D&D 5E How long does it take to level?

[overgeeked]

So I was killing time with Excel (like you do) and decided to take the assumptions of D&D5E at face value and see about how long in game it should take for a character to level up. This is kind of a tangent off the D&D world demographics thread, but I didn't want to derail that thread, so here's a shiny new one for this.

My assumptions are:

1. The party is four adventurers.

2. One medium encounter is the party facing one solo monster of a CR equal to the party's level.

3. The adventuring day consists of the recommended 6-8 medium encounters.

According to pure math, with 6 medium encounter per day, it would take 143.28 days to go from 1st level to 20th level. At 7 medium encounters per day, 122.81 days from 1-20. At 8 medium encounters per day, 107.46 days from 1-20. As an example, the Mighty Nein, the PCs from Critical Role campaign 2, went from 1st level to 16th level in 327 days. This is the equivalent to about 1.7 encounters per day. The rest are: 1 enc/day, 859.65 days to 20; 2 enc/day, 505.68 days to 20; 2 enc/day, 429.83 days to 20; 3 enc/day, 286.55 days to 20; 4 enc/day, 214.91 days to 20; 5 enc/day, 171.93 days to 20; 6 enc/day, 143.28 days to 20; 6 enc/day, 122.81 days to 20; 8 enc/day, 107.46 days to 20.

Considering how hardy adventurers are and how the game mechanics are stacked in their favor, most people who start the life of an adventurer would survive...and in a rather short period of time, you'd have a world dirty with high level characters. The hiccup would be parties between levels 1st and 4th because they wouldn't have access to resurrection spells. Revivify comes online at 5th. If the party has a cleric, celestial sorcerer, or wildfire druid. Even if adventurers are so rare that there's only one adventuring party formed per year, you'd still get four 20th level characters every year. Unless you consider things like adventurers retiring. A few too many near death or actual death experiences and the character hangs up their bedroll. Or they set out to accomplish some specific task, did so, then retired. Or they were trying to get a certain amount of gold for some purpose, then called it quits.

ETA: Yeah, characters advance however often the DM wants. I don't bother with XP and just use story-based advancement. This is just a post about the game's math. Not how it "should" be done.

 

[Malmuria]

Levels make no actual sense from a world-building perspective and are just a conceit of playing the game, imo.

 

[iserith]

It might be worth considering downtime in there as well. I'm not sure there's any standardized metric for it outside of AL though. In my current hexcrawl game, I've made some changes to when resting occurs and how XP is gathered (via gold) so the PCs are 3rd or 4th level on Day 110 right now. There's a good amount of downtime in there since long rests are 1 week and tied to a downtime activity.

But as was already mentioned it's probably not worth thinking about the setting implications too closely for most campaigns. If one does though, there are plenty of fictional reasons one could imagine for the world not being populated by high-level adventurers.

 

[cmad1977]

It takes as long as it takes.

 

[aco175]

This is why I wish they still had level NPC like commoner and expert. I still tend to give some levels of stuff to the more important NPC in my games and maybe a skill bonus. It can take adventurers a week to go to 3-4th level and a blacksmith of 30 years still only had 1HD. Seems like he may have had to do some things along the way and have a couple HP and some cool smith power. I know the premise of adventurers are exceptional and nobody else is will in to place themselves in danger is a common thought in the game to make things work.

 

[Mercurius]

As a rule of thumb, I try to make leveling up occur every 2-5 sessions, depending upon level.

At early levels (1-4), I make it happen every 2-3 sessions. Once the party gets to 5th level, I slow down to more like every 3-5 sessions, with 4 being the norm.

But there is no formula - I do it more organically, and guide XP accordingly. Meaning, I use XP rewards as a baseline and then adjust accordingly to match the pace that suits the campaign and players, and that may include individual player bonuses for good roleplaying and heroic/clever acts.

 

[Yora]

For a very long time, I went with aiming for PCs gaining a new level every 4 or 5 games.
But when I started running a 5th edition game last year, I found that classes get so much new stuff that that pace feels very rushed and much too fast. Every 6 to 7 games probably works much better.

The prolem is that characters get too many XP per fight. Unless you play a game with very few fights, the standard XP pgogression is just too fast.

 

[Mercurius]

Levels make no actual sense from a world-building perspective and are just a conceit of playing the game, imo.

Yes and no. On one hand, an advancement system like Runequest (back in the day, at least) makes more logical sense: incremental improvement of specific skills over time. On the other hand, people often get better at something in jumps, especially after a "rest period." A musician or artist or athlete will work hard every day and notice no gains, and then take a break for a few days and when they start up again, see noticeable improvement.

Obviously D&D levels are an over-simplification of a complex process, but that is true of every aspect of the game.

 

[CleverNickName]

The characters gain a level at the end of each quest, adventure, or mission. If they were successful and triumphed over evil, they might also gain other rewards like treasure, magic items, and powerful friends.

An adventure usually spans 2-6 gaming sessions, with 4 being the average, and we play every week. So I guess you could say that the characters in my games level up once a month, more or less.

 

[el-remmen]

My current 5E group went from 1st to 5th in 23 sessions that range from 4 to 5 hours. In-game time that has been about three and a half months, but soon I am going to introducing my own version of "extended rests" based on MCDM's Strongholds and Followers, since they built a lodge and are building ties to the community.