D&D 5E Help! My Players Are Leveling Too Quickly

[DEFCON 1]

The first 3 levels go very quickly. They're supposed to. You basically gain a level a session for the first 3 levels, and then it starts to slow down.

Check the xp chart.

This.

The game is set up such that level 3 is your "I'm now an adventurer" level, as that's when most classes get their subclass. So levels 1 and 2 are the "introduction to adventuring" levels and just by looking at the XP chart, are meant to get through in pretty much a single session or two for each. So even if you were doing XP calculation rather than milestone... reaching level 3 by like the 3rd session is expected and the way they set the game up.

After that... Level 5 is the next leveling milestone and when adventurers "get their black belt" as it were. Spellcasters get their 3rd level spells, martial characters get their second attack, and everyone's proficiency bonus goes up to +3... which is what the game uses to signify them as Experienced Adventurers. Thus, the XP to get through levels 3 and 4 to reach 5 are also not too bad. However, it's the path from 5 to 11 that sees the slowdown in level gaining. This is where multiple sessions over the normal advancement rate will occur, as the game intentionally slows things down because it's where traditionally most groups hang out in.

But then once they reach 11th level and get out of the adventurer's tier, they move into the paragon tier and again leveling speeds up a bit. This was done because so many groups wrap their games up prior to 11th that they wanted to keep those games that reach this high moving forward with propulsion. So they made advancement again a bit easier just to keep groups moving forward.

Now obviously if you are doing an Adventurer's Path, the book is set up for you to level when appropriate for the story. So if the group streams through the chapters of the story quickly, then leveling will go up quickly too. At that point you either (as was mentioned above) throw in extra encounters so that the party has more things to do before reaching the next chapter, or you don't level them up at the AP's designed chapter breaks (but then run the risk of them being under-leveled and under-powered for future chapters.) But if you happen to have a larger than normal size of a group, or if you are a bit more generous with magic items and the like... the risk of them being under-powered for later chapters if you slowed down your milestone leveling is lessened.

Personally... I'd just have fun with the book by adding in additional encounters, especially roleplaying ones. I've had sessions where so much roleplaying has occurred that they naturally slowed down their own milestone advancement. You end up having an extra session or two in the milestone leveling because the party spent sessions talking with people, rather than hitting all the requisite encounters needed to advance to the next chapter of the story. Throw in an extra fight or two and you'll find things even slower.

 

[Croesus]

...the PC's have reached level three in one week's time and in one or two more days (game time) will reach level four. My fear is at this rate, they'll ding level 20 in a couple months of game time.

In my experience:

levels 1 and 2 - 1 session each
levels 3 and 4 - 2 sessions each
levels 5-10 - 3-5 sessions each

This will vary on how long your sessions are and how much the characters get done, but the ratios should serve as an indication of how things go.

This is the key element in leveling. The OP is looking at what happened when his characters went from 1st to 3rd level and extrapolating that rate across 20 levels. Things will slow down noticeably once the characters are 5th level.

It occurs to me that this could be a problem with adventure paths not written for 5E, as they may assume a slower rate of advance from 1st to 5th. The GM may have to boost early encounters to account for that. Once the PCs reach 5th, I suspect the PCs and the adventure path will be back in sync.

 

[Jester David]

New DM looking for some help. I'm running Rise of the Runelords adapted for 5e and so far all of the action has been fueled by a fair amount of urgency (solve the goblin problem before the next invasion occurs, etc.) Because of this, the PC's have reached level three in one week's time and in one or two more days (game time) will reach level four. My fear is at this rate, they'll ding level 20 in a couple months of game time.

Yup.
Rise of the Runelords is meant to take place over a period of a few months, with the slowest delays being the travel to Hook Mountain in Ch3, the Runeforge in Ch5, and Xin-Shalast in Ch6. Each of those journeys only takes a few weeks. So the start of the adventure is the first day of Autumn and they're climbing mountains to save the world that winter.

This should be slightly faster in 5e than Pathfinder, since there won't be the weeks of downtime spent crafting magical items.

You can force some downtime between a couple of the chapters if you wish. Between chapters 1 and 2, and 2 and 3, and 4 and 5 there's room for some downtime. You can have a few weeks or months pass during that time.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

New DM looking for some help. I'm running Rise of the Runelords adapted for 5e and so far all of the action has been fueled by a fair amount of urgency (solve the goblin problem before the next invasion occurs, etc.) Because of this, the PC's have reached level three in one week's time and in one or two more days (game time) will reach level four. My fear is at this rate, they'll ding level 20 in a couple months of game time.

This seems absurd to me as, for example, the dragonborn paladin with the soldier background who's been actively fighting in a war for the past three years (his backstory) all of the sudden has an unbelievable surge in his power by simply fighting a band of goblins and a few other monsters. I've hinted via their dreams and visions that it's possible that there is divine intervention at play on their behalf as I'm not sure how else to explain to them that all of the sudden they have a new understanding of their fighting, magical, and exploration abilities.

Note that "actively fighting in a war for the past three years" doesn't have to mean "involved in continuous battles to the death for three years running." You know what they say about war: "long periods of crushing boredom punctuated by short periods of frantic activity." He could have spent weeks or months at a time patrolling an area or a supply route to keep it secure against raiders, then a day or so ambushing small groups (squads) of raiders with overwhelming force (company-strength) to ensure that none of them escape, then another week patrolling followed by a fighting withdrawal against a battalion of enemy troops, etc. You'd expect to see lots of maneuvering, with attack rolls only being made when someone's maneuvering has failed. E.g. "fighting withdrawal" might mostly involve concealing two dozen horses in a location such that after you make several rounds of attack rolls from high ground and behind partial cover onto the enemy forces advancing on your position, you can then still get to your horses and retreat safely out of range before they can overrun your position; do that enough times and the enemy's advance will slow because he has to always bring enough soldiers to the party to beat you even if you're behind partial cover on high ground, which means he has less forces available elsewhere to secure his own supply lines against your mobile attackers or night-time skirmishers, etc. "Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics." Perhaps your veteran soldier has spent three years fighting these types of battles and still been in only ten or twelve engagements; he may have killed fewer than twenty enemies over the course of the whole campaign. (And twenty enemies is still a very respectable kill count for a veteran BTW, even in real life. In D&D it would put you at third level or so.)

So, as much as I hate quick levelling, from a plausibility perspective it's not that hard to imagine that killing "a band of goblins and a few other monsters" could be a fairly new experience for your dragonborn soldier, depending on what the other monsters are.

What makes D&D contrived is not the number of combats veterans survive, it is that (especially in bad modules) the combats are often constructed to let the PCs crush the enemy with overwhelming force regardless of what the players do. It's one thing to be a veteran of twelve battles; it's another thing entirely to be a veteran of twelve "level-appropriate/Medium difficulty" effortless cake-walks. It gives you a skewed perspective on war.

 

[Warrior Poet]

Rise of the Runelords is particularly egregious with regard to this issue. It's a sprint, start-to-finish, and one of the elements of the adventure path that I really dislike (our group is in the Runeforge now).

Goblin threat quashed? Skinsaw murders start practically the next day. By the end of the Magnimar section, our group was on pace to reach level 20 within one in-game year. So I pleaded with our GM to throw in a winter break. Contact with the Black Arrows wasn't lost until after spring started. We've wrangled for periodic breaks of a month or six weeks in-game at a couple of other sections, too.

Rise of the Runelords is written breakneck. No idea why, but I think some of the ideas in the thread for slowing things down are good ones, and may help address your concern. The whole adventure will probably still feel a bit hurried (and harried), but you can mediate the "0-to-100 kph in less than 4 seconds" somewhat.

Good luck! It's mostly a good adventure path, with some great and fun moments.

Still learning,

Robert

 

[pontinyc]

Many thanks to everyone for all of the extremely helpful input. Some great ideas in here re: how I can slow things down a bit and some validating info telling me that it's also just the nature of the AP. Will be putting all of this input to good use!

 

[Ahrimon]

I explain everything with fate and destiny. Everyone but the PCs is controlled by fate and their destiny. A rare few few people in the world are outside fate and are not ruled by it. They can make their own destiny but their passing affects the destiny of others. So gods and powers seek them out to attempt to use them to their advantage or to send them into dangerous places in the hope that they'll die. Sometimes both.

 

[Quartz]

New DM looking for some help. I'm running Rise of the Runelords adapted for 5e and so far all of the action has been fueled by a fair amount of urgency (solve the goblin problem before the next invasion occurs, etc.) Because of this, the PC's have reached level three in one week's time

You're supposed to zoom through the first few levels.

 

[Orion1138]

I generally am enjoying the milestone method over giving out xp each session. The trouble is sometimes it is hard time figure out when pc's should level up. But I can adapt if needed.

 

[Tony Vargas]

New DM looking for some help. I'm running Rise of the Runelords adapted for 5e and so far all of the action has been fueled by a fair amount of urgency (solve the goblin problem before the next invasion occurs, etc.) Because of this, the PC's have reached level three in one week's time and in one or two more days (game time) will reach level four. My fear is at this rate, they'll ding level 20 in a couple months of game time
As a note, I'm using the milestone leveling recommended in the adventure as I don't have time to properly adapt all of the xp from Pathfinder to 5e.

5e uses the same 1-20 scope of levels as 3.5/PF. So you should be getting the same effect as in the native system, as far as that goes. Maybe the AP just isn't what you were looking for?

That said, I'm not sure what to do to contribute to the feeling that rising to heights of great power should be a slow and arduous journey.

I suppose you could add lots of side-adventures. But you'll be making the campaign, itself arduous. You could slow the pacing of the campaign, inserting longer periods of downtime between the events of the AP, decreasing that sense of urgency, and add more downtime activities, possibly including 'training' downtime after each milestone to level up.

You could also just start using 5e exp. Assuming you're converting encounters to be 5e-level-appropriate, you'll find that the experience required to level goes up sharply relative to the experience 'budget' of encounters starting at 4th level. The first 3 levels are supposed to go by quickly, as quickly a 'day' each. 4th-5th should take twice as long, as should most levels beyond that through till they hit 11th. Then it picks up again.