How many gamehours between levelling up

[daveted]

What's the average number of gamehours do you play between levelling up characters?
The DM guide gives a good guide for creature encounters, but not enough detail for roleplaying IMHO. My current campaign is mainly roleplaying, and I am having the PC's play around 15 hours of playing between levelling up for 5th to 6th level. Is that too much, or too little?
Also, should the hours between levelling up increase as you increase in levels i.e. should levels 19 to 20 take way more than 15 hours?

Sorry if this has been discussed before. This is my first post, and I can't see a search engine.

Thanks
Dave

 

[IronWolf]

In our games it really depends on what the PCs are up to. Most recently we were levelling up nearly every 4 to 4.5 hour session, but we as a lower level party tackled numerous giants, so the XP awards were high. Now we are back to tackling tasks a little more up to our level so our progression rate has slowed somewhat. There is also the question of whether we are in town roleplaying things out or fighting our way through to accomplish some task.

 

[diaglo]

in ye olde dayes for my campaign:

3-4hrs/session; 5 sessions/week; 50 weeks/year; for 10+ years (just shy of 11 years)

the avg was 1 real year per level. approx 900 hrs of roleplaying


nowadays it is way too fast.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Depends on the session, but currently every 3-4 6-hour sessions. 48 sessions into this campaign, and charcters are between 13th and 14th level.

 

[Umbran]

In the end, it comes down to pace - how many challenges to the characters go through in an hour?

I've played and run in successful games where we went through perhaps one real challenge in a 4 hour session, with the rest ofthe time filled with non-challengeing yet interesting roleplay. I've been in other games where people fly through one or two challenges per hour.

The basic guideline is roughly 13 challenges per level. So the first case would have levelling up approximately every 52 hours of gaming. The latter would have levelling after maybe 12 hours.

In other words - no matter what the average is, the distribution is probably very broad.

 

[Qualidar]

In 3/3.5 I find it's usually about once every adventure. For us that's 3 sessions at 5 hours, so 15 hours.

~Qualidar~

p.s. welcome to the boards!

 

[MPA]

About 100 hours per level if it's a combat heavy setting.

 

[mirivor]

Holy crap!!! Diaglo.... 900 HOURS?! Now THAT is role-playing! LOL! Our group tends to go up once every two weeks at about 5 hours a week.... every ten hours or so. It really depends on the group, mood, and flavor.

 

[Gahnomen]

My current players are levelling up roughly once every 15 or so hours (they tend to get 1.5 levels per two sessions, each session ranging from 10-12 hours). They are 11-12th level now though, they got one level per sessions levels 1-3, and the pace has very slowly been decreasing since then. In a few levels from now I imagine it'll be one level per two sessions (one level every 20-24 hours).

This works well for us, there's a fairly steady pace of improvement and the players generally know that if they don't level up this session, they will definitely level up the next. Seems to be motivating.

 

[Crothian]

In our games it really depends on what the PCs are up to. Most recently we were levelling up nearly every 4 to 4.5 hour session, but we as a lower level party tackled numerous giants, so the XP awards were high. Now we are back to tackling tasks a little more up to our level so our progression rate has slowed somewhat. There is also the question of whether we are in town roleplaying things out or fighting our way through to accomplish some task.

It was actually a bit more then that, we do things on tour message baords inbetween sessions so that helps keep the sessions a bit more streamlined.