Player: "I need to level up so I can do cool stuff!"

[Henry]

Yarp.

Cool stuff is what you do with whatever resources that you have at your disposal at a given time.
Not enjoying the current adventure is a separate issue IMHO. If you really loathe going on what seems like a peasant's mission would being able to shoot fireballs out of your arse really make the adventure more enjoyable?

In several cases, yes -- it meant the adventure was over quicker.

NPC: "Kill those rats in my cellar."
Wizard: "Fireball!" *FWOOSH!*
Wizard: "Done! What's next?"
NPC: "MY HOME!!! DAMMIT!!!"

In a similar line of questioning, would you play in a campaign where you never leveled and only had 1st level adventuring quests for a six month campaign? In my experience, I enjoy exploring, weaving a great story, and developing a character, but I also enjoy a mechanical feeling of progress, too. It's part of the fun of a levelling system, and why some people prefer games like D&D to others like Savage Worlds or GURPS, where the rate of progression is MUCH slower.

Back when I played AD&D in high school and college, I didn't mind advancement every two or three months -- now, when we can only play two sessions a month for a given campaign, if it took me four or five sessions to level, I'd feel like I was going nowhere for two to three months - in our case, we level every two sessions, roughly. It's a dizzying pace for some, but in context, "dizzying" hardly describes levelling a character sheet once a month.

 

[Janx]

Back when I played AD&D in high school and college, I didn't mind advancement every two or three months -- now, when we can only play two sessions a month for a given campaign, if it took me four or five sessions to level, I'd feel like I was going nowhere for two to three months - in our case, we level every two sessions, roughly. It's a dizzying pace for some, but in context, "dizzying" hardly describes levelling a character sheet once a month.

There's some article I read quite awhile back that talked about this concept, and it echoed principles some friends and I talked about way back when.

The more frequently you play, the slower advancement should be.

The less frequently you play, the faster advancement should be.

This keep ups advancement moderated in frequent gaming groups, and give a sense of progresss to infrequent gaming groups.


Thus, if you play every day, don't give out a lot of XP or you'll have level 20 PCs by the end of the month.

If you only play once a month, consider advancing the party a level every month or two.

Obviously, a GM will want to choose the rate for themselves. The good news, you don't need to hand out +5 levels because the group only plays every six months.

The act of leveling 1 level is usually what players are looking for. With a frequent playing group, while you're slowing things down to avoid hyper-levelism, the group is getting constant stimulous from the game itself that they shouldn't need to level constantly.

I recommend this basic method, that I put in my blog somewhere:
figure out how much real time to advance a level seems appropriate
figure out how many times you're gaming in that real time (Frequency)

Give out roughly this much XP per PC per session: (1000 * party level) / Frequency

For a daily gaming group, maybe leveling every 2 weeks is good
for a weekly gaming group, maybe leveling every month is good
for a monthly gaming group, maybe leveling every 2 months is good
for a yearly gaming group, leveling every session is good

As always, the preferred rate varies by group and GM. But I think a GM should be cognizant of the math and reasoning for their chosen advancement rate. Rather than not factoring it into how they run their game and the side effects it can cause.

 

[innerdude]

Thanks everyone for some great responses so far!

To a certain degree, I may have overstated a bit just how much the problem was bothering me. I'm actually not terribly annoyed by it personally, I've known the player for a long time (we used to work together, and have a number of mutual friends).

And as others have brought up, to a certain degree, I get where he's coming from. He is, in fact, playing a sorcerer, we're currently level 4. We started at level 3, leveled them at the end of the third session, and we typically play 3 out of four weeks a month for 4-5 hours, to give an idea of progression.

I think I was more commenting on the general mindset itself, more than my own personal dissatisfaction with the player.

To me the danger of the "I can't be cool until I level!" mindset is that as a player, you're TOTALLY setting yourself up for disappointment. What if when you level, the power feat/spell chain doesn't work quite the way you thought it would? What if you totally forgot that there's a prerequisite you don't have, and now you've got to plead your case to the GM to let you change it?

In so saying, I realize that unless you have a good reason as a GM, you should say "yes" to these sorts of things, but what if you've set up several highly intensive encounters based on the group as it stands? Again, it's no big deal to try and change them on the fly, and as a GM you're probably going to be "winging" certain elements of any encounter.

But the point still stands that if you're putting in the effort to make the game fun for the whole group, having a player who's constantly complaining that "I can't do anything cool," even if you've tried to set up encounters for them, give them opportunities to strategically/tactical shine, would be a real downer to me as a GM.

To me, a player who is constantly dissatisfied with their character, regardless of group, game system, or campaign, is probably looking for a highly specific type of game style that suits whatever need they have, and it's probably not one that's going to mesh terribly well with the "average" RPG group.

In any case, you all have given some great ideas about how to approach leveling, XP, playstyle and the like.

 

[innerdude]

Oh, and here's the irony too--I was more than willing to let the group start at somewhere between levels 5-8, and the entire group--other than my power-gaming friend--said, "No, we want to start lower level and work up."

 

[prosfilaes]

I think one of the thing that D&D 3 does that encourages this, is that you have to prepare many levels ahead to get into prestige classes and to get certain feats. So when you're doing a first level character, you've got to be thinking about what you want to do at 7th level, which means your focus is on the future, not the present.

 

[Plane Sailing]

My observation is that in pre-3e days, PCs levelled up very rarely. And so I saw the players get their kicks from treasures and interactions with the world.

From 3e onwards, with typically much faster levelling (by design), I saw more players thinking about the next things they would get when they gained a level. Heck, I found myself doing it lots too!

While it is perfectly possible to run a 3e game with xp accruing at 10% of the rate or something, it isn't the standard expectation, and my observation is that the standard rules tend to set peoples expectations, which is not unreasonable.

It seems to me that one of the essential design goals of 3e was to allow characters to advance to 20th level in the lifetime of a typical campaign, according to WotC research. I'm sure Monte Cook said something like that on ENworld once, but I'm blowed if I can find it.

Anyway, I think that having -some- people say "I need to level up so..." is pretty much a natural result of the design principles behind the most recent versions of D&D (can last decade or so still count as recent? I guess we've been on the post-2e wave for quite a long while now!)

Cheers

 

[Lanefan]

My observation is that in pre-3e days, PCs levelled up very rarely. And so I saw the players get their kicks from treasures and interactions with the world.

This.

So much this.

I far prefer when levelling up is a nice side effect of play rather than the entire goal of it.

From 3e onwards, with typically much faster levelling (by design), I saw more players thinking about the next things they would get when they gained a level. Heck, I found myself doing it lots too!

While it is perfectly possible to run a 3e game with xp accruing at 10% of the rate or something, it isn't the standard expectation, and my observation is that the standard rules tend to set peoples expectations, which is not unreasonable.

Simply put: the reward paradigm shifted from fluff-based to crunch-based, and stayed there.

It seems to me that one of the essential design goals of 3e was to allow characters to advance to 20th level in the lifetime of a typical campaign, according to WotC research. I'm sure Monte Cook said something like that on ENworld once, but I'm blowed if I can find it.

I've seen that somewhere too - could it have been in a 2000-era Dragon article? Or in one or more of the various discussions at the time coming out of Dancey's article on WotC's pre-3e market "research"?

Anyway, I think that having -some- people say "I need to level up so..." is pretty much a natural result of the design principles behind the most recent versions of D&D ...

Natural result or not, it's still not an attitude I'd want to deal with in my game.

Lan-"cool is in the eye of the beholder"-efan

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

My observation is that in pre-3e days, PCs levelled up very rarely. And so I saw the players get their kicks from treasures and interactions with the world.

My observation is likewise...but without the qualifier.

Our 3.5Ed group took close to 2 years to go from 1st to 11th. Our 4Ed game is gong on a year old now, and last week we just played our first session at 4th level.

 

[Pentius]

My observation is likewise...but without the qualifier.

Our 3.5Ed group took close to 2 years to go from 1st to 11th. Our 4Ed game is gong on a year old now, and last week we just played our first session at 4th level.

Same. I remember my first 4e game ran for a good 4 months, and we barely hit level 3. That's playing weekly, at sessions that averaged 8=10 hours(good ol' "all day saturday" style)

 

[Henry]

I've seen that somewhere too - could it have been in a 2000-era Dragon article? Or in one or more of the various discussions at the time coming out of Dancey's article on WotC's pre-3e market "research"?

I can't remember either, but I saw it as well - more specifically, they found that the average campaign lasted about a year to 18 months (at the time), and most people just weren't playing high levels and topping at 9th or so, because that's where a year of weekly play got you with the AD&D XP charts. Therefore, they re-jiggered the XP tables so that a person could play for 12 months and get to level 20.

Damned if I know where I read it though -- I'm strongly inclined to say some of Ryan Dancey's run-up to 3E stuff too.