How Many Hours Do You Usually Spend in a Level?

[Minigiant]

All of the above.

But when I DM, I have level range in mind and I stay 40 hours in that range for each plot. So my Greendragon gangster adventure is should level 3-8 at 15-20 hours a level.

 

[Yora]

About every four sessions, each one 5 to 6 hours. That makes it about 20+.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Usually more than 40 hours, much, much more.

Only in our 4e online game we see that levelling up takes place fast, which puts me in the 21-30 hours range for this campaign.

 

[pemerton]

In my 4e game the PCs have gained 25 levels (ie 1st > 26th) in about 5.25 years of play. So that's just under 5 levels per year (about 4 and three-quarters). We play every two to three weeks, so around 20 sessions a year, of around 4 hours play. So that's more than 4 levels in around 80 hours, meaning that I ticked the 10 to 20 hours box. The rate isn't uniform, in that some levels last only a couple of sessions and others might last 5 or 6, but the trend has been very consistent of taking about 2 years per tier.

 

[Lindeloef]

Only in our 4e online game we see that levelling up takes place fast, which puts me in the 21-30 hours range for this campaign.

What he said. And it's partially my fault ^^

 

[Abraxas]

Depends on too many factors to list - so anywhere from 10 to 40+

 

[steeldragons]

Depends on too many factors to list - so anywhere from 10 to 40+

This.

There's no way to even come to a general average.

Are we playing 1st level characters? 5th? 15th? Some demi-god level "tournament" kind of game where XP and leveling aren't really an issue, but we're just playing through a given scenario or single great battle/war?

Do they find all of the treasure, some of it, miss it completely? Get the sack of copper pieces off the ogre but miss the huge bejeweled golden sceptre in the secret "real" treasure room? Are we including Magic Items as additional XP or simple "treasure/gp worth" XP?

Do they defeat all/some/none of the monsters? I grant XP for "defeating" creatures, not necessarily "killing" them...at least partial, if not whole. At low levels in particular, bypassing a monster, parlaying/making deals and/or stealing their treasure without putting the party's well-being in jeopardy gets you nearly complete "monster" XP.

Are they going up against a hive of kobolds or a single demon lord? As characters of any level can potentially encounter either or anything in between in my games.

Are we playing a 2 hour session? 5 hour session? All day/overnight/weekend marathons? Seems the longer one can play straight through, the more creative players get, the more interesting "in character" stuff happens (which might also land you additional XP), the more the XP tends to accumulate more rapidly. So it could be a level in a single [moderately] long session...but could take any multiplier longer, if playing in shorter sessions, to accumulate the same amount of XP.

So...yeah. Not really a question/poll that can be given a "straight" answer....so naturally I put 40+.

 

[Umbran]

I have no real clue for stuff in the distant past. I simply wasn't paying attention.

I was playing in a Star Wars Saga Edition game recently, and that one went two or three sessions between levels, so 15 to 25 hours of play. We found it to be a bit faster than we really wanted.

 

[the Jester]

It varies widely, but I'd say my current group averages 20-40 hours, depending on the pace of the campaign at that point and whether an individual pc is at the average level, above or below (I have a "catchup" system for xp for lower level pcs).

 

[gamerprinter]

It depends on the adventure and who is GMing it, but generally speaking - in home brew adventures and published adventures that I am invovled in, a rough guide is 12.5 encounters per level with 2 hours as the average time per encounter (of course this varies greatly) with a rough estimate of 25 hours per level. Most of our sessions run about 4 hours, and we average 2 encounters per session. Sometimes major encounters take most of an entire session, though sometimes 3 short encounters fit in a session. So my average is still about right - about a whole day in hours per level.