Alt XP guildlines help please

[dcollins]

12 games to get to 5th lvl!!??
How often do you play and for how long?
For any game that is WAY to slow.

No, that's just about right. As it states in the DMG, the rules are balanced to advance characters by a level every 13.33 or so encounters (not any faster at lower levels). The RPGA guidelines estimate that a standard play session is expected to last about 4 hours and have approximately 5 encounters. Hence about one level per 3 game sessions, or expected 12 sessions to gain 4 levels over 1st.

Now my personal playgroup never gets to 5 encounters in 4 hours, but they like to role-play a lot, so it comes out even slower.

 

[Dr.Dan]

Great System

Rel,

I really liked your system and will be presenting it to my players in the near future to see what they think about it. Thanks for posting it. It’s simple, gets the players involved in their own reward system, and takes the game away from the focus on combat and more toward the ‘Role-Playing’ aspect of it. (Did the fine people at WoTC forget that D&D is an RPG when they designed 3E's XP system?)

I’m sure that I’ll end up tweaking it to something that suits our needs a little better, but it’s a great starting point. Thanks for posting.

The Doctor

 

[melkoriii]

No, that's just about right. As it states in the DMG, the rules are balanced to advance characters by a level every 13.33 or so encounters (not any faster at lower levels). The RPGA guidelines estimate that a standard play session is expected to last about 4 hours and have approximately 5 encounters. Hence about one level per 3 game sessions, or expected 12 sessions to gain 4 levels over 1st.

Now my personal playgroup never gets to 5 encounters in 4 hours, but they like to role-play a lot, so it comes out even slower.

Maybe thats is. We have one game every two weeks that last about 6 hours. In that time we have between 0-2 combats.

Also the 13.33 encounter are your CR encounters and not boss encounters (Party CR+(2-3).


Still 12 games is way to slow for me. Campains change onces every 9-12 months and I want to get to lvl 15 or so in that time else the game will not really be fun with no advancement.

 

[Rel]

Dr. Dan, I'm very glad you like the system. Please feel free to bend it completely out of shape to fit your personal needs. One of the things that people have liked so much about it is how easy it is to modify. You can delete categories, add them, change how many "tic marks" you hand out or just change the xp multiplier to adjust what you are rewarding and how fast you want to the characters to gain xp.

To that end, Gwarok, if it would work better for your group, chop out all but a few of the categories. Maybe Combat, Roleplay, Goals and one or two others (or not) and just give more tics in those categories. Or bump up the xp multiplier. Just a suggestion as to how you might use our system to get where you want to go.

Melkoriii, if the system is not to your taste, I've got no problem with that. I've had plenty of people tell me they wouldn't want to use it and I'm not offended. If your beef is that the rate of advancement isn't fast enough, the xp multiplier could always be doubled or tripled or set to whatever you like in order to get the preferred rate of advancement.

One of the players in our group designed a spreadsheet comparing our system to the one in the DMG and ours is a bit slower. But not by much. In the early levels, they are very similar in rate of advancement but at higher levels ours tends to lag behind more and more until it eventually takes about 50% longer to get to 20th. For the record, we play once a week for about 4 hours.

But our goal isn't to get to 20th level.

That's the part of your initial post that I don't really identify with. When you say:

The game really dosnt start till you hit 5th lvl.

I don't get it. If the game doesn't start until you hit 5th level, why aren't you starting characters at 5th level? Personally (and for pretty much all the guys I game with), I enjoy playing my character at every level. It is the playing of the character that is fun, not the leveling itself. If I were to play in a game where I was gaining a level almost every session for the first 6-8 sessions, I'd find it hard to get into the character. It is difficult for me to envision playing a character whose abilities change every few encounters.

Please don't take this as a personal insult to your style of play. It's just not the one that I'd prefer to play under or DM myself.

If anybody wants a copy of the spreadsheet my friend worked up that does the comparison and also lets you see the different rate of advancement using various xp multipliers and number of tic marks, I'd be happy to e-mail it to you.