D&D General Matt Colville on adventure length

[Clint_L]

I find very odd the love of level 1 play that some people have. Or even level 0 play! I appreciate that it exists, but I don't want to spend a long time there.

I love low level play and wish I could spend more time there. Battles feel more dangerous and I find that players tend to be more creative in solving problems when they don't have a spell, ability, or magic item for every situation. And if someone dies, it's not the end of the world. Plus, just in general I prefer stories where the characters aren't superheroes and are sort of fumbling their way through things. Levels 1-3 is my favourite range.

However, most of my players enjoy more rapid levelling, especially at school where the campaigns are short. My current home game is at level 10 after a little more than two years of play, but we don't play nearly as often as I would like.

 

[Charlaquin]

They do vary widely in quality (as I said), but there are so many of them that I bet there are some you would like.

There definitely are, I’ve read some that I like, and played in one that I enjoyed so much I decided to run it myself and had a blast doing so. But I do think the requirements of the format are a big design restriction that makes that level of quality much harder to achieve.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

There is no need to play the AL stuff out the box. I collected a bunch of them when they were being given away free during the pandemic. Some are terrible, but others could be polished up into something shiny.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That's not the acceleration wotc designed. They took a game where most groups are probably only going to get to about level ten or so give or take a couple & have it an advancement rate that tries to assure that within a year of regular sessions you can get an additional dozen or so levels give or take .

And I have seen this alleged "acceleration" in all of one campaign. The one I'm currently playing in, run quite graciously by Hussar of this very forum.

When folks say 5e's issues lie heavily on the GM side of the equation, they aren't joking. There are numerous parts of 5e that are simply NOT used the way they were designed, consistently not used that way, despite the fact that doing so actually makes the play experience worse for most people who play it--and even sometimes worse for the person running it! (I'm particularly thinking about the skills system there, and how it is very poorly used by a large chunk of 5e DMs, but that's just the most prominent example.)

I find very odd the love of level 1 play that some people have. Or even level 0 play! I appreciate that it exists, but I don't want to spend a long time there.

While I surely do not share the interest, I consider it an absolute requirement that any future full, proper, no-pretense, we-actually-recognize-it-as-one edition of D&D provide full-throated, well-tested, effective rules for "Novice Levels" or "Zero Levels" or whatever folks might want to call them.

I consider this no less essential than anything that caters to my own interests, even though I would probably never make use of those rules myself. Because part of a commitment to creating a system that is well-designed for a wide variety of players is stuff like that. Spending development time on things that I don't care about, but which I know would make a HUGE difference for people with different interests.

The initial scheme that Wizards designed was basically:
1 session for levels 1 & 2,
2 sessions for each succeeding levels

(Although a few would take longer. Sessions being roughly 4 hours in length).

So, to reach level 20 takes 36 sessions or thereabouts. Except possibly longer.

I'm aware of what they aimed for. I have seen it, as noted, precisely once, and that only extremely recently.

Can't speak to 5e specifically, but IME low-level play in general can be a blast because players - not yet being too attached to their characters

Gonna have to stop you right there. I am attached to my character before a single die has hit the table. I am not able to roleplay a character to which I have no attachment. It would be like trying to write a poem about something you literally could not care less about, or trying to give an enthusiastic performance with a song you genuinely feel no emotions about whatsoever. I just can't do it.

- will have them try the craziest things; which puts the entertainment value way beyond the high end of the charts.

Whereas I find that you get them to do the craziest things, all throughout the campaign, by ensuring (a) they know they won't be harshly punished for creativity, (b) they feel confident that they can accurately gauge the risks involved, and (c) they actually feel comfortable taking risks, because they know you don't just willy-nilly take away the stuff they're invested in (even if you may torture them ruthlessly over some change or cost ).

When creativity is rewarding, when players play in good faith, when DMs support sincere enthusiasm, when the players know (as Jafar so kindly taught us!) "after all, there are things SO much worse than death!"--that's when you get players doing the crazy stuff, gladly throwing themselves into devil-pacts and swinging from chandeliers with Flynn-ly abandon and smooching dapper swains left and right.

Instead of grubbing for every advantage they can get, they trust you, and you trust them--they trust you to not shut them out of participation, to not destroy the anchors that tether them to the experience, and in return, you trust them to adhere to the spirit of the game, to do what is dramatic and exciting and productive rather than merely what is safely sterile and dully efficient.

One might even say you encourage them to make magic feel magical again.

My preference is for a campaign whose real-time duration is "open-ended" and measured in years. To achieve this, the base levelling rate has to be much slower than the 3e-4e-5e model has it; and there's other tricks a DM can use to slow the overall advancement speed down. 2e as written, and 1e if one doesn't give xp for gp, got it right.

That is also my preference, unless I'm very specifically aiming for a full 1-to-max adventure path. (Someday, someday I will find a 4e group willing to run Zeitgeist. And it will be beautiful.)

It doesn't at all need to be slower though. 4e has 30 levels. Three years is 36 months. Accounting for occasional delays, e.g. say 3 months total of missed weekly sessions (aka about 4 missed sessions per year, which IMO seems pretty conservative!), running from level 1 to level 30 (gaining 29 levels) means gaining around one level per month, give or take. Since 4e characters start off actually competent and fulfilling their class concept right away, as opposed to feeble and inept and extremely likely to die, there is no issue with spending four weeks at 1st level. (And yes, I have lost multiple 5e characters before they even reached level 2, and I even effectively lost a particular one thrice in one campaign!) Indeed, it can be quite pleasant to stick with a focused skillset at first so you really learn exactly what you can do with it before moving on.

But being trapped in a world where one bad roll can literally mean the end of your adventuring career, where death is not merely a danger but an everpresent, constant, paranoia-inducing threat? I don't enjoy that in the least--and stretching it out over months of play? God, I'd almost rather you actually torture me than do that. At least the latter gets it over with.

 

[Staffan]

And I have seen this alleged "acceleration" in all of one campaign. The one I'm currently playing in, run quite graciously by Hussar of this very forum.

I think this might be related to the popularity of milestone leveling combined with the lack of explanation in the DMG. The XP tables are designed to get you to level 3 in a very short time, but there's nothing in the DMG that actually explains that. So if you're using milestone leveling, you could easily miss that and spend longer on level 1 and 2 than intended.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think this might be related to the popularity of milestone leveling combined with the lack of explanation in the DMG. The XP tables are designed to get you to level 3 in a very short time, but there's nothing in the DMG that actually explains that. So if you're using milestone leveling, you could easily miss that and spend longer on level 1 and 2 than intended.

Well, in at least two of the cases, it was because the DM was throwing encounters at us that were stupidly strong but which gave relatively paltry XP for their level, so even though we'd (barely) survived multiple Deadly encounters, we hadn't yet cracked the XP needed to reach level 2. For example, one campaign folded following session 4 (still at 1st level, mind) after we had an all-but-one-person TPK (the rogue alone escaped) two combats after a previous near-TPK...and said previous fight had only earned us 70 XP apiece due to the "you outnumber the enemy" halving of XP value since it was just one CR 3 creature (a mummy) vs our party of 1st-level characters.

I suspect that, in that specific game, if we had survived the ambush the DM dropped on us while we were taking a short rest to recover, we'd have (finally) levelled up. As it was, like I said, effective TPK killed the campaign.

Sadly, I had specifically warned this DM, multiple times, that 5e characters are extremely fragile at low levels and that it was necessary to be cautious about throwing high-CR enemies at them. He blithely dismissed my concerns, due to having had a previous party that (I presume purely by luck) managed to punch well above their weight class. He believed he had to be "tough" in order to give even a moderate challenge in 5e. That policy did not serve him well in that campaign.

I certainly don't need rules that purport to achieve the impossible goal of preventing genuinely ill-intentioned GM behavior. But given how grievously I've seen the rules of 5e both misused and actively ignored in ways that directly and severely harmed the experience--enough to drive multiple friends away from D&D permanently, as far as I can tell--it seems to me that designers choosing to dump everything on the GM's shoulders, shrugging and saying, "You're the DM, you figure it out" was an unwise move.

Of course, I'm sure someone will now come along and extol just how successful 5e has been and thus it couldn't possibly have done anything incorrect if it sold well. Because everyone knows sales are perfectly 1:1 correspondent with quality and effectiveness in design.

 

[Staffan]

Sadly, I had specifically warned this DM, multiple times, that 5e characters are extremely fragile at low levels and that it was necessary to be cautious about throwing high-CR enemies at them. He blithely dismissed my concerns, due to having had a previous party that (I presume purely by luck) managed to punch well above their weight class. He believed he had to be "tough" in order to give even a moderate challenge in 5e. That policy did not serve him well in that campaign.

Yeah, that's one of the weird things about 5e. PCs are quite tough, which kind of makes a mockery of the encounter building guidelines leading DMs to often throw encounters at them that are supposed to be 4 times as strong as "deadly", and the PCs still handily win. But that's something that happens a while into the game. Level 1 and 2 characters die to a strong gust of wind.

 

[tetrasodium]

And I have seen this alleged "acceleration" in all of one campaign. The one I'm currently playing in, run quite graciously by Hussar of this very forum.

Fascinating. I was not aware that the observer effect extended past things like the double slit experiment and into simple math.

 

[Staffan]

I think the discussion also brings up a long-time flaw of level-based games. The assumed power scaling prevents people from easily using whatever module or AP they want. You can't, for example, run a 10th-level party through a 3rd-level module or a 1-10 level AP without a lot of work. Which also cuts way down on potential customers/sales. It seems like a ridiculous way to organize things. If you don't use levels, the problem goes away. Likewise, if you scale monster stats by PC level, the problem goes away.

Yeah, I had another thread about how I prefer games where PCs start out competent. Part of that would include not having them advance particularly fast, at least not in their main area of expertise. In addition to the other advantages of starting with PCs who know what they are doing, it would also remove the demand to keep escalating the adventures to scale with character level. That in turn would make smaller adventures more commercially viable, because you wouldn't segregate the customer base by level.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Fascinating. I was not aware that the observer effect extended past things like the double slit experiment and into simple math.

Not really sure what you're implying here. I've played at least a dozen different 5e campaigns at this point. Of them, exactly one has had the "acceleration" the person I replied to spoke of.

If it's supposed to be how the game is run, why is it so hard to find it in practice, across wildly different groups, from different contexts, where the one and only factor in common is that I happened to be a player in them?

And if the fruits of the so-called "DM Empowerment" initiative are to empower most DMs to make their campaigns suck more by not doing what the books plainly tell them to do, I'm really not sure it's as worthwhile as folks claim it to be.