D&D 5E Does progression rate slow down?

[S'mon]

I wonder if, maybe, it might be a middle of the road for someone (like me) that does not want/enjoy fast progression...but does adhere to the more modern gaming sensibility that all PCs are created equal and should be leveling together all at the same time..

All Created Equal would be 'everyone starts at 1st with 0 xp'. Having new pcs come in at party level is All Are Equal, pretty well the opposite.

I use both, depending on the campaign.

 

[Grainger]

No, it's not. Players don't exist. Characters earn XP, by doing things that are worth XP. There is in-game causality involved, even if it's sometimes weird to look at.

<snip>

I get what you're saying, and I agree with nearly all of it. However, I don't think I put across what I meant very well. When I say "players get the XP", what I mean is that in terms of why it's there in the game, the XP is a reward for the players. Yes, the characters get it, it's tied to their character, it's justified in game terms by what their characters do (as you say). But... it's there as a reward for the players. Otherwise, we wouldn't need it in the game, and PCs could just stay more-or-less at the same level. It's there to give the players a sense of progression, add to a sense of achievement, and allow the tactics of the game to evolve, so it doesn't get stale over longer periods of play. It's there for the players, and really it's the players that earn it, even if (with a wink) we say that the characters do.

 

[Grainger]

The problem with this that I see is those situations (and we've all had them) when you've gone through 3 4 hour sessions, yet somehow, your PCs has only completed a single combat and explored 2 more rooms, over about 3 hours of in-game time...but it's taken you (for myriad reasons) 3 sessions to get that far.

I think for many (most?) players, they're going to be aware of real-world time passing far more than game time. So if they play for a month, but only a day of game time elapses, it's still going to feel more like a month than a day. Sure, if you need to calculate time in-game, they will understand that only a day has passed, and it will work fine. But in terms of the "feel" of character advancement, I think the real time elapsing is still more important than the game time (by the way, I mean real time during which you actually play regularly - if you spend 6 months of real time failing to meet up and play, that's a different matter). Sure, levelling when all the PCs have done is explore 4 rooms doesn't bear close scrutiny, really, but I think you just have to gloss over that - there's a lot about D&D that doesn't stand up to close examination anyway, and sometimes XP-for-sessions is going to have issues in this way.

 

[Grainger]

Do they carry the xp tally over to new pcs? If not, then it's not them getting the xp.

See a couple o' posts above this one for my clarification on what I meant there. I was talking of function and spirit, not literally. Sorry - I could have made it clearer last night when I originally posted.

 

[B9anders]

Do they carry the xp tally over to new pcs? If not, then it's not them getting the xp.

That's what we do in our campaign - XP belongs to the player, not the character. Doing it the other way has a discouraging effect on risking your life for good roleplaying reasons.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Once you start awarding EXP to the players rather than the characters, then you have well and truly forsaken any claim to Simulation in favor of pure meta-game. You can stop trying to figure out how the world is supposed work in any sort of consistent matter, because it's just a game at that point. You might as well say that levels don't correspond to anything but plot importance, so you can go ahead and tailor every encounter to the party, since you've already admitted that there's no internal causality to any of it.

I don't buy the slippery slope argument, nor would I argue that there is an all-or-nothing dichotomy between simulationism and gamism. After all, if we take the approach that some amount of gamism means you must reject all forms of simulationism, then you're going to have a really hard time justifying any game mechanic at all without the conclusion being, "let's play Chess instead."

 

[B9anders]

Once you start awarding EXP to the players rather than the characters, then you have well and truly forsaken any claim to Simulation in favor of pure meta-game. You can stop trying to figure out how the world is supposed work in any sort of consistent matter, because it's just a game at that point. You might as well say that levels don't correspond to anything but plot importance, so you can go ahead and tailor every encounter to the party, since you've already admitted that there's no internal causality to any of it.

This makes no sense at all. There is no simulation involved at all in rolling up a new character. Whether you decide to start him at 0 XP or or the same amount as your previous character it is in any case an arbitrary 'meta-game' decision. A simulationalist approach would be to simply stop playing in the campaign once your character dies.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

When I say "players get the XP", what I mean is that in terms of why it's there in the game, the XP is a reward for the players. Yes, the characters get it, it's tied to their character, it's justified in game terms by what their characters do (as you say). But... it's there as a reward for the players. Otherwise, we wouldn't need it in the game, and PCs could just stay more-or-less at the same level.

Conjecture. I've heard it before, that your XP total in old D&D was like your score in an old arcade game, as a measure of how awesome the player is. If that's your approach to it, then it's a purely Gamist one.

You can play D&D in a lot of ways, but if you're taking a Simulationist approach to it, then you don't generally include such purely Gamist elements. Instead, you include the Simulationist element that characters get better over time through practice and experience. Why you include a rule - what it represents - can be as important as how it's implemented. If you're just talking about the basic XP and level rules, then the practical difference may be negligible, but whether it's a Sim element or a Game element is going to have an impact on how you use it.

For example, if you treat XP as an award for the player, then you can feel free to include bonus XP for meeting whatever criteria you feel like, even if there's no logical (in-world) reason why avoiding a combat in favor of RP (or whatever) should make you better at swinging your sword.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

You can play D&D in a lot of ways, but if you're taking a Simulationist approach to it, then you don't generally include such purely Gamist elements. Instead, you include the Simulationist element that characters get better over time through practice and experience. Why you include a rule - what it represents - can be as important as how it's implemented. If you're just talking about the basic XP and level rules, then the practical difference may be negligible, but whether it's a Sim element or a Game element is going to have an impact on how you use it.

Another simulationist approach, the one I use, is that "XP for kill" is a real phenomenon with a physical basis in the gameworld. In short, D&D is Highlander: There Can Be Only One. If you ask a sage, he'll tell you that participating in the death of powerful creatures grants you a small portion of their life force, which accrues to your own, strengthening your abilities across the board. There is of course a lot of waste in the transfer, so you need to kill many, many powerful creatures before you are nearly as powerful as any of the things you took power from. (E.g. you'd have to kill 20+ adult red dragons solo before hitting 20th level, at which point you'd be approximately as powerful as an adult red.)

PCs are essentially vampires. This doesn't appear to bother my players for some reason.

 

[B9anders]

You can play D&D in a lot of ways, but if you're taking a Simulationist approach to it, then you don't generally include such purely Gamist elements.

D&D is not really Simulationist friendly at all. If you object to the things you do, you should object to notions like levelling up instead of piecemeal progression, the arbitrarily defined attributes, hit points, that AC makes you harder to hit instead of reduce damage and the very notion of character class.

This looking down on the gamist approach simply doesn't tally with playing D&D in the first place. If we were talking about GURPS (itself a lovely system) this could be a discussion. D&D is by default not simulationist.