BECMI and Campaign Pacing

[Wabbit Season]

Background: My group has been playing 4e for the past several months and has enjoyed it. While our regular DM is taking a break to prepare more material, I offered to run BECMI as a demo for several sessions just to show our newer players how different the game was back in the day. It turned out that everyone, including our regular DM, absolutely loved it and wanted to make that our regular game.

I hadn't really planned for a full-blown campaign but I have a cache of old modules that I'd like to run and I wanted to get some opinions on how long they might take to play through. I know our regular DM wants to pick up his campaign at some point and one other player wants to try DMing, so this will help our scheduling. I don't have much of a feel for the pacing of the older editions since I never DMed back then. My memory as a player is that level advancement was glacial.

1. Keep on the Borderland (levels 1-3). Tonight will be session four and the party has only cleared out all the goblins plus half the orcs. This includes exploration, RP, planning, etc. I don't think anyone is even halfway to 2nd level yet.

2. Temple of Elemental Evil (levels 1-8)
3. Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (levels 6-10)
4. Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun (levels 5-10)

I was a bit optimistic in thinking that we could get through Keep in three sessions and I have no idea how long it will take a party of six to reach the appropriate levels for the other modules. Any ideas how long this would take, disregarding travel time between sites? I'm considering having portals connect various areas. We play 3-3.5 hours once per week.

Thanks!

 

[Uder]

Are you rewarding xp for gold? Advancement is balanced with that in mind.

 

[Scurvy_Platypus]

Are you rewarding xp for gold? Advancement is balanced with that in mind.

Seriously. I can't stress this enough. People freaked when 3.0 first rolled out talking about how fast advancement was, etc. Of course the reason why it seemed so fast is because they'd been using the houserules for years of "gold is it's own reward and you don't get XP for it".

Since that was the case, when they went and did 3.0 they bumped up the monster XP to account for the way GMs were awarding XP.

If you've got the Rules Compendium (aka RC), it talks about roughly how fast people should advance. As a bonus, it even includes a fore-runner of the CR system, not that a lot of people seem to know/remember that.

Depending on how "old school" you want to take it, there is of course always the option to simply ignore XP outright and advance based on the number of encounters. Remember that 3.x used 13.33 encounters to level as its premise; 4e is 10 encounters I believe.

 

[Wabbit Season]

Are you rewarding xp for gold? Advancement is balanced with that in mind.

Yes, I have been giving them gold xp so far. At last night's game we discussed possibly giving a flat xp amount each session, such that some classes will level about every 5 sessions, some faster, some slower (demi-humans). The players who have been weaned on 3e and 4e were grumpy about the xp pace. Actually, we're also considering switching over completely to Savage Worlds to avoid such issues (and for other reasons), but that's a story for another time.

I am also handing out 50-100 xp bonuses for good RP, taking risks, etc.

 

[Uder]

Yes, I have been giving them gold xp so far. At last night's game we discussed possibly giving a flat xp amount each session, such that some classes will level about every 5 sessions, some faster, some slower (demi-humans). The players who have been weaned on 3e and 4e were grumpy about the xp pace. Actually, we're also considering switching over completely to Savage Worlds to avoid such issues (and for other reasons), but that's a story for another time.

I am also handing out 50-100 xp bonuses for good RP, taking risks, etc.

Hmm. Sounds like it's just pacing then. Is the 50-100xp bonus split amongst the players? IME, giving 10-20% of all xp as bonuses works fine and doesn't unbalance things.

That reminds me: with the later AD&D modules on your list you may want to increase the various hordes of gold to cover some missing xp. AD&D gives xp for magic items. Of course, if you have access to AD&D books you could award xp for magic items - this alone might fix your advancement issues, since a single +1 sword can be worth between 400 and 2,000 xp depending on whether it's kept or sold.

Disclaimer: Prior to 3E I'd mostly played OD&D, Holmes, B/X, and AD&D, never much BECMI... but they're so similar I hope I'm not giving bad advice here.