I would call an "automated" a "dead level" as well. Sure, a level could give nothing, but a level that only gives HP, proficiency increases, it doesn't serve a purpose other than stretching out the game. Like for example, most proficiency last over multiple levels. So you don't even gain that in some levels, you just get HP. Why not increase the base HP given out to compensate and subtract those levels from the maximum total.
It's not that other games don't do this either. There are plenty of "tighter" D&D variants that range from 1-5 or 1-10 or 1-15 because they've simply removed the "spacer" levels. Progression is steeper, but the solution there is just higher XP requirements per level.
I can see the idea here, but two things cause me concern.
One is that if there becomes too much difference between each level we're right back to the problems of 3e where characters of different levels had trouble running in the same party, where 5e currently does a nice job of allowing for a varied-level party. I do individual xp and over time as characters come and go the levels slowly drift apart, which I don't mind at all.
The other, for my game anyway, is that I still have level loss as a thing...this would make it even more of a menace than it is now.
If you follow the adventures-per-day guidelines, it hands out a lot of XP fairly quickly, and the low XP requirements of 5E cause you to blow through the early levels really fast. Especially if you award XP for non-combat encounters (which I did as habit from 4E encounter design, and I feel it encourages players to put more energy into non-combat encounters). Doubly so if you want to up the ante and run harder fights.
Ah, now I see.
As DM, though, you could always double or triple the amount of xp needed for each level to slow things down if you like...
Meh. IRL-decade long campaigns don't interest me. They never have. I'm firmly in the boat that WotC did the right thing with making all their campaigns designed to be completed within a year. I think that's a good amount of time for a campaign. Sure, if you want to revisit the same gameworld and have more campaigns, that's cool too, but ending games also gives time to play other games, for other people to DM and if there's an "end" every year or so, that's a good time to switch out.
I come at it from pretty much the opposite viewpoint, in that my ideal goal when starting any campaign is that it will last until a) nobody wants to play in it any more or b) I die.
World design is a lot of work, and I do it pretty much from scratch for each new campaign; I prefer to only have to do it once*. Along with this comes a complete review and partial rewrite of the whole game system, based on what worked or didn't in the campaign just ended - again, a big pile of work.
* - so far it's been about once per decade.
I don't see a single adventure path as being an entire campaign by any means, though one can build several different APs into a long campaign and find ways to interweave them...though if it's a published AP one has to do a lot of work to flatten out the expected level curve.
One can (and IMO preferably would) have several PC parties in the world where you jump now and then from playing one group to another, and where these parties can meet, interact, switch characters, influence each other's adventures, and so forth. (though a word of caution: the DM has to be very careful about timelines) Players might also come and go...of the four players who started my current campaign only one remains, I'm down to three total right now but have had as many as seven (in two groups on different nights) going at once; and so far thirteen different players have been involved at one time or another in this game.
And they've gone through a staggering number of characters, much of which came early on when youth and enthusiasm (two players) and old age and alcohol (the other two) threw caution and wisdom to the winds on a weekly basis...and some would say little has changed in the 9 years since...and that's what makes it fun!
Yeah, that's part of it too. I wouldn't mind a return of epic "levels" I think what I'd like to see is a system similar to Star Trek Online. Once you hit level cap, you're done, no more levels. But each time you earn enough XP to have gotten from the 2nd to last level to the max level again, you get a specialization point. I mean, I guess that's kinda the way E6 does it, but it's be E20? I guess the "boons" can provide this service too, but once you run out of base levels, I think any continued growth should be largely story-based.
Or just make it open-ended, but each new level after a certain point (18? 20?) takes a great deal longer to achieve than the one before...a steeper j-curve on the required xp, in other words.
I mean...you could go dual-class? If every PC was two classes and leveled up in them every other level it'd stretch the game out over another 20 levels...but with a dramatic power increase I think.
Yeah, that's certainly an option too; though I find multi-class characters tend to want to become single-character parties as they have less need of the others in the party to provide abilities they don't have. If everyone's single-class then they need a party around them, and the whole can become greater than the sum of the parts.
Lanefan
