Long Adventures and Levelling. etc.?

[Dwimmerlied]

I've pesonally always found this one a tricky one to rationalise;- the long adventure sequence, dungeoncrawl, or time-critical kind of mission that leaves little or no downtime for large stretches.

One problem seems to be that downtime is kind of an assumption, for creating magic items, or learning new skills, training and such.

But more challenging to represent, I think, is where characters don't get the downtime assumed to level. This is compounded when running an arc of adventures spanning multiple levels gained by touch-and-go, go, go!! encounters. The best plan seems to be that characters simply level as they go (which seems a little video-gamey). In the short-term, its not that noticeable, I guess; It can be rationalised by abilities manifesting that we assume the character has been training in during downtime. A fighter has gained enough combat sense to really make that power attack work, and sorcerers have focussed long and hard on producing fireball, and in a moment of inspiration it all falls into place.

But the suspension of disbelief is often stretched, I reckon, in the epic storyline campaigns that happen rapidly, especially in lower level campaigns. In some situations, characters who struggled against goblins are challenging the orc-king in a couple of weeks!

I've put this thread up because I'd be very interested in whether this is a problem for other people. Is it? How do you rationalise this? What interesting houserules or alternative ways in handling it are there?

Cheers!

 

[delericho]

Simply put, I don't. I try to give PCs the opportunity to take downtime semi-regularly (for other reasons), but if they're involved in an ongoing quest and they hit the next level then they get to advance immediately (well, at the end of the session) and we go from there. I don't try to make sense of it - I honestly have enough other things to worry about without bothering with why the Wizard couldn't cast fireball one day and suddenly can the next.

In one case, we had a situation where a PC had died a long way from home, and the party Cleric was right on the edge of being able to raise dead. However, that PC was also about to run off into the next dungeon, so wouldn't be around to actually cast the spell. In that instance, I ruled that the PC actually cast it before leaving the ship, even though he was a few XP short, so that at the start of the next session the revived PC could get involved right away.

Which actually worked very nicely, because while the other PCs were away some fairly important stuff had happened on the ship, which the revived PC could discover immediately.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Two things. One, time has to pass for character advancement. I don't care how much stuff you do. Two, I usually don't deprive the players control of their characters for that long. If they want to stop for a while, they can unless there's some compelling reason to the contrary.

 

[DEFCON 1]

For all kinds of situations like this... I always default to a particular way of thinking--

D&D is a story. D&D is a game. And more often than not, one is going to run counter to the other in order to make both sides work. So just accept it and handwave it away.

So in the this case... "leveling up" is distinctly a game concept. It has nothing to do with story. The fact that a person remains flatline in power and ability for however many days/weeks/months but then suddenly increases in health / abilities / skills at a completely arbitrary point is purely to make the game work. The game says your PC "gets better" over time... but there is no cause and effect inside the fiction why this switch suddenly turns on and you get all this stuff at a single point in time once you've reached a certain game milestone of "XP".

Yes... we all try and justify this switch by saying to ourselves that the characters have been slowly "gaining power" in the background of the story this entire time... but that doesn't play out in the game. Our numbers don't slowly increase over time. The game doesn't have us go from a 15 STR to a 15.1 STR to a 15.2 STR to a 15.3 STR and so on until we magically reach a 16 STR just as our character coincidentally dings 4th level (if you're playing 4E).

So to go through all the mental effort of trying to align every single game point to some sort of "reality" within the story to me is a waste of energy, because it's never going to work 100%. There will always been issues and loopholes where game and story just can't align. So I just choose to whitewash the "game parts" as a necessary evil to the story we're creating, because you need the game parts to actually have a game to play.

 

[am181d]

Two things. One, time has to pass for character advancement.

Does it, though? What are most people getting when they level up? Some more hit points? A modest improvement to skills they already possessed? Maybe a slight increase in an ability score?

Yes, wizards pick up new spells, but is it really so hard to believe that they'd just figure it out one day?

"Hmm. If I did my Burning Sphere this way instead..."

In my opinion, leveling has always been an awkward abstraction in the game, and requirement training between levels takes something that abstraction and makes it literal.

"What level are you?"
"What do you mean?"
"How many times have you taken time off from adventuring to train?"
"Oh, I get it. That must mean I'm a 17th level fighter."

 

[Umbran]

Don't over-think it.

I try to make sure there are occasional places for downtime for advancement (for any game - D&D isn't the only one with this issue). But, if the adventure is really so fast and furious that there's no place for it, guess what? The players will quickly forget about the oddity, and soon move on with their characters. They'll be too busy with the adventure to dwell on it. So just get it done and move on, and you'll be none the worse for it, in the long run.

 

[Ahnehnois]

In my opinion, leveling has always been an awkward abstraction in the game

Agreed.

and requirement training between levels takes something that abstraction and makes it literal.

Well, we're not necessarily talking about training. Just time. The awkwardness is if at one discrete moment, a character has +9 Knowledge Arcana, and at the next moment, he has +10. What happened in between? How is he 5% better at knowing arcane things (the same applies to any other level-based change)? Because that makes no sense, it has to happen offscreen, for which there needs to be an appreciable period of time where everyone's goings on are not explicitly accounted for.

That's my take on it, anyway.

 

[howandwhy99]

So much of this depends on playstyle really. Some folks are going to want an adventure path to follow and sticking to that allows them to learn the story. If there is no downtime in these types of adventures you as DM should include when it happens. Extend the timelines of the adventure to fit what the game needs in terms of time for each level of advancement. Include other costs like gold, acquiring appropriate items, finding a trainer if necessary, a safe and secure location, recruiting more powerful allies, and so on.

Others will want to take a more hands on and personally involved approach in determining what happens and when. In these games how much down time occurs is largely up to them. It isn't about how much time is needed, but how much the players desire. Issues of suspension of disbelief can be handled by the players directly. If they feel the adventure should take have longer or shorter length, then they can work out amongst themselves what that will be.

A more sandbox and game-focused approach is going to include the players playing against the clock. And in a scenario generated adventure that means that clock is alterable, but it's also harder to judge an average length beforehand. The simplest method is to gauge how many PCs there are, their class XP level requirements, and compare that to the quantity of class level challenges in adventure areas. If the adventure is meant to consist of the whole of a level or more, than it will have quite a lot of material. As the players alter and, for their sake, weaken the opposition the generated timelines for each session are likely to show the adventure taking longer for the NPCs to succeed. This allows the PCs more flexibility for their efforts, but still not totally dictate the time requirements of the NPCs.

In any case, make sure you include all of the material in the world the players will need to seek out advancement between adventures. That means treasure troves and higher level NPCs to ally with train them as well as safe areas they can trust to relax and restore themselves.

 

[Umbran]

Well, we're not necessarily talking about training. Just time. The awkwardness is if at one discrete moment, a character has +9 Knowledge Arcana, and at the next moment, he has +10. What happened in between? How is he 5% better at knowing arcane things (the same applies to any other level-based change)? Because that makes no sense...

This is what I mean by overthinking.

Ask yourself this question - how often does a character miss a roll by *exactly* 1? Occasionally, but not often. The chances that the difference would be apparent on the next few die rolls is small. The character may well go for a full session or two without having to make a check against any particular skill! Thus, you likely *won't notice* that he's 5% better at knowing arcane things. 5% is a *small* number, not a big one. It is useful and valuable to the character/player in its long-term aggregate effect, but in the short term means little.

 

[delericho]

Ask yourself this question - how often does a character miss a roll by *exactly* 1?

5% of the time, surely? Unless his score is so high he can succeed on a '1' (and the roll allows it), or so low he fails on a '20', then there's a magic number where he will miss by exactly 1. Since that's as likely to come up just as often as any other number...

But, yeah, that's just a nitpick. I don't think the "miss by 1" argument is a particularly strong one. The "suddenly I can cast wish!" one is probably more telling... and even that can be handwaved away.