Level Advancement and In-Campaign Time

[jgsugden]

...@OP:

As a player, and I suppose as a DM, my biggest issue with "time passing between events" is "What do you do with players who want to keep adventuring?" Aside from of course, having players who are totally into this kind of stuff. Lets say you're using XP right? So every dungeon, every gold piece, every quest, every monster kill equates to some kind of advancement. ...

Raise your right hand. Move it to the left. Move it back to the right. Then to the left. Then to the right. This maneuver is called hand waiving and it is a great tool.

Johnny and Jimmy decide to settle down for the winter, help out around the town, maybe find love, who knows. They get no experience, but you might have a few story based encounters to set up the next adventure or just to have some role playing social encounter fun. They might make valuable allies in town, or otherwise gain some subtle advantages for the future through the social role playing events in town during their 'down time'.

Sue and Jane on the other hand want to face the winter wilderness and hone their skills, kick monster butt and find treasure. They wander the wilderness around the fringes of town and find a few insignificant challenges. The experience is negligible for such weak foes. Or, they decide to set off and fight DRAGOTHA THE DRACOLICH who lives in the mountains a hundred miles away. Maybe they get sidetracked on the trip or stormed in while passing through a nearby town. Maybe they get there and they can't get into the lair. Maybe they get into the lair and find that a dracolich is not a good foe for fifth level PCs and either die (if they were really foolish) or come home with their tail between their legs. There are a lot of ways to spin it, but in the end - whatever they end up doing - they don't advance much. Maybe you give them a bit of experience points, but they miss out on the benefits of the social role playing that Johnny and Jimmy found.

Now, you might complain that the DM is constraining Sue and Jane artificially.

Yup.

The DM is setting the stage for the adventures. That is his job. He writes the setting for the story, and the PCs interact with the setting. It is the DM's job challenge to make that setting interesting for the PCs despite the curves they throw at the DM, such as wanting to wander off and fight monsters.

 

[Tony Vargas]

How do you explain in-game the lack of a magic item economy of any kind?

Lack of magic items. Demand so far out-strips supply that there's no viable markeplace. Those who can make items make them for their own use or own purposes, since they can 'make' all the money they want even more easily, so there's no production-for-sale.
When magic items change hands, it's primarily by theft (including the adventurer's stock-in-trade home-invasion robery & serial murder) or barter (for another magic item) or in service to some agenda.

Fairly traditional take, really.

 

[Lanefan]

The DMG says that "unless you decide your campaign works otherwise, most magic items are so rare that they aren't available for purchase." So I guess they're effectively priceless.

I've heard this one before, and it's fine on the surface - but collapses when exposed to any sort of in-setting logic.

Without going into great deatil (I've done this elsewhere in other threads), the short form is that unless your PCs are the only active PC-like adventurers in the setting* there's going to be other parties out there occasionally finding magic items...and not always will they be of use. Similarly, your own PCs are likely to find items over time that they can't or won't use, and want to part with. Trade between said parties in these items is the logical and expected outcome here; which will result in perceived item values being compared against each other and - eventually - to some sort of agreed-upon default value system coming into place**.

* - and if they are, where do any replacement PCs come from and how did they earn their xp and-or (particularly magic - where did that come from) wealth?
** - and unless your PCs are the first adventurers the setting has seen, these steps will have long since already taken place

For my part, I don't address why as there's really no need to.

"No need to" ends the moment one of your PCs tries to sell (or even give away!) a magic item.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

Now, that said, there are a few things I do to help ensure that time passes, and they're largely centered around the downtime rules. One thing that isn't centered around DT is travel. Most adventures don't take place conveniently close to the party's home city/area, so it takes time to get there (and back). And the way my world is set up, travel itself is arduous and dangerous. So to use one concrete example, one of my groups went on a major adventure that required about 2 weeks' travel each way to reach the site. Now, there are exceptions- sometimes the adventure is in town or whatever, and there are lots of adventure sites within a few days of home- but that travel time absolutely adds up. (All that traveling also encourages pcs to spend money on e.g. mounts, a stage coach, pack animals, etc.)

At low-mid levels this is good stuff.

But once they get access to teleport and other fast long-range travel options you're hooped: the only "slow" travel is the part where they're trying to find the adventure site, after long-ranging to the general area.

Another factor that relates to this is a setting element. There are no other cities around; civilization has fallen, and the last city only stands because, at the time of the fall, a brave group of heroes (4e pcs) managed to save it. So if the party runs off to adventure 1,000 miles away, they have to come home to resupply. There's nowhere else to do so. Sure, they can burn spell slots to create food and drink and whatnot, but those are resources expended. Eventually, everyone goes home.

In a setting designed for it, yes. But most aren't...

Then there's downtime. First of all, if a group tells me they want some, they can have it, as long as no ongoing thing interrupts it. Second, I almost always insert some days or weeks of downtime after a major adventure. Third, I run multiple groups, so I'll often throw downtime at one group to help keep time fairly synchronized between groups.

As fate would have it, I'm in exactly this situation right now. We've just finished adventuring with one party and they've nicely caught up to the other in time; and both groups have just completed major story paths thus are free agents for the moment...but they're about 2000 miles apart and without reliable long-range travel for about half that disatnce. So I'm trying to convince one party to take a month off to allow the other to get to their neighbourhood, at which point the players can sort out who they want to send out next.

 

[iserith]

I've heard this one before, and it's fine on the surface - but collapses when exposed to any sort of in-setting logic.

Without going into great deatil (I've done this elsewhere in other threads), the short form is that unless your PCs are the only active PC-like adventurers in the setting* there's going to be other parties out there occasionally finding magic items...and not always will they be of use. Similarly, your own PCs are likely to find items over time that they can't or won't use, and want to part with. Trade between said parties in these items is the logical and expected outcome here; which will result in perceived item values being compared against each other and - eventually - to some sort of agreed-upon default value system coming into place**.

* - and if they are, where do any replacement PCs come from and how did they earn their xp and-or (particularly magic - where did that come from) wealth?
** - and unless your PCs are the first adventurers the setting has seen, these steps will have long since already taken place

"Selling magic items is difficult in most D&D worlds primarily because of the challenge of finding a buyer. Plenty of people might like to have a magic sword, but few of them can afford it. Those who can afford such an item usually have more practical things to spend on."

Seems logical to me. Magic items are effectively priceless. There's just no market for them. The game works fine that way. I don't have to present the characters with buyers or sellers and that sorts itself out.

"No need to" ends the moment one of your PCs tries to sell (or even give away!) a magic item.

Lanefan

See above. They're welcome to give one away or sell it for a song, of course.

 

[BookBarbarian]

I like how Adventures in Middle Earth handles this.

The default assumption is that adventures may happen once or twice a year, with downtime, called the Fellowship Phase, in between adventures. The Fellowship phase has some options for downtime activity that can have quite the impact on the character.

in default 5e it takes about 30 standard Adventuring Days to get to 20th level. In Default AiME that becomes 15-30 years, which is more the pace that I prefer.

 

[the Jester]

At low-mid levels this is good stuff.

But once they get access to teleport and other fast long-range travel options you're hooped: the only "slow" travel is the part where they're trying to find the adventure site, after long-ranging to the general area.

It certainly alleviates the time required, yes, but remember- in 5e, teleporting is very risky unless you're headed to a teleportation circle. Of course, there are other options- e.g. wind walk, transport via plants- but they have their own drawbacks.

 

[Harzel]

"Selling magic items is difficult in most D&D worlds primarily because of the challenge of finding a buyer. Plenty of people might like to have a magic sword, but few of them can afford it. Those who can afford such an item usually have more practical things to spend on."

Seems logical to me. Magic items are effectively priceless. There's just no market for them. The game works fine that way. I don't have to present the characters with buyers or sellers and that sorts itself out.

I'm not sure what you mean by "logical" here. A chain of reasoning can be logical (or not), but that quote is just a series of assertions. Do you mean that you can imagine a (D&D) world in which those particular assertions are true. I'm sure that's the case, but that seems like faint praise.

What strikes me is that those assertions are wildly inconsistent with the other tidbits of economic assumptions scattered in the PHB and DMG. There are enough people that can afford 75 gp for a horse, but not enough who can afford between 100-500 for a +1 sword?? Yes, you would have to be somewhat better off to go for the luxury of that sword, but in order for the to be "no market", you have to whittle potential buyers down to a tiny fraction of 1% of the population. So sure, magic items might be effectively priceless, but a bunch of other things are going to have to change to make that plausible.

 

[iserith]

I'm not sure what you mean by "logical" here. A chain of reasoning can be logical (or not), but that quote is just a series of assertions. Do you mean that you can imagine a (D&D) world in which those particular assertions are true. I'm sure that's the case, but that seems like faint praise.

What strikes me is that those assertions are wildly inconsistent with the other tidbits of economic assumptions scattered in the PHB and DMG. There are enough people that can afford 75 gp for a horse, but not enough who can afford between 100-500 for a +1 sword?? Yes, you would have to be somewhat better off to go for the luxury of that sword, but in order for the to be "no market", you have to whittle potential buyers down to a tiny fraction of 1% of the population. So sure, magic items might be effectively priceless, but a bunch of other things are going to have to change to make that plausible.

The value by rarity only applies IF the campaign allows for trade in magic items. The default as laid out by the DMG is that items are effectively priceless and not available for purchase. That is the reality of the setting to the extent the DM follows those rules.

 

[Uller]

That makes much more sense.

I'd never want it to be so formulaic, though - just seems contrived, somehow. But, if anyone bumped you could have thier training take a couple of weeks to find and complete, which would achieve the same goal and fit with the narrative as well....

It is contrived. But it is a game, after all. In my game we are trying to capture the feel of The Darkest Dungeon CRPG...the characters in it have to spend time recuperating between adventures while other characters take up quests. I _could_ implement a stress/fatigue system to model that...but everyone in the group is fine just handwaiving it and accepts that their characters have to recuperate or have other duties that prevent them from just adventuring 24/7. There are others in their camp that hijack hooks from them to complete adventures and steal renown.