D&D 5E Campaign Pacing

One of the interestingly entangled aspects of 5th edition are the guidelines on Campaign Pacing. It's elements are short rests and long rests (PHB 186), adventuring days (DMG 84), encounter XP thresholds (DMG 82), creature CR (MM 9), sessions (DMG 261), XP and levels (PHB 15). Character resources are tied to it. So I became curious about the implications of how it all joined up, for example how much XP worth of encounters are expected per session, and what might that mean for rests?



Behold, the Pacing Table!

A few interesting metrics (which can all be derived in multiple ways, so go with)

• XP cost to level / adventuring day XP = days to level
• XP cost to level / sessions to level = XP per session
• adventuring day XP / XP per session = days per session
• adventuring day XP / average encounter XP = encounters per day
• encounters per day * days per session = encounters per session
• XP per session / encounters per session * characters = XP per encounter

And a few interesting findings (per RAW, YMMV)

1. it takes 33 adventuring days to level from 1 to 20
2. it takes 51 sessions to level from 1 to 20
3. it takes about 144 encounters to level from 1 to 20
4. encounters must usually be hard, to make the guideline levelling pace
5. there must be 2-5 encounters per 4-hour game session

Once we expect 144 encounters, we can make a statement like if a PC has a 1:100 chance of dying per encounter, then they're ~76% likely to die before 20th level. A 1:1000 chance produces ~13% chance to die before 20th level, which sounds fine until you recall that a party has four characters. In fact, I believe this gives us a big hint that allowing revival spells to play a role is a pretty good idea. But that's really a derail (into ToA!)

Hope this lends vim to your campaign.


[Edited to add original sheet as an attachment.]

vonklaude said:

One of the interestingly entangled aspects of 5th edition are the guidelines on Campaign Pacing. It's elements are short rests and long rests (PHB 186), adventuring days (DMG 84), encounter XP thresholds (DMG 82), creature CR (MM 9), sessions (DMG 261), XP and levels (PHB 15). Character resources are tied to it. So I became curious about the implications of how it all joined up, for example how much XP worth of encounters are expected per session, and what might that mean for rests?

View attachment 89283

Behold, the Pacing Table!

A few interesting metrics (which can all be derived in multiple ways, so go with)

• XP cost to level / adventuring day XP = days to level
• XP cost to level / sessions to level = XP per session
• adventuring day XP / XP per session = days per session
• adventuring day XP / average encounter XP = encounters per day
• encounters per day * days per session = encounters per session
• XP per session / encounters per session * characters = XP per encounter

And a few interesting findings (per RAW, YMMV)

1. it takes 33 adventuring days to level from 1 to 20
2. it takes 51 sessions to level from 1 to 20
3. it takes about 144 encounters to level from 1 to 20
4. encounters must usually be hard, to make the guideline levelling pace
5. there must be 2-5 encounters per 4-hour game session

Once we expect 144 encounters, we can make a statement like if a PC has a 1:100 chance of dying per encounter, then they're ~76% likely to die before 20th level. A 1:1000 chance produces ~13% chance to die before 20th level, which sounds fine until you recall that a party has four characters. In fact, I believe this gives us a big hint that allowing revival spells to play a role is a pretty good idea. But that's really a derail (into ToA!)

Hope this lends vim to your campaign.

Click to expand...

Nice work. I did the Adventuring days to Level calculations a while back, and decided that was going to be my milestone system.

Seeing how it breaks out into sessions is very interesting too.

Just curious - what does column T (Vs. Hard) represent?

Are you assuming that every encounter is combat?


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1:1000 chance of dying.
It explain why some found encounters too easy.

Harzel said:

Just curious - what does column T (Vs. Hard) represent?

Click to expand...

The session encounter looked close to Hard to me, so I deducted the Hard XP Threshold from the Session XP/character/encounter to see if that was right. It was: averaged, the session encounter budgets are for Hard encounters

As you can see, the differences are small enough for the generalisation - encounters must usually be hard - to be justified.

cmad1977 said:

Are you assuming that every encounter is combat?


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Click to expand...

Not at all. I assume each encounter has a cost and a chance of failure, i.e. is challenging. That could be a fraught negotiation with the Duke, with the character's fief on the line. It could be an ambush by the Orcs of the Fall. It could be a trial following a mistaken identification. It could be a slog across an icy waste with a real risk of becoming lost and exhausted.

Pragmatically, most encounters are probably combat encounters. In part, because D&D addresses most of its rules toward such encounters.

Krachek said:

1:1000 chance of dying.
It explain why some found encounters too easy.

Click to expand...

Heh. That was for illustrative purposes and it has prompted the intuition I hoped. We likely share a feeling that a 1:1000 chance of dying is too low / feels too easy.

But the maths proves that over the number of encounters that characters will face, even a 1:100 chance of dying is going to kill most of them. I believe that points toward the role of revival magic - Gentle Repose, Revivify, Raise Dead, Reincarnate, Resurrection, True Resurrection. In another thread, I asked DMs their experience with death revival and many related very few deaths, and very few or no revivals. I take no issue with that - of course - but in my opinion the mechanics of D&D point in an entirely different direction: a greater chance of death, and a greater chance of revival.

I would argue that

a) In order that encounters feel challenging and tense, the risk of death (or other great loss) must be palpable, and
b) The lethality ratio that equates with "palpable" will be great enough that characters are certain to die over the expected number of encounters
c) Therefore, something needs to bring them back again - a revival ratio

Formulae

1-(1-lethality)^encounters = death chance

1-(1-lethality*(1-revival chance))^encounters = permanent death chance

I may post up a table later showing the implications (for varying lethality and revival assumptions) in terms of how many characters need to be created in order to have one survive across each tier boundary. It is possible to pick tuning values for lethality and revival that match our world assumptions for density of character class equivalent individuals at each tier.

I found that the following lethality and revival assumptions worked quite well

Deadly encounter = 1:10 chance of death (of 10 characters going into a deadly encounter, 1 dies)
Hard encounter = 1:100 chance of death
Easy-Medium = attritional (no chance of death when considered separately)

Revival per tier
Tier 1 = 1:5 (of 5 characters that die, 4 are permanent)
Tier 2 = 2:5
Tier 3 = 3:5
Tier 4 = 4:5

The scaling revival likelihood does two things:

1) maps quite well to a world assumption that however many individuals are tier 1, there are an order of magnitude fewer per tier upward. About half being assumed to retire, and all but one of the rest die.
2) appropriately acknowledges the greater work and narrative significance invested into a higher tier character

Very good analysis!

vonklaude said:

1. it takes 33 adventuring days to level from 1 to 20
2. it takes 51 sessions to level from 1 to 20
3. it takes about 144 encounters to level from 1 to 20
4. encounters must usually be hard, to make the guideline levelling pace
5. there must be 2-5 encounters per 4-hour game session

Click to expand...

This confirms my personal idea that that the game pacing in 5e is still too fast for my tastes.

I generally prefer* a somewhat logarithmic progression of level rather than linear, meaning that I'd like it to take always a bit longer time to get to the next level, compared to the time it took to reach the current level from the previous. This is something that is actually shown by the XP thresholds to level up (which increase faster than linearly), but is then neutered by the XP awards by encounter level (which also increase), together ending up with a mostly linear level advancement by time.

*if you wonder why I prefer that, there are multiple reasons:
- is feels more realistic, in the same way as in real life it takes a short time to learn the basics of anything (e.g. learning some chords on a guitar enough for a few songs) and then progressively more and more time for further improvements
- it gives the feeling that playing at higher level is actually more demanding than lower level, and thus higher level suits better players
- it gives more time to the players to adapt to the higher complexity of higher levels, instead of throwing them onto the next when they still haven't grasped the abilities acquired at the previous

Li Shenron said:

This confirms my personal idea that that the game pacing in 5e is still too fast for my tastes.

I generally prefer* a somewhat logarithmic progression of level rather than linear, meaning that I'd like it to take always a bit longer time to get to the next level, compared to the time it took to reach the current level from the previous. This is something that is actually shown by the XP thresholds to level up (which increase faster than linearly), but is then neutered by the XP awards by encounter level (which also increase), together ending up with a mostly linear level advancement by time.

Click to expand...

I wouldn't overdo this. AD&D2 in particular had a bunch of levels in the middle where it took ages to level up, so much that player characters ended up feeling more or less static. I would not mind this in any other RPG, but D&D comes with the expectation that characters level up every so often.

On the other hand, I agree 5e levels up way too fast. It's so temptingly simple to just divide xp awards by 10.