Different leveling speed for different campaigns?

[darklight]

After having read Philip's poll regarding the leveling speed of 3e, I began wondering about how I feel myself. I don't currently have a running campaign, so I'm not entirely sure and I think I might choose differently depending on which campaign I get to run (gritty Eberron or my high fantasy homebrew.) All in all, I want to ask all you friendly ENWorlders:

Do your leveling speed preference change depending on the campaign you run/play?

To clarify: would you, for example, use one speed for a gritty dark fantasy campaign and a different (faster?) for a high magic/high fantasy campaign?

darklight

 

[Crothian]

Yes, but as a secondary effect. Different campaigns have different pacing and different levels of encounters. Depending on that then XP will either be slower and faster.

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

My Porttown campaign only meets about once a month, and while I wanted everyone to start at first level (since most of the players are new to 3E, and some have never played any edition), I also wanted to be able to ratchet up the challenges. So I use story-based XP awards along with regular CR-based XP to increase the leveling speed; so far we're on our 15th session, and characters are level 5 despite the fact that there's often only one encounter per evening.

 

[Umbran]

Yes, but not strictly defined by genre. It isn't as if all gritty fantasy games should progress slowly and high-magic ones should go quickly, or anything.

The rate of character advancement is a significant factor in the feel of the game, so the advancement rate becomes a useful tool.

As an example: Let's say you have a fast moving plot - having a fast character advancement rate makes the players feel like they are keeping up,and like they matter. Throttle down the advancement rate, but keep the plot fast, and the players start to feel like the world is a big place, and that it may run them over if they aren't careful.

That being said, I also like advancement tied to events. If the party doesn't accomplish anything, then there's o advancement. If they do lots of stuff which affects the world, or is at least highly interesting, then they advance.

 

[Clint]

Yes, absolutely.

I modify the advancement of every campaign to suit the world and the story. For a world-heavy, NPC-heavy game, levelling up frequently can screw with everything. A massive dungeon crawl demands more levels and items, which for me is the target of the current full advancement tables.

 

[SableWyvern]

In my current Lone Wolf game, the characters are advancing a level a session, keeping pace with the original game books. It's a very different feel from the norm, and a great change of pace.

In my upcoming Conan game, advancement after the first few levels will almost certainly be well below the d20-standard rate.

And, in the last D&D campaign I run, things moved at around the standard.

So, yeah, I think I could safely say my levelling speeds vary.

 

[Varianor Abroad]

It goes entirely by how frequently the game meets and game system.

If I'm running Champions, I handle experience a lot differently. When I was running my low-magic Tapestry game, levelling was incredibly slow because it had low granularity of advancement (10th level was the max, equivalent to a 40th level epic D&D PC). But in 3E, I want my players to level to get to the kewl powers and abilities. Right now, my f2f Arcana Unearthed game meets once every three weeks at best. So I try to level the PCs every other session, but it still doesn't always work out that way. We started with 2nd level characters, and a year later everyone is now 7th, nearly 8th level.