How long can you stay level XXX and still have fun

[Sunseeker]

I don't see why. My protagonists - the PC's - do epic awesome things right from the start. It's easy, really easy, to make whatever else they do bigger, grander, and more epic than what they did before. I don't see how I gain anything by making the early levels less heroic than the latter ones.

My 'epic tier' is intended to be from 1st level on.

Mine isn't. But that's a difference in preferences. I want my players to feel like they're normal people who are moving up in the world. But I also don't want to end up with a "fighting the gods" scenario too soon. That, IMO, is something even max level characters should struggle with.

Stop right there. If in fact 3rd level adventurers are fairly common, why in the world don't they handle whatever problems arise instead of the poor 1st level mooks that are your PC's? I very much dislike the whole 'I'm too busy'/'I can't be bothered'/'I want you younguns to prove your worth' excuses for why the level 65 town fathers and gaurds don't go and clean out those troublesome level 1 kobolds next door. Likewise, I hate the general, "Over the hill, everyone is 50th level, but we can't find any one from there to take care of this goblin infestation!" that infests some settings.

Who says they haven't? There may be 30 random lvl1-3 adventurers wandering around, but YOU(the party) are the ones the town picked. YOU are the ones who volunteered. Perhaps the problem is new, the town's resources stretched, maybe the guards aren't so tough and the town elder looks like he's two days short of being 6 feet under. Why did Frodo have to take the ring? Because he was 'special' in that he could resist it's power, and he was dumb/brave enough to take the job.

The party is no different, you are either special enough to be the only one for the task, or you were dumb enough to sign up for it. The fact that the enemies will have loot from previous adventurers demonstrates that you're NOT the first one to try.

In my campaign world, a 3rd level character is fairly ordinary. But such a character is usually a 3rd level commoner or expert with 15 pt buy and skills, equipment and feats geared toward overcoming problems of farming or commerce. Even if the 3rd level character is from a combative class, such as the veteren fighters in the king's standing army, he'll still be built with about 15 pt buy and he'll simply lack the knowledge, experience, and equipment you'd expect of a 3rd level PC fighter. He's quite capable as a soldier, but much less capable as an adventurer. The same is true of the out of shape hedge wizard who makes the town potions. Yes, in my world, you need to start being 5th or 6th level to really start standing out on the basis of level alone, but 5th or 6th level is about as high as you expect to find NPC's in my game and again most of this will be NPC classed with relatively low point buy equivalents and with a design that is not optimized for combat.

Exactly! We have different ideas of how a world should be set up, and thus, this generates different ideas of how levels should work.

In my game, generic anythings are never 10th level. Tenth level characters are among the most powerful individuals in entire nations. They are never 'mooks'. You don't ever find rooms containing generic 10th level fighters simply because the party is 12th level and 1st level fighters would no longer be a challenge. The most infamous pirate in the whole world is probably a 15th level character.

And in mine, you do. Why? Partly because I like pirates. Also, these guys have been pirating their ENTIRE LIFE, just as you adventurers have been adventuring for the better part of your lives. They are skilled fighters, theives, and sailors. They have a lifetime of dirty deeds and nasty tricks up their sleeve, just as you have a lifetime of herioc deeds and saved princesses. Their Captains are their captains because they are stronger, smarter, and more skilled than any of their crew. They are the "generic pirates" who thought outside the "generic pirate" box, the ones who made deals with demon lords for great power. And as such, they have skills even a great adventurer should fear.

Compared to most of the rest of the world, even from 1st level, the characters are extraordinary both individually and most especially as a team. The PC's are never mooks, and its not unusual at low levels for many of their foes to be higher level than they are and yet not necessarily as capable. While a starting group of heroes is not as powerful as some of their mentors, foils, and potential villains initially, they will be immediately recognized as having extraordinary potential. In my game, a 1st level PC is made from a 32 pt buy and is an advantaged character possessing a destiny. In my world '10' really is average, unlike some worlds where you'd be hard pressed to find an NPC with less than a 12 in anything. For there to be 4-6 such extraordinary characters working together is considered amazing by any NPC that observes it, and by 2nd or 3rd level they are a force and by 6th level they are generally well on their way to being legends.

Again, we have different ideas of how worlds should work and this is great! My heroes start off as slightly better than mundane. You are joe blow, outcast from your town, looking for a special weed to save your sister when you are swept up into a whirlwind of adventure. And yes, at first level, most other NPCs could probably kick your butt, even the fat old lady who seems to have one too few chairs for her bottom.

By the time characters are 5th level, they are showing themselves to be quite heroic, but still fairly average. Oh, they're still heroes, but average heroes. By 10th level, they are quite skilled, and this is recognized by everyone around them. They're not Batman, but they're getting close to Boy Wonder. But to be honest, I don't tend to go much past there, why? We all tend to get bored and want to make new characters for new adventures. Perhaps after this thread I'll organize a new game and see how high everyone wants to go.

Another thing to consider is that with NPCs level is usually tied directly to character age. A 4th level character is usually middle aged. A 6th level character is often a senior citizen. So to find such relative youths possessing such extraordinary skills is very rare.

I do not use this measurement of age to level. Some of the very skilled are very old, and some of the entirely unskilled are also, very old. I tend not to age characters as some races age quickly compared to others, by the time a game is over, Joe could be a wrinkled old man and Elfina the Elf could be well...exactly the same.

A self-fulfilling prophesy.

Of course I realize this, but I do a lot of things to make the mundane seem less mundane. It's hard to explain without seeing it in action.

While there is a place for that sort of thing, giving a player abilities only to take them away when they would be actually useful is antagonistic DMing and tends not to be very fun in the long run. It's much better IMO to up the ante so that the problems that they face require their greater power and ability to overcome, and so 'use rope' remains relevant to the extent that it lets you conserve your stronger abilities for when you truly need them.

I don't feel as the DM that I 'gave people powers'. They worked hard and learned those powers, but they must also learn that just because they have great powers, it doesn't mean you'll be able to use them all the time. I'm not taking them away, I'm making them think before they leap, it's not like they're NEVER going to be able to use those powers, it's just one instance where they need to rely on their basics rather than their awesomes.

 

[The Human Target]

I think it really has a lot to do with the game system.

In general though, if I have a lot of options as a character regardless of the level I don't care much about going up. I'd be happy staying at one level for the whole campaign.

My dream system wouldn't have much leveling at all.

 

[Celebrim]

shidaku: I'm not going to respond to that point by point because such threads have a tendency to grow.

Instead I'm going to note one thing particularly, and make other random comments afterword.

You have your players spend 1st-5th level as mundane characters doing ordinary things against mundane foes. You do ostencibly to make the higher levels feel more epic.

But in point of fact, by your own admission, you never go there. By your own admission, about the time your players are ready to be playing playing your worlds sidekicks and minor players, you're bored with it and ready to start over.

I sense what seems to me to be a little bit of a failure of introspection.

As for NPC's levels generally being proportionate to their age, I've never had a game last more than 5 years of game time. No race ages so fast that that is particularly significant. I'm not talking about players. I'm making the assertion that most NPC's lack quite the potential, or the destiny, or the fast pace of challenges that PC's typically face. You typical NPC does not face 5 life threatening challenges before breakfast on an almost daily basis. They might face 5 such challenges in their whole lives, and mostly what they do is learn through the slow but proven method of practice, training and repitition. Simply put NPC's aren't expected to earn nearly as much XP/day, and as such for a given level they tend to be older than an equivalent NPC. You might find elderly wizards who are 9th level spellcasters. They will be astounded at the natural talent and/or luck that has allowed the PC to master such potent magic at such a young age. The wizard is a quite powerful character, but with a strength, dexterity, and constitution of about 6 he's hardly fit for adventuring. As I said, '10' is intended to be a real average score in my world. I stick to that firmly on the basis of having been in so many campaigns and looked at so many published works were the PC's have on average the lowest ability scores of any prominent character. This is in my opinion not the optimal way to go about challenging players.

I have a serious simulationist streak as a DM. I like my world to feel at least on superficial inspection to be a functioning ecology. We must include the sentient species in particular in this ecology. If in fact there are areas where 1st level characters are extremely relevant, and yet there are whole crews of fierce 10th level bucanneers out there, one wonders why the 10th level pirates don't just go pillage and plunder the places that the characters were first level in, and stay well away from the areas where anything might challenge their skills and dominion. And if there are 10th level pirates, then there is most likely 10th level barroom brawlers and 10th level city gaurds out there. And if so, why don't they spread out a little? And most importantly, if everyone has been going around killing things with the rapidty of the PC's and facing similar life threatening situations 'there whole life' just like the PC's, why in the world is there anything left alive? Things couldn't breed fast enough to keep up with the XP demand.

What you describe sounds alot like the world of a MMORPG. And such world doesn't have a functional ecology and to make it work, various meta-restrictions have to become real in game restrictions limiting people from interacting in precisely the ways I've described. It doesn't 'hang together' for me when put into a PnP setting where players typically hold the setting to higher standards.

 

[Sunseeker]

shidaku: I'm not going to respond to that point by point because such threads have a tendency to grow.

That's too bad.

Instead I'm going to note one thing particularly, and make other random comments afterword.

You have your players spend 1st-5th level as mundane characters doing ordinary things against mundane foes. You do ostencibly to make the higher levels feel more epic.

But in point of fact, by your own admission, you never go there. By your own admission, about the time your players are ready to be playing playing your worlds sidekicks and minor players, you're bored with it and ready to start over.

I'm not sure what you mean by "we never get there". I generally don't go that far beyond 10th level. I don't think we've ever made it to 15th to be honest, which is kind of sad because that leaves a lot of the game unexplored.

I sense what seems to me to be a little bit of a failure of introspection.

Now now, no need to get snooty. We were having a fine discussion, albeit of differing opinions on why we like to level our games at the rate we do.

As for NPC's levels generally being proportionate to their age, I've never had a game last more than 5 years of game time. No race ages so fast that that is particularly significant. I'm not talking about players. I'm making the assertion that most NPC's lack quite the potential, or the destiny, or the fast pace of challenges that PC's typically face. You typical NPC does not face 5 life threatening challenges before breakfast on an almost daily basis. They might face 5 such challenges in their whole lives, and mostly what they do is learn through the slow but proven method of practice, training and repitition. Simply put NPC's aren't expected to earn nearly as much XP/day, and as such for a given level they tend to be older than an equivalent NPC. You might find elderly wizards who are 9th level spellcasters. They will be astounded at the natural talent and/or luck that has allowed the PC to master such potent magic at such a young age. The wizard is a quite powerful character, but with a strength, dexterity, and constitution of about 6 he's hardly fit for adventuring. As I said, '10' is intended to be a real average score in my world. I stick to that firmly on the basis of having been in so many campaigns and looked at so many published works were the PC's have on average the lowest ability scores of any prominent character. This is in my opinion not the optimal way to go about challenging players.

Now, see, here's where we're reaching a sticking point. I'm not telling you you're wrong, in fact I've found it quite interesting so far to hear your point of view. However, this post is increasingly sounding like you're telling me that I am wrong. The optimal way to level in my book is the one that generates the most fun for everyone involved. In my case, that's where my leveling style has come from. In your case, yours. The optimal way should be what you and your players enjoy the most, what works for you and what works for me, may not work for each of us conversely.

I have a serious simulationist streak as a DM. I like my world to feel at least on superficial inspection to be a functioning ecology. We must include the sentient species in particular in this ecology.

As you are so clearly aware, we have different approaches.

If in fact there are areas where 1st level characters are extremely relevant, and yet there are whole crews of fierce 10th level bucanneers out there, one wonders why the 10th level pirates don't just go pillage and plunder the places that the characters were first level in, and stay well away from the areas where anything might challenge their skills and dominion.

Well, the obvious, lvl 1's don't tend to have anything that lvl10 pirates would find useful. That, and a lot of towns with lvl1's tend to be very landlocked, but then there are always those hordes of 10th level barbarians.

And if there are 10th level pirates, then there is most likely 10th level barroom brawlers and 10th level city gaurds out there. And if so, why don't they spread out a little? And most importantly, if everyone has been going around killing things with the rapidty of the PC's and facing similar life threatening situations 'there whole life' just like the PC's, why in the world is there anything left alive? Things couldn't breed fast enough to keep up with the XP demand.

Of course there are. In larger cities you are no doubt more likely to find a greater abundance of people with greater training and skills. And suffice to say, it's a big world.

What you describe sounds alot like the world of a MMORPG. And such world doesn't have a functional ecology and to make it work, various meta-restrictions have to become real in game restrictions limiting people from interacting in precisely the ways I've described. It doesn't 'hang together' for me when put into a PnP setting where players typically hold the setting to higher standards.

Now now, there's no need to be insulting, we were having such a fine discussion on our own individual ways of leveling within our own campaigns. No, to be honest I don't strive to make a real world because 9/10ths of it will NEVER be explored by my players, and I would much rather create a hundred small stories within a hundred worlds than create one world that is so detailed I could spend a real lifetime exploring it with my party.

 

[Lanefan]

Celebrim and shidaku: may I take a moment to throw another pebble in the pond?

Campaign length, both expected and realized.

How long do you expect your campaign(s) to last, in real-world time? I suspect your answers will differ significantly from one another...

If you're going in to a campaign expecting it to last a year or two at most, but still want to try and get to high levels, then obviously you're going to want to blow through the low-level stuff ASAP. On the other hand, if you're going in to a campaign on a completely open-ended schedule then there's no rush to level.

Edition matters too. If you're runnng 3e or 4e the game scales differently; you've got a relatively narrower range of suitable foes to throw at a party as the game's math is more finely tuned, and that can more easily lead to monotony. Too easy and it gets boring. Too tough and it gets deadly.

Also, to shidaku: lower-level opponents only become mundane and-or boring if you as DM let them. My current 1e-variant campaign's been running for about 2.5 years now and the PCs are levels 3-4 in one party and 3-6 in the other...and if I could swing it they'd stay there for years to come*. I've gone in to this campaign with the intention that it will last as long as people are willing to play it and the ideas well doesn't run dry; I'm projecting about an 8-10 year lifespan at this point.

* - well, except that I've got a bunch of higher-level adventure ideas I want to run, so they'll have to advance sometime.

Lan-"if the above doesn't make sense, please let me know"-efan

 

[Sunseeker]

Celebrim and shidaku: may I take a moment to throw another pebble in the pond?

Campaign length, both expected and realized.

How long do you expect your campaign(s) to last, in real-world time? I suspect your answers will differ significantly from one another...

As I mentioned above, I run shorter campaigns. Partially, it's how I like to write, I write short events, not world-spanning epics.

If you're going in to a campaign expecting it to last a year or two at most, but still want to try and get to high levels, then obviously you're going to want to blow through the low-level stuff ASAP. On the other hand, if you're going in to a campaign on a completely open-ended schedule then there's no rush to level.

Having moved on an almost regular 4 year basis, If a campaign reaches a year, it's likely gone it's full course. But then as I've mentioned, I run weekly, which seems to be more often than a number of other posts.

Also, to shidaku: lower-level opponents only become mundane and-or boring if you as DM let them. My current 1e-variant campaign's been running for about 2.5 years now and the PCs are levels 3-4 in one party and 3-6 in the other...and if I could swing it they'd stay there for years to come*. I've gone in to this campaign with the intention that it will last as long as people are willing to play it and the ideas well doesn't run dry; I'm projecting about an 8-10 year lifespan at this point.

Yeah, I definitely have no intent on running such a campaign, or playing in one. I really don't see the draw, but that's me.

 

[S'mon]

I find optimal time to level is around 3-8 4 hour sessions, with the occasional levelling after 2 sessions in case of epic battles and achievements. I haven't experienced a huge variation in desirable rate between editions per se; frequency of sessions, length of campaign, and intent of campaign are more important. Eg (all sessions ca 4 hours of actual gaming):

In my current 'Willow Vale' 3e campaign, which is close to wrapping up, PCs are 7th level after 19 sessions, around 3 sessions to level. It's an 'epic' campaign which suits fast levelling, so I use the standard 3e levelling rate.

In my previous 'Lost City of Barakus' sandbox 3e campaign the PCs reached 8th level after around 35 sessions, or 5 sessions to level. I used reduced XP, half standard awards plus bonuses.

In my current online 1e City State of the Invincible Overlord sandbox campaign, the highest PC is 5th level after 18 sessions, around 4.5 to level. The other PCs are mostly 4th level.

All those rates have been fine, IME. I think in general 1e and 3e both suit a similar levelling rate, around 5 sessions/level up to about 8th. 4e can cope better with a faster levelling rate, inasmuch as 4e PCs don't increase in power so fast, OTOH 4e has big problems if opponent level is not kept very closely tied to PC level.

 

[Celebrim]

Let's back up to the beginning.

But IMO, when you start having stuff like Dracoliches and deep ones being defeated by IMO, low-level adventurers, they lose their epic charm.

Now, see, here's where we're reaching a sticking point. I'm not telling you you're wrong...

Funny, but I don't see how you are telling me any less how I'm wrong than I was telling you. I mean, you get all 'snooty' (your word) about the fact that we have a difference of opinion and that I seem to think mine justified, but your entry into this discussion was marked by the same sort of attitudes and statements that you've now decided to condemn. Why you've decided to get all passive aggressive and defensive, I don't know, but I have no interest in indulging you as a victim in this. You are the one who has decided to be insulted by the comparison to an MMORPG, rather than simply acknowleding: "to be honest I don't strive to make a real world"

I'm not sure what you mean by "we never get there". I generally don't go that far beyond 10th level. I don't think we've ever made it to 15th to be honest, which is kind of sad because that leaves a lot of the game unexplored.

More self-fulfilling prophesy. My point is that you never get to dracoliches and armies of deep ones. You never get to the epic game that you think are protecting by insisting on spending the first 5 levels doing ordinary things and the next 5 levels doing a little less ordinary but still mostly ordinary things before you quit.

My basic problem with your description is it leaves me very much in doubt over the question of whether shidaku knows what he likes or merely likes what he knows. You initiated your complaint with my style by saying that you thought it would cause monsters to loose their epic charm if low level adventurers could have extraordinary adventures. That's well and good, but by your own admission you never have extraordinary adventures. You have small stories on small worlds where heroes do mundane things, and even when these heroes reach 10th level, what are they facing but more mundane things like pirates that have been amped to 10th level so that the players, relatively speaking, might as well not have leveled up at all as they have gained no real advantage in doing so. At level 1 they were facing level 1 pirates, and now after much adventuring they are facing level 10 pirates. Moreover, by your own admission, you never advance your game much past that point, so all those monsters whose epicness you are protecting are protected to the extent that they might as well not exist. You never dracoliches because you've safely ensconced them off in CR 20 fairy land where you never go. By your own admission, your players never get to be 'the batman'. The best they can hope for is to be slightly less effective than the boy wonder. And by your own admission, this is sad.

But, for me, if I run a game from 1st to 10th level, then it's the whole game and no part of it is missing and the world's heroes are my PC's. And the same is true if I ran it from 1st to 15th, or (heaven help me) all the way to 20th or higher. That's because I don't want to be caught waiting for the monsters to be fantastic and the adventures to become epic. If the campaign stops at 5th or 6th level, I'll be disappointed in that the whole of the story arc wasn't played out, but no one will be able to complain that they spent their whole time killing rats and kobolds and waiting for the good stuff to start.

You have protested that I diminish monsters and make them mundane. I protest back that you've diminished your whole world, and that my monsters are less mundane than yours.

Look, I know where you are coming from. Fifteen or twenty years ago I had many of the same opinions. But I got exposed to a DM with a different play style, and I had an otherwise promising campaign die early because I didn't do enough to impress upon the players that this mundane existance was going to transform into something epic and heroic. I had plans for where the story was going, but in effect, I made the same mistake as a novelist who spends too much time in exposition before getting to the meat of the story. I've learned from that time that you are better off doing as a good novelist does and putting your big hook on page one so don't risk losing anyones attention.

 

[Sorrowdusk]

We average around 80-100 hours of play per level, but there is an enormous amount to learn each level. Based upon the vast complexity of the world we play in it's really too fast, which is going to bother some people. However, we do manage to collect a lot of power ups from exploring and they give us far more abilities than just what we receive from leveling, so it evens out in the end. Every session has new things to explore and exploit to our PCs' advantage.

IIRC, our Ref ran the game at a standard 900 hours per level rate, but he has certainly toned that down for us.

Leveling, like the game length, is variable like how long it takes a person to solve a puzzle. Some boardgames take 45-60 minutes, some take 4-6 hours. As a game designed to last 1000s of hours, the number of hours it takes to level varies widely upon how what strategies we use in play. And the luck of the dice.

OVER 900 Hours?! *Scouter explodes*

I dunno...PER level?

Well, I can recall starting a game at lvl 5 in october, and the party being about 8-9 by the following May (I also went through 3 characters), so about 3-4lvls over the course of 7-8 months/28-32 games? It seems like we played MOST weeks, although there were a number of times we couldnt meet, I cant say exactly how many. We would usually play for 6-8 hours at a time.

I have no idea what a "standard" or truly "typical" pace is-but I can tell you I wasnt bored in that campaign. Other games like Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, and Savage Worlds dont really have levels.

IMC right now, it seems lvl 1-5 took about from Dec-Januaryish. Between Febuary and October (8 months), I'm 15th lvl. Big difference-but I wont say that my current campaign is "better" by comparison to the last one.