D&D 5E 5e recommended 2.5 sessions/level rate

S'mon · Jun 30, 2019

Fanaelialae said:
I've been using a homebrew XP system of my own that grants levels approximately every 1.5 to 2.5 sessions. We've had 30ish sessions and the PCs are around level 15. I'm fairly happy with it.

I suppose it depends on the story that you want to arise from your campaign. If you have a ton of material that you want to explore, you could slow advancement. If you have have a fairly tight amount that you don't want to pad with filler, I could see increasing advancement to as much as 1 level per session.

If you want your campaign to run to level 20, at 2.5 sessions a level that's around 50 sessions (you get level 1 for free, but presumably you want to give the players a few sessions to enjoy level 20). If you don't have 50 levels worth of material, it's probably better to accelerate advancement than to add filler (IMO).

Yeah, I am running a Princes of the Apocalypse monthly game which is working well at ca 1.5 sessions/level; the pace is still pretty close to what the book expects (assuming not every bit of dungeon is cleared) and it works well with a fairly casual group doing the Epic Quest.

My Thule game though runs weekly and at 2.5 sessions/level should span 1-20 in a year, which is definitely much faster than I usually do.

Giltonio_Santos · Jun 30, 2019

I try not to spend more than 3-4 sessions to make players go from 1 to 3. After that, they get individual XP only.

Shiroiken · Jun 30, 2019

My first campaign used the standard xp, but I was using a lot of older 1E adventures, which can be a grind of combat. Once we got about 10th level or so, they started leveling almost every session, because they were killing so many things each time. This didn't really give them time to adapt to their new abilities, so they were often overlooked and forgotten. I'd think 2.5 sessions should be the minimum, except for levels 1-2, which can be done in a session or two each.

Gilladian · Jun 30, 2019

One session for lvl 1, 2-3 session for lvls 2-3, then slower. But we will top out at 8th lvl and get feats only after that. We use milestones, too. Our sessions are 3 hours long, which I suspect is fairly short.

Li Shenron · Jun 30, 2019

S'mon said:
What do you think of the 5e DMG's recommended 2.5 sessions/level rate? How do you think it compares to using the XP system, which seems designed to keep PCs in the level 5-10 range as long as possible?

I have never reached 10th level in 5e, but so far the advancement rate using standard XP has been quite close to 3 sessions / level.

For my tastes it's too fast, since I would personally prefer a lower and also decreasing speed, but for example for my children it's just right.

Retreater · Jun 30, 2019

Two sessions per level sounds good. We play (if we're lucky) 2 sessions a month; sometimes it's once a month. A slower progression than that would feel like the characters weren't advancing at all, with months between levels. I think XP awards by the book are fairly miserly. I will never use XP in future D&D campaigns.

Tony Vargas · Jun 30, 2019

S'mon said:
What do you think of the 5e DMG's recommended 2.5 sessions/level rate? How do you think it compares to using the XP system, which seems designed to keep PCs in the level 5-10 range as long as possible?

I missed that memo.

The XP progression in 5e is a pretty good idea, IMHO, it speeds your players through the deadly/dull Apprentice Tier, lingers in the Sweet Spot, and gets dysfunctional high-level play over with fairly quickly, but not so quickly you feel like you've been cheated of the accomplishment. So I'd be hesitant to give it up were I running a long campaign.

Anyway, even assuming hard encounters, through the sweet spot those'd map to 4-encounter sessions using the XP tables .... hm, actually, that'd be mapping sessions approximately to adventuring 'days' of 6-8 medium/hard encounters. Those'd be long sessions and/or fast combats.
Probably what they were thinking?

jgsugden · Jun 30, 2019

How is session a unit of measurement when people have different length sessions and move through sessions at different rates? I'm not familiar with this 2.5 sessions, anyways. If you follow the DMG recommendations for encounter building and adventuring, levels 1 and 2 are fast, 3 and 4 slow down, 5 5through 16 are slow, and 17 to 20 speed up again (if all experience comes from fights and you use repetitive patterns in encounter design based upon level).

I have used milestone advancement for decades longer than we had the term. I design things so that new abilities arrive to freshen things up once they've played with established features for a while. It works, and it tends to result in faster advancement per game hour if you play rarely and slower per hour if you play often.

BMaC · Jun 30, 2019

My math is fuzzy, but if a party runs the “recommended” 6-8 encounters per adventuring day, and these encounters are of varying difficulty levels, then a party is going to level up (by XP at least) faster than 2.5 sessions unless 1) your sessions are really short or 2) a single adventuring day spans multiple play sessions. Or both.

our group plays every other week for six hours and does straight XP leveling. We average a level every 1.5 sessions.

S'mon · Jul 1, 2019

BMaC said:
My math is fuzzy, but if a party runs the “recommended” 6-8 encounters per adventuring day, and these encounters are of varying difficulty levels, then a party is going to level up (by XP at least) faster than 2.5 sessions unless 1) your sessions are really short or 2) a single adventuring day spans multiple play sessions. Or both.

Only if every encounter is with a single opponent.