Interesting problem re adventures

[the Jester]

It raises a few rather serious corollary questions as well:

What does each adventure represent in terms of level advancement? One level per adventure? More? Less? Highly relevant as the core design only goes to level 20...if you're going through an adventure every 2 sessions and each adventure represents a level, you've run out of game in a year or less.

How long a campaign can this system support? If someone is looking to run a long game (5-10+ years) can 5e even touch it, or will it implode at level 20 after a year and a half? Or will the advancement rate be tweakable?

Personally, I'd bet on modules for faster or slower advancement being in the core rules. But these are very valid questions; an adventure that assumes pcs will go from the start of 1st level to mid-way through 3rd level by the end is very different from one that assumes you're not hitting 2nd level at all yet.

 

[amerigoV]

How long a campaign can this system support? If someone is looking to run a long game (5-10+ years) can 5e even touch it, or will it implode at level 20 after a year and a half? Or will the advancement rate be tweakable?

Lanefan

Didn't the market research for 3e find that most campaigns lasted around a year presuming weekly 4 hours games (I'll let some adventurous person dig that up for some xp)? If they have that kind of data, the game should built on that and then give guidance on how to accelerate/slow down the advancement.

 

[I'm A Banana]

From my own research, approximately:

1 year campaign = 10 levels = 30 sessions = 120 hours.

So if people can fit all of the Caves of Chaos into about 3 sessions, we might see one "module" per level, with each module covering about 3 sessions (or 12 hours) worth of play-time.

Of course, that number is adjustable if you think a once-every-month-or-so advancement rate is too fast too furious or too slow too serious.

 

[Li Shenron]

Personally, I'd bet on modules for faster or slower advancement being in the core rules. But these are very valid questions; an adventure that assumes pcs will go from the start of 1st level to mid-way through 3rd level by the end is very different from one that assumes you're not hitting 2nd level at all yet.

Do we really need a module to tell us how to make slower/faster advancement? In our 3ed games, once the rules told us that with the standard XP/CR the characters (party of 4) would level up every ~13 encounters of average CR, we didn't need any more information... it's automatic that if the DM wants advancement at half speed, she gives half XP, and so on.

The second point it totally spot-on. 3ed published adventures are hard to adapt to a campaign style with an advancement at a rate different than the default, because many adventures (except the shortest ones) assume you level up once or twice before the end (actually IMHO this is because they often give encounters of CR higher than expected). So if you want a generally slower advancement rate, you have to double the number of encounters, but then you have to space these accordingly to the rest rate of the party... not always easy.

 

[Harlock]

There is a comment in the latest Legends and Lore article that people are "happy at how much of an adventure they could play through in a short time" and I will attest to that also. This throws up an interesting problem: if players are able to play more over a given period of time, does that not mean that more published adventures will have to be made available? Or at least that there will be more demand for them. Sure, a lot of DMs will be writing their own stuff but I imagine that Wizards will either have to up their game on publishing adventures (and quality ones too) and/or make it easier for 3PPs to do so.

Oh and we should also see some solid guidelines on converting old adventures to D&D Next (or whatever it will be called). From what I have seen, no D&D system so far has been as flexible when it comes to this.

I think this problem is fairly easily resolved by Hasbro simply converting the old modules and re-releasing them. There is a wealth of old modules out there that will sell for the nostalgia factor alone, and we are all partial to our own old favorites. They proved it can be done with the Playtest adventure. I'd love to see X2 Castle Amber, B4 The Lost (or was it forgotten?) City, etc.

On top of this, they could also release a new adventure path and then have a separate path (or two) for Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Mystara, etc.

 

[amerigoV]

Just a side comment - I know people are geeked about a faster system, but other than 4e, has any D&D system been slow at the low levels? One could get through quite a bit in 3e (or die quickly) at the low levels.

I'll be curious to hear what people think when they release a high level (I'm talking 9-12 level) test -- or is there enough information in the playtest materials to infer that? I only played in playtest at Origins and I have not looked at the materials they released other than the PC I ran.

 

[Harlock]

In earlier editions, the carrot on the stick was much closer in the beginning and leveling did slow down quite a bit at lower levels.

 

[Agamon]

All I know is, if combat slog is what makes a campaign last longer, I'll take a quick campaign, please.

Me, I'll see it as an opportunity to get as many combat encounters in as normal, and then increase the amount of roleplay and exploration that sometimes tends to get brushed off when the fight-of-the-night take an hour and a half.

 

[Lanefan]

Didn't the market research for 3e find that most campaigns lasted around a year presuming weekly 4 hours games (I'll let some adventurous person dig that up for some xp)? If they have that kind of data, the game should built on that and then give guidance on how to accelerate/slow down the advancement.

The data for that research has some rather large and annoying holes in it, one of which is in this aspect in particular.

When tolling up the data, all replies from anyone over 35 at the time were thrown out. As longer-term (and thus likely to be older) players would naturally tend toward longer-term campaigns, the results they achieved from their data were artificially skewed heavily toward shorter campaigns by their data management decisions.

Lanefan

 

[amerigoV]

The data for that research has some rather large and annoying holes in it, one of which is in this aspect in particular.

When tolling up the data, all replies from anyone over 35 at the time were thrown out. As longer-term (and thus likely to be older) players would naturally tend toward longer-term campaigns, the results they achieved from their data were artificially skewed heavily toward shorter campaigns by their data management decisions.

Lanefan

Heh - you do not know my group of old farts. Of course, eventually every session will be a one-shot cuz we are getting too old to remember what happened last time and too lazy to read the log

Thanks for pointing out the hole in the data.