D&D 5E EXP Complaint leads me to this idea.

[GameOgre]

We play on average once a week(prob around 1 and 1/2) for 8-12 hours or so. About every other week we might get in two games and around holidays we go crazy and play huge.

One a year we all take out vacations together and play for like a week strait.

I guess it's important to note I play with my grown kids and their wives and friends.

Yes, I had to grow my own group kinda 8)

 

[Satyrn]

You could also just stop using XP, divorce leveling from the gameplay entirely. You could have them level up after a number of sessions equal to their current level, for example.

Or just level up when the players get antsy for new toys.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Here is my table for level advancement:



I divide all treasure in half (not counting items with plot importance), and use the living expenses, equipment costs, and real estate costs from the DMG as guidelines to revise rewards the PCs might get for performing tasks. (Your average innkeeper probably isn't going to be willing or able to offer a 500 gp reward (approximately equivalent to $50,000) for cleaning kobolds out of their cellar!) I'm estimating that with the extra living expenses the party will have due to more in-game time passing, they will end up somewhere around 2x the wealth 5e adventures normally hand out. In a long campaign like this where they might feasibly invest in a lot of downtime and non-adventuring types of activities, that's probably workable.

 

[Horwath]

My players think 5E's exp advancement is way too fast.

They don't want to have a stable of characters or create a new character with every adventure path( or even do adventure paths for that matter). They want to play their characters for years and years through many story arcs and adventure lines.

I have experimented with exp advancement in our games(mostly be milestones and just having them leveling slower without tracking the exp) but it's hard because they really feel that the exp portion of the game is fun and like the constant accumulation of exp's.

So I came up with this idea.

Whenever a pc levels his exp total resets to 0. So from 1st to 2nd level is still just 300 exp but to make 3rd level once you make 2nd level you will need to make 900 more exp.

Basically this is around 6 X EXP of the book. Now it wouldn be 6 X slower because I would award exp also for story awards and social encounters and exploration as well as for treasure spent or whatever else i wanted to make more of a focus on our games.

Killing monsters would account for a much smaller portion of the exp's total than before.

So I think the advancement would be in the nature of 3X slower. Letting them have a much longer adventuring life while also giving them more of a portion of the games mechanics they seem to like.

To be honest though, I'm unsure of just how this would work out. It's one thing in theory to say"I wish my character would adventure for a lot longer" it's another to play the game and be fine with"I'm leveling so slowly".

I think eventually I might try it in some form. I do remember back in AD&D playing one character for years and it was fun, I'm just not sure it was MORE fun than playing in 5E style.

Well, that is kind of two edged sword here.

Many of us just love to play in DnD's sweet spot. That is levels from 6 to 10.

You are quite more powerfull than your common folk that you meet on the way, but still not in nation/world shattering league.

And staying here while enjoyable can get boring if new toys come very slowly, if at all.


Try the E6, E8 or E9 verstion with continous gestalt leveling.

Lets say that your leveling stops at level 9. great spot. +4 proficiency bonus. 1 level 5 spell for casters, level 3 spells for half casters. Some cool features for martial classes.

Now, when you get enough exp to "level" from that you gain 1st level in second class.

You do not gain any HP from leveling, no extra HD for healing. Unless the next class has bigger HD than your current then you exchange HPs and HDs for that level.

I.E. as 9th level cleric you have 8 HP + 8×5 HP, and 9 d8 HDs. if you gain a level of fighter as second Gestalt class, your 1st level HP goes from 8 to 10 and you exchange one of your d8 HDs with one d10 HD.

You gain all weapon/armor proficiencies as well as all special features of the second class.

No matter how many of this secondary levels you gain you never gain HP(except if you go for bigger HD then you just gain the difference), never gain higher proficiency bonus, or higher level spells.

This will make your character little more powerfull as you will have more options, but you are still limited by 9th level proficiency bonus, 9th level HPs, and 9th level class features.

And mostly still limited by 1 action, 1 bonus action and 1 reaction per turn.

You will feel of character growth in broadness of skill but not height of high level mostly campaign breaking powers.

 

[mellored]

Simply double/triple the XP needed.

Or just don't use XP. Level up every few months. Or after each major quest is complete.

No need to follow the book if you don’t want to.

 

[Lanefan]

Simply double/triple the XP needed.

Or just don't use XP. Level up every few months. Or after each major quest is complete.

Note that in the first post [MENTION=57914]GameOgre[/MENTION] says the players like tracking their characters' xp, which kinda pulls not using them off the table as an option.

Lanefan

 

[Li Shenron]

Whenever a pc levels his exp total resets to 0. So from 1st to 2nd level is still just 300 exp but to make 3rd level once you make 2nd level you will need to make 900 more exp.

I think it's a very good idea.

Re-do the advancement table instead, from top to bottom.

Why do I say this?

Because your method above, while good in intention, doesn't hit the easiest and most obvious place to slow down the advancement: 1st and 2nd levels. As written they go by in a flash; if you can spin them out longer then right there you're setting yourself up for a longer campaign overall.

The other thing re-doing the whole table achieves is to give you some control on how each level relates to the next in terms of speed. Maybe you want to slow things down until 10th, for example, but don't mind going through 11th-15th a bit faster (relatively) then slowing down again for the real high-end stuff.

This is even better.

I don't really understand for example why the 5e xp table doesn't use round numbers but has all these small differences. I am not talking about the purposeful design of "speed bumps" or "speed brakes" at certain levels, here I just mean I don't understand what's the point in a 900xp threshold instead of 1000xp.

If you just re-design the xp table, you can use more round numbers and thus easier to use or even remember (the 3e xp table had a simple algorithm behind it), and then decide how you want to deal with "tiers" or even make your own.

When we finished up Princes of the Apocalypse, the rogue had around 10,000 gp saved up (to build her hideout). The barbarian had several thousand gp, mainly because I don't enforce daily living expenses (he would have blown it all on ale and whores). The wizard? Flat broke. He spent every gold piece adding spells to his spellbook. Granted, the player has gone a bit overboard in adding spells, but by the time a wizard gets to double-digits in level, scribing spells can get expensive. That's a tax that other classes don't necessarily have.

That sounds to me like the Wizard is actually using treasure better than the other characters! Although it's always nice to have players invest in some downtime benefits.

 

[Li Shenron]

I heard recently of a game that got to level 20 in two years. They played every week - sometimes once a week, sometimes twice a week, with a few weekend games throughout the year. I'm still amazed they got to 20 that fast.

Mmm... maybe I remember it wrong, but wasn't the 3e advancement designed around the idea of going through 20 levels in 2 years of weekly gaming? If that's the case, it seems this game had gone actually a bit slower than that.

We play on average once a week(prob around 1 and 1/2) for 8-12 hours or so. About every other week we might get in two games and around holidays we go crazy and play huge.

One a year we all take out vacations together and play for like a week strait.

I guess it's important to note I play with my grown kids and their wives and friends.

Yes, I had to grow my own group kinda 8)

I gave you xp for this, but in truth, I hate you.

 

[Li Shenron]

You could also just stop using XP, divorce leveling from the gameplay entirely. You could have them level up after a number of sessions equal to their current level, for example.

Or just level up when the players get antsy for new toys.

Or just don't use XP. Level up every few months. Or after each major quest is complete.

No need to follow the book if you don’t want to.

GameOgre said his players like getting XP.

I have also used the no-XP levelling approach and I like it for various reasons. For example, XP tend to encourage the players to play less immersively, not acting like their characters would. That's because XP is an OOC reward essentially, unlike treasure. It's easy to imagine that some characters would risk their lives for treasure, but XP is quite different. I don't want to start a long debate here, however. The bottom line is that without XP, the players are more likely to choose a non-combat resolution, meaning more variety overall (because it's very unlikely anyway that the game will have too little combat). There is overall more attention on the narrative.

But I have to admit that XP have their own merit, because they give this constant feeling of advancement into the game. They add more reasons to keep playing, when you can get the feeling of how close you are to completing your current level and seeing the next one.

It's complicated and sometimes reminds me of the colored belts in martial arts. On one hand, a martial artist should only care about her learning and improvement, which is what really matters, not the color of her belt. But the belt system helps the martial artist have a plan, and kind of sets a visible next target, so overall it probably acts to add motivation for hard training. Maybe it's not a good motivation, but it works.

 

[S'mon]

I think if you want 1e style advancement you should probably use 1e style XP charts. 5e has the weirdest XP chart of any edition, specifically designed to be very fast 1-3, slower 4-10, then fast again 11-17+. Look at how much XP you expect to award per session then design an XP chart around that.

Eg: Classic D&D (Rules Cyclopedia) suggests 5 sessions per level, and has the same charts as 1e up to 9th level. If you expect to award 4 medium encounters worth of XP per session (4 hour session, 1 encounter per hour) and want a 1e/Classic type progression rate, it should take 20 medium encounters' worth of XP to level up. That compares to 3e's expectation of 13.3 encounters/level, 4e's expectation of 10 encounters/level.