D&D 4E Are you supposed to level faster in 4e?

[Stalker0]

My group has never used standard xp methods. Generally we just level every x number of sessions. So I was curious, is the design of 4e such that you are supposed to level faster than before? And is so...how much?

 

[fba827]

Well it's hard for me to judge that because my current game sessions with the group run much longer (real time wise per session) than other games in the past.

However, 4e is designed to go up in level every 8-12 encounters -- that's social encounters and skill challenges and traps in addition to combat encounters, as well as counting minor and major quest rewards... (or something like that, I'm quoting the number from memory).

So I guess it's a question of how many "encounters" your group normally gets through in any given sit down session.

Having said that, if your group is happy with the "go up every X number of sessions" by all means, do what works for your group.

 

[egarvue]

Don't know how its supposed to go, but we've found that its roughly every 6-9 encounters for us, depending on how hard the encounters are. Our group plays about 4 hours a week, every week since 4th edition came out in June and we just hit 6th level. It seems faster, but we like it that way. We also keep track of XP as a group score - we all level at the same time.

Oh, btw Stalker0, my group loves your Obsidian system, it adds so much roleplaying flavor to what might be an ordinary bunch of skill rolls. Excellent job.

 

[Stalker0]

Yeah the main reason I'm asking is our "X" in that X sessions we level is based on how we leveled in 3e.

If 4e assumes a group levels a bit quicker, we might take that into account in our group.

 

[Subumloc]

The group I DM is levelling a little faster than 3.5, about once every 2-3 game sessions as opposed to 3-4. I think that's primarily beacuse they're expected to go through fewer combat encounters, but the "quest" OX remained basically the same.

 

[frankthedm]

While levels come faster, they are much more incremental boosts of power.

Also Players have to kill more things in 4e. The XP per Opponent ratio seems notably lower.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Yeah the main reason I'm asking is our "X" in that X sessions we level is based on how we leveled in 3e.

If 4e assumes a group levels a bit quicker, we might take that into account in our group.

I think the intention was to speed up leveling a little bit for 4E.

IIRC, 3E assumed 13.33 encounters of your level to gain one level, and 4E assumes 10 encounters of your level to gain one level.
(Encounters also includes skill challenges and quest rewards).

The rules do not presume you run only equal level challenges (both in 4E and 3E), this just sets a "baseline". IIRC, my DM in our Savage Tides conversion is working with 8 encounters per level (with a 4-man party). I think it was a little faster in my Keep on the Shadowfell campaign, which I ran mostly unchanged for 4 PCs instead of 5. (So no real surprise here). I think the best we got were 8 encounters per session (~8 h). I think one level per 1-2 sessions is to be expected with my group. That is not much differently from 3E, I think, but it might be a little faster in advancement overall.

So, how many encounters do you run per session? Did the number change in 4E? "Armed" with this knowledge you might know how much it effectively changed for you.

 

[jodyjohnson]

Our experience in 3.5 was that levelling was very fast. Since our character were almost always fighting and winning fights +2 CR or higher we only fought 4-5 encounters per level because of the way the XP scale rewarded fights of higher CR. These harder fights did not last much longer vs. time spent because the hp did not scale as fast and player damage was very high (plus usually only one creature was around for more than a few rounds).

4e does not reward fighting encounters over your level in the same way. If anything we find that higher level fights actually play out slower for less XP per time spent since you can't really earn double, triple, or quadrupel XP for a very hard fight. They just get very long and after a dozen rounds very monotonous.

Our house rule is to cut HP in half for normal XP and double XP for anything with book standard HP since we like to level fast.

 

[KarinsDad]

Don't know how its supposed to go, but we've found that its roughly every 6-9 encounters for us, depending on how hard the encounters are. Our group plays about 4 hours a week, every week since 4th edition came out in June and we just hit 6th level. It seems faster, but we like it that way. We also keep track of XP as a group score - we all level at the same time.

This is my experience as well. We average probably 5 hours per session once a week since June and just made 7th level yesterday (with I think 2 or 3 sessions off due to people being on vacation over the summer). That's an average of a level almost every other session or a level every 11 gaming hours.

 

[Mengu]

In 3.x, we leveled up pretty fast at low levels, and it gets slower at mid levels, then speeds back up at high levels (as the DM gets tired of the grind and starts handing out levels every few sessions).

In 4.0, I think leveling up is actually slower at lower levels. In 3.x low level fights were very fast, you hit stuff, they die, encounter over. In 4.0 fights go longer at low levels. I'm thinking I'll need to speed up the leveling up because the required number of encounters between levels is a bit too much for our play style. There are natural adventure resolution points in a campaign, and I like to have people go up a level based more on accomplishments than XP, so I'm sticking with my old ways when it comes to determining when it's time to level up, which never really was monster XP based.