How do you handle Experience Points?

[herrozerro]

I like savage world's XP system. 1-3 xp per session for the whole party depending on how much got done. every 5 xp is an advance, every 20 xp is a new tier.

It's simple, no more fiddling with hundreds of xp, and it's small enough in scale where most games a party will advance every other session or so. Which means more stuff faster.

 

[Lanefan]

For any level-based d20-ish system except D&D 3.5e (that is, just about everything I run), I just have everyone level up once every 3 sessions or so. Even if the player missed one (or even all three!) sessions, the character still levels up.

I don't really care what 5e does. It is my intent to follow the same scheme of "level every 3 sessions", so as long as 5e doesn't do something that prevents that working, I'll be quite happy.

This brings up a corollary question: how real-time long do you want or expect your campaigns to last? Levelling every 3 sessions means that at 3 sessions a month (not an unreasonable pace) you'll be 24th level after 2 years and 60th level after 5. Most systems don't go that high, or certainly don't do it well.

I expect my campaigns to last a lot longer than just a few years and would thus prefer a very slow (by these standards) advancement rate. If the average party level goes up by one or maybe two in a year that's fine, any faster than that and I'll run out of playable level range long before I run out of campaign.

Lanefan

 

[delericho]

This brings up a corollary question: how real-time long do you want or expect your campaigns to last?

Yes, a very valid (and important) question.

Levelling every 3 sessions means that at 3 sessions a month (not an unreasonable pace) you'll be 24th level after 2 years and 60th level after 5. Most systems don't go that high, or certainly don't do it well.

We generally play two sessions a month. My most recent campaign lasted a little under 3 years but had some gaps - the characters advanced from 1st to 15th level.

But that campaign was something of an exception for us (and me) - generally, I'd expect a campaign to run for a calendar year (roughly), meaning that characters would generally advance 1st -> 9th in that time. (12 months = 24 sessions = 8 levels gained.)