Rate of Advancement: A Level per Day?!

[Jester David]

This:

I suspect you are correct. It makes a lot of sense to have a very fast rate of level increase when trying to test out the rules.

There's not a lot of monsters written yet and they want to test character gen, encounter design, and some more of the power balance.
The best way to do that is to set the level-up bar low so people can see how multiple characters work at at the provided level range.
Don't worry too much about it.

 

[howandwhy99]

So is an "adventuring day" meant to cover an entire adventure, taking up three or four game sessions?

1 Adventure Per Session
This was the stated design goal in of the Design & Development articles.
That means 1 Class Level advanced per Session by default.

I don't expect the default to be adhered to by most people. That feels insanely fast and I'm getting the feeling we're only looking at 10 levels maximum.

Also, 2 Tough combats is not every single adventure. They are basing and Adventure / Single Day on Combat Rounds against Average opponents.

Not sure, but if, say, 10 rounds of Combat (successful combat) = 1 Adventure / 1 in-game Day / 1 Session, then that is how Daily Class abilities are balanced.

This makes sense with the NPC healing rate of FULL HP after a Daily Rest being just like a PCs. If you don't kill them Day 1, you have to do it all over again.

EDIT:
I do not believe any of this is about pacing playtesting.

 

[Sunseeker]

I wanted to come back to this and posit some more thoughts.

What is an adventuring day, exactly? Well, it's the time-period in which you fight monsters, explore dungeons, tackle puzzles and all sorts of things like that right? It's also where you play detective, scour the city for clues, investigate strange happenings.

This doesn't really include the time spent sleeping(unless you spend it sleeping in a dangerous forest where there's a real chance of being attacked by some monstrous predator), it doesn't really include "travel time", that strange wishy-washy period in which your group travels from Here to There.

Really most D&D campaigns are like a movie, what we take the time to play are the really interesting bits, the battles, the chases, the puzzles, the searches. I mean, it took Gandalf 3 days to ride from Rohan to Minas Tirith, but it was simply a scene transition in the movie and only a few paragraphs in the book.

So, a "level per adventuring day" is fairly accurate, now, a "days" worth of content might be broken up over multiple sessions(though probably not for combat), but yes, I would say that the average "adventuring day" probably nets a level-worth of experience.

I realize this probably indicates a fairly quick leveling pace, but I feel it gives more value to any given combat, given that a "challenge" will level the players, but it also places a greater focus on proper game pacing.


What it does make me wonder about: are we going back to a time when only monster killing grants XP? Do skill challenges, social stuff, and exploration no longer count towards "experience"?

 

[Li Shenron]

I think it's simple enough. Some people enjoy the moment. Some people enjoy the memory.
It's the difference between telling one truly epic story that takes years, or telling many shorter stories.

For some others it's even simpler: they just want to "win".

 

[Li Shenron]

What it does make me wonder about: are we going back to a time when only monster killing grants XP? Do skill challenges, social stuff, and exploration no longer count towards "experience"?

To me it doesn't matter what the books or other gamers try to tell me, I'm just going to give out XP the way my group likes, and that depends on the campaign.

 

[Transformer]

My best guess is that they've artificially lowered the XP needed to level to make sure they get feedback through level 5 for the playtest. But levelling every session just seems silly.

I think this is all but confirmed considering what Mearls tweeted about encounter and daily XP budgets. If they're manipulating those for the sake of the playtest, I'm pretty sure they're manipulating the XP-to-level too.

 

[Stormonu]

I don't understand why some gaming group are so anxious to actually reach the end of the game... When I am enjoying something I actually want it last longer

The game ends when we say it does, not at some arbitrary level a designer a thousand miles away picked. Besides, sometimes you need the XP to get to the point/level in the game you like best. Fast leveling to get through the indroductory levels, slowed when you hit the parts you want to play at for a while.

 

[Sunseeker]

To me it doesn't matter what the books or other gamers try to tell me, I'm just going to give out XP the way my group likes, and that depends on the campaign.

I agree, but if core says "non-killing stuff grants xp" I feel it leads to a different conceptualization of the game, both by players and the DM. IMO: when skill-checks, social events, and the like are considered equal to monster killing it does a few of the following:

When at the end of the day, only killing advances your level, I think it makes social things feel unimportant.

I will still assign XP/levels when I feel like, as I always have, but there's a certain mentality I'd like to see engendered in the game regarding what parts of the game are valued.

 

[KesselZero]

I wanted to come back to this and posit some more thoughts.

What is an adventuring day, exactly? Well, it's the time-period in which you fight monsters, explore dungeons, tackle puzzles and all sorts of things like that right? It's also where you play detective, scour the city for clues, investigate strange happenings.

This doesn't really include the time spent sleeping(unless you spend it sleeping in a dangerous forest where there's a real chance of being attacked by some monstrous predator), it doesn't really include "travel time", that strange wishy-washy period in which your group travels from Here to There.

Really most D&D campaigns are like a movie, what we take the time to play are the really interesting bits, the battles, the chases, the puzzles, the searches. I mean, it took Gandalf 3 days to ride from Rohan to Minas Tirith, but it was simply a scene transition in the movie and only a few paragraphs in the book.

So, a "level per adventuring day" is fairly accurate, now, a "days" worth of content might be broken up over multiple sessions(though probably not for combat), but yes, I would say that the average "adventuring day" probably nets a level-worth of experience.

I realize this probably indicates a fairly quick leveling pace, but I feel it gives more value to any given combat, given that a "challenge" will level the players, but it also places a greater focus on proper game pacing.


What it does make me wonder about: are we going back to a time when only monster killing grants XP? Do skill challenges, social stuff, and exploration no longer count towards "experience"?

My concern is more for the amount of table time it take to level, rather than the amount of game time. If 6 easy combats or 2 tough ones nets you a level gain, given how quickly combat moves thus far, you'll probably level every game session. Again, I know this can be altered at whim by the DM-- it's just a strange baseline.

I think the evidence is pretty much in that this is playtest-unique and won't be our final rate. They even asked in one of the pre-playtest polls something like "How many sessions do you think it should take for a party to level up?" and I can't imagine an overwhelming majority of people voting "One level per session" (unless the munchkins got ahold of the poll).

Regarding your interesting examples of an expansive reading of "adventuring day"-- Gandalf taking three days of travel in a paragraph, e.g.-- there is a gamist twist. Three days of travel technically gets you three extended rests, i.e. complete resource recharges. The "adventuring day" as defined in the playtest has to do with how many resources a party can expend before needing to completely recharge, which maps to a solar day because sleeping overnight is the trigger to recharge all that stuff.

Regarding XP-for-killing, I'm definitely with you in being a bit concerned about that focus and the effect it can have on gameplay. They do include some vague guidelines about giving XP for achieving goals, though. Hopefully those rules (along with other variants such as XP-for-GP and so on) will get full treatment as options in the DMG. I try not to advertise for myself, but rather than copy-pasting a long thing I'll link to this: Megadungeon XP for D&D Next | Megadungeons.com which suggests two alternate systems I cooked up for awarding XP at the same rate as the playtest guidelines, but for different achievements other than killing.

 

[Ichneumon]

I thought the advancement rate was an artificial one for playtesting purposes, but now I'm not sure. The designers haven't mentioned this, and the progression looks exponential. Surely an artificial rate would've been linear.

What I suspect is that they want to see how the game works when surviving your first few fights bumps you up to the next level. Given 1st-level PCs low hit points, a boost after roughly a session of gaming would be very timely and help with survival rates. Whether it still "feels like D&D" is something that only road-testing the rules will decide.