Leveling: Too fast, too slow, or just right?

[Hereticus]

As a side note, I've stopped calculating XP in our Scales of War game and just hand out the right amount of XP at significant plot points. It's made my life easier, and the players know they won't be penalized for coming up with clever monster-avoidance solutions.

We do something similar, but we found that we want to advance quicker during the lower levels, and advance slower during the mid and higher levels. Character personality is created most at lower levels, where you need to be more creative to get things done. But there is much less you can do, so we want to move through them quicker. Once we gain power, then things are slowed down.

One other problem that we have resolved is unequal leveling. If someone misses a game or two, they start falling behind. We had one player who was a bit behind in XP and had to go away for a month. When he returned he was hesitant about rejoining the group over two levels behind the others in experience. When we told him that we changed to equal leveling for all characters, he changed his mind in a snap and was extremely enthusiastic about rejoining.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I always have a hard time believing I'm in the minority thinking its too slow. 13.3 encounters? A couple dozen encounters was probably my last *campaign*. I assigned ad hoc XP and had them level probably more like every 2 or 3 encounters (equating to roughly one weekly session of six to eight hours) and that still wasn't exactly fast.

If I or my players play a good quality session and the characters don't level, I'd be pretty disappointed.

 

[Khairn]

I find leveling every 3-4 sessions to be just the right rate. We play between 4-6 hours each session and usually have a mix of combat (challenges), npc interaction, and group interaction / planning.

But I freely admit that awarding XP and leveling is one of the aspects of my game where I follow the "rules" the least.

 

[Piratecat]

If I or my players play a good quality session and the characters don't level, I'd be pretty disappointed.

Wowsers.

You would hate my campaign.

 

[Hussar]

I'm thinking about including level advancement tables for Project Phoenix, my 3.5 revision, and I wanted to get people's opinions on the levelling speed. In our current campaign, after 4 sessions, we're halfway to L3 already. I've heard many comments over the years that PCs kind of zip through the levels, not giving the players time to get used to their abilities and such before they get new ones and have to learn those too, so I was thinking of reducing the level rate by 50%. Basically, you would need 50% more XP to level up:

L2: 1500
L3: 3000
L4: 6000
L5: 15000

etc.

Comments?

First off, how long are your sessions. If you're following the guidelines, you need 26 par CR creatures to hit level 3. After four sessions, you are saying you have defeated about 21 par CR creatures. That's a heck of a lot of combat to be blitzing through, but, maybe your sessions are six hours long. It would help if you put your advancement in levels/hour, rather than levels/session.

Me, I game 3 hour sessions. We bump about every 4 sessions, which is perfect for my tastes.

Secondly, bumping at such low levels has always been pretty quick, in any edition. Do you find that the speed of leveling changes over time?

Thirdly, are you following the xp guidelines or are you dumping in ad hoc xp on top? In other words, are you giving the xp that they suggest?

Now, as far as speed goes, the idea of going 12 sessions between levels is just boring to me. Sorry to be blunt, but, the idea that I'm going to spend three months at a given level means that, for me, an entire campaign would result in about 4-6 levels. This can be particularly bad if you have classes with multiple dead levels. Having just played a binder from levels 5-8, I can say that dead levels REALLY suck.

For those who don't know binders, from 5th to 8th level I gained hit points, 1 or 2 points of BAB and immunity to fear. That's it. SNORE. Combine that with the idea of even slower advancement than 1/month and I'm spending the majority of an entire campaign not doing anything new.

As I said, 1 level/12-16 hours of gameplay seems to work for us.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Wow, people really like slow leveling. I ran a "vanilla" 3.0 game and it took me from February 2001 - August 2008, running 6 hour games every 2 weeks to get a group from 1st level to 23rd level. That's a whopping 3 levels each year. I just about pulled my hair out at how slow the characters gained in power.

About the only thing I agree with 4th ed is that leveling should be sped up. Most campaigns I've been in or heard of tend to last for a dozen sessions or so and often a lot of the reason the games fall apart is that the players get irritated with slow advancement.

I had trouble throwing enough rational, store-relevant encounters to give out enough XP. And I gave out XP for anything that looked reasonable. Social challenges were treated as "traps" that had to be disarmed or worked around. The players were told that some encounters would be too high level for them to survive a combat encounter and that it wouldn't be obvious, but they'd get XP for talking or avoiding conflict. Roleplaying got XP awards with bonuses for developing and/or reaching in-character goals.

Admittedly, some of the slow leveling was the players; they spent a lot of sessions socializing (in-character) or scheming. I suppose my plots contributed to that; we kept a dry-erase board of goals/plot points and at the end of the campaign there were more than a dozen entries. I think the fact that players managed to eliminate a plot points with regularity offset the slow leveling and gave the appearance of progress.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Double the amounts, at the least. And that's if you want to retain that linear rate of increase (I don't, when it comes to D&D).

 

[jdrakeh]

I ran a "vanilla" 3.0 game and it took me from February 2001 - August 2008, running 6 hour games every 2 weeks to get a group from 1st level to 23rd level. That's a whopping 3 levels each year.

Ideally (and typically, according to designers), a character gains a level in 3x for approximately every 13 encounters.

Having mentioned the magic number thirteen, if you're breaking up games into two sessions each month (as opposed to four sessions each month) it will signifcantly decrease the number of encounters that you get to play through in a calendar year. This will prolong level ups.

Then you need to factor in the often molasses slow combat of levels 10+ in 3x, where it's quite possible that it will take an entire one of your six hour game sessions to play through one encounter. This, too, can significantly impact the number of encounter that you play through in a year.

And, as you note, you then have to factor in casual gamers spending more time shooting the breeze than playing and things like using fiat to award XP at higher levels in lieu of good rules for high level challenges (which can throw a huge wrench in the works).

I think people forget a lot of that. Still, though, D&D 3x levels too fast for me. My first AD&D 1e character took almost two years of weekly sessions (with a few exceptions) to gain three levels.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Wowsers.

You would hate my campaign.

I'm getting that. It's amazing how many different ways there are to play this game (perfectly good ways, Imight add). Personally, I've always found that time is short and I'd better go fast.

 

[arscott]

Games I play in or run tend to be talk-heavy and action light, so without pretty significant roleplaying xp, the 3e model seems too slow.