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Message: <blockquote data-quote="leporidae" data-source="post: 1935488" data-attributes="member: 19624">Training time didn't work for my campaignI also have been looking for ways to slow character advancement in terms of game time, partially because too rapid advance makes the levels seem like less of an achievement to the players, but is also tough on me as a GM to determine how NPC's react to someone who has gone from scrub to demi-god in six months. (There is also the problem of creating challenging encounters which can be difficult if characters are rapidly going up levels, but has more to do with how fast characters advance in relation to RL time.)My first attempt was to add a training day requirement to go up levels, the problem is that one character or the other would always want to stop and spend time training, when either the other characters didn't need to, or thought thwarting the bad guy was too important to wait. Eventually, I relaxed the rules so that characters could go up one level past what they were trained for, and other times could bank one extra level's worth of training days. This made the training requirement flexible to the point of not being very meaningful. I concluded the rule added more bookkeeping and player conflict than fun to my campaign and dropped it when we started again.My second idea was to increase the amount of experience needed to go up levels, almost to 1st Edition levels, where the required experience doubles at each level. This was too slow, and created the problem where losing a level was (in the long run) as bad as dying and starting a new character (because you'd be one level behind the rest of the group either way.) So I continued to tinker with experience requirements and awards, which tended to upset players, especially if they liked to forecast how long it would take them to go up to the next level.For a new campaign I like the idea of taking periodic breaks, that is, tell the players that nothing adventure worthy is going to happen for at least the next year of game time and ask what their characters would do. It would give them a chance to add depth to their characters, and enable me to unwind (and create) plot threads in a realistic amount of time.</blockquote>

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