Advancement even faster?

[Minicol]

Well, see ya. I'm too old to wait seven real-time months between levels. At that rate, by the time I hit level 30, I'd be dead.

It's a wrong problem.

the DM controls the xps he gives in a home game, right ?
So i'm doing the calculations so that my PCs are leveling every 3 sessions or so. I'll let them know in advance, of course.

 

[Celebrim]

Luckily, the speed of level advancement is completely controlled by the DM.

Yes, and it's a simple problem to fix. But, even though its a simplier problem than other problems, like say game balance, I'd rather just have it fixed than have to fix it myself. Every little thing I have to tweak is work. Character design and creation and advancing levels already takes up too much of play time. The last thing I want is more leveling more often. It hasn't been good for me as either a player or a DM, and I now cut all XP in half by default.

Besides which, I remember when leveling up felt like a significant achievement. 'Woot! I survived!' Now it feels perfunctory. No wonder new players feel like they need another hit as soon as possible. We are on a slippery slope here, much like the power inflation in 3rd and then 3.5. What's next 40 levels of default play and even faster leveling? Why not 50? 60? 100?

I played I don't know how much 1st edition, and never once took a character from 1st to 20th. I never felt cheated by that. I didn't realize that the goal was to get to 20th. It certainly didn't seem to be a designed for goal. The game was open ended as far as I could tell, and based on my experience in 1st edtion playing every week you'd need about 9 years to reach 20th legitimately, before which time surely you'd be ready to try out other characters.

 

[Li Shenron]

I don't like an advancement that is too fast, because some players tend to focus too much on levelling up and see adventures only as a "what we do between levelling".

As a DM, it forces me to look up for more monsters or to advance them more quickly than I wish I had to. For instance, if the PC level up during the same adventure, it forces me to design the adventure so that I partially railroad the PC into a certain sequence of actions, because the later encounters must be higher level than the earlier, so I have to make sure that the order the PC face the encounter is more or less under control.

As a player, it bothers me to get more and more abilities that I don't have time to use. Since I prefer playing spellcasters, I wish I had more time trying all my spells and combine them in interesting ways, but I can understand that a Fighter may want to level up more quickly.

Anyway, there is always DM's fiat to set the advancement rate different compared to the core rule.

 

[MerricB]

I don't like an advancement that is too fast, because some players tend to focus too much on levelling up and see adventures only as a "what we do between levelling".

As a DM, it forces me to look up for more monsters or to advance them more quickly than I wish I had to.

It is worth noting that such depends on the power gap between levels. If a "level" only meant the PC gained 3 hp, then you could "level" a lot faster! From indications, a gain of a level in 4e isn't as significant as the gain of a level in 3e.

Cheers!

 

[Li Shenron]

It is worth noting that such depends on the power gap between levels. If a "level" only meant the PC gained 3 hp, then you could "level" a lot faster! From indications, a gain of a level in 4e isn't as significant as the gain of a level in 3e.

Cheers!

It's not the "power step", like how many hp, but how many new abilities you will get from levelling up, and 4e has made it clear you will have at least 1 choice at each level.

That's why I mentioned that in 3.x it was me (usually the arcane caster player) wishing for a slower advancement, while the fighters and barbarians in the group never complained...

 

[wedgeski]

Yes, and it's a simple problem to fix. But, even though its a simplier problem than other problems, like say game balance, I'd rather just have it fixed than have to fix it myself.

'Broken' for you may not be 'broken' for the designers, or for the vast majority of the player-base, for all we know. Like you I prefer slower advancement but thankfully it's one of the most isolated systems in the game and can be changed very easily.

 

[Doug McCrae]

1e has fast levelling too. You have to houserule xp for gp away to make it slow. In all editions, levelling speed is probably the easiest thing to houserule there is, so it seems odd that it should be a reason for avoiding 4e.

 

[IceFractal]

Well, what's the point of having levels 11-20 if you never use them? In pretty much every 3E campaign I've been in, we were lucky to advance 10 levels beyond where we started, and that's with full XP, even somewhat higher than normal as we took on tough challenges.

What with people changing schedules, wanting to start new campaigns, sticking alternate games into a weekly rotation, and so forth, a campaign may not last all that many sessions. I'd like to the option to play a full 1-20 campaign in a sustainable amount of time.

So IMO, a campaign that goes the full 1-30 should be the standard, with levelling speed that supports that. If anyone wants to level slower and/or start higher, that's fine, the XP rate is easy to adjust.

 

[FireLance]

I think it only becomes a problem if the DM's preferred pace of levelling is different from the players' preferred pace of levelling. Otherwise, the group as a whole could simply decide to have a faster or slower pace of XP gain, or to level when everyone agrees that they should (my own group's standard is for everyone to gain a level after every session).

However, for what it's worth, I think that a standard encounter in 4e is going to be quite different from a standard encounter in 3e. A standard encounter in 3e is expected to use up about 25% of party resources. I'm guessing that a standard encounter in 4e will be expected to use up almost all per-encounter resources and maybe 25% of per day resources as well. Given that a character out of per-day resources is going to be at about 80% effectiveness, that means that a standard encounter in 4e may be expected to consume about 75-85% of party resources. If so, a standard encounter in 4e would be the equivalent of 3 standard encounters in 3e.

Of course, the theoretical 13-14 standard encounters before levelling hardly ever happens in an actual game. I suspect that in most games, the characters will go through 4-5 encounters of 1 to 3 points above average party level before gaining another level, and that this will be close to the standard number of encounters between levels in 4e. 4-5 tough fights should give players plenty of time to get used to their abilities since I expect that they will need to use all their per encounter abilities in each fight, and their per day abilities at least once.

 

[Bagpuss]

Well since I've never got above 15th level in a campaign so far, faster leveling doesn't appear to be much of a problem to me.