How Long to Reach 10th Level

[Umbran]

So, from this, and I do realize how valid online polls are, over 70% of respondents figure you should hit 10th level in one year or less, playing 2 hours per week.

It isn't just how valid the polls are. It is also how you look at the data. Yes, 70% say you should hit 10th level in one year or less. But, 45% (nearly half) say it should take 10 months or more.

I didn't see the original poll, but like others here I have to wonder at that "2 hours per week". How literal is it? In one sense 2 hours a week is the same as 4 hours every two weeks, and that's the same as 8 hours once a month. But, in my experience that isn't how games play. There's spin-up and spin down in every session. 4 sessions of two hours is not the same as one 8 hour session.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

As someone in favor of being able to go from 1st level to max level in a 1-year long campaign, this is my biggest concern about being able to level up fast enough to make that possible.

The solutions, I can figure, would be one of these two:
1) Fewer powers (or no powers, as will apparently be core in 5e). I don't like this because the breadth of powers and its use in customizing your character is one of my favorite things about 4e.
2) Fewer levels. I don't really like this one, either, but I can't explain why. Maybe it's the lack of granularity. If you halved the number of levels (to 15), then you'd be getting twice as many new things to wrap your head around at each level, which seems just as conducive to a lack of system mastery as getting more features one at a time more frequently.

I'd prefer the second option, though, if it could be done properly.

The tradition of the game works against them on this. If you were starting to design a game to handle this problem, with no regards to the tradition of D&D, the answer is easy: Characters start out in a rough ballpark of power, which gives them plenty to do. When they "level", they don't get much new. Or, they level infrequently and get a few neat things. In either case, "leveling" doesn't radically change the power of the characters, but is simply a way to show some progress.

This is, in fact, the way some other systems play. The "character mastery" is mainly upfront, rapidly accumulated in play, and then levels off. Next, all you need to do is handle new players. Again, obvious answer--a few early "levels" where you start from nothing, gain ground rapidly, and then level off after awhile. That's practically 1E or BECMI ... if you go against tradition, practically coddle new players below 5th level or so, and run through those first few layers as fast as the players can handle the new abilities.

There have been other variants of D&D that could approximate this, if you knew what you were doing. For example, start 3.5 characters using very liberalized gestalt rules (to expand skills even more), begin around 5th level, and level very slowly. The E6 variants are another obvious one, at a different power level. But it's tough to build something like that into a system while still supporting "Farmboy to Demigod" at the same time. You'd almost need a "power rachet" and a "power breadth" option, to radically change what characters of a given level could do. Much easier to simply limit the level of the campaign.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

I don't quite understand how this hurts anyone except in the most hypothetical of ways.

But, hypothetical is the easiest place to start criticizing from because it doesn't actually require any effort. If you start asking people to criticize from the position of actual play experience, they might reveal that 99% of the criticisms that they make never actually occur.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I think 2 hours should not be the yardstick by which the question is judged. Neither do I think there needs to be an answer. I think it is and should be subjective by group. Some people play one encounter a month, but play all night. Others will run weekly games at 2 hours a piece for 18 years. It isn't something that can be judged objectively that way.

On that much, I agree.

Frankly, I don't think the length of a session or the pace of advancement are huge design considerations at all. The length of a battle maybe, but making that shorter is what helps me get more done in whatever session I have time to run.

 

[Lanefan]

Just because there exists a baseline minimum doesn't mean that WotC will consider that the only, exclusive, unqiuely viable experience. It just means that D&D has to be able to fit into that experience. It can be bigger.

Given WotC's history I'd watch out here, for their designers tend to design to a specific goal and put the blinkers on regarding all else. Example: 3e was based on their (extremely flawed) market research showing the game was supposedly played by 4 players running 1 PC each and a DM over a campaign length of 1-2 years, and that dictated large parts of the design...even though it wasn't accurate.

If they get it in their heads that a 2-hour session is the norm the game will be designed around that and damn the torpedoes. I'm not sure that's something many of us want to see.

But, hypothetical is the easiest place to start criticizing from because it doesn't actually require any effort. If you start asking people to criticize from the position of actual play experience, they might reveal that 99% of the criticisms that they make never actually occur.

Er...in case you haven't noticed, except for a few tidbits of dubious accuracy hypothesis is all we have to go on here.

Lanefan

 

[I'm A Banana]

If they get it in their heads that a 2-hour session is the norm the game will be designed around that and damn the torpedoes. I'm not sure that's something many of us want to see.

Yeah, it's smart to be skeptical. But given the list of goals that 5e is setting out to achieve, I think that they'd be actively ignoring their own advice on this if they did that. I've known WotC to have the wrong idea to start with, but I've never seen them fail to deliver on something they tried to do. As long as they hold true to their big design goals, I'm not too worried about this, personally.

But it is smart to be skeptical. WotC can get myopia. I think their other goals help ensure that it's not going to happen this time around, but that's optimism speaking.

 

[Hussar]

On that much, I agree.

Frankly, I don't think the length of a session or the pace of advancement are huge design considerations at all. The length of a battle maybe, but making that shorter is what helps me get more done in whatever session I have time to run.

Now this I disagree with. Pace of advancement is a huge consideration. If you pace the game that expectations say that it will take X hours of game play to cover the range of options in the game, then how far or close that is to how people usually play is going to have a very large effect.

High level magic in AD&D for example, rarely saw play because most groups didn't play long enough to get to those levels. Leveling a character to 18th level in AD&D takes a LOT of play time. ((although I find 1-10 generally doesn't vary all that much between editions)) So, whether the high level spells were broken or not rarely came into play.

3e speeded things up considerably with the expectation that you would actually use all the rules in the PHB. Then it was discovered that a number of higher level spells really weren't a good thing (Harm being a prime example).

This is a very important consideration IMO.

Given WotC's history I'd watch out here, for their designers tend to design to a specific goal and put the blinkers on regarding all else. Example: 3e was based on their (extremely flawed) market research showing the game was supposedly played by 4 players running 1 PC each and a DM over a campaign length of 1-2 years, and that dictated large parts of the design...even though it wasn't accurate.

If they get it in their heads that a 2-hour session is the norm the game will be designed around that and damn the torpedoes. I'm not sure that's something many of us want to see.
Er...in case you haven't noticed, except for a few tidbits of dubious accuracy hypothesis is all we have to go on here.

Lanefan

I'm not sure how flawed their market research was vs what they wanted to know. It's market research, which means they want to identify who will buy their products. They found that the over 35 crowd spends significantly less on gaming material than the under 35 crowd. So, they focused on the under 35 crowd. That's just good business sense.

That it might exclude your group does not make it bad research. It's just that odds say that your group isn't going to buy enough product to make it worth courting you as a customer. In the specific, that might not be true, but, overall, it probably is.

I mean, heck, poll after En World poll has shown almost exactly the same results as the WOTC market research. There must be something to the research.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Yeah, it's smart to be skeptical. But given the list of goals that 5e is setting out to achieve, I think that they'd be actively ignoring their own advice on this if they did that. I've known WotC to have the wrong idea to start with, but I've never seen them fail to deliver on something they tried to do. As long as they hold true to their big design goals, I'm not too worried about this, personally.

But it is smart to be skeptical. WotC can get myopia. I think their other goals help ensure that it's not going to happen this time around, but that's optimism speaking.

I'm cautiously optimistic that good design goals and serious playtesting is about half the battle towards something good. Might not be something I want to spend much time with, but it should be good for a large chunk of people. (And it might be something I like. I'm more cautious there because of the relatively niche nature of some of my preferences, not because of failure to follow through.) Then all we need for the other half is good development, good editing, good presentation, and solid advice to reinforce the design goals. They've been all over the place with those, but certainly capable of doing each one well in the right circumstances. Plus, good design and playtesting covers a lot of mistakes.

My only real reservation is more about the range of "Meh" to "Wowza!" What they are trying is so ambitious that it gets into one of those situations where "loss of nerve" can have them knowing what to do but not being sure that they can risk it. I see a lot of home run attempts being needed, and relatively few bunts. Or rather, a lot of the bunts are things they already know--practically a sure thing. It's just human nature (and frequently good sense) to shrink from going for that many home runs, but every subsystem is going to require a couple to meet the ambitious goals. Law of averages says someone is going to pull up and go for the single base hit, or strike out, on at least a few. I'm a little worried that we might get something "OK" that could have been much more impressive.

 

[Ratskinner]

<snippage>

On a side note, I'm sure they are going to make the effort to accommodate me, the 2 hour people and the years long people. The problem I foresee is them putting most of their time accommodating the 2h/week for 4-6 week people and ignoring the rest of us.

Can you explain why designing for a two-hour game hampers a longer session? It seems to me a lot harder to play a 4-hour adventure in a two hour session than the other way around.

I don't want a new level every 3 hours. I don't I don't I don't. I can barely imagine getting a new level every 1.5 sessions (or 2). Getting a new level every 3 sessions seems quick to me, magnify that feeling if the sessions are only 2 hours long. That will mean I'm gaining a level for very little work.

Okay. Okay. Okay. If you need to slow down advancement, just double the XP totals needed on the chart. I've done that before. I've also halved them to speed it up. (You can also use different multipliers like 1.5 or .75) I'm really not seeing how "The game can play well in 2 hours" kills longer sessions with slower advancement.

 

[Lanefan]

Can you explain why designing for a two-hour game hampers a longer session? It seems to me a lot harder to play a 4-hour adventure in a two hour session than the other way around.

Well, if the game is played according to that design but in 4 (or more) hour sessions two obvious problems arise:

1. What do you do for the other two (or more) hours; or
2. How long will it take to run out of adventures, if you're running 2 (or more) per session?

Personally, I prefer bigger adventures over smaller (but not to the bigness extreme of Undermountain or Dragon Mountain) as you get a chance to sink your teeth into it before it's over. I played in an adventure not long ago that we thought would be something long; we reached the dungeon, got through a few minor traps, fought and killed three Giants, then wiped out their much-less-threatening pets. And then we walked out the back door and realized we'd finished the adventure...something of a let-down.

I always expect an adventure will take more than one session to play; over the long run they seem to take between 4 and 10 sessions depending on a raft of circumstances. Our sessions are usually about 4-6 hours, some of which time is spent chatting.

Lanefan