. they had fun, they fought a purple worm random encounter, met some druids in random encounters. because they rolled natural ones on their d20 random encounters. then they arrived at the volcano they were supposed to visit to gain the artifact. they discovered an entire fortress full of wyverns and giants as well as dwarves... yeah flying above the mountain to avoid every encounter didn't go in their favor once at the top. but they never realised there would be a fortress att he top. they never thought the volcano would be inhabited. thats where we ended up. if i had dismissed the game, these players would of felt bad not playing. the one who arrived late already can't make it every games, imagine if i had to cancel a game when he can make it. it would be devastating for him.
moral of the story... don't let one or 2 players missing stop your gaming. i can understand if you preffer to have 3 or 4 players coming in. unlike me who would DM for just 1. but... please think of your players... some really want to play and its their way of letting the job steam go off. don't remove that from them.
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Which is totally missing the point. There are three different time scales for advancement: how much time passes in-game, how much play time is involved, and how much time passes out of game. If PCs gain a level every session, but every session takes four hours and covers a year in game and you play every month, reaching level 10 takes 9 in-game years (slow), 36 play hours (fast), and 9 out-of-game months (medium).
Like a few other posters here I started playing this great game in 1976. Unlike many of them I stopped in 1985....And now Im back ! Read this thread with interest and a little puzzlement. I started a campaign a month ago - playing 3 sessions so far, and my players just scraped level 2, next level xp gap is three times the size.
I cannot see how they will hit level 20 in the time spans talked about, but hey maybe I am wrong and if I am - guess what - I will change the rules to make it harder to level...
There seems to be a weird fixation ive seen in these forums that we must stick to the rules at all costs....well we didnt in the old days...they even have a name for this "homebrew" implying that its somehow illicit. Well soz.....so imho if you feel the pace in your campaign is too fast....slow it down by changing the rules / alter your world appropriately.
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Udain, I'm right there with you. I came back to the game because my son started playing 3.5e. When he switched to 5e he started DM-ing. I started looking over his shoulder and offering tips to worldbuilding. He took most of my ideas. Now a friend wants to introduce D&D to his kids. I decided, 'what the heck' and so I've joined in their campaign with half adults and half kids.
We played the first session and leveled up to level 2 after defeating a couple zombies, skeletons and three shadows, then three harpies, and then a group of goblins teamed up with a group of kobolds that tried to burn down a village we stayed in overnight. In the second session we defeated a Hydra and that got us to level 3. In the third session we defeated a band of worgs and goblin riders, and then we went on to scare away the rest from their lair. We defeated twelve zombies and a guardian something that was a watered down version of a Beholder. After the third session we had hardly made a dent in progressing to fourth level.
At one session a week, we wouldn't likely get to tenth level unless the DM decides to make this a much more combat heavy game. We don't appear to get XP for anything but combat. He is using the milestone leveling system so the whole party stays at the same level. As a Bard, leveling only from combat is not the best for me, but it is necessary to keep the party together. I think if the DM were awarding XP for RP, I'd be a full level ahead of the other (players) characters already and he doesn't want that, and I don't know that I would either.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
MY typical experience in 5e:
Level 1 advances to level 2 in 4-6 hours of game play. Level 2 advances to level 3 in 6-8 hours of game play. Level 3 advances to level 4 in 12-16 hours, 4 to 5 takes 24-30 hours. After that it normalizes with most levels taking 12-16 hours. Part of this is how experience gaps are done, part of this is both encounters and intraparty roleplay takes increasingly longer as it gets more complicated, intimate, subtle, and numerous, and part of this is how I DM, which is to try getting them to level 3 quickly while they take care of "local" problems, and than they get into one of two main plotlines, which will require more than just encounters to uncover.
Interestingly enough, when I'm a player, the DM tends to do something fairly close as far as pace of play is involved. Course the core of the group has been playing together for a couple of decades off and on.
if you ever played with my groups... you'd get that this is next to impossible to do as the group tends not to take decisions by themselves or take an unconsiderate amount of time to decide. aka, let's decide next session. and then next session is half the session for them having to considerate the new stuff they thought about in the meantime before the session... sometimes games do not go forward and i am not the kind of DM that just blatantly say "hey this happen cause you are undecided". i respect my players. unfortunately... we're playing 4hours a week and sometimes it takes upward of 7-8 sessions before a leveling happen. i'm trying to stick to 4. which is level up per month. which means about 1 to 3 in about a month. then like 5e says int he book, trying to level up every 3 4 sessions afterward. so basically a campaign should be finished from 1 to 20 in about... a year and a half. just to show how whack this game has been... we're reaching that year and a half mark soon and we are barely level 10 about to be 11. so i'm far off my mark with this group. whats funny is how undeciding they are. they know, they try to be going forward, but somehow there is always something keeping them up from going forward. something they are doing, not me. they are in an open world and as i said... "they choose" where to go. i think the thing is, they have too much on their plate at this point. but thats because they didn't do a thing at the beginning and decided to act only when time was running out. and now they fear losing the world they live in because of their indecision.
as an exemple... the same group was the worst power rangers ever. because yes, i did a power ranger esque game with them... they literally skipped every fights because they feared whatever consequences they thought would be hapenning if they did participate. i literally told them, if this was a power ranger show, you'd be the worst of all the shows. they all laughed at this.
so yeah the problem with these calculation, is that tey are entirely dependant on the group you are playing with. some takes more times then others and others would go faster then some others.
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you know game time is irrelevant considering how fast things go ?
i mean, we have a little over a year done on this campaign and my players barely passed the 2 month in game time.
seriously, time is whatever we want it to be in the game so why calculate that ?
4 hour sessions doesn'T represent 4 hours in the game. if that was the case then the players would be gone every fights when they start to argue about strategies.
in my games, a 4 hour session is often resulting in barely an hour passed in the game. the only time they go forward is when they agree to skip time forward. but often then not they just want to role play every seconds of it.
most campaigns are resolved in a matter of months in-game.
again, in-game time is entirely irrelevant because it can be whatever the DM wants it to be.
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heres your problem to begin with... even in the old days, the books was suggesting getting XP as a reward for even role playing a thing. meaning XP isn't just about combat. it is supposed to be given by everything the players does.
exemple of my actual game...
my players gain XP from defeating monsters of their levels. so no destroying a goblin village in hope to gain level up.
my players are also rewarded for doing stuff that interact with the world around them. exemple of asking people to gether information, or asking the blacksmith for a special treatment in exchange of a quest.
my players also gain XP from completing quest and objectives given by NPCs or other stuff.
with all that in mind... going from 1 to 2, which is only 300xp is not a long process, it is something we attain in the first hour of the game.
from level 2 to 3, thats 600... that is still nothing to get at, we reach that after the next 2 hours. thats literally a 3 hour session from level 1 to 3.
honestly thats what the book says we're supposed to get at.
yeah the problem is that people don't like the idea of gaining levels for anything else then fights, but really fighting isn't the only thing that gives XP.
does that mean your DM doesn'T give you XP when you decide to flee a fight ?
does that mean your DM doesn't reward you for using diplomacy instead of your sword ?
sorry to say but that DM , if he does that... is turning you into murder hobos.
and thats my problem with the DMs of today, it seems like they reward only fighting and not cleverness.
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100% agree with you statements.
Killing things is most certainly not the only way of gaining XP
As I track players I annotate back through where they have been and assign based on tasks completed, puzzles solved etc. Giveing larger rewards when they start to understand plot lines.
Running away, when needed or creatures fleeing death at the hands of the players if damaged in combat also awards xp
Along with role-playing ....this is a role playing game after all !!
IF you arent designing your adventures and campaigns with these sorts of challenges - then you are selling your players short.
Have to add the ancient practise of converting gold value to xp is not a rule I miss!
The D&D Revolution,................Art over Science......... Humanity over Systems,............Friendship over Victory
It's very relevant because that is what the thread originally was about.
Somehow at some point discussion went from the fact that leveling fast in game time breaks verisimilitude to the discussion about level pacing in real life.
It is irrelevant, because that player wants to level slower, its one players perspective, or DM perspective. nothing in the DMG forces that player to play by the rules, it is his choice entirely. that's why we all said its irrelevant. because in the end, most players do not even go the distance. how many players back 30 years ago could boast having gone from 1 to 20 ? i for one achieved that about 5 years ago, after about 30 years of playing the game. and i was the DM, the many roads and roadblocks i had to overcome for my players to enjoy that feats of strength was uncalculable.
so the original poster says its a lifetime because back then it took a lifetime to level up. could just imagine critical role or any of the tabletop games on the net taking 10 years to level up to end game ? the only game doing this is acquisition incorporated and the reason they are doing it is not even because of leveling itself, they are doing it because of the power levels. they are at 9th level and will stay there for eternity because beyond that, its ridiculous. at least they have a reason for doing this and its logical. the first poster... literally said he preffers 2e because leveling takes ages.
so why is he even playing for leveling then ?
its irrelevant !
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The OP is not stating anything about levelling really at all. It is that leveling itself, which in ways "caps" content, is done very quickly in the game world under the premise of all published modules and the basis of 6-14 encounters per level to level. So in one game world day one goes from 1st to 2nd level, one or two more in game adventuring days and one is third level. Within 10 adventuring days one is 5th level.
Compare that to Dragonlance and the novels, Raistlin is a first level mage at the beginning, and over the course of two years in world time becomes 5th level.
It took a CHARACTER's lifetime to level up, not a PLAYER's.
You keep confusing what this is all about.
It's about how unrealistic it is that a hypothetical Frodo Baggins starts at level 1 in Shire and drops the Ring at level 15. It's not about how many meetings at the table there were.
And AFAIK CR had a one year time skip, at least during first campaign.
Also, when speaking of CR - at least the players there travel long distances so it adds days/weeks to their "adventuring time".
you think the journey from the shire to the mordor took more then a year ?
calculate it the way you want man, but the story of frodo baggins took about a month at best.
so you are telling me that the whole trilogy was them going from level 1 to 3 ?
the problem is not about how long it takes to level, it is about how stupid people have created their world in.
exemple... JRR created his world with leveling in mind. aragorn wasn't level 3 or 4 when he met the frodo baggins and his crew.
he was probably much higher level then them.
same for boromir, he was probably much higher level then them.
the problem comes from people who do not think their world should be high level and thus when the players comes to high level, their world falls apart.
in my world, sorry but level 20 druids happens. they are the ones governing the tribes. same for any capitals, the generals are about level 15 and the king is almost always a level 20.
so in my world leveling is not about how godly you become, it is about how fast you learn stuff. and heroes are supposed to be heroes for a reason. not everybody can beome an adventurer, so why would your heroes be common people that advances at the same pace as your common people ?
its not the leveling process who makes no sense... it is the world around the heroes !
if your world make sense, then your leveling will make sense.
of course it makes no sense for heroes to be level 10 if the world around them is at most level 5.
there are other adventurers in the world, not just your heroes. there are other people that are capable of doing what they do, otherwise how would those characters learn ?
but why are kings not doing the stuff then... listen at yourself... maybe because the king has other things to do then bail out a bunch of adventurers against goblins. that king has gods to stop ! as your heroes goes up in level, so is their renown and eventually they will either meet gods who are wanting them in their army or kings who wants them to be allies. but if your world always depends on heroes because your world is always defenseless because of low levels... then i ask, why are villages still standing in a world where monsters can just dominate people ?
take monster hunter for an exemple... do you think your character who starts level 1 is really just a commoner in the first place ?
they wouldn'T throw people on that island if they had no experiences at all. so you could say your hero is about level 3 to 4 when they start, yet they start you level 1.
again, if your world makes no sense, then your heroes makes no sense.
leveling is a problem only if you can't understand how the leveling works.
tell me...
why isn't bruenor doing a thing to help your characters when you play in forgotten realms, why isn't do'urden doing a thing to help you ?
they are there, they are much higher level then you. so why aren't they doing things, why isn't your characer actively seeking them for help. why isn't the whole world actively asking them for help ?
why isn't gandalf always casting spells and fighting to solve the problem himself ? isn't he much more powerfull then any of the halflings ?
the only reason to keep frodo since the beginning is because he resist the urge of the ring. remove that and you realise that the whole trilogy isn't even capable of doing a thing.
yet the elves, the humans and the dwarves are already capable of defeating soron and his armies. sure they will lose people, but they can win. they already have in the past.
now thats a world that works. that is believable and leveling make sense.
leveling is as good as your world is. if your world sucks, then your leveling sucks.
as for your CR argument about a year going by...
they didn't even level up during that year. not a single level.
so that argument falls short !
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No I don't think that the journey of the Fellowship took more than a year and that is my point - that if you made Frodo a playable character according to the DND 5 Ed. rules, you'd have to level him up like crazy during his journey up to the point where he can solo a whole Uruk-hai group. Which would be unrealistic, because he clearly can't do that.
As for what you are writing next, I have no idea what kind of point you want to make. It looks like words for words' sake. Whatever makes you think that the argument falls short because the CR crew didn't level up during downtime is also beyond me.
I will remove myself from this discussion because there is clearly some miscommunication here that cannot be resolved in a discussion since I believe I made myself clear and you somehow went to compare relative power of Gandalf and Aragorn to the hobbits and asking why some high level NPC aren't helping you in your quests.
I think 5e gives players and DMs the tools they want to craft the stories they prefer. A sorcerer could conceivably come into the fullness of their power within the course of a month, because their power isn't the result of study or experience. It is part of their nature and that can, as they say, escalate quite quickly.
At the same time, there are variant options that can emulate the older flavor if that's what your table wants.
Among some things:
1. Checkpoints instead of XP. Characters gain points for leveling that are not XP and are dependent on completing objectives and plots rather than butchering the countryside. They can earn these as fast or as slow as you like. The recommendation for tiers 1 and 2 is 4 checkpoints per level for levels 1-5, and 8 from levels 5 to 10.
2. Variant rests. Short Rests take 8 hours. Long Rests take 1 week. Your wizard needs an entire week of downtime to recover spent spell slots and prepare a different set of components and such for prepared spells. Fighters take longer to recover. Adapting Relaxation XGtE rules on the longer scale, Relaxation takes 7 weeks to end bad effects and restore lost ability points. Characters also don't regain all their HP after a long rest, they have to spend HitDice after a week to regain lost HP, and then rest again, probably, for another week to get ready for another foray.
3. You could specify that character must train or study in order to synthesize the power and experiences they've gained over the course of an adventure. Expanding on the Variant Rule in the DMG to make it even longer and more expensive, training or studying from levels 2-4 would take 70 days plus 140 gp in costs. From 5 to 10, it would take 140 days of training plus 280 gp in costs (that's almost 5 months of just training). For superheroic characters in the 11th-16th levels, true champions of the realm, each level up would require 210 days (7 months) and 420 gp in costs.
Just continuously training from levels 5 to 10 would take 840 days (nearly three years) alone. If you include the amount of time traveling, healing up, and actually adventuring, that's your 10 years from levels 1 to 10.
It bears mentioning that none of this is supposed to simulate realism. Hitpoints aren't realistic and just never will be. Human bodies aren't bags of hitpoints. Hitpoints are an abstraction meant to simulate luck, toughness, and plot armor. A character at 1 hitpoint may not actually have been physically hit by anything at all! He's just on his last legs and now lacks the ability to defend himself from a killing blow that gets past his defenses. This metaphysical durability has no basis in reality. Whatever the length of recovery is meant to portray a flavor of campaign.
For what it's worth, my campaign is about a year and a half old and the players are level 8 currently. We play about once per month.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
And how much "in-world" time has gone by? That's the crux of the OP's point.
Just a few months. We haven't had a lot of downtime as it doesn't fit in with our priorities from a storytelling perspective.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
What was the differences in Frodo's abilities from the time he was in the Shire to the time he left Mordor?
He learned to use a sword, kinda. He could get about, fairly stealthily, but really needed the ring or the cloak to avoid detection. So from Sep 22 (When Frodo left the Shire) to Mar 25 (Ring was destroyed) Frodo gained a level in Rogue, at best 1/1 Fighter/Rogue. That's it, though if one wanted to argue another level of either, it would be fine. During the same time, none of the other heroes, save Aragon, show any significant increase in their competency, proficiency, or skills.
Years or weeks for leveling up, doesn't really matter, one can argue that the amount of experience one gains in their first battle in the military is more than what one learns from the rest of their battles. Both The Big Red One and Band of Brothers illustrate this quite nicely.