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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 8241085" data-attributes="member: 463">The 5e XP system as written seems to imply around 18 months of weekly 4 hour games to go from 1 to 20,  and that's about the rate I saw in my first two big 5e campaigns (Ghinarian Hills & Runelords) - about 75 sessions/300 hours of tabletop play, or roughly double that for text-chat online gaming. But the DMG's suggestion that PCs level up 1, 1, 2 then every 2-3 sessions is much faster, playing 4 + 17x2.5 levels is 46.5 sessions, under a year, more like the 3e D&D rate (assuming no PC deaths).My current 5e game has a much slower advancement rate, simply from using less generous non-combat XP awards and having most monster encounters be with groups of low-challenge creatures, plus large PC groups of around 7 PCs with a few NPCs. The longest playing PCs have gone 1st-5th in 8 months of weekly online play, I count 39 sessions so far, with last session being their first at 5th level. So 38 sessions to level up 4 times; 9.5 sessions per level. But those are online text chat sessions averaging 3.5-4 hours, you could halve that for the equivalent tabletop time.Edit: I remember in 4e D&D they explicitly discussed expected levelling rate as 10 hours of play. IME when played as written the rate was about half that. I tended to give a bunch of bonus XP to get the rate down to around 15 hours. 5e seems fairly similar; without forced power levelling via bonus XP, or levelling by GM fiat, the actual advancement rate is much slower than the designers seemed to expect. You can get PCs to level 2 in one 4 hour session by using a lot of 50 XP Goblins (and probably 'forgetting' their bonus action Disengage/Hide ability) <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> but after reaching level 3 the natural rate of advancement tends to be about half what's expected. The only way to keep it at 2.5 sessions/level would be using mostly solo monsters at or above CR = Party Level, lined up in convenient adventuring-day packets.Edit 2: Checking some logs I see PC Hakeem Godslayer went 1-20 in 132 sessions of my online Wilderlands campaign, which would be around 66 tabletop sessions, but that was unusually fast and involved a lot of solo adventuring and taking on much higher-CR opponents often single handed.</blockquote>

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