Pace of level advancement in 4th edition D&D

[Cas Liber]

Hi all,
I have just gotten 4th ed to start DMing a campaign, and wondered how other DMs felt about the experience points needed for gaining levels on the table in the PHB p 29.

Are folks happy with it? Too easy to level up? Has anyone tweaked it in their own campaigns thus far?
cheers
Cas

 

[Moon-Lancer]

I have found leveling happens slower then it did in 3.5

 

[Cas Liber]

Hah. last time I played seriously was with 2nd ed in 1994 or so; my main game was 1st ed AD&D which I played from 1980 or so. I have been hibernating for many years and have missed 3 & 3.5 totally
cheers
Cas

 

[ForbidenMaster]

Once you get the hang of the game you should level up after about every 10 hours of actually playing.

 

[Danceofmasks]

Well, it's certainly paced better than 2e .. where the XP tables were seemingly random and unintuitive.
Where the wizard hit level 11 faster than anyone, then slows down to a crawl ... was there a class (druid?) that needed 1.5 million xp for exactly one level, 'cos TSR did the same thing IBM did with 640kb RAM?
"No one will ever need more than 14 levels"

 

[defendi]

Once you get the hang of the game you should level up after about every 10 hours of actually playing.

More like ten hours on the battlemap. Hopefully your games involve something other than combat. My Echoes of Heaven Playtest goes on an off XP rules (on when we're officially playtesting, then off for filler story so everyone is exactly at the xp I want for the next playtest). We tend to level about once every 2-4 weeks, 3 is the most common span. We play 3-5 hours in a week. Our combats sometimes go a touch long (lots of characters), but we have others that are pretty quick so I think that balances out.

 

[ForbidenMaster]

More like ten hours on the battlemap. Hopefully your games involve something other than combat. My Echoes of Heaven Playtest goes on an off XP rules (on when we're officially playtesting, then off for filler story so everyone is exactly at the xp I want for the next playtest). We tend to level about once every 2-4 weeks, 3 is the most common span. We play 3-5 hours in a week. Our combats sometimes go a touch long (lots of characters), but we have others that are pretty quick so I think that balances out.

You only get XP for combat in your games?

 

[Drakhar]

I found that for the first few levels (I.E upto about 4th) my group was leveling pretty quickly however after hitting fourth it seems to have slowed down a bit.

Now this could also be from combats taking a little longer when a good portion of the party can't seem to roll for their lives but still.

 

[the Jester]

I'm really liking the pace of advancement. I generally prefer to slow things down, but this time around I'm digging the relatively quick advancement. We started pretty quickly after the 4e release, and the party is currently 7th-9th level. I'm actually doing a couple of things to speed advancement up, so we can play through some of the interesting stuff at higher levels more quickly.

 

[Paul Strack]

Feh. Ignore the XP charts. Figure out how quickly you want your PCs to advance, and level them up at exactly that rate.

I am leveling up my PCs at a rate of 1 level per adventure because I am running a monthly game. If I were running a weekly game, I would probably level up every other adventure (roughly once per 4 sessions, so again once per month).